Diablo 2 & Sorceress builds

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Well, I never specifically said go for the unique version of wire fleece - just look for a good elite light armor. I was speaking generally. I recommended light to minimize the strength requirement, and elite for the best possible affixes. I figured if you had enough strength for wire fleece, you'd also have the strength requriements met for all the other light armors as well, and this would give you some versatility in selecting your equipment. Sorry if you thought I was specifically pointing you to the elite wire fleece. However, now that you mention it, I was under the impression that the elite wire fleece was Gladiator's Bane, which among a whole bunch of other good mods offers big damage reduction, and the always useful cannot be frozen. So now that I think about it, I think the elite wire fleece is a pretty good armor, although IIRC, it has a very high level requirement - 80-something. I also thought it gave you a boost to resistances, but I must admit I don't remember that part for sure. If it's not Gladiator's Bane, then I'm just true to my namesake.

Only elites can have 4 sockets? I was under the impression that normal and exceptional shields also came in 4-socket varieties, provided you were talking about a shield that took up at least 6 inventory spaces. In other words, only the buckler and small shield class *aren't* available in 4-sockets. I know I was talking about elite class equipment, but I when I said that, I was only referring to the body armor. So there's no such thing as a 4-socketed dragon shield? He said he was only looking for a shield for resistances, so a lesser defense shield really doesn't matter for him.

 

Only Palladin shields below Elite can get 4 sockets. You can get some fantastic low level req 4 socket palladin shields mind!

45 res all 4 socket anything for levels < 20? Pah, they spoil the palladins.

Edit to add:

Gladiator's Bane is the Unique Wire Fleece, true enough. Clearly it can only ever get one socket as is the case with all uniques - unless they already have the sockets as a mod, however the level req on Gladiator's Bane is prohibitive. Lvl 88 iirc - which is the highest lvl req for any unique item. I've found one about 9 months ago and never put it to use for exactly that reason.

Looks good on a level 1 mule

 

Well, you'd never actually find a shield with 45 resist all under level 20. 45 resist all is a high level modifier (chromatic perhaps), which certainly isn't going to be available any time in normal. Still your point is taken. It is conceivable for a paladin to have a shield that is 45 + 19(4) = 121% resist all. If you got such a shield in nightmare, by the time you started hell you'd still likely have all your resistances maxed. Throw in doing Malah's quest in normal and nightmare, and you're up to resist all +141%, meaning you've completely covered the hell penalty, and are already more than halfway to the 75% max limit and you've only taken one item slot into account. Picking up the other 34% from all your other items should be easy.

 

The palladin shields can have res all as an automod [Ie it's not the magic mods]. In other words a white shield can have it built in.

To be fair, the mod actually does have a higher rlvl - 42 to be precise, BUT on white items this is supressed and the rlvl is that of the basic shield.

In other words, I think that this mod can actually appear on a shield with rlvl of 6....

 

The best pally shield I found is a 4 socket 30 resist all. I wished I was a pally. I'm lvl 73 and bored of Hell difficulty. I started from Black Marsh 3 times and I couldn't reach Countess yet and played for several hours. My merc. can't kill anything and I don't have enough mana to cast much spells. He died more than a hundred times. Some creatures are immune to both cold and lig. I'll restart with a hammerdin or an amazon (for various kinds of damage).

 

Yeap. Dual immunes are a pain in hell. Fire/Cold seems to be the most unlikely combi, which is why the meteo-orb sorc is so popular.

 

Hey, Duffin, what is your merc setup?

Also is this single player or B-net?

And finally, what is your skill set-up?

We'll get you through this if it at all possible!

 

Right - that's how I came up with the 121% resist all. Up to 45% as an automod on the shield, and then 19*4=76 if it has four sockets.

Dual immunes do suck. That said, there shouldn't be *that* many cold/lightning immunes. Maybe at most one enemy type per area, and most areas won't have anything that is immune to both. One would think your merc should be able to handle that. The only thing I can think of that is pre-set immune to both cold and fire is the unique fallen shaman in the cold plains (I can't think of his name offhand). That said, on hell, there's always the possibility of a unique spawning with those mods.

 

Until Black Marsh I've two encounters with c/l immunes. Anyway I returned to Nightmare and will kill Baal until he drops a better weapon for my merc because he couldn't kill anything in hell. Maybe 72 was a low level for hell. I'll try to get to lvl 80 before I return to hell again.

Edit: He has a unique war fork (42-100 dam), unique death mask and a four socket ancient armor with runes for resists.

 

I think your tactics are more of the problem that your level. I mean, 72 is right around the recommended level to start hell. In fact, I'd say it's a little higher than where most people are when they start hell. As I'm sure you realize the difficulty jump from nightmare to hell is huge compared to the difficulty increase between normal and nightmare. The problem is usually with the bosses and uniques, with them getting way more abilities than they had in earlier versions.

It is practically necessary for you to divide and conquer in hell. Any groups of 5 or 6 melee creatures - never mind a boss pack - is going to be incredibly difficult for your merc to handle. Unless you are doing things to help your merc out defensively (and honestly there is very little a sorceress can do in that regard) about the only merc that stands a chance is a defiance merc. Finding a better weapon isn't going to help your merc if he keeps taking tons of damage - he'll just inflict a bit more damage before he dies.

Maybe we can help you out a bit more if you tell us what type of merc you have and how your skill points are distributed.

 

Key things to keep your merc alive:

1) Get him some LL. Remember that this is cut to 1/3 of the numbers on screen in Hell, so 9%LL = 3% in Hell. Amn in his weapon get's 7LL.

2) Remember that you can teleport him out of trouble. Use a little hop if he gets over run badly.

3) If you're on B-net make an Insight for him. It is pretty decent for damage if made in an elite polearm, and you will love the mana regen. IF you are not on B-net, download the file to enable realm only runewords and make an Insight.

4) Use NM defensive merc for the HF aura. The slow will help both you and him stay alive.

Level wise you're OK ish. In Hell your merc will not actually be killing all that much anyway

 

My merc is Holy freeze. I play on single player. I've maxed Frozen orb, Lightning and chain lig. I'm trying to max L. Mastery. Also have 1 point in warmth, teleport, C. mastery. and s. field.

Do you recommend putting some points to energy? I run out of mana too quickly.

 

Well for starters, you may want to up cold mastery, as that will break down enemy cold resistances, and may make frozen orb a more useable spell. Increasing lightning damage is great, but a lightning immune creature takes 0 points lightning damage no matter what you do. I know that cold mastery can break immunes, but it requires more than a point. You see on hell, monsters can have more than 100% resistance. So one point in cold mastery may not be enough to break it. If you reduce cold resistance by 10%, but a creature has 120% cold resistance he's still immune. I don't know the exact values, but Viking may be able to help you out here. One of the best combo games I ever did was with my brother. I played a paladin with a maxed out aura that lowers enemies elemental resistances, and he played a cold sorceress with maxed cold mastery. Even the most cold immune creatures had their immunities reduced to negative numbers with both those abilities at work.

 

OK, I will put every skill point I gain to cold mastery from now on. I already have 10 points in L. mastery. If I knew it removes immunity I would put all these points to c. mastery.

I reached that bitch countess and killed her at last. One of the problems that made me angry was being surrounded by monsters at each level as soon as I enter the level. And there is little space to run away. I was thinking about farming countess but it seems I won't be able to...

BTW I also started a necro and he rocks. Easier than sorceress it seems. My undead army killed Anderiel by themselves.

 

Are you sure? I put quite a few points into CM, and increased that even more with items, but never saw CM breaking immunities. It might be you got that impression because the CM from the Sorceress was working on top of the Paladin aura, which had already broken the immunity.

 

@Ziad - that's kind of what I was saying. I don't know how many points in CM are necessary to break cold immunes. In the game that my brother and I were playing, we had two characters both working to bring down the immunities of enemies, whereas Dengo does not have that luxury.

I just pulled those percentages out of thin air. I'm not saying that I know for certain that all cold immune creatures have 120% cold resistance. They might have 200% cold resistance, in which case it would take a very high level of CM indeed - probably at least double digits and maybe even 20-something points in CM to break the immunes. Given Dengo's situation though, I don't see an alternative. Upping LM at this point isn't going to do any good against LI enemies, so the next option is work on breaking cold immunes. Granted, if there were no enemies that were immune to both cold and lightning, you wouldn't have a problem, and maxing out LM would be the way to go.

 

Sorry guys,

Cold mastery CANNOT break immunity. This is also true for any item based -resists like for example rainbow facets.

The only skills that can break immunities are conviction and lower resist for elemental immunity, and amp / decrep for physical immunity.

You can buy wands with charges of lower resist which is an excellent thing to have on switch for a sorceress.

 

OK, I pulled out D2 yesterday and started a meteorb sorceress. I'm having some initial difficulties. For starters, since your first pumpable spell is fireball, and you don't get that until level 12, my sorceress is currently using a long bow as her primary offense. The long bow actually does more damage than any spell I have at my disposal (since I have nothing beyond level 1) and it also doesn't require mana to use. Obviously, this means I had to spend a lot of my early stat points on strength and dexterity, and my current vitality is not much beyond base. I'm not too concerned with that though, as I eventually plan on getting my strength into the 80s, and my dexterity well over 100, so it's not like the points are "wasted".

The first potential pratfall I see with this build is confronting Andariel, and then Duriel in Normal difficulty. Especially Andariel. I can't imagine I'll be more than level 16 or so when I confront her, meaning that I'll have a level 5 fireball as the only thing to take her down with, and I imagine that means I'm going to need a LOT of fireballs. And it's not like I can just stock my belt full of mana potions, as I'm going to need healing potions as well. Duriel won't be as bad, as I'm usually around level 22 or so at that point, which means, assuming I pump fireball exclusively, that I'll have a level 11 fireball at that point.

Also, is teleport more than a convenience spell? It seems like it would be nice to get you out of trouble, but it also seems that by the time you identify that you're in trouble, hit the hotkey to switch to the teleport spell, and actually move and click on a safer area, you'd likely be dead already. If the only real purpose is to cut down on travel time, I can probably do without it.

Also, is it really wise to keep energy at base and only stick one stat point into warmth? It seems like it's going to be mana prohibitive to use high level spells if you don't have a decent mana pool.

Finally, I know what the end build should look like, but not the order. I know I want:

20 frozen orb
20 fireball
20 meteor
10+ fire mastery
10+ cold mastery

What is the order here? Should I pump fireball exclusively until frozen orb becomes available, or am I better off switching to Meteor at level 24, and pumping that until I get frozen orb? I know FO is the spell of choice, for normal and nightmare, so that should be pumped exclusively once it become available, but after that, what next? Max out fireball, max out meteor, or start developing one of the masteries?

[ April 03, 2007, 15:17: Message edited by: Aldeth the Foppish Idiot ]

 

Andariel can be a pain, but if you take the time to kill all her followers first you can make her endlessly run after you, especially around that pool in the first room. She's quite slow, and tends to drop pursuit often to cast her poison nova (which is very easy to avoid from a distance). You could keep switching between Fireball and Ice Bolt to slow her down even more. Duriel I find to be harder - the room you have to fight him in is just too tight, so there's zero margin for error.

Teleport saved my Sorceress more times than I care to count. When you suddenly find yourself surrounded by fast melee monsters, your only hope of survival is to switch to Teleport and hope you can get far enough to recover. It doesn't always work, but when it does you'll be glad you've invested a point in it.

I put in a few points into Energy at first, as it makes Normal much more bearable. Later in the game (mid-Nightmare) you start getting items that increase mana significantly (stuff that adds a % to your mana are great). As for Warmth I think one point is more than enough - let the +skills do the rest. Besides there's so many mana potions lying around in the early game, you'll be fine as long as you have a couple on your belt.

I don't really have much advice for skills. I did not use Meteor much, though putting points in it makes Fireball significantly stronger at no extra mana cost (as opposed to actually putting points in it). I went Frozen Orb all the way, as that was my main attack - Fireball was the backup for cold immunes.

 

Alright, if teleport really can save your butt with any frequency, it's worth the investment of two skill points (one point for teleport +1 prerequisite).

I was more worried about Andariel than Duriel for a couple of reasons. For one, I will have more spells at my disposal when I run into Duriel than Andariel. Secondly, I will have a paladin merc at that point who will actually be of some help. I do not think I have ever had a rouge merc survive the fight against Andariel - or any other boss for that matter.

I'll try to resist the urge to put points into energy. I suppose sorceresses also get a boost of a few mana points on every level up anyway, so it's not like keeping energy at base will mean my mana won't increase at all. Plus, every point spent in energy is one less point than can be spent somewhere else. It just seems counterintuitive to keep a spell-based character at base energy.

I suppose for considering skills, I should probably look at the skill tree and check out synergies. I have to assume that warmth gives less of a bonus to meteor and fireball than either fireball or meteor give to each other, which is why only one point is recommended. It should be easy enough to figure out once I hit level 24 if I will increase the damage of fireball more by investing in the skill directly or by investing in the synergy. Similarly, at level 30, I can figure out what's best between fireball, meteor and fire mastery. Actually, if spending points directly in fireball increases the mana cost, it may be of more benefit to work on the synergy for that reason alone.

From what I have heard, there really is no reason to use anything other than FO throughout nightmare. There are very few cold immunes in nightmare, and due to the large damage disbursment of the spell, it will outshine fireball and meteor. That is, until you start running into cold immunes.

Hopefully, even in hell difficulty I won't run into too many dual fire-cold immunes, as I don't really trust my merc that much to handle things. I also think it might be wise to maintain a decent bow on my weapon switch to help out Mr. Merc when the need arises. Since I'm going to have a high dexterity anyway, it only makes sense to keep a bow as a backup weapon.