A question for old school D2 veterans from someone who only played 1.11 onwards:

I am trying to play offline old patches, currently trying to do 1.09.

I have a level 80 sorc and level 30 bowazon. For my bowazon, I tried killing nightmare countess 10-20 times, I did not get a single rune drop. ZERO runes, that is literally 0. I tried farming nightmare countess on my level 80 sorc, I got rune drops around 1/5 runs?

Can someone please explain how the 1.09 rune drops worked?

Also on normal, she only dropped el an eld runes, is this right?

countess as a rune source is added in 1.10.

also worth to mention that, before 1.10, there were a lot less runewords and very few of them were useful and none of them were very essential to any build. the game was much easier back then and most builds were good enough with exceptional uniques.

I could say that back in the day, patch 1.10 was one of the largest patches seen in gaming ever and it reshaped the foundation of d2, practically the one we see today.

Thanks for the advice, so I'm guessing when countess did drop runes it was mostly luck? How did people farm runes back then? Was it mostly luck and cows?

luck and cows indeed, but also as he mentioned runes had much less value. no one needed a jah rune, ber runes had some use in items like Gaze, and zods were needed for a lot of items. most of the rest were worthless.

the only real runewords used in 1.09 are fury and silence. everything else was temporary.

Cham?