To preface -- I'm not playing on /players 1 by choice. I made the mistake of getting D2R on the switch, so this is my only option.

Tonight I wrapped up my 700th Ancient Tunnel run. I rolled a decent layout that spawns 6 or 7 unique monsters on average. It takes me between 1:40 to 2:10 (including ~35s of loading time each run) to blink through with my (~300 mf) blizz sorc, snipe the uniques, and quit out. That's about 23 hours that I've spent farming this location over the last week and a half and all I have to show for it are as follows:

- Darkforce
- Wizardspike
- Aldur's armor
- Lo rune (I understand this is a pretty decent find but it could've been found anywhere)

Is this just a bad dry spell or do I need to be on /players 8 to actually find anything here? I've had some pretty exceptional luck farming Mephisto so far but AT just feels like a total bust.

This post was edited by often on Oct 4 2021 09:04pm

It's just bad luck, I run on /players 1 because I'm MFing on B.net and I do Pindle/Tunnels/Meph. After enough runs, I get decent drops from all 3.

imo if you're going to run exclusively players 1, like on battle.net, especially once rudimentary bots are available, the #1 place to MF is travincal.
council have much different drop tables than normal monsters and get most of their quantity at players 1 unlike the 62.5% no-drop odds for normal monsters, and they cap out at 0% nodrop by players 3, and each council member has the same drop odds even the bosses so you can just ignore toorc icefist entirely, kill 10/11 of them and restart instantly. And they have some of the highest rune droprates

if you're going to solo farm for runes on battle.net nothing beats searching players 7/8 games for lower kurast / sewers runs (and maybe hell cows), but finding 8 player games that don't get irrationally angry at you for farming next to them isn't easy

I'm playing in offline mode, so joining random games is unfortunately not an option.

I'd like the give trav a try but the council honestly wrecks me harder than anything else in the game. Any tips for optimizing a sorc to run trav? I'm assuming capped fire res is something I'm going to have to work towards.

honestly its not that hard to run reasonably safely even with a suicide sorc build, as long as you play cautiously and know how they work. There's not much to threaten you besides melee dorks and hydras, so as long as you keep moving and kiting you don't take damage easily at all. Your merc on the other hand eats hydras so building the merc to survive them is paramount. Steel shade armet is huge