Sorry to sound ignorant, but I've only played D2 for around a month now, so I have a question to ask On the item drop calculator, what exactly designates an item type as exceptional or non-exceptional? I am trying to get myself out of the horrid drops I am seeing now, ie, magical items being a huge rarity, and any help in doing so would be appreciated. I thought at first it might be the game item type exceptional, but then one would not know beforehand which one would pertain to the calculator until the item had actually dropped.

Thanks in advance,

Kyzoku the Grim

The difficulty. In normal, exceptional items can't drop period. In nightmare they have a 10% (usually, though occasionally it's 20%) chance of dropping, and in hell, they have a 20% (occasionally 40%) chance of dropping.

Exceptional items are a whole different class of items. Just like regular items, they can be socketed, magical, rare, etc., with the exception that there are no set nor unique exceptionals. However an individual exceptional is related to a regular item, i.e. an ornate armor is the exceptional counterpart to an ancient armor (I think), and a pavise is the exceptional counterpart to a tower shield. You can check out the differences between exceptionals and normal items by looking at Blizzard's Chaos Sanctuary:

http://www.battle.net/diablo2/

If your drops are horrid, you should consider looking for magic find items. They do what you expect them to do -- if with a monster you have a 1% chance to get a magical item, and you have 50% magic find total, then you now have (roughly) 1.5% chance to get a magical item from that monster. Here "magical" include magical, set, rare, and unique, not just the magical group.

http://www.battle.net/diablo2

Look under 'Items'.

Basically, exceptional items are better items, found only in nightmare and hell difficulties that use the same graphics as non-exceptional items.

eg. Quilted Armor is the non-exceptional item.
Ghost Armor uses the same graphics as Quilted Armor, but is the exceptional item corresponding to the Quilted Armor.