In the D2R 2.6 Ladder Season 3 Start Guide, we go over the best early game runewords and gear you should get for Ladder Reset in Diablo 2 Resurrected. 

Top 10 D2R 2.6 Best Ladder Season 3 Starter Gear & Runewords

About the very start of a season, a ton of people use the exact same gear it's because it's the absolute easiest to get and it's the absolute best to use during your playthrough or right at the beginning of a ladder when you first start farming, these are those items we are going to show you exactly where to find them and where to get them.

1 - Lower Resist Wand: Grim Wand of Lower Resistance (For All Builds)

First up we're going to look at shopping for items, the first we're going to look at here is the lower res wand. You can actually walk right over to Akara in Act 1 and look for a wand that has low resist charges. Make sure not to make the mistake of having lower res skill, it has to be the charges so that you can use it on any character now if you're out farming for maybe we'll say Mephisto or Duriel drop a lower res on them and obviously it does exactly what it says it lowers their resistance which will increase the amount of damage and increase your kill speed. 

You can use this on all other sorts of monsters as well, or generally only use it on the losses if you're farming one particular type of monster because it's the most efficient to use that way really casting all these charges all the time constantly having to repair it is not going to be great for you. Obviously early on, when those first few Diablo clones start spawning, you definitely use these if you are out there trying to farm with any type of Elemental Caster.

2 - Life Tap Wand: Grim Wand of Life Tap (For Early Melee Builds)

You can shop quite easily once again from Akara is a life tab wand, these are absolutely crucial for those early melee characters especially that super early Uber smiter when you're getting out there taking on Uber Mephisto, Uber Diablo and stuff like that, life tap is essentially like life leech on steroids. Now remember once again this has to be the charges, it cannot be the life tap skill.

3 - Teleport Staff: Gnarled Staff of Teleportation (For Any Character but Sorc)

So we're going to keep that credit card out and we're still going shopping and this is probably the most important shopping trip you're ever going to make, if you're any character but a sorceress make sure you go ahead and shop yourself a Teleport staff early on in ladder. 

There's actually a little trick to make your shopping a little bit quicker and the steps will be cheaper, what you do is head over to Ormus in Act 3 of normal with a character somewhere between like level 20 to 23, as long as you're under that level 24 the staffs that have teleport charges on them will be red. So you can go ahead and find them quicker you don't have to look at every single staff, you can shop it, and then when you eventually do, turn level 24 you can slap that puppy on and start teleporting through the game like you're a sorceress. Though these charges are incredibly expensive to repair, it's really great for teleporting past giant mobs of monsters that you really have no interest in fighting or teleporting across walls.

4 - Other Items with Great Stats from Vendors

Now a lot of times too, don't forget you're going to have slots that are just going to have no real great gear for them and incredibly early on you can literally just walk over to vendors and actually shop stuff that's incredibly useful. This gets overlooked probably the most, but you can walk right over to Charsi, find boots that have maybe 15 or 20 or 25 lightning res on them, and find some gloves that maybe have some life on them. Don't sleep early on if you don't really find anything good to put in these spots, just go shop for something that has anything that can really help you out and even later on in the game you can and find stuff that has a ton of Magic Find on it, buying boots that have walk run on them, and you can even find gloves that have up to even 3-2 bow skills up to 20 increase attack speed. Even early game you can get some really helpful stuff just by buying it from vendors.

5 - Stealth Armor (For All Builds)

Now we're going to talk about Diablo 2 Runewords that everybody uses early on, the most obvious go-to is everybody makes one of these no matter what your character is and that is not hyperbolic in any sense everyone makes this and that is the Stealth armor. It has all 25% faster cast rate, faster walk run, and hit recovery, so it really does work well on any build. The armor is not hard to find, it's just any random two-socketed armor, you can even shop these from Charsi, and the runes are also not incredibly difficult to get, you can just farm the count just a few times and you'll probably pretty quickly get a Tal and an Eth rune. You're going to continue using this armor probably all the way through the game to be perfectly honest.

6 - Leaf Staff (For Fire Sorc, Fire Druid, Fire Trap Assassin Builds)

This one isn't as universally used, but it can give you a huge boost to the certain characters that do use it and that is the Leaf staff - this uses just a Tir and a Ral rune, and goes in any two socketed staff. Once again much like the armor, you can march over to Akara in normal and just shop a two-socketed staff, sometimes if you're going for that sorceress maybe a fireball sorc, you can find these stats with a bunch of skills on it even, and make an absolutely nasty Leaf. Besides the sorcerers though don't forget you can throw this on the Fire Druid and sometimes people will even use this on the Fire Trap Assassin.

7 - Lore Helmet (For All Builds)

The next up incredibly low-level Runeword that a ton of people use is a runeword for the helmet called Lore. Now this gives you one to all skills, it only takes an Ort & Sol rune, and once again you can go over and just shop the base. Once again heading over to Charsi just check the helmets, buy whatever you can that has two open sockets slap those runes in and you're good to go.

Lore

+1 To All Skill Levels
+10 To Energy
+2 To Mana After Each Kill
Lightning Resist +30%
Damage Reduced By 7
+2 To Light Radius

8 - Insight Polearm (For Act 2 Mercenary)

The next one is actually used on end-game builds but you can actually make an incredibly budget version of this one earlier, and it's going to help you out a ton and that is making yourself an Insight polearm as fast as you can. This isn't going to necessarily be used on your character, even though you can if you're a Melee character go ahead and whack down some demons with this sucker, but throw this on your Act 2 mercenary - a lot of times it's known for the meditation or to help out the casters, but even not counting that it actually increases your melee damage for your mercenary a ton. We wouldn't really be too picky on what base you use for your first one either, just any or socketed polearm you find as fast as possible, get those runes in there to make an Insight, it is going to help your character out a ton. 

Spirit

Level 12-17 Meditation Aura When Equipped (varies)
+35% Faster Cast Rate
+200-260% Enhanced Damage (varies)
Sale[+240-260% Enhanced Damage] (varies)
+9 To Minimum Damage
180-250% Bonus to Attack Rating (varies)
Adds 5-30 Fire Damage
+75 Poison Damage Over 5 Seconds
+1-6 To Critical Strike (varies)
Sale[+6 To Critical Strike]
+5 To All Attributes
+2 To Mana After Each Kill
23% Better Chance of Getting Magic Items
Sale[ETH]

9 - Spirit Sword (For Caster Builds)

Once you get that character past normal, if you are a Caster you're gonna probably need a better type of Caster weapon, the absolute end-game one is that Spirit Shield, you're not really going to be able to make that very quickly but you can actually make a spirit sword super easy early on just after you get past normal. All you have to do is go out into cows, and find yourself a Crystal Sword, Longsword or Broadsword, Crystal is usually the most preferred due to the lower strength requirement. Take that sword over to Larzuk, use your Larzuk Socket Quest and it'll get four open sockets every single time. Go ahead and plug those Spirit runes in and you have yourself in an absolutely amazing Caster weapon. Now it's risky business if you grab a sword from anywhere in Nightmare or anywhere else like that because you don't know for sure if it's going to get four open sockets, the reason from cows it gets four open sockets every time is because of the monster level of the cows. If you grab one from somewhere in Nightmare you don't know for sure what the item level is going to be, so you could risk getting five or even later in the game six sockets on that Crystal Sword, completely nuking your Larzuk quest, so don't do that. You could go ahead and wait to find that four-open socket sword but sometimes it can take a little bit longer than you'd expect and this item helps you out so much if you're on a playthrough.

[Shields]

Spirit

Shields
+2 To All Skills
+35% Faster Cast Rate

+55% Faster Hit Recovery
+250 Defense Vs. Missile
+22 To Vitality
+112 To Mana

Cold Resist +35%
Lightning Resist +35%
Poison Resist +35%
+8 Magic Absorb

Attacker Takes Damage of 14

10 - Three Socket Helm with Topazs (For Magic Find)

it tackles the one thing that everybody wants to accomplish. You want better gear on your character, how do you find that better gear? You have to get more Magic Find on and that's why we always grab a three socket at Helm and plug-in topaz to get free Magic Find essentially.   

While you can get more MF by plugging those topazes into an armor because there are four open slots possible on Armor, you give up too much whether you are still rocking your stealth that cast rate, the walk-run, the hit recovery; or if you have a better armor now maybe you've got a Vipermagi - it's not worth sacrificing that to get the Magic Find. Usually on the helmet slot for almost every character right when you get through hell difficulty, you're usually still rocking something like a Lore or something that, just really not helping out that much. A Lore does have that one to all skills but we feel like sacrificing one to all skills is well worth the amount of Magic Find you can get on this helmet. Now that is the reason we plug it in on the helmet instead of the armor. Also we would tell you don't necessarily wait to get three perfect Topazs, just plug in whatever you got whether it's flawless or perfect right off the bat, that's going to be perfectly fine. Plugging in three flawless Topazs as opposed to three perfect Topazs is only the difference of 12 magic find, and considering it could take you a day or two to find enough Flawless Topazs to cube up to perfect, it's really not worth that sacrifice in time.