Rune hunting

There are all kinds of rune hunting guides out there. If you're level 92 with a teleporting character these guides are great. For lower level characters or even high level solo characters these rune guides don't seem very applicable. It's hard to get good equipment. Sometimes you get lucky and get a couple of items, but getting good equipment to match a build is extremely difficult unless you dupe (and that's not an option for many of us).

I realize it takes many hours, evidenced by some players thousands of LK runs. Recently I had a few thoughts about running lower kurast and rune finding in general. Like many I'd heard of the "special" chests. Generally they're neat a fire put. It happened on one of my hell Lower Kurast runs that the way point appeared very close to the special chest(s). So I thought "why not just run these two chests" over and over for 1/2 hour. In that 1/2 hour I picked up the following items of interest: jewel, Tal rune, flawless skull, flawless ruby (2), Dol rune, flawless amethyst (2), and a flawless sapphire.

Next I ran Diablo in normal mode with /players 8 to see if he'd drop any runes. This took quite a bit of time (I don't have a teleporting character) even though I rushed and didn't kill anything (at least compared to running the Hell LK chest at /players 8) unnecessary. The reward, a single Ort rune.

Then I ran normal countess at /players 8. I ran her 3 times and got 2 x Tal runes and a Nef rune. The single Ort was a better reward.

The best of all three of these was doing the Hell Lower Kurast runs at /players 8. Dol is significantly higher than Ort and I also found a Tal.

Funny enough one of the runs I need to make is one that finds chipped sapphires. I have a lot of Sol runes (15) that need to be cubed up.