What does IIQ/IIR affect?

I know it affect droprates but does it also affect drop AND quality of currency items or just plain items?
Will more quality get me more currencies? Will higher IIR make it more likely to get exalts where a lower IIR would've droped a chaos? Or is 0IIR just the same as 300 for currency?

increased quantity gives more drops(currency and items)

increased rarity increases chances of drop being magic/rare/unique. It does not effect currencies in any way

Great so if (for some odd reason) i wanted to do currency runs i would want 100IIQ & IIR doesn't matter right?
How about other modifiers, do higher level content get better odds at droping more / better orbs? or is that fairly random?

You are correct. Quantity is what you want for currency and rarity doesn't matter. Currency can drop anywhere so you can't find a place to farm exalts. The only thing you want to do is make sure you are within 2 levels of the area. If you are over 68, you will be counted as 68 for currency drops, so you can farm any area 66 and up and not be penalized.

You're basically saying at level 71 I gain no benefit farming anything other than maps?

The most efficient way of doing currency runs is getting Sadima and Perandus and other twink items that give high amounts of IIQ, then doing ledge/fellshrine/docks runs until level 30 on a mule specifically designed for low level farming.

Once you reach level 35 or so, delete the character and make a new one, then continue farming.

The reason for this is that low levels have smaller loot tables, which makes the chance of dropping currency items relatively higher.

PS: By "smaller loot tables", I mean that there's a smaller pool of items that it can potentially drop. To illustrate, if you're running normal Ledge, you can drop ANY currency item (yes, even the fabled Mirror), and any item between level 1 to level 9 (for rare mobs). If we make a hypothetical table, you have as potential drops



Making it a 1 in 10 chance of dropping a currency item whenever you kill a mob that drops something.

By contrast, farming Cruel Ledge gets you either currency or items between level 1 and level 39, making it a 1 in 40 chance of dropping currency items.

Personally I find this design to be insightful of GGG, at low levels they give the currency you'd need to trade/craft at high levels.