Trang-Oul's Chaos Armor

There just isn't a whole lot of excitement to tell. I've been running around Lower Kurast accumulating flawless gems, cubing them up and using 3 pgems to transmute charms, mostly into less useful charms. I found this Trang-Oul's Chaos Armor after about 50 runs.

I also found that some seeds have more than 1 camp-fire. Previously I'd been attaching myself to running 1 camp-fire area, until I found out there was more than 1 in some seeds, which would explain the lousy drop rate I mentioned in a previous post.

I accumulated statistics for 48 runs. In those 48 runs nothing really remarkable appeared (other than this set item). Oh, I suppose the Laying of Hands (Disciple set) Bramble Mitts also could be considered remarkable. I think it's actually the second piece I've found in that higher level set.

A lot of charms dropped, and almost all of them useless. I muled a bunch away for really weak characters I'll play in the future (any advantage is an advantage). I also muled away a bunch of jewels. At some point I'll probably start crafting caster items with these things. Maybe I'll run the countess a bunch of times and see if I can get the right runes to drop... but not now.

Speaking of runes, here's the rune count from the 48 runs: 2 x Ort, Thul, Tal, Tir, Io, Ral, and Sol. Not a lot of runes, but the Io is a pretty high rune. Running countess at /players 8 is likely to result in multiple deaths (and loss of experience) and maybe I could cube up to something a lot better, then again I have heard of Ber runes dropping in Lower Kurast... just not for me, not yet.

The spreadsheet I created in LibreOffice has cells for 56 runs (2 pages), front/back if you have a printer that can print on 2 sides.

My goal running LK has really been about getting runes to drop so I can cube up. I'm thinking I've been wasting a lot of time and it's time to move on.

Slicer is level 86 now. All the synergies for Blessed Hammer are maxed out. There's little room to squeeze more out of Slicer except with exceptional equipment. Without Enigma and HOTO Slicer does just shy of 5k damage.

Slicer was getting his butt kicked trying to get into Nilithak's lair. Turns out the raised skeletons are darn strong. It might be high time I look at beefing up Slicer's hireling.

Lower Kurast Combat technique

Some bosses are fast, have lightning and tend to come with an army of minions. For bosses like this I find it helps to trap them just beyond their reach.

The screenshot shows a good example of trapping a boss. Black Maul is on the raised up way point. If I get close enough to the edge Maul can claw me, so I stand just clear and send hammers flying.

Sometimes the bosses are fast and I end up on the way point with them trapped below the way point. Either method works pretty good as long as you don't get swarmed.

For swarms I use the stop, hammer and run method to take out a few minions. When it's just me and the boss, or me and a couple of minions I try to trap them.

There are still a few minions that are pretty strong, but I find that some of the minions in lower acts are actually more difficult than Lower Kurast.

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.

Level 84 solo

Slicer made it to level 84. Interestingly much of the experience was gained on 1 run of Lower Kurast. I'm not sure what happened but it seemed like I must have hit the magical seed that makes almost every monster a boss. In one run of Lower Kurast I think I must have killed about 12 boss monsters in addition to all their minions (and almost dying several times). Even being careful it was hard not to get swarmed... the seed was unbelievable. So were the drops, nothing for unique or set items, but charms out the wazoo! Most of the charms were high level, one level 69, another around 65, but only one was useful (a Fire resist + faster heal). A second became useful after I cubed up some perfect gems and a less useful charm for a large magic find charm. This makes the second magic find charm (the other an even better small MF charm) in my stash, putting my MF up around 80%.

Eighty percent isn't much for magic find, but I also don't have Enigma, Hoto, or any of the high level rune items yet. I've been playing without hacks (only muling off items) trying to see if it's indeed possible to find the equipment recommended for a Hammerdin in single player mode. Hammerdins are suppose to be one of the strongest characters in the game, it didn't feel like it last LK run, though I know running friends through Normal and Nightmare will be a laugh. At level 84 I've maxed Blessed Hammer and ALL synergies. I thought I had +5 to all skills via various items, but it appears it's only +4 since Blessed Hammer is only 24.

At this point I'm not quite ready to give Frozenstein/Anya another crack. I think I'll try to get a bit more experience before tackling this quest again.

Lower Kurast finds

Spent about 40 minutes this morning on the hardest setting of Hell mode running (more like inching) Lower Kurast (in solo). Besides being 43 million away from level 83 I scooped up a couple of items I didn't have before: IK Gauntlets (set item), Snake Cord Light Belt (Unique).

Along with these items I found the usual round of flawless gems, enough to do 2 rounds of transforming grand charms (both of which resulted in worse charms). Two runes also dropped, Ral and Dol. Dol comes in handy cubing up. Still looking for that elusive Ber rune. I think Atma's item calculator said there's something like a 1 in 40,000 chance of getting Ber - something ridiculous anyway.

The monsters in LK are not quite as nasty as the last act, but I still had to inch my way around to avoid the lightning enhanced monsters... having bad memories of almost getting to Anya in hell only to be stopped by Frozenstein's lightning enhanced body. One of the problems with the hammerdin spamming hammers is if you find yourself surrounded and one of the monsters is lightning enhanced. Even with 75 max lightning resist in hell Frozenstein still took me out pretty easily. This is one of the reasons I jumped back to Lower Kurast, to build up a bit more health and hopefully find a few more runes to get Heart of the Oak or Enigma.

Hammering up the lower kurast ruins

Slicer is now just shy of level 80, 2 more before I can use the amulet I crafted back at level 75. I can still hardly believe I got so lucky to have crafted a cool amulet appropriate to the character I'm playing.

Baal runs turned out to be a bit of a PITA (pain in the a**). Running seemed to take forever and the same large useless items kept dropping. For a little while I switched between normal and nightmare just so I could get a shorter map, but that takes time too. I

Why run Lower Kurast in Hell mode? It's rumoured that there are chests which drop the awesome Ber rune! But some of those people ran LK thousands of times to get the Ber rune. I have no such ambitions. My purpose was to cube up Flawless gems that would later be used on a grand charm in hopes of getting a +skills charm. I tried cubing up a few times and got some interesting results, but no +skills. I saw mention somewhere that the charm has to originally be high enough level. When I cubed the charm up its level seemed to jump all over the place. On top of all this doing Lower Kurast with the /players 8 switch gives loads of experience. In 5 runs I leveled from 77 to almost 80 (one or two good baddies should do the trick).

One trick that helps with nasty monsters that quickly deplete your mana is to orient them around the waypoint. You can do this 2 ways. Either trap the monsters on the waypoint and attack them with your hammers/spells from the other side of the waypoint. You can also, as I've done in the screenshot above, trap them around the waypoint and then you stand on the upper part of the waypoint and kill the monsters the same way.

In 5 runs here's some of the swag I scored: approximately 17 flawless gems, a couple of Amn runes, a sol rune, a hel rune, a couple of ort runes, some other minor runes, a couple of large charms with 14% and 15% fire resistance, a small charm with 7% magic find, Taebaek's Glory set item, and about 7 jewels of various sorts. In actuality I found a lot more, but nothing else really worth reporting. On one run I found 8 flawless gems, so much was dropping that I had to keep going back to town.