I was perusing through Jarulf's Item Find Results today trying to pin down where the earliest spot was where I could find imbuable lances and gothic bows. For those of you who have looked at the results already, there are generally three columns, which look something like this:

------ NMCB-- NMCB-- Hell Cat

First question: do the three columns correspond to normal, nightmare, and hell difficulties respectively? My assumption always was yes. For example, the entry above was copied from the lance information, which means (to me, at least) that lances can drop from Hell Clan in both NM and Hell difficulties. Is this correct?

If it is, then I have another peculiar question. I copied the same entry from the gothic bow section of the results:

------ NMCB-- NMCB-- Hell Clan

In otherwords, does this mean that it is possible for gothics to drop in NM diff from Hell Clan? The rule of thumb (or so I've been told) is that one can't get gothics until late Act III in NM difficulty. If this is the case, then I must be interpreting Jarulf's results incorrectly.

Any help in clarifying this issue would be most appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

Best,
Smarty.

I could easily be missing a factor, though. Come save us Jarulf

---
-Erik on the old Lurker forum, now T-hawk (dash not underscore, this forum is dumb)
Co-op Clan DoH, http://disciples.clanpages.com

Read the start of the list, it contains:

N - Normal monster
M - Minion
C - Champion
B - Boss

so for your example, any Hell Cat/Clan will do the trick in either difficulty, given enough MF and luck.

Either use the program or look for the "Monster by Item" textfile to find the lance droppers. Gothics can also appear in Act2, but it's more probable in Act3, simply because there are more opportunities. The files also indicate that such goodies can appear in Act1NM, but my experience says that lances are probably in Act2NM underground areas, while Gothics are in Act3NM from Flayer Jungle to Upper Kurast (I picked up a unique and rune bow the other night).