Almost every build can handle her, and she drops all the runes available from her special rune drops frequently enough that even slow runners can grind out their desired Runewords without too much trouble before advancing. But for all of these, there is little strategy or optimization needed. See the Runeword reference at the end of the guide for more. It doesn’t take too long to farm runes for common Runeword such as Leaf, Stealth, or even Ancient s Pledge (from cubing Rals to an Ort) in normal difficulty, as well as ones such as lore or rhyme in nightmare difficulty. In normal and nightmare difficulty she is a common target for rerunning with nearly all characters. So running on p1 will give many more runes Normal and Nightmare Due to the way her treasure class (which determines what she can drop) is structured, dropping items from her normal drop often takes away potential rune drops. The first thing to know about running the countess for runes is that it should always be done on players1.

She will drop those keys in single-player as well, but they have no use. On BattleNet, she is also often run in Hell difficulty for Keys of Terror, needed in torch farming. Her special rune drop drops up to Ral, Io, and Ist in normal, nightmare, and hell difficulties, respectively. Simply put, if a rune is available from her special rune drop, she is almost always the fastest and easiest way to farm that rune. The former is commonly called The Countess’s “normal drop” and the latter her “special rune drop”. She drops from two treasure classes, Countess Item and Countess Rune.

The Countess has an interesting treasure class, which causes her to drop runes reliably. Why Run The Countess? The Countess as seen in Diablo 2. At the end of the guide, I will also provide a “Runeword Reference”, originally written by Sparks, which can be used to see what Runewords are available to you at each difficulty from a reasonable number of countess runs. In this guide, I will discuss why and how to run The Countess as well as the calculated chances for her to drop commonly sought runes in hell. Her elevated rune drop chances make her a common target to run in all difficulties of the game. She is found at the bottom (cellar level 5) of the Forgotten Tower which is in the Black Marsh in Act 1. The Countess is a Superunique monster in Diablo 2.

Table 2: Runs to find or cube at least 1 of rune with 63.2% confidence level.

Table 1: Average runs for direct drop of rune.

Diablo 2 countess rune words normal