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Most commonly, gamers pursue Lower Kurast chest-opening, Cow-level slaughtering, or Chaos Sanctuary, Pindleskin, and Baal runs.

In my opinion, the most effective are the LK runs, however, both the monotony of the repeating procedure and the rune-level restriction (up to Ber only) are the major drawbacks of this approach.

On the other side, the fighting strategy requires dealing with enormous amount of monsters, since the probability of a rune drop from a killed monster is by an order of magnitude lower than a similar drop from a container at the same player settings.

Is there any possible way to perform effective chest runs in order to get HRs (including Zod) that would time-wisely compare with the known algorithms Looking for an answer to this question I went through different Act 5 (Hell) areas searching for high chest density locations.

Earlier in this forum my game colleagues showed an ineffectiveness of the SuperChest hunting in Act 5 due to its irregularity in appearance, as compared to Act 3 (LK) and Act 4 (RoF).

And Hell Act 5 is the only place in game where Zod might drop from any container.

In this post I would like to describe my short research of a chest rune hunting in Act 5 based on repetitive runs to the mini-hell levels: Abaddon and Infernal Pit.

Actually, the third such a mini-level in the game, namely Pit of Acheron, has appeared way too far from the Arreat Plateau WP in my working map, so I have abandoned an idea of getting there after 100 time-consuming runs.

All these mini-hell levels offer one SpecialChest (NOT a SuperChest like in LK) at the end of the pathway.

This chest has a higher rune drop probability than any other normal container in this area; at the same time, any repeating combination of the dropped goods (that is observed for SuperChests) was never recorded for this type of chests, to my knowledge, thus not confirming an assumption of a reasonably limited amount of possible drop combinations (like the 65,536 hypothesis).

This means that only a substantial amount of runs could have shown the potential of this place for rune hunting.

My strategy included runningteleporting from a WP to the corresponding portal and then to the final SpecialChest.

While moving, I tried to hit as many containers (chests, corpses, stashes, etc.) as I could without losing too much time.

Avoiding fighting was crucial for my task since it would dramatically increase the time needed for a run, and thus, impeding the proper estimation of the chest-opening approach.

However, the monster-killing was sometimes unavoidable when the amount of the dropped units from the SpecialChest exceeded the screen-seeing capability (and that happens every other time at Player Settings 7), and I had to clear up most of the junk to be sure not to miss a Zod.

I also kept track of Uniques being dropped from the SpecialChest, however it might depend on the MF of my gear, so I dont know if these numbers are that useful.

Indeed, the productivity of regular containers appeared to be very similar in both areas with almost equal numbers of rune dropping probabilities.

However, the SpecialChest behavior was drastically different.

Despite the probability of seeing a rune being dropped from a SC is the same for both mini-levels (10.2-10.5), the amount of HRs in Infernal Pit SC equaled 7 (out of 1960 runs) while in Abaddon NO SC HRs were dropped in 1240 runs.

These findings allowed me to suggest that the chances of EACH HR being dropped from the SC in Infernal Pit are significantly HIGHER than those of Abaddon (and, most likely, of Pit of Acheron also), thus making Infernal Pit the best choice for Zod hunting.

In other words, IP SC should provide runes of higher quality than Abaddon or PoA SCs within the same total amount of dropped runes.

Analogously, even if mathematically a total of 10 regular containers in Act 5 (Hell) provide the same probability of dropping a HR (10 x 0.037) as compared to one SC in Infernal Pit (0.36), the probability of encountering a better HR is higher in Infernal Pit SpecialChest, as I can judge from my personal experience.

See for yourself, in less than 2000 runs IP SC has provided me with 2 x Ist, Gul, Ohm, Lo, Cham, and finally Zod (run 1960).

Axe Of The Pit Diablo 1