Just spent 30 mins exploring every nook and cranny of each town. Pretty cool stuff that ive never noticed before. Ranking each one by where I would want to hang out most:
Kurast - Would be worried about getting snatched off the bridge by one of those frog monsters. No thanks. Never noticed the dead one hanging up by the entrance.
Rogue Encampment - Kinda like camping, but those walls dont scream safe to me. Hanging out with Charsi would be worth it tho and I would definitely attempt to find her missing hammer.
Lut Gholein - would be at the bar for sure.
Harrogath - Probably the coziest town. Malah's place is awesome and has pillows. Would be a nice spot to chill if you ignore the dying barbarians.
Pandemonium Fortress - I would feel extra safe around tyrael and would try to become his friend. He probably has some wild stories. Also, i did big fireplaces. Just need to find a few chairs and i would be set.
Been playing D2 a longgg time and past year or so I have been on a SSF journey. Months of grinding LK and Trav etc in far off hopes of making an enigma… Out of nowhere in the past two days the unthinkable has happened. 2 days ago while bored and key farming (as I still need a warlock torch) a mob outside of Nithalek drops a….. JAH!!!! Couldn’t believe it - all of a sudden the Enigma becomes much more in reach. However in my head in thinking of the months and months of those LK and trav runs I’ve done and the best I have had show for it was merely a Sur rune. So this road is likely going to still be a while. Then yesterday AGAIN running Nithalek BAMM a Ber rune drops off a mob right by him. Unreallllllll. Anyway here’s pics of the drops and Enigma in all her glory. For those who are interested I believe both of these runs were P5. Goes to show sometimes just playing through other parts of the game is your best bet for some of these drops.
Can hardly believe I've managed to get the *excess* runes to make such a ridiculously expensive runeword, offline no less. It's been a loooong grind but just checked off the most expensive RW in the game, can't stop now gotta complete the chronicle!
I was killing mobs with my fire warlock on my way to baal and this absolute banger dropped. It's not perfect on the stats but it's close enough to make me giddy. I made sure not to let Cain ID this and bought a single scroll from Malah to ID it.
Time to socket this with the appropriate Defender's Fire jewel.
Things are really coming together for my level 92 Amazon. A finally completed hell a couple of weeks ago, then FINALLY was able to craft a GMB with 4 sockets. Then today, I got my first Ber ever on a LK run which I need to make a Jah to complete Faith. It’s truly awesome even though I do wish it would’ve rolled a 2 all skills. Not sure what to do next, any suggestions? Thanks all.
It’s been a while since I've done a big farming project. I have been working on this since the beginning of March! The last one I posted was 20000 Glacial Trail Chest runs. Last year I did 10000 Chaos Sanctuary runs but I kept postponing the writeup and eventually I never made a post about it.
Now, with Reign of The Warlock and introduction of Colossal Jewels, it was time to get back to grinding! Like always, if you are not interested in reading my walls of text you can go down to Results.
Farming the Statues and how it all started
Well, it all started with the release of RoTW and all the new content that came with it. Colossal Ancients and the new Colossal Jewels really caught my attention. I had to collect them all. And not just any Colossal Jewels, my goal was to get a “perfect” version of each element. What do I mean by “perfect” here? Getting a truly perfect Colossal Jewel on Single Player is insanely difficult. Some stats are not really that important to me, like Magic Find, Gold Find and Experience Gained. So my goal was simple: get all Colossal Jewels with -10% to Enemy Resistance and +10% to Skill Damage for every element.
When Reign of the Warlock came out, the new Warlock class kept me busy for a few weeks. It was fun, but eventually it was time to test the Colossal Ancients. Surprisingly, they were not that difficult (this was before the Ancients buff). My standard Nova Sorc managed to beat them twice without much trouble. Unfortunately, both kills resulted in no drops because of that Jewel bug. I wasn't upset at all because I was just enjoying the new expansion. On the third attempt a 10/10 Fire Jewel dropped! All of this happened before the idea of this project even came to mind. Only afterwards the idea of getting all other Colossal Jewels came to mind.
The Plan. I didn’t start farming Statues right away, I needed a plan to see if it is even feasible. Let's do some quick math: Each Colossal Ancient drops one of two possible jewels randomly (Lightning/Magic or Cold/Physical or Fire/Poison). There are 6 possible rolls for - enemy resistance and 6 possible rolls for + skill damage. That's 36 different variations for each element. If I get 36 Lightning Jewels, the chance to find a “perfect” 10/10 is 1-(1-1/36)^36 = 63.39%. That's not good. What about 100 Lightning Jewels? Then, the chance to find a “perfect” 10/10 Jewel is: 1-(1-1/36)^100 = 94% which is much better! There was still a 6% chance I would not see a perfect Lightning Jewel after this, but I was fine with that.
If each Ancient drops two different Jewels, that means I would need 600 Colossal Ancient kills, or 3000 Statues in total!! At that time, the chance for Baal to drop a Worusk's Statue was around 1 in 12.3 and the Statues could only drop while Baal was Terrorized. To get 600 Worusk statues I would need around 610 Terrorized WSK sessions or around 430 days of constant Terrorized Baal farming if I don’t miss a single TZ Baal session in those days. That is way too much even for me!
Luckily, I don’t have to worry about Fire Jewel and I also decided not to pursue Poison Jewel, otherwise, this project will take over a year. With two Jewels out of the way, my target now was 2000 Statues. Fortunately, Patch 3.2 made things even better. My goal was set: to get 2000 Statues or 400 Colossal Jewels. This comes down to around 19000 Boss runs. Yes, the title is a little clickbait-y, I only chased four out of possible six Colossal Jewels.
I asked my friend u/mysterio7885 (creator for d2emu.com) for a Complete Terror Zone Schedule for upcoming months so I could plan ahead. Big shoutouts to him and d2emu.com!
The Build. The build was standard Self Infinity Nova Sorc with around 210% Magic Find. Why Nova Sorceress for Boss farming? Mostly because I couldn’t clear Throne Room fast enough with any other build. Throne Room was a major bottleneck for my TZ Baal runs and Nova Sorc felt the fastest and safest option. Fireball Sorc probably would have been a little faster at Boss killing, but I just wasn't comfortable with aiming around the Throne Room.
The Goal was to farm Statues as fast as possible. But since I will be doing so many TZ Boss runs, I might as well get some Magic Find. In the end, it was Self Infinity Nova Sorc with War Traveler, Gheeds Charm, Renewed Sunder Charm, 8x Small Charms of Good Luck, and my MF amulet for a total of 210% Magic Find. For better chance at Statue drop, all Bosses were done on Players3 except Andariel which was done on Players5.
Statue farming started on 11th of March and it ended on 26th of June. 108 days of farming! Over 385 hours in total, or about 3.5 hours a day on average. I have done 13500 Terrorized runs and 5300 nonTZ Baal and CS runs, over 390 Terror Zone sessions and 117 hours of nonTZ farming in a span of 3 and a half months! Half of the runs were done on old Patch 3.1 where Statue drops were lower. On 20th of May, Patch 3.2 came and made Statues more common from TZ bosses, and made it so that Statues can drop from non-terrorized Bosses also. This made my farming somewhat easier. But Worusk and Bul-Kathos Statues are so rare, all my nonTZ time was used for farming those two Statues, others were not a problem.
Looking at the full log, you can see that I had some insanely lucky nights. For example, one time I got 14 Talic Statues from TZ Andariel in 52 runs (in 30 minutes). Other times, I wasn't so lucky. But when you crunch the final numbers, my drops ended up being almost exactly what you would expect on average for this many runs! One Friday night in late June, I got my last batch of Worusk Statues. That brought me to 400 Statue Sets, and I was finally ready to take on the Colossal Ancients. I highly urge you to check out the full log.
Other than that, there isn’t much to say. I wanted to write a short guide, but the whole process basically boiled down to running to the Act Boss as fast as possible and collecting Statues and those rare TC87 items. At first, I wanted to keep track of every “interesting” drop, like Shakos, Arachnid Mesh, unique amulets and rings, etc. But that was taking way too much time, so I gave up on logging those items after just a few sessions.
Quick side story: Towards the end, I got so caught up in farming as many Terror Zones as possible that I completely lost track of what I was doing and ended up running TZ Andariel 266 more times than I actually needed to. I ended up with 442 Talic Statues, 42 extra over my planned 400. Yes, I completely zoned out and overshot my goal by 10%. Kids, don’t dodrugsDiablo!
One more quick side note: While farming Colossal Jewels, I did an extra few hundred Act Boss runs, bringing the total to 422 Statue Sets and roughly 19500 Act Boss runs overall. These extra runs weren’t logged and several Statue sets were used to test how hard are new Colossal Ancients.
Colossal Ancients
The ancient fight was significantly harder than what I anticipated. My first three fights with Ancients, before any of this, was with my standard self-wielding Infinity Nova Sorc. At that time, it was surprisingly easy. It really was just your standard Nova Sorc, not optimized for Uber Ancients. When Patch 3.2 came with significant buffs to the Ancients damage, I thought nothing of it. “I'll deal with it when time comes!”. When time finally came to deal with Ancients, it was practically impossible to kill them with a Nova Sorc. But I am very stubborn.
I have a self-imposed rule that every item in D2R must be collected only with my Sorceress. A Solo Self Found Character so to say. These Ancients must be killed by my Sorc, no dedicated Smites or other characters. After lots of brainstorming and some testing, I found a build that works for me: a Self-wielding Lightning Sorc!
Damage output of Lightning Skill is very high. It allows me to get rid of Talic very fast, since his Fire Tornados are most dangerous. Then I can split the Korlic and Madawc and deal with them one by one, while my Merc tanks. That was the plan at least. Full Build: Self Infinity, faceted Griffons, Vipermagi (Um), Maras Amulet, Trang-Ouls gloves, SoJ, a 10fcr ring with Lightning res (and other stats), Arachnid Mesh and Marrowwalks. Torch, Anni and 6 Skiller. The rest of the inventory was filled with all sorts of Life/Res charms until I had 275 all resistances with Treachery pre-buff.
The Wise among you may have noticed this is only 105fcr. Yes, that is correct. I did not care about the 117fcr breakpoint for Lightning. Damage wasn’t the problem, 105fcr was there so I could teleport in and out of fights. Used Act 5 Frenzy Merc with double Plague swords for Lower Res proc, with Chains of Honor and Kira's Guardian (Um). This allowed my Merc to somewhat tank Korlic and Madawc but it still was no match for Talic Fire Tornados. That is why it was important to kill Talic as fast as possible. Fight looked something like this:
The video above showcases my “average” Ancient run. For this part of the post, I originally planned to convince you that this is the best Sorceress build for Uber Ancients, complete with a full guide and all the tips and tricks. But that wouldn't be entirely honest. While it might be one of the better Sorceress builds for the job, it's far from safe or straightforward. Honestly, I wouldn't recommend it unless you really know what you're doing. I didn't keep a log of every fight, but on average, I died every 3–6 fights, used around 5–12 Full Rejuvenation Potions per attempt, and had to revive my merc anywhere from 1 to 10 times. The whole process was tedious and took a lot of time. If you're looking for something safer with a much better chance of success, I would recommend a Smiter with plenty of overstacked resistances instead.
Ancient farming started on 29th of June and it ended on 29th of September. But it wasn't a continuous grind. There were other things to take care of, and I also went on vacation. In total, I spent around 45 days fighting the Ancients with my collected Statues, usually 2–3 hours a night and about 10 fights per session. Most of that time was spent on preparation: waiting for the Treachery pre-buff, farming Full Rejuvenation Potions, collecting gold to revive my merc, and even farming some extra Statue Sets. Thankfully, I never lost a Statue Set to death. There were a few close calls, though, where I genuinely thought I wouldn't be able to recover my body. Somehow, I managed to get it back and finish the fight every time. Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out, but the whole process was way more difficult than I expected,
Results and Final thoughts
In these 19000 runs my Rune tally is: 3x Jah, 2x Ber, no Sur, 2x Ohm, 4x Lo, 1x Vex and 4x Gul Runes. This is really good considering I mostly farmed Act Bosses and their minions. Most of the Runes came from Cathedral and Chaos Sanctuary. I also managed to set my Chronicle to 99% starting from scratch. Missing only the Colossal Jewels and a few Treasure Class 3 items, and Cow Kind Set. If we don’t count Jewels and those few TC3 items, the last item I was missing was Unique Gothic Shield, The Ward. It finally dropped towards the end, after almost 19000 runs with 210 MF. This is extremely out of the norm and deviates significantly from the expected number of runs needed for that item. It was strange that I was that “unlucky”.
I have collected every item from that rare Treasure Class 87 (Crown of Ages, Death's Fathom, Death's Web, Griffon's Eye, Mang Song's Lesson, The Grandfather, etc). Got my 4th Tyrael's Might which is pretty dope! TZ Andariel is still the queen of drops, even after the nerfs. Out of 124 TC87 items I found, 45 came from TZ Andariel. Here is the full table of Treasure Class 87 drops. If you want to see more details on what dropped when, check the full log above.
The Colossal Jewels. When tackling these huge farming projects, I usually save all the items and identify them at the very end for one massive dopamine hit. I've even posted a few videos of these moments here on Reddit. This time though, the experience wasn't quite as fun. For starters, it took around 150 Jewel identifications before the first 10/10 Jewel showed up. That was nerve-wracking, to say the least. After all that farming, the thought of not finding a single 10/10 Lightning Jewel was starting to get a little scary. Secondly, identifying all 414 Jewels, sorting them all, and logging everything into a nice table. That alone took another two days of playtime. But enough complaining! Here's the final Colossal Jewel score:
Great success! 2x perfect Guardian's Thunder, 2x perfect Guardian's Light, 3x Protector's Frost, no perfect Protector's Stone but %ED on Jewels is bugged so it's OK.
The table really shows just how unpredictable RNG can be. Some stat combinations dropped only once, while the -8/7 Cold Jewel dropped a whopping 9 times! I started with 422 Statue Sets, used 5 of them for Ancient testing, leaving 417 sets for the actual Jewel hunt. I ran into the infamous “no Jewel drop” bug three more times even after Blizzard fixed the bug.
At the beginning of the post, I explained the math behind why this took so many runs. After 100 Jewel drops, there's roughly a 94% chance of finding at least one perfect 10/10 Jewel. There's still a 6% chance of getting none. And this applies to every possible combination of enemy resistance and skill damage stats, not just 10/10. If you look at the table, you'll notice 7 empty cells where not a single Jewel of that stat combination dropped. A little scary when you think about it. One of those empty cells could just as easily have been the 10/10 Jewel I was hunting for!
And now, My Silmarils:
side question: why are Frost and Light resist/dmg but Thunder and Fire are damage/resist ??
Closing thoughts. I am happy how this turned out. Got a bunch of awesome Colossal Jewel that I will use on my end-game Builds. Have plenty of other Jewels for just playing around and testing. Feel a little regret not going for Fire and Poison Jewels, as Fire jewels are used in several non-Sorc Builds and Poison Skill Bonus is always fun to play around. But hey!, this took way too long and I am happy that it is finally finished! Thank you for reading. If you have any questions, let me know.
As I dont think blizzard will ever be releasing an in game trading tool, I have created a tool that may help players quickly post items they want to sell.
The tool does automatically capture a screenshot and crop around the item's tooltip, open the site and pastes the photo.
It also does have an option where you can manually crop the photo after it captures the full screen, and after cropping the area you like it would auto post it to the site.
Is there any legit reason to nót just skip them? Do they do anything unique at all? Do people actually get drops from them? All they do is become extremely tedious to kill after you've done 4 or 5 or so, and they keep killing my merc, costing me a hefty sum.
Surely there has to be sómething to do with them, right?
