What is the most amount of runes you can get in Elden Ring? I'm talking about this. The number above your Rune counter whenever you use an item or defeat an enemy bosses drop a lot of runes. But there are some ways to get unimaginably high amounts of Runes in a single go and part of it is a mechanic most of you probably don't even know about.
1. Special Equipment
But first, let's look at all of the possible ways to increase rune gain. Elden Ring offers a significantly less buffs for that than previous Fromsoftware Games. There's no armor, set weapon or shields to boost rune gain, but you can instead get a small buff by being in a multiplayer group, which grants you a 5% increase for 5 minutes.
If a member of the group becomes Elden Lord or defeats a Shardbearer, there's also the Golden Leaf rain, which increases rune gain by 5 more percent. But it seems to both be rare and random and only really happens outside of caves and dungeons.
Good news however is that all of these increases stack multiplicatively. So, for the sake of testing, I edited two of my Talismans to give me a five percent increase since both of those effects cannot be reproduced. All in all we are looking at a 172 increase to rune gain. Then, where do we start?
2. Most Rune Gain
The first thing many Elden Ringers probably think of is the final boss. Beating Elden Beast results in 500,000 Elden Runes and with every rune of active, it would turn into 860,000. But the Golden Leaves ironically cannot fall during the end of the game. So, it's only 819,000.
Not bad for a start but that wouldn't even be enough to get you from level 296 to 297.
3. Hidden Mechanic
So, I introduce the overkill mechanic. Overkill increases the Elden Runes dropped by an enemy by 20. And for it to work, you have to kill an enemy with excessive force. So, if an enemy has 100 HP overkill means dealing 151 or more in a single hit. It's crazy though I imagine not many people have even considered this mechanic when farming Elden Runes.
But dealing enough damage to account for the red Albunarics results in a very sizable increase in runes gained at every single run.
4. Scaling
Another way of increasing Elden Runes is to go into NG+7, bringing the Elden Runes dropped by the final boss all the way up to just a little over 2 million with all of the buffs active. With all of that in mind, the only thing missing would be overkill on bosses.
5. Myths
But does that even work? I did a lot of testing to make sure I'm right on this. And unfortunately, it doesn't work on any boss no matter if it has phases or cutscenes or if it's a field or dungeon boss, it just doesn't work.
So, does that mean that 2 million is the absolute most amount of Elden Runes you can gain? Surprisingly, it's far from the most. But to explain that, let's dive a little deeper.
The most expensive item to sell is the Somber Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone and selling 999 gives us just short of 2 million Elden Runes. The problem is that to get that many, you would need to do 125 runs and there's no way to increase the Elden Runes you get from selling them. So, it's not really a competition.
Let's look at PVP then. When defeating a fellow IGN enjoy and PVP, you can get up to 15 of the last level up cost. But only if the player invaded you, which means that someone who is level 713 will drop a staggering 1.3 million Elden Runes. And guess what? These can be boosted by buffs.
The problem here is that the chance of having both the group and Golden Leaf buff active as you winning against a Max Level player. that invaded you up basically zero. So, all I can do is tell you how many Elden Runes he would get in this once in a lifetime event. 2.3 million Elden Runes in a single go.
But wait, there's more the celebrant weapons have passive rune gain on hit effects, which means that using this one to pancake the invader gives me an extra 20 Elden Runes.
Anyways, at this point some of you might be wondering if overkill works in PVP. I unfortunately had to find out that it doesn't work. Elden Ring is special in that. You cannot deal more damage to a player on PVP than they have health no matter how much raw damage you're actually dealing and it's not just a visual thing. Dealing thousands of damage gave me the same Elden Runes as slowly whacking away the health.
6. Secret Sauce
But there's one more thing to save the day. You might have noticed that I left out selling runes and remembrances earlier. That's because you can carry up to 99 of them.
And both the Lord's Rune and Elden Remembrance give you 50,000 Elden Runes when consumed, meaning that after 20 runs of collecting Lord's Runes, you can own and use 99 of them for a grand total of 4.95 million runes in a single go, which happens to be the highest possible gain in the entire game.
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