Diablo 2 Resurrected Countess: Where to find, rune drop

Who is the Countess?

The Countess is a super-unique monster in Diablo 2. She is located at the bottom (basement level 5) of the Forgotten Tower, which is located in the Black Swamp in Act 1. Her increased chances of rune drops make her a great run target on all difficulty levels of the game. In this guide, we will explain how to defeat the Countess, as well as the calculated chances of her dropping runes, which are usually found in hell. At the end of the guide is a "Runeword Guide" that can be used to find out which of the words are available to you on each difficulty within a reasonable number of runs of the Countess.

Why farm the Countess?

The Countess has an interesting Treasure class that drops runes reliably from her. She drops two types of treasure: Countess Items and Countess Runes. Items are usually "regular Countess drops" and runes are "special rune drops". To put it simply, if a rune is available for her to farm from the Countess, it is almost always the fastest and easiest way to get it. Her special runes Ral, Io, and Ist drop in Normal, Nightmare, and Infernal difficulty respectively.

In BattleNet, she also frequently completes on Hell difficulty for the Keys of Dread needed to farm torches. She will also drop these keys in single player, but they are useless.

Note: A guide to all runic words in Russian localization you find here!

How to beat the Countess

Player settings

The first thing to know about the Countess is that it should always be done on the Player. Due to the way her treasure class is structured (which determines what she can drop), dropping items from her regular drop will often take away potential rune drops. So running on a single player will give a lot more runes

normal and nightmare

On Normal and Nightmare difficulty, she is a common replay target with almost all characters. To farm runes for common runic words like Leaf , Stealth or ancient; s Pledge, doesn't take long (from cube ral to ort) on normal difficulty, and also such as Story or Rhyme on nightmare difficulty. See the runic word help at the end of the manual for more information. But all this does not require strategy or optimization. Pretty much every build can handle her, and she drops all the runes available from her special runes often enough that even slow runners can grind up their desired runewords before advancing without too much trouble. Note that on Nightmare difficulty, she has 75 fire resistance, though fire characters seem to do fine with her on Player 1.

Infernal difficulty

Hell of a difficulty might require a little more preparation. The Countess in Hell is immune to cold and fire, and her minions are immune to cold. Monsters that can appear on the way to the Countess also have several immunities. Clan Devilkin и B are immune to fire, ghosts are physically immune, and archers are immune to lightning. This can make accessing the Countess quite dangerous for many characters who don't have a teleporter. However, the most reasonably strong builds have attacks, spells, or crowd control to be able to get down to level 5 consistently enough, and in many cases it's possible to just run past most monsters (although this can sometimes be dangerous). So farm runes Pool to upgrade weapons, or Mind or Small for a runic word is often quite doable before heading to the rest of hell.

Considerations for long-term farming

Now, if you want to farm runes with the Countess for a long time on hell difficulty, the issue of running speed and builds becomes more important.

Assemblies

Thanks to their native and fast teleports, Enchantress automatically becomes the ideal class to visit the Countess. Since it doesn't take much damage to kill her players, movement speed becomes the main consideration. So 200fcr is perfect for raiding the Countess, but 105 works really well too. Since the Countess is immune to both fire and cold, lightning attacks are ideal, and indeed, the Sorceress' abilities are probably the best options for dealing with the Countess. However, the hybrid sorceresses are also all right. And finally, even fire sorceresses and fire/cold hybrids can control her quite quickly. Her minions are not immune to fire and can be destroyed by fire spells, then freeing up the mercenary's path to kill the Countess (especially if you're using a static field).

At the same time, other classes can extremely skillfully control the Countess if someone has the runic word Engima. Otherwise, there will be problems and the Sorceress will be much faster. But if Engima is available, almost every class will be able to put her down quickly. In particular, the Barbarian is fast, his fcr frames match those of the sorceress, and Necromancer и Paladin They also get the job done quickly. The most common builds for each class work well, as long as the only damage source is not cold based and preferably not fire based (although this may work fine as described above).

Map and lead time

If your Countess is up and running with decent enough gear and you want to do a lot of runs (e.g. farm a few runes Ist for weapons), then trying to get a decent card will pay off in a long run. I rewind the cards until the tower is close enough to the Black Marshes waypoint, and then see if there are several long paths between levels on the way to the Countess.

It is possible to make shortcuts in each level, but finding such a map is extremely difficult. So if the paths have a decent average length, I would do about 20 runs and see what the average run time is. In my experience with the Lightning Sorceress 200fcr, it doesn't take too much effort to find a map that can run in about 35 seconds. Runs under 30 seconds are very possible, but often require a map that takes quite a bit of time to complete.

Rune Drop Chance in Hell

I manually calculated the correct rune drop chances for Countess in Hell difficulty and presented them in this thread. This is a fairly complex calculation due to the interaction of her tc item and tc rune, and the most commonly used drop calculators have a significant headroom. I will also include result tables in this guide.

Table 1: Average runs for a direct rune drop

This first table is the direct chance that this rune will drop from the hands of the Countess. So the average number of runs to get a given rune without considering the cubing of lower runes.

RUNE	Players 1/2	Players 3/4	Players 5/6	Players 7/8
Lum (Lum)	34	46	56	61
Ко (Ko)	51	69	84	92
Fal (Wall)	66	89	109	119
Lem (Lem)	99	133	163	179
Pool (Pul)	131	175	215	235
Um (Um)	196	262	322	353
Small (Evil)	192	257	316	346
Ist (Is)	288	386	473	519
Hoot (Yellow)	29745	18070	16082	15445
Vex (Vex)	44617	27104	24123	23168
Om (Ohm)	42353	25729	22899	21992
of the (Lo)	63530	38593	34348	32988

Table 2: Finding or dice at least one rune with a 63,2% confidence level

Simply put, use this table to determine how many runs you need to make to find or create a cube for the single rune you are looking for. Note that this counts rune dice 2 levels lower than the one you are looking for.

RUNE	Players 1/2	Players 3/4	Players 5/6	Players 7/8
Fal (Wall)	56	75	92	101
Lem (Lem)	81 year	108	133	145
Pool	110	147	180	197
Um (Um)	126	169	207	227
Small (Evil)	135	181	222	243
Ist (Is)	176	236	289	317
Hoot (Yellow)	382	507	618	674

Table 3: Long Term Runs per Cubic Rune

If you're doing a lot of runs (this number assumes an infinite number of runs, but I would recommend using it if you're doing somewhere around 1000 runs or more) and want to know how much of a given rune you can expect to cube at the end, use this table . Again, this takes into account the cubing of runes 2 levels below the desired rune.

RUNE	Players 1/2	Players 3/4	Players 5/6	Players 7/8
Fal (Wall)	41	54	66	73
Lem (Lem)	58	78	95	104
Pool	79	106	130	142
Um (Um)	95	127	155	170
Small (Evil)	104	139	170	186
Ist (Is)	136	183	224	245
Hoot (Yellow)	326	431	524	571

As, let's say, I want to know how much time to find or cube 6 ists for phase blade Pitzerker . With a lot of Ist Runes, "Long Term Medium Runs" become very accurate, but deciding how many runs you need to do to be accurate is very tricky. I would personally say to myself "well we know it's between 176 and 136 as expected". And that would suit me. Maybe if you want 6 easts for a phase blade, plan for something like 150 x 6 = 900 runs. In the end, this is only an estimate. It's possible that it could take a lot more runs, or a lot less. But I think it's good to see the numbers and have a practical idea of ​​what to expect.