What's The Best Alternative To Loot Running For Making Emeralds?

I'm just not a big fan of loot running. In my opinion, I just don't find it fun running around in a set path (and usually messing up along the way because the chest is in a difficult spot to get or I end up dying) and looting chests. It's also not fun IMO trying to guess how many emeralds those items go on the Trade Market and then waiting, hoping that my items get sold so that I can loot run again (Also guessing if those items are even worth putting up on the trade market and knowing what items to take when loot running to put up on the Trade Market). Not to mention the fact that I have to keep an eye out on the durability on the lr gear I use and the WC I'm in so that I maximise the quality and quantity of items in the chests. It's especially annoying if I choose a WC that has already been looted, I have to go to another WC that hopefully hasn't also been loot ran and wait a couple of minutes in order to start loot running again (I know the Loot Runner Discord server exists, but I don't have 2.5K chests opened in order to properly join the server and I don't have the motivation to open 2.5K chests. Even if I did however, that's still only fixing one issue I have with loot running).

Anyways, enough with my rambling about why I hate loot running. I don't like loot running, but I also want a lot of emeralds. Right now I'm doing Ragni Cap scrapping, which gives me around 5.75LE per hour, but I want to know if there's a better way to make emeralds. What's the best endgame alternative to loot running that makes a lot of emeralds and is fun to do?

 

Quests I would say. There is not really anything that is really good and at the same time

 

Yeah, I know quests are good for emeralds, I even did ToA a bunch of times in order to buy my lr gear. But it was a little annoying grinding from lvl 1-40 as fast as possible because I kept dying a lot, so if I were to do do just quests for emeralds, I would probably just do ToA a bunch. Do you know what the best and fastest way to grind from lvl 1-40 would be and also what the best gear is for beating ToA at lvl 40?

 

There are many other quests that give a lot of emeralds, just do playthrough again (all quests give more than a stack of Le)

 

But the thing is is that doing every single quests takes a long time. AFAIK, in the same amount getting to lvl 103 and doing every quests, I think getting to lvl 40, do ToA, delete class, rinse and repeat, gives a lot more emeralds than getting to lvl 103 and then doing every quest (Probably even if you have to do ToA without having to get all the tokens with a higher lvl class).

 

I'm pretty sure hat scrapping is the most efficient method as of currently.

Leveling to 103 for quests is a common recommendation, and doing all the quests yields 64.75 le, according to the wiki. This would mean you need to beat all the quests in 675.7 minutes, or just over 11 hours and 15 minutes, to make full 103 questing more worthwhile than hat scrapping (assuming hat scrapping yields 5.75 le per hour, as you mentioned in the first post). I'm sure it can be done in some extreme cases, but it's likely more trouble than it's worth.

ToA gives 8 le per completion, so you'd need to be able to consistently speedrun levels 1-40, grind the tokens on another character, and scale the tower in an hour and 23 minutes to match the hat scrapping speed of 5.75 le per hour. It would take some testing to see how viable this method is, but I doubt it's consistent enough to reliably pull off without xp bombs.

EDIT: I just attempted a ToA run with a fresh character, just to see how practical it was. I used a therck set for levels 1-28 and planned to use adventurer set for 29-40 (it deals less damage, but the 50% xp boost more than makes up for it). I used 2x morph topaz and witherhead's talisman at level 12 as well. I used assassin for the sake of damage output, and used therck's dagger up to 20, where I switched to an almuj's dagger with a tier 6 thunder powder. It's important to note that I did this without mob totems and on a server without dxp. I started the grind by immediately going to the mushroom area just outside detlas, where I leveled to 11 to gain vanish (important for survivability). After that, I went to a spot near rymek at 1500, 106, -1460 until level 30. I had planned to use the llevigar spiders for the 30-40 stretch, but between grinding the tower tokens on a maxed out character and leveling the new one to 30, I actually ran out of time based on the 83 minute break-even threshold compared to ragni hat scrapping. I ran out of time by enough of a margin that I doubt it would be possible to profitably run ToA without dxp bombs and mob totems (which quickly becomes unsustainable), at least compared to hat scrapping.

 

It really, really depends on how much money you need and how quickly you need it.

If you only need a little bit of LE (like 2-16) and you need it really quickly, I would say diving at the seavale reef is a fairly underated source of money. You get about 2-4LE per hour and it takes basically no focus so you can do it while watching TV or Youtube videos or whatever. Of course, it isn't all that efficient, but it is consistent and doesn't require any setup so you start making money right away.

I think the next tier of grind is probably questing which was mentioned a little bit before. If you make a new class and do every quest you get basically a stack of LE. I would say it probably takes 10-14 hours to do that if you're fairly good and are prepared with gear progression, so you could say the rate is around 6 LE per hour, but the issue there is that the profit is really, really top heavy with almost all the LE coming from really long level 85+ quests so for the first 9ish hours you'll basically be making nothing at all . If you have the time for questing, it's a good source of revenue for sure, and you can also just do it to get more level 100 characters of different classes, but I wouldn't really call it a sustainable way to make LE like loot running is.

Finally, I think professions are potentially one of the best sources of revenue in the game, maybe even better then loot running, but the amount of investment required to make them worth it is actually comical, and that's coming from a guy with 2 gatherings to 100 and the other 2 at 90 with all my craftings at 80+ and woodworking at 100. The number of hours it takes of completely unprofitable mindless grind to get even remotely to the point where you could say you were making a profit is just way, way too much for the average player, but if you think you have it in you, selling T3 dern materials is a very, very profitable job, along with the fact that crafting and selling the lower tier materials to the blacksmith can also get you quite a lot of money considering it's really just a biproduct. By doing professions, you also gain the ability to craft fairly powerful gear too, which might be of some interest to you. All that being said, I think it might be wise to hold off on doing profs for now since 1.20 might make the grind much more reasonable which would probably cause the prices to drop and make profs a much less lucrative source of emeralds.

You can also just keep doing what you're doing if you want, 5.5 LE per hour isn't really that bad at all considering you're not lootrunning.