How to farm runes in D2R 2.8

Ben Author

Created - 21.06.2025 Updated - 25.06.2025

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Runes are the currency of Diablo 2. Higher-tier runes are amongst the rarest items to drop, and runewords are some of the most powerful in the game. Runewords consisting of lower-tier runes are often the best choice for leveling, so make sure to check out our Best Ladder Starter Runewords guide and get ready to quickly level up your character. However, if you want to find them yourself, this guide has some great tricks for you to use.

What You Need to Know About Rune Farming in D2R

D2R Runes are typically dropped by bosses and unique monsters at certain difficulty levels, though they can be obtained through chests and lowly monsters as well (at a significantly reduced rate).

In addition, rune drops in Diablo II: Resurrected are affected by some factors, such as area level, monster level, and the number of players in the game (certain areas have higher chances of rune drops as we’ll outline below).

Increasing your Magic Find percentage does not increase the chances of finding runes; it only improves the chance of upgrading items to rare, magic, unique, or set items (from basic items). Runes, you could say, are a separate category of their own.

As you advance through the game, the possibility of obtaining higher-level runes increases. There are a few exceptions to this, but in general, the table below outlines the D2R Runes that can drop in each Act and difficulty level.

Take note that the list is cumulative, meaning that if Zod can drop, so can all other Runes (this also does not include terror zones that have increased monster levels during the period they are active):

These are the areas where any rune can drop (Hell only):

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Hellforge Quest

The Hellforge Quest is the second quest of Act 4. The completion of this quest rewards you with a rune, allowing you to get mid-tier runes early in the game. On Normal Difficulty, you can get runes up to the Amn Rune.

On Nightmare Difficulty, you can be rewarded with the Sol Rune all the way to the Um Rune. Finally, on Hell Difficulty, you may receive any rune from Hel Rune to Gul Rune just by accomplishing this particular quest. All runes that you can obtain from the quest have an equal chance of dropping, so you may get lucky and acquire something useful for your particular D2R Character.

Best Locations to Farm for Runes

There are some areas in Diablo II: Resurrected where you can “target-farm” certain runes. Here are the best locations in the game:

The Countess

The Countess is a demon “superunique” mini-boss that can be found at The Cellar (Level 5) of the Forgotten Tower in Act 1. The tower itself, if you are wondering, is situated in the Black Marsh.

She is the only monster in the game with a uniquely high chance to drop runes. On Normal Difficulty, you can acquire the Ral Rune, which you can use to craft caster amulets in D2R that have Faster Cast Rate and other good bonuses.

On Nightmare Difficulty, you can get the Ko Rune. This particular D2R Rune doesn’t do much aside from allowing you to upgrade the tier of a piece of gear to “Elite.” You can use the Ko Rune for upgrading unique armor, rare armor, and even set items when placed with the other crafting ingredients into the Horadric Cube.

On Hell Difficulty, you will have a high chance of obtaining the Lo Rune. The Lo Rune is one of the runes you need to create Grief or Fortitude, both of which are exceptional runewords that provide a ton of value for melee builds in Diablo II: Resurrected.

The very high drop rate of runes from The Countess only affects those up to Io Rune on Nightmare Difficulty and Ist Rune on Hell Difficulty. As an example, she has a 1:287 chance to drop an Ist Rune on Hell, while the second-highest drop chance of an Ist rune is 1:7789 by killing the Act 2 Boss, Duriel. By using the rune-upgrading Horadric Cube recipes, The Countess is the best source even for high-tier runes up until Sur.

Rune Drop Mechanics

The Countess' rune drops are calculated in a unique way. For one, about five rolls are made in her item drop table, each with a 19/67 chance to roll nothing. Next, three rolls are made from her rune drop table, each with a 1/4 chance to roll nothing. If a rune is rolled, it first rolls the highest rune for the corresponding difficulty. If it doesn't roll a rune, an El or Eld Rune is guaranteed to drop.

Rune Drop Limits by Difficulty

The Countess's special rune drop table can roll up to a Ral Rune on Normal difficulty, an Io rune on Nightmare difficulty, and an Ist rune on Hell difficulty.

Lower Kurast

Super Chests, also known as special chests, offer an unparalleled opportunity to acquire high runes in Diablo II: Resurrected. Lower Kurast is a prime location for Super Chest farming due to its unique map layout and abundance of Super Chests. This guide will cover the basics of Super Chests, their item generation, and tips for optimizing your Lower Kurast rune farming.

Understanding Super Chests

Super Chests differ from regular chests in their drop mechanics, boasting a significantly better chance of dropping high runes. Super Chests are rarer than normal chests but are easier to find consistently in Lower Kurast. They also have a significantly higher rune drop rate than normal chests or monsters.

Why Lower Kurast?

Lower Kurast is an ideal Super Chest farming location in Diablo II: Resurrected because the map always spawns with a hut containing three Super Chests. Occasionally, these chests may spawn in two huts, offering six Super Chests in a small area. In addition to Super Chests, Lower Kurast features numerous armor and weapon racks and interactable objects like logs and corpses, which are great for finding runes.

Identifying Super Chest Locations in Lower Kurast

Look for two rectangular buildings with a bonfire below them enclosed by two walls. This tile will contain the Super Chests. Here is an image of a hut that contains one of the possible Super chests you can find in Lower Kurast:

Optimizing Lower Kurast Farming

Focus on high survivability and mobility when farming Lower Kurast, as there is no need to kill monsters. Stick to higher difficulties (Players 7) for the best chances at obtaining high runes. Going to Players 8 will not increase the likelihood of rune drops when compared to Players 7.

The reason why you’d want to go to Lower Kurast when farming more valuable runes at high player counts is that the more difficult the content, the better your chances of acquiring amazing loot. Fortunately, you do not need to fight the monsters here as you can head straight to the Super Chests if you want to.

Moreover, we highly recommend playing the Sorceress if it is your first-ever character in Diablo II: Resurrected. This is because she has access to Teleport, which is an amazing movement ability that allows her to cover the massive Lower Kurast area easily.

Other characters can also be used to farm high runes in this region, though you’ll have to equip them with the Enigma Runeword to gain access to Teleport. Of course, this is an expensive D2R Runeword, so if you do not have the means of obtaining it, you can go for the Paladin with Vigor Aura or the Assassin with a high-level Burst of Speed.

The Secret Cow Level

If you find farming high runes specifically by opening Super Chests to be boring, there is a good alternative to that. The Secret Cow Level is one of the famous farming spots in Diablo II: Resurrected mainly because of the insanely good monster density in this area. Just wander around and you will see yourself getting surrounded by a bunch of Killer Cows that will stop at nothing to defend their home turf!

That said, to find Ber, Jah, Cham, or Zod Runes, doing a lot of grinding is inevitable. Bosses have a 10 to 20× higher chance to drop these runes than regular monsters—from Duriel dropping Ber Runes once every 42.945 kills to Hephasto The Armorer dropping Zod Runes once every 192.066 kills.

The best way of acquiring these high-tier runes is by killing lots and lots of monsters. That is why The Secret Cow Level is the ideal place for that. If you are interested in coming to the said area, you can access it through a Red Portal by cubing together Wirt’s Leg and a Tome of Town Portal in Act 1.

If you do not know where to find Wirt’s Leg, you have to go to Tristram via the Stony Field in Act 1. Head to the northwestern section of the map to find Wirt’s Body.

When you come across Wirt’s Body, simply click on his corpse and Wirt’s Leg will drop along with some Gold to help you in your travels.

Normal Cows (Hell Bovines) have a 1:730,000 chance to drop a Ber rune, and an abysmal 1:2,560,000 chance to drop a Zod rune. Despite the atrociously low drop rates, these high runes are still easier to find simply by farming cows. This is because about 350 to 450 Hell Bovines could appear in The Secret Cow Level and chase you until you die.

To efficiently farm The Secret Cow Level in D2R, your build of choice should be one that deals a huge amount of area damage, allowing you to cut through the groups of Killer Cows quickly. Some builds you can use include the Lightning Fury Javazon, Blessed Hammer Paladin (aka Hammerdin), or the Whirlwind Barbarian, among others.

In addition to being the best place to farm high-tier runes, The Secret Cow Level is also the ideal source for socketable base items. In conclusion, it is the go-to place if your aim is to acquire high-tier runewords in Diablo II: Resurrected.

Travincal

The Travincal is a prime location for farming high runes up to a Cham Rune. Besides that, this place is good for obtaining various unique items, jewelry, charms, and gold. In this section of our D2R Rune Farming Guide, we'll provide an overview of the Travincal area, as well as the infamous Council Members and strategies for overcoming them. We are also going to give you some awesome tips on how to maximize the loot drops.

Council Members and Super Uniques

There are a total of 11 Council Members in the Travincal, including 3 Super Unique Council Members. While all Council Members share the same drop table, the minions have a lower chance of dropping unique or set items. However, they are still valuable for farming runes.

Overcoming Council Members

Council Members are formidable foes, boasting different immunities, high damage, and healing abilities. Super Uniques have natural Fire Immunity, with Geleb Flamefinger and Toorc Icefist also immune to Lightning and Cold Damage, respectively.

Minions are immune to either Lightning or Fire. Just when you think that all hope is lost against these enemies, you can break their immunity to certain damage types with the Infinity Runeword or opt for a melee- or magic-based build. Be cautious of Toorc Icefist's Holy Freeze Aura because it cannot be negated by “Cannot be Frozen” mods like from Rhyme or Raven Frost.

Due to the prevalence of fire damage from the enemies found in Travincal, make sure to cap your “Fire Absorb” defensive stat and fire resistance to protect your character from death.

Get More Loot from Travincal Farming

We at RPGStash are going to let you in on a little secret. Basically, a trick has been found where you can defeat monsters with Player1 stats but have their loot drop as if they are set to Player7. In other words, you get to fight and defeat the Council Members easily because they have lower HP, though the quantity and quality of items that they drop are similar as if you have defeated them in P7 Difficulty.

So, what you will do is set the game’s “Offline Difficulty Scaling” to one by default. This is done by adding the command “-Players 1” by right-clicking the shortcut for D2R and choosing Properties.

Do the same thing for the Battlenet App. Choose Diablo II: Resurrected from the list of games inside the app, click the gear icon (Options), and then Game Settings. Under “Install Location,” put a checkmark on “Additional Command Line Arguments” and type “-Players 1” as well.

This particular command will make sure that the game client will default to P1 Difficulty every time you log in. Although this is optional, it helps improve rune-farming efficiency immensely.

Once that is done, open the Notepad and type “/Players 7” without the quotation marks. After that, copy the text by highlighting it and pressing Ctrl+C. This will allow you to press Ctrl+V to paste the command every time you log in, alleviating the need to type it manually.

Okay, after the initial setup process is done, fire up Diablo II: Resurrected. Head to Act 3 Travincal and use Teleport to go directly to the Council Members. Now, your goal at this point is to simply activate the council so that they can be attacked, but you are actually not going to kill them just yet.

After activation, press Teleport twice until they are out of your screen. This is an important step that you have to make in order for this trick to work. Alternatively, you can head to the Kurast Causeway if you want to be sure, though this is not really needed.

When the Council Members are away, press Enter and paste the “/Players7” command using Ctrl+V. Don’t forget to hit Enter again after pasting. This part of the process will set the game’s offline difficulty scaling to seven, essentially making the enemies harder.

However, the thing is, doing this trick will actually not make the Council Members more challenging. It only changes the loot drops because the game still thinks that you are in P1 Difficulty as it is the one that was set by default.

Now here comes the fun part: Kill all the Council Members! We suggest the D2R Nova Sorceress because of her amazing AoE-killing potential, though any build in Diablo II: Resurrected will do fine so long as they can clear groups of monsters quickly and easily.

So, in a nutshell, the trick involves the following steps:

1. Set game difficulty to Player 1 by adding the command line argument “-Players 1”
2. Type /Players 7 on a Notepad so that you can easily copy and paste it
3. Fire up Diablo II: Resurrected and head to Travincal in Act 3
4. Use Teleport and go near the Council Members to “activate” them
5. Teleport away from the council until they can no longer be seen on screen (or head to the Kurast Causeway just to be sure)
6. Type or paste /Players 7 and wait for 4 to 5 seconds for the game to apply the difficulty scaling
7. Go back to the Council Members and slay them. Enjoy the loot!

If you are asking if this trick is still valid in D2R Season 11, yes! Absolutely! This is not an exploit by any means because it is simply how the game works. It is just not well-known until now!

Take note that while this trick can work in an online multiplayer environment, we highly advise you to only do it solo. This is unless you are confident that the other players know exactly what they should do for this trick to work flawlessly.

Farming Player Difficulty

Now, if you do not want to rely on the trick to get better loot, you can kill the Council Members in P3 Difficulty instead. Slaying them in Players 3 Difficulty offers a good balance between how challenging they can be and the loot you are going to get.

Combining Runes in D2R—Why You Should Do It

During your rune-farming runs in Diablo II: Resurrected, you will get boatloads of low-tier runes and they accumulate really fast if you do not know how to manage your stash and inventory properly.

The good news is that you can actually combine your excess runes by using certain Horadric Cube Recipes to form more valuable higher runes. Here is a breakdown of the runes that you need to craft better ones:

D2R Rune Farming Area Tier List

D2R Runes—Highest Value by Category

Final Thoughts on Farming Runes in D2R

Runes in Diablo II: Resurrected have plenty of uses, making them valuable items to have for the betterment of your characters. You can use them as is, socketing them into each piece of gear you have equipped to obtain certain bonuses and effects.

Alternatively, you can combine these runes to create D2R runewords that have an amazing collection of stats and bonuses you cannot find elsewhere in the game, such as Enigma, Fortitude, and Spirit, among many others.

That said, farming these runes on your own will require a heavy time investment; time that you might not be able to fit into your busy schedule. If you’d rather have these runes at your disposal immediately without farming for countless hours, then head to our D2R Store where you will find all of the runes mentioned in this article, as well as various gear, unique items, and sets!