Setting the game to ‘Players 8’ limits the Countess rune drops to one per kill. What’s also increased, is your experience received and the drop rate for better items. ‘Players 8’ is a command that you can type into single player games to increase the health and difficulty of the monsters you face. When I looked into this further after my Normal difficulty run, I found that Path of Diablo is always set to ‘Players 8’ which tells the game that there are 8 players in the same game, as opposed to just yourself. When I killed her the first time, I received one rune, which was pretty uncommon in my experience. During my Act I Normal play through, I did my usual stop off at the Countess to grab Tal and Eth. Path of Diablo does something funky that made me look into this further. With the drop rate that high, and both ‘Stealth’ runes being in the drop pool, it shouldn’t take more than 2-4 Countess kills to acquire one Tal and one Eth rune so that you can move on. In Normal difficulty, The Countess can drop rune numbers 1-8, (Tal is #7 while Eth is #5). In particular, she has a chance to drop up to six runes per kill in Diablo II, though netting two or three per kill is much more common. In Diablo II, the Countess, an optional boss in Act I has a higher than usual drop rate for runes. ‘Stealth’ runeword, incredibly useful in most early builds in Diablo II.

All of that is incredible for a low level character and makes, at least Normal difficulty, much more trivial. If you socket both ‘Tal’ and ‘Eth’ into a two-socket armor, in that order, you create ‘Stealth’, a runeword that gives you many more bonuses such as faster run/walk, faster hit recovery and faster cast rate. If you socket ‘Eth’, you’ll receive 15% better mana recovery rate. For example, if you socket the ‘Tal’ rune into armor, it gives you 30% poison resist. Each of these runes has specific bonuses if socketed into a piece of equipment.

There are 30 total runes in Diablo II ranging from the most common ‘El’ to the rarest, ‘Zod’. I wanted to dive a bit more into this for those that may not be familiar with Diablo II and to give more background on that comment. In Part I of the series, I mention at one point that finding runes for ‘Stealth’ armor was brutal. If you missed the first part of the series, you can check that out here.īefore jumping into my experience through Nightmare difficulty, I wanted to go over a few things I found out in between articles. Welcome back to my series on Path of Diablo where I chronicle my first experience with the mod and hobble through as a new player without any gear to speed along the process!

Diablo 2 countess rune drops