It’s been a while since I've done a big farming project. I have been working on this since the beginning of March! The last one I posted was 20000 Glacial Trail Chest runs. Last year I did 10000 Chaos Sanctuary runs but I kept postponing the writeup and eventually I never made a post about it. 

Now, with Reign of The Warlock and introduction of Colossal Jewels, it was time to get back to grinding! Like always, if you are not interested in reading my walls of text you can go down to Results.

Farming the Statues and how it all started

Well, it all started with the release of RoTW and all the new content that came with it. Colossal Ancients and the new Colossal Jewels really caught my attention. I had to collect them all. And not just any Colossal Jewels, my goal was to get a “perfect” version of each element. What do I mean by “perfect” here? Getting a truly perfect Colossal Jewel on Single Player is insanely difficult. Some stats are not really that important to me, like Magic Find, Gold Find and Experience Gained. So my goal was simple: get all Colossal Jewels with -10% to Enemy Resistance and +10% to Skill Damage for every element.

When Reign of the Warlock came out, the new Warlock class kept me busy for a few weeks. It was fun, but eventually it was time to test the Colossal Ancients. Surprisingly, they were not that difficult (this was before the Ancients buff). My standard Nova Sorc managed to beat them twice without much trouble. Unfortunately, both kills resulted in no drops because of that Jewel bug. I wasn't upset at all because I was just enjoying the new expansion. On the third attempt a 10/10 Fire Jewel dropped! All of this happened before the idea of this project even came to mind. Only afterwards the idea of getting all other Colossal Jewels came to mind. 

The Plan. I didn’t start farming Statues right away, I needed a plan to see if it is even feasible. Let's do some quick math: Each Colossal Ancient drops one of two possible jewels randomly (Lightning/Magic or Cold/Physical or Fire/Poison). There are 6 possible rolls for - enemy resistance and 6 possible rolls for + skill damage. That's 36 different variations for each element. If I get 36 Lightning Jewels, the chance to find a “perfect” 10/10 is 1-(1-1/36)^36 = 63.39%. That's not good. What about 100 Lightning Jewels? Then, the chance to find a “perfect” 10/10 Jewel is: 1-(1-1/36)^100 = 94% which is much better! There was still a 6% chance I would not see a perfect Lightning Jewel after this, but I was fine with that.

If each Ancient drops two different Jewels, that means I would need 600 Colossal Ancient kills, or 3000 Statues in total!! At that time, the chance for Baal to drop a Worusk's Statue was around 1 in 12.3 and the Statues could only drop while Baal was Terrorized. To get 600 Worusk statues I would need around 610 Terrorized WSK sessions or around 430 days of constant Terrorized Baal farming if I don’t miss a single TZ Baal session in those days. That is way too much even for me! 

Luckily, I don’t have to worry about Fire Jewel and I also decided not to pursue Poison Jewel, otherwise, this project will take over a year. With two Jewels out of the way, my target now was 2000 Statues. Fortunately, Patch 3.2 made things even better. My goal was set: to get 2000 Statues or 400 Colossal Jewels. This comes down to around 19000 Boss runs. Yes, the title is a little clickbait-y, I only chased four out of possible six Colossal Jewels. 

I asked my friend u/mysterio7885 (creator for d2emu.com) for a Complete Terror Zone Schedule for upcoming months so I could plan ahead. Big shoutouts to him and d2emu.com! 

The Build. The build was standard Self Infinity Nova Sorc with around 210% Magic Find. Why Nova Sorceress for Boss farming? Mostly because I couldn’t clear Throne Room fast enough with any other build. Throne Room was a major bottleneck for my TZ Baal runs and Nova Sorc felt the fastest and safest option. Fireball Sorc probably would have been a little faster at Boss killing, but I just wasn't comfortable with aiming around the Throne Room.

The Goal was to farm Statues as fast as possible. But since I will be doing so many TZ Boss runs, I might as well get some Magic Find. In the end, it was Self Infinity Nova Sorc with War Traveler, Gheeds Charm, Renewed Sunder Charm, 8x Small Charms of Good Luck, and my MF amulet for a total of 210% Magic Find. For better chance at Statue drop, all Bosses were done on Players3 except Andariel which was done on Players5.

Statue farming started on 11th of March and it ended on 26th of June. 108 days of farming! Over 385 hours in total, or about 3.5 hours a day on average. I have done 13500 Terrorized runs and 5300 nonTZ Baal and CS runs, over 390 Terror Zone sessions and 117 hours of nonTZ farming in a span of 3 and a half months! Half of the runs were done on old Patch 3.1 where Statue drops were lower. On 20th of May, Patch 3.2 came and made Statues more common from TZ bosses, and made it so that Statues can drop from non-terrorized Bosses also. This made my farming somewhat easier. But Worusk and Bul-Kathos Statues are so rare, all my nonTZ time was used for farming those two Statues, others were not a problem. 

I catalogued my every run and how many Statues dropped in that time. You can check out full log here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iFMSc5cj7zRNJctfh2VPsJcy26RtofXO6erMSqXhz7s/

Looking at the full log, you can see that I had some insanely lucky nights. For example, one time I got 14 Talic Statues from TZ Andariel in 52 runs (in 30 minutes). Other times, I wasn't so lucky. But when you crunch the final numbers, my drops ended up being almost exactly what you would expect on average for this many runs! One Friday night in late June, I got my last batch of Worusk Statues. That brought me to 400 Statue Sets, and I was finally ready to take on the Colossal Ancients. I highly urge you to check out the full log.

Other than that, there isn’t much to say. I wanted to write a short guide, but the whole process basically boiled down to running to the Act Boss as fast as possible and collecting Statues and those rare TC87 items. At first, I wanted to keep track of every “interesting” drop, like Shakos, Arachnid Mesh, unique amulets and rings, etc. But that was taking way too much time, so I gave up on logging those items after just a few sessions.

Quick side story: Towards the end, I got so caught up in farming as many Terror Zones as possible that I completely lost track of what I was doing and ended up running TZ Andariel 266 more times than I actually needed to. I ended up with 442 Talic Statues, 42 extra over my planned 400. Yes, I completely zoned out and overshot my goal by 10%. Kids, don’t do drugs Diablo!

One more quick side note: While farming Colossal Jewels, I did an extra few hundred Act Boss runs, bringing the total to 422 Statue Sets and roughly 19500 Act Boss runs overall. These extra runs weren’t logged and several Statue sets were used to test how hard are new Colossal Ancients.

Colossal Ancients

The ancient fight was significantly harder than what I anticipated. My first three fights with Ancients, before any of this, was with my standard self-wielding Infinity Nova Sorc. At that time, it was surprisingly easy. It really was just your standard Nova Sorc, not optimized for Uber Ancients. When Patch 3.2 came with significant buffs to the Ancients damage, I thought nothing of it. “I'll deal with it when time comes!”. When time finally came to deal with Ancients, it was practically impossible to kill them with a Nova Sorc. But I am very stubborn. 

I have a self-imposed rule that every item in D2R must be collected only with my Sorceress. A Solo Self Found Character so to say. These Ancients must be killed by my Sorc, no dedicated Smites or other characters. After lots of brainstorming and some testing, I found a build that works for me: a Self-wielding Lightning Sorc!

Damage output of Lightning Skill is very high. It allows me to get rid of Talic very fast, since his Fire Tornados are most dangerous. Then I can split the Korlic and Madawc and deal with them one by one, while my Merc tanks. That was the plan at least. Full Build: Self Infinity, faceted Griffons, Vipermagi (Um), Maras Amulet, Trang-Ouls gloves, SoJ, a 10fcr ring with Lightning res (and other stats), Arachnid Mesh and Marrowwalks. Torch, Anni and 6 Skiller. The rest of the inventory was filled with all sorts of Life/Res charms until I had 275 all resistances with Treachery pre-buff. 

The Wise among you may have noticed this is only 105fcr. Yes, that is correct. I did not care about the 117fcr breakpoint for Lightning. Damage wasn’t the problem, 105fcr was there so I could teleport in and out of fights. Used Act 5 Frenzy Merc with double Plague swords for Lower Res proc, with Chains of Honor and Kira's Guardian (Um). This allowed my Merc to somewhat tank Korlic and Madawc but it still was no match for Talic Fire Tornados. That is why it was important to kill Talic as fast as possible. Fight looked something like this:

https://reddit.com/link/1x6th8z/video/c99gdoqj1ovh1/player

The video above showcases my “average” Ancient run. For this part of the post, I originally planned to convince you that this is the best Sorceress build for Uber Ancients, complete with a full guide and all the tips and tricks. But that wouldn't be entirely honest. While it might be one of the better Sorceress builds for the job, it's far from safe or straightforward. Honestly, I wouldn't recommend it unless you really know what you're doing. I didn't keep a log of every fight, but on average, I died every 3–6 fights, used around 5–12 Full Rejuvenation Potions per attempt, and had to revive my merc anywhere from 1 to 10 times. The whole process was tedious and took a lot of time. If you're looking for something safer with a much better chance of success, I would recommend a Smiter with plenty of overstacked resistances instead.

Ancient farming started on 29th of June and it ended on 29th of September. But it wasn't a continuous grind. There were other things to take care of, and I also went on vacation. In total, I spent around 45 days fighting the Ancients with my collected Statues, usually 2–3 hours a night and about 10 fights per session. Most of that time was spent on preparation: waiting for the Treachery pre-buff, farming Full Rejuvenation Potions, collecting gold to revive my merc, and even farming some extra Statue Sets. Thankfully, I never lost a Statue Set to death. There were a few close calls, though, where I genuinely thought I wouldn't be able to recover my body. Somehow, I managed to get it back and finish the fight every time. Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out, but the whole process was way more difficult than I expected,

Results and Final thoughts

In these 19000 runs my Rune tally is: 3x Jah, 2x Ber, no Sur, 2x Ohm, 4x Lo, 1x Vex and 4x Gul Runes. This is really good considering I mostly farmed Act Bosses and their minions. Most of the Runes came from Cathedral and Chaos Sanctuary. I also managed to set my Chronicle to 99% starting from scratch. Missing only the Colossal Jewels and a few Treasure Class 3 items, and Cow Kind Set. If we don’t count Jewels and those few TC3 items, the last item I was missing was Unique Gothic Shield, The Ward. It finally dropped towards the end, after almost 19000 runs with 210 MF. This is extremely out of the norm and deviates significantly from the expected number of runs needed for that item. It was strange that I was that “unlucky”.

I have collected every item from that rare Treasure Class 87 (Crown of Ages, Death's Fathom, Death's Web, Griffon's Eye, Mang Song's Lesson, The Grandfather, etc). Got my 4th Tyrael's Might which is pretty dope! TZ Andariel is still the queen of drops, even after the nerfs. Out of 124 TC87 items I found, 45 came from TZ Andariel. Here is the full table of Treasure Class 87 drops. If you want to see more details on what dropped when, check the full log above. 

The Colossal Jewels. When tackling these huge farming projects, I usually save all the items and identify them at the very end for one massive dopamine hit. I've even posted a few videos of these moments here on Reddit. This time though, the experience wasn't quite as fun. For starters, it took around 150 Jewel identifications before the first 10/10 Jewel showed up. That was nerve-wracking, to say the least. After all that farming, the thought of not finding a single 10/10 Lightning Jewel was starting to get a little scary. Secondly, identifying all 414 Jewels, sorting them all, and logging everything into a nice table. That alone took another two days of playtime. But enough complaining! Here's the final Colossal Jewel score:

Great success! 2x perfect Guardian's Thunder, 2x perfect Guardian's Light, 3x Protector's Frost, no perfect Protector's Stone but %ED on Jewels is bugged so it's OK.

The table really shows just how unpredictable RNG can be. Some stat combinations dropped only once, while the -8/7 Cold Jewel dropped a whopping 9 times! I started with 422 Statue Sets, used 5 of them for Ancient testing, leaving 417 sets for the actual Jewel hunt. I ran into the infamous “no Jewel drop” bug three more times even after Blizzard fixed the bug. 

At the beginning of the post, I explained the math behind why this took so many runs. After 100 Jewel drops, there's roughly a 94% chance of finding at least one perfect 10/10 Jewel. There's still a 6% chance of getting none. And this applies to every possible combination of enemy resistance and skill damage stats, not just 10/10. If you look at the table, you'll notice 7 empty cells where not a single Jewel of that stat combination dropped. A little scary when you think about it. One of those empty cells could just as easily have been the 10/10 Jewel I was hunting for!

And now, My Silmarils:  

side question: why are Frost and Light resist/dmg but Thunder and Fire are damage/resist ??

Closing thoughts. I am happy how this turned out. Got a bunch of awesome Colossal Jewel that I will use on my end-game Builds. Have plenty of other Jewels for just playing around and testing. Feel a little regret not going for Fire and Poison Jewels, as Fire jewels are used in several non-Sorc Builds and Poison Skill Bonus is always fun to play around. But hey!, this took way too long and I am happy that it is finally finished! Thank you for reading. If you have any questions, let me know. 

If you liked this post, maybe you can check out my other farming projects over the years. Chronological list:
- 11000 Lower Kurast runs (rune farming)
- 10000 Nightmare Andariel runs (SoJ farming)
- 10000 Pindleskin + Thresh Socket runs (unique farming)
- 12300 Key farming runs (torch farming)
- 20000 River of Flame runs with 3 Super chest (rune farming)
- 10000 1st Terrorized Act Boss runs (unique farming)
- 2184 Cow Level runs (rune farming)
- 10000 2nd Terrorized Act Boss runs (unique farming)
- 10000 Travincal runs with drop manipulation (rune farming)
- 20000 Drifter Cavern Sparkly chest runs (rune farming)
- 10000 Chaos Sanctuary runs (rune and base farming) *
- 19000 3rd Terrorized Act Boss runs (statue farming)

Personal first! Started back in 1.08.

Perfect 100 Demon ED! High def! Screw the rest, WE GOT TYRAEL'S MIGHT CHRONICLE!

I just realized that we can click "undefiled grave", break it, and get loot. Are we disturbing the peace of the dead, defiling their graves and robbing innocent corpses?

We might as well join the enemy.

I heard mixed things. I was planning on just raw dogging the game completely and never look anything up really. I'm kind of tired of having to "study" in order to enjoy games.

Is this a good way of approaching Diablo 2? raw dogging it all the way to Hell including Hell? Can I even do it?

Me and my partner just started playing Diablo 2! It's my very first time playing it and it's so much fun. I can't wait to see what more is to come! I'm playing Necromancer and my partner is playing Druid. But I've enjoyed the hell out of it so far. 😈 also my skeleton is very spastic but that's hilarious 😂

Consider the Stormrider.

+100% Enhanced Damage
Adds 35-75 Damage
Adds 1-200 Lightning Damage
15% Chance To Cast Level 5 Charged Bolt When Struck
10% Chance To Cast Level 13-20 Charged Bolt On Striking
5% Chance To Cast Level 10 Chain Lightning On Striking
Attacker Takes Lightning Damage Of 15

Currently, pretty terrible! So I got to thinking, how could you make this actually GOOD? And that got me to thinking about enchanting!

I know there's already an enchant SKILL, but imagine a character built around enchanting in general?

So one thing is that I think that you've gotta differentiate the stuff that comes from smithing from the stuff that comes from enchanting. Smithing gives you defense and melee damage and stuff. Enhanced Damage%, +Damage, etc. That's not what this guy does.

Then you've got the ENCHANTMENTS. Fire damage, lightning damage, stat buffs, etc. The magic bits and bobs.

So one whole tree would basically be around 'enchantment mastery'!

For example, you could have a skill that increases the chances of CTC effects, and increases their level! Like, imagine that each level increases the CTC by 5%, and increases the level by 1? So with level 20 in Enchanted Spells, the Stormrider would have a 20% chance to cast a level 40 Charged Bolt on Striking! THAT is starting to get into the realm of 'fun', lol. AND you'd have a 10% CTC level 30 Chain Lightning at the same time.

You could tweak the numbers a bit of course. It might be a bit silly to give a simple +1 per level. Would advantage low level CTC spells too much. But maybe like, +1 for every 5 levels, plus a multiplier on the base level? Maybe it'd double the base level and then add like 5 levels at level 20? That'd give you a level 45 charged bolt and a level 25 chain lightning, but like, a level 1 Amp Damage weapon would get improved to level 7.

Then you could have armor-based enhancements. Like, imagine you could boost the stat bonuses from armor? Like, Lionheart is currently kinda lame, pretty well beaten out by other options. But imagine you could double or triple the stat buffs there, so suddenly instead of getting 25 to strength you're getting like 50 or 75 to strength? Suddenly that's actually getting kinda fun!

Lastly I'd buff the actual straight elemental damage off weapons. Probably should make that break down by element, of course, to not make multi-element weapons too OP without a lot of investment, but like, runewords like Famine are pretty lame atm:

+30% Increased Attack Speed
Ignore Target's Defense (Jah Rune)
Adds 180-200 Magic Damage
Adds 50-200 Fire/Lightning/Cold Damage
Adds 1-50 Lightning Damage (Ort Rune)
12% Life stolen per hit
Prevent Monster Heal
+10 to Strength (Fal Rune)
+320 to 370% Enhanced Damage

But imagine if you could, like, quadruple that elemental damage? All of a sudden you're looking at some actually legitimate damage!

Not really sure what the other trees could do tbh. Maybe, like, enchant weapons to fly around as minions? That'd be pretty funny. They probably shouldn't have auras that can apply to you, because that'd be pretty OP, but it could plausibly apply to themselves. It'd be highly amusing to have like 5 Griefs flying around whacking stuff - but again, the enchantment mastery might make elemental based weapons better there.

I dunno, sounds fun to me. Thoughts?

Mixed shift and control and swapped to jav and sold my grief phase blade. Ormus loved it and refused to sell back to me. Be careful out there. Closed game for a bit to greave my grief. Going to take a while to recover from that one.

If any of these changes seem too overpowered please let me know. I love learning about this game and I'm by no means an expert on this game or game design in general. This was just for fun.

Here's a few things I should clarify:

1. The idea I had for Evade is that it reduces defense by a percentage while running and not that it no longer reduces defense by any amount that you might think from how I wrote it.

2. The weapon masteries on Barb don't mean you can dual wield two two-handed weapons, just that you can wield one without penalty but the other weapon he holds must be either a shield or a one-handed weapon (or a two-handed sword with the normal damage penalty).

3. Inferno AOE refers to how big the actual flame you shoot is. My idea is that it will also get wider as you level up and cover much more of the screen while using it.

Was just hunting Trav for HRs and didnt expect to find this little guy. Guess im switching to a Bash Merc. SP

The Sunder drops while herald farming has been brutal for me. I have killed quite a few with very low yield. My switch decided I didn’t need the only black cleft I had, and it disappeared. It happens occasionally on switch.

Most of the sunder drops I’ve had are random, but I’m considering making a dedicated sunder farmer. Throw barb is going to be my pick with moderate to fast clear speeds at p1, and I’ll obviously hork the heralds.

Has anyone found moderate to good success with farming heralds?

Is it possible to craft hit power gloves with both life and mana steal?

I know poison turns off regen. If that was the only thing wouldn't you only need 1 charm of 6 seconds and it wouldn't matter whether it had both a suffix and prefix? Its still turning off the regen. Is that the only reason people want poison?

Phys Damage charms have incredibly tiny values. Do people prioritize them for the attack rating? Why not get the pure attack rating small charms than?

Offline solo.

Never saw this before. Is it good for Fire Warlock or should i keep Obediance?

It stacks with anni? I have 10% exp anni

Have a few characters who i have around 79-81 decent gear i think but prob not ready for hell as i dont do well when i try 😂

What should i do respec or is their farmable gear in nm that i should try get before going back into hell

Yes that is an Ethereal Sacred Armor next to it, but I am much more clear on how I would use that. Would anybody self-use a Sacred Armor, and for what?

Stupidly lost my freshly made shaled bonesnap on Sunday, got annoyed, went farming for a replacement and got this instead. My first ever since although I played the original back in 2000, I didn’t play the expansion. Feeling better now so back to farming. Thanks for reading.

This is single player btw

+7 to BO!!

Holy shit guys I am so freaking overwhelmed.... This is my first and only Ber ever, what the.....

My story with D2 started around 2003-2004, played in a local bulgarian server called 'Headoff', mainly just for fun, back then I didn't really understand the mechanics, techniques, quirks, etc, but I had sooo much fun... what a time it was. Now, just barely a month ago, I started a single player D2R offline sc replay, with a sorceress, I was just casually leveling, building an adaptive MF build, skills split into blizz (rest in CM and spike for freeze) and nova (rest into static + LM), coz I have no sunder charms yet, no skillers, almost no end-game items:

-spirit sword/ancient's pledge shield

-vipermagi 33/12, almost perfect

-vidala amulet + boots for 50% MF and some res

-nightsmoke belt

-25MF ring + Nagelring 25MF

-3x perf topaz helmet for 72MF

-Insight merc with Cure and Treachery

So with this setup I have 191% MF and 81% FCR, and I BERly feel comfortable on hell with 1 player and tricky with 3 players... Current level is 85. I have yet to finish my build but I am pretty happy about getting this Ber right now. The roll gods were pretty scroogy with the rune drops - I barely have some mid runs, and Ber was my first one.

I welcome any comments about my build and/or if you have any tips. Wishing you all some Ber luck!