Diablo 2 & Sorceress builds

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I've played through the game (including LoD) with a Sorceress before, but that was on patch 1.08 (no syngergies) and I ended up having something like a tri-sorceress with skill points all over the place and not a single powerful attack.

This time I'm using 1.11b and I want to build a Sorceress that I can take through the entire game until Hell Baal. Now here's the catch: I want to do this in single player.

I suppose this severely limits the number of builds that can actually work over the entire game. The way I see it there's only 2 builds that stand a reasonable chance of surviving Hell by themselves: either Blizzard or Meteorb. Now my problem is the following: I really dislike Meteor, and would much rather play a pure Cold sorceress, just because I find the Cold tree to be much more fun than anything else. However, I'm really worried about immunes in the harder difficulties. I've come across some already in Act I Normal, which I easily dispatched thanks to item-granted Fireball. However I know this trick will not work on higher difficulties. My question is therefore this: how possible/impossible is it to solo a Cold sorceress all the way to Hell Baal? If it's just a matter of encountering the occasional Cold immune then I don't really care, as I can always run past them. I am however much more worried if some of the superuniques or bosses frequently spawn as cold-immune.

Another possibility would be to build a Meteorb with Frozen Orb and Fireball (rather than Meteor) as the main attacks. The problem with Meteorb builds is that I'll have a very difficult time until I get Frozen Orb. I've resisted the temptation to put more than one point into Ice Blast until now (and I have none in the Fire tree), but this may become more difficult as I'm starting to encounter monsters that take 3-4 shots of Ice Blast to go down, and I'm not even going to think about Champions, Andariel, or [shudder] Duriel. The nice thing about a Blizzard sorc is that I would be able to pour points into Ice Blast and Glacial Spike, since they synergise with Blizzard anyway.

Here's how I envision the possible builds until now:

Blizzard sorc
Ice Bolt: 20
Ice Blast: 20
Glacial Spike: 20
Blizzard: 20
Cold Mastery: 20
The rest go into the one-point wonders (Static Field, Warmth, etc)

Meteorb sorc
Frozen Orb: 20
Cold Mastery: 20
Fireball: 20
Meteor: 20
Fire Mastery: 20
The rest into prerequisites and one-point wonders.

Suggestions/ideas anyone?

 

As I recall - and check this up, as it was some time scince I last played - every monster in hell is immune to at least one element, and double immunities are quite common. That means you will need to do some serious parking, esp with your blizzard sorc. Expect the acients to be a nightmare you'll never forget .

 

Use the 'leaf' runeword for lvl 1-30. Cheap to make and will make the meteoorb sorcerer much more bearable till she gets frozen orb

 

@Ziad - your build can work. I find that it's fine to build a frozen orb sorceress and then take a single attack in another elemental for creatures that are immune to cold. You could pump fireball and not necessarily pump meteor. Despite this greatly reducing the effectiveness of your fire attacks, if you are primarily using cold, fireball will do against cold immunes, espcially if you take an Act 2 defensive merc. He won't do a whole lot of damage, but he makes a great wall.

However, if you aren't going to synergize anything with fireball, you might find more success going to the lightning tree instead - nova is a pretty good option.

 

I could never get past Duriel with a sorceress.

 

Use a 'cannot be frozen' item. Cast static, cast blaze, and run in circles. Let duriel burn himself to death

 

I don't like Nova. It's a real mana burner, and it doesn't do much damage. I'd much rather go for Lightning or Chain Lightning if I'm taking my secondary attack from that tree. Even without any synergy both attacks still deal more damage than Nova.

Leaf seems like the perfect runeword if I can get the runes early on. I checked online, and it seems that almost all monsters are immune to one type of attack (including phyiscal and poison) in Hell, so a Blizzard sorceress is out of the question. I think I'll switch to Fireball being my primary attack until I get Orb, or at least until Blizzard. That way I can pump Fireball as much as I want until then, which will make the game significantly easier. If I go that route I'll end up with tons of unused points so I might end up pumping Meteor anyway, or maybe invest into a Lightning attack... I'll have to think about that.

 

@ teh: Duriel uses Holy Freeze, so there is no protection from the slow. But that's not really a problem in normal difficulty if you can slow him down too and have a few stamina potions.

 

oops yeah...and since practically all sorcs use a holy freeze merc....

 

I did go the Meteorb way after all. I've just completed the game on Normal difficulty by killing Baal. It was much easier than I expected really. I pumped Fireball, and got really lucky because I found an orb that adds +2 to Blizzard. From levels 24 to 30 my strategy was to set off a Blizzard, and while everything was slowed to a crawl throw in Fireballs into the fray.

I kept this up until level 30, where my strategy radically changed because of 2 things: Frozen Orb and Leaf. I did manage to get the runes and a 2-socket staff, and I have to say I LOVE this runeword. It upped Warmth by 6 points, and Fire Mastery and Meteor by 3. I can now regenerate Mana really quickly, and shifting between Frozen Orb, Meteor and Fireball makes things quite easy. I still don't like Meteor much, but it's VERY useful in some occasions (it made short work of the Ancients). Frozen Orb is even more powerful than I remember it, and is turning everything into minced meat. A while ago I also made the Stealth runeword into a Ghost Armor (I think it's the Exceptional version of the Leather Armor) to dramatically increase both casting rate and Mana regeneration (as if I needed that). Baal's minions were quite easy: open with a Meteor, then Orbs and Fireballs. Baal was a pushover: I kept spewing Frozen Orbs at him (and gulping Mana potions by the truckloads) until he died, which took less than a minute.

I'm starting the game on Nightmare now, as soon as I clear the Cow Level on Normal.

 

You'll notice that the ratio between melee/magic is quite heavily shifting towards 'magic.' With a reason.

 

The ratio had been shifting for a while. I think the last time I took a physical hit at something was in Act 3 Normal. In Nightmare, with the damage that enemies make, I wouldn't even dream of going into melee. With my measly 200 Life I don't stand a chance. Besides, why bother with 17-30 physical damage when Frozen Orb does 100-200 PER BOLT! (not to mention Meteor now does >1000).

I am a little irritated that I haven't come across any Cold immunes till now in Nightmare (I'm in the Monastery), as this means a Blizzard build would have been even deadlier. However I know things will be very different in Hell, so I don't regret going for a Meteorb. Besides Frozen Orb is awesome. I knew it was powerful but this is ridiculous. I've yet to perfectly master the art of aiming it though. I can do lots of damage to many targets, but I've not yet figured out how to get the Orb to explode on top of a target. It happened on a couple of occasions by accident, and I noticed that all the shards go into the target - I shudder to think of the damage this thing does.

I got a 3-socket shield, which I'm saving for Ancient's Pledge (I'm missing one of the runes). I've also saved a 3-socket body armor for either Lionheart or Enlightenment, depending on which runes I get.

At the moment I'm running around with no hireling. I'm planning on getting the Act 2 Holy Freeze merc, and until then I don't see the point of having a tag-along that I can't keep alive. Besides I'm doing quite well by myself, although once again I expect this to change in Hell.

One thing I would like to know is at what level to go into each difficulty. I've read about people running Baal in Normal till level 50 before moving to Nightmare. I moved there at level 35, right after killing Baal the first time, and I seem to be doing fine. I am worried about experience penalties though if I am of lower level than the monsters. What level should I expect to be when I get into Hell, and if I am of a lower level, should I keep leveling in Nightmare till that level?

 

Depends on your equipment. But as a caster, you'll do fine in hell at lower levels compared to barbs, amazons etc. And get the merc asap. the lower level you get the merc, the more powerful he gets. A level 70 merc you leveled up from scratch is more powerful then hring a lvl 70 merc outright

 

I just got to Act 2, so I'll hire the Holy Freeze merc promptly. Thanks for the input. Any specific equipment you'd recommend giving him? (runewords or uniques in particular)

 

Insight (Ral + Tir + Tal + Sol) runeword for weapon. Boneshaft for armor. Guillaume's Face for helm. All can be found easily with some bhaal and countess farming

Edit
I thought I'll mention this as well. You mentioned you didnt have a problem with mana at level 30, which means its likely you have been pumping energy and warmth. For a meteo-orb sorc, warmth should be kept at base lvl 1, and energy should be no more then base 75. the priority for your stat points should be min str required for items, min dex for 75% block with stormshield monarch, and rest into vit. Not a point into energy.

[ September 05, 2006, 06:47: Message edited by: teh ]

 

I did put a few points into energy, to get it to 60, but that's about it. I also have only one point in Warmth. My mana is at 180, but I'm not having any problems with that thanks to the Leaf runword, which I'm using at the moment and gives a +6 bonus to Warmth. I've also got a couple of "+mana after each kill" items, and these help quite a bit. I rarely run out of mana, and when I do I've got lots of mana potions in my belt.

The only rune I'm missing for Insight is Sol, so I'll keep an eye for that. I'm assuming that the reason for recommending it is Meditation. Considering I don't have any problems maintaining my mana level, is there another runeword that might prove more useful?

 

Any high level unique polearm/spear will do then, as most other useful runewords are either ladder only or exceedly difficult to get. Another alternative is to farm for ber runes (also rare) and put them in a socketed unique item or a 6 socket giant thresher. Since you are only in nightmare, both are very diffcult to get, so your merc's holy freeze is still his best weapon

 

I'd recommend level 35 as a minimum for nightmare (more like 40 for melee builds), and I'd say level 70 is a good time to move up to hell.

While the suggestion of getting Ber is a great idea, there's no way to get that in Nightmare. IIRC, Ber is the 29th rune out of 32, and the highest attainable rune drop in all of nightmare is 26. So Ber is great, but you'll probably have to settle for Sol until you get well into hell, if at all. While it is possible to get a Ber on Hell difficulty, it's not like they are even remotely common. I think I've received one Ber in the countless hours I've played D2.

 

Getting Ber through drops in almost impossible, so you should just gather every rune you can find and keep upgrading them. Every piece counts up.

 

^And even that is difficult. IIRC, and it's been a while, don't you need to add gems to the runes to continue to upgrade them? Especially considering some gems I don't even bother holding on to after a point. What am I going to use a chipped amethyst for?