I thought some folks might be amused to know that I applied for the posted Dark Library Administrator position over at d2.net, and as of June 19 I made the first cut. Now the field is down to about 50, so the odds of me getting this are slim to none, but one can pretend to be worthy;)
Could ya send me the account name / pass some time, I’d like to help level it up.
That’s a good idea, Ryle, and it gives me one as well. Since this is going to be a communal character, it seems to me that the build ought to be more or less decided upon before this girl gets into her 40s or 50s so we don’t have to scrap her.
ckhd suggested at the fest, and I think it would be a fair idea, to essentially make a fireball/meteoress with enough thrown into orb to be able to kill fire immunes. My skill point allocation for 78 points (to level 79):
15 warmth
20 meteor
20 mastery
10 orb
5 mastery
anything left gets us to teleport
Stat build … I’d go en vit dex en vit, and pump str every once in a while so it’s at 60 for lvl 29 (this means putting two in, roughly, every level until it’s 60). However, I am not known for my sorc-building skills, and I am known for my preference that sorcs be able to block, so in the absence of a printed, agreed-upon guide I’d suggest saving any points you get for the main runner (ckhd, I believe), who will have to suffer with whatever mistakes he makes and thus cannot yell at us:D
What I did on mine is probably a little unorthodox. But I loved her. She was all cold with cold mastery. The lower level spells had only one skill spent on them. Only thing I had besides cold was Warmth, cold armor and Static. I only wasted one point on static though. If a character was immune to cold, I would use the hell out of that to get it’s energy low enough to blast with a level 4 firewall (Granted by a staff). I got into hang-ups a bit when a boss would be immune to cold. But I managed. As far as regular critters, nothing stood a chance. Oh, I didnt waste anything on teleport either. It takes like three skill points just for level one teleport or something like that. That’s points I could use on blizzard or frozen orb.
Whats the point of teleport anyway? Seems lazy to me. If I need to get somewhere, I just run.
Anyway, take that for what it’s worth. I’m no where near a Diablo Expert or anything. Im just letting you know what I did cause you asked.
Let’s see… three skill points for the ability to motor around like a maniac, skip over long stretches of pointless areas, and quickly get to the places you need to go…
Sounds worth it to me.
Once you get addicted to it, you never go back. My sorceresses only walk in town anymore. Anywhere else is just easier to teleport to. Not to mention it’s a necessity for rushing mules.
For sorceress stat points, I usually do strength until I hit 60, and then never touch it again. Nor do I bother with dex: A sorceress who’s staying at proper range should never have anything to be blocked. I go with energy (until my mana is reasonably stable; I think I went overboard with TempusIgne) and then vitality (she’s still vulnerable to ranged attacks, most of which are unblockable, so more life is good).
Bear_Nenno, teleport is great if you want to get from point A to point B quickly, like if you’re doing runs. It’s even better if there are things between A and B that you’d rather not deal with. If, for instance, a cold immune boss were giving your girl trouble, you can just bamf away. At first, I relied on a staff to give me teleport, but I found it too annoying to not be able to retrieve my corpse after dying in some far-flung corner, so I splurged on the two points needed for it (my only two non-fire points: I have a similar policy to yours about using them better on my main skills). Incidentally, there’s never any reason to spend more than one point on teleport itself. The only thing that improves with level is the mana cost, and you should have mana leaking out your ears. My sorc doesn’t even walk in town, if she can avoid it: You can go down a portal or open your stash from across the screen using telekinesis.
While we’re at it on valuable single-point sorceress skills, energy shield can be a lifesaver. You don’t need many points in it for it to be valuable, but it does have a fair number of prerequisites (five of them, plus at least one in the skill itself), so it’s a good one to get off of an item (that’s the way my fire sorc gets hers).
Incidentally, I have not bothered with static field on my sorceress: I used to use an item for it, but my fireball has gotten to the point that I can do more damage to almost anything using it.
Alright, I’m housesitting this week, and they have a cable modem. For some reason, I accidentally clicked on US East. No worries, I switched back, but not after someone dropped a Flamebellow for me - anyone on East want it? It’s the unique Balrog Blade.
Alright, I’ll be back on tonight (West, this time!) - I’m starting anew, if anyone wants to join. I’ll be playing either an Avenger or a frenzier - I really can’t decide!
Welcome to West, Munch…
What is your account name so we can list you on our friend lists? What will be your hours of operation (and time zone you are in)?
Just to keep everyone up to date on the classic sorceress being created to make mules rushing faster…
She’s up to lvl 39 in act 3 of nightmare. Playing classic is strange, the stash is about 1/3 the size and there aren’t any charms or runes. She’s got maxed fireball, and 2 points in meteor and 1 in Fire Mastery and 1 in Frozen orb. I believe the plan is to max fire mastery, meteor, and Frozen orb. I guess we should put a point into cold mastery too.
ISTR it’s exactly half the size of the LOD stash. A quick check on the LOD packaging confirms this.
Ther are no runes, charms, jewels or pieces of socketed armor (sans SoJ recipe, anyway) in Classic. No Anya quest, either, though res only go down 20 in NM and 70 total in Hell.
I would personally recommend going orb/meteor/mastery/meteor/mastery, one skill point in each, and I’d also put a point or two, maybe, in cold mastery before long. The reason for that is that orb is meant to slow stuff down as much as to harm it, but your real punch will come from meteor and Fball, which gains damage from meteor and mastery (thus pumping both will help you get to about a 4K fireball without much effort).
However, playing the char may well yield a more useful build, so feel free to smile and ignore me:)
i’d personally hit either meteor or fire mastery first, depending on which raises fireball damage more. It may be a case where alternating points meteor/mastery is the quickest way to ramp up damage.
one point in orb is all you’ll need for slowing right now, and in fact, i doubt you’ll need it until you start seeing fire immunes. I don’t remember where they show up in classic, but my guess would be hell difficulty. Before then we should get around 5-10 points in orb so that we have a way to deal with them. Meteor and Fire Mastery should be the first priority though, until we have a sufficient need for orb.
Cold mastery should only get one point, anything more is unnecessary, at least until all the other skills we want to max are maxed. Remember, we only care about orb wrt fire immunes, who already (most likely) won’t have huge cold resistance.
Unless it changed between classic and expansion, fire immunes only start showing up on a regular basis in Hell. Before then, Bishibosh and the Grand Vizier of Chaos (finger mage boss guarding one Diablo seal) are fire immune in all difficulty levels, and you’ll occasionally see other bosses spawn with fire immunity (especially things like burning dead, which start with a fair bit of fire resistance). The Vizier is the only thing which is both unavoidable and always fire immune in Normal and NM (at least, non-expansion). Incidentally, both of these two actually have “fire immune” as an attribute, not just over 100% resistance, so Conviction, Lower Resist, etc. won’t help.
And I really ought to know about skill priority for max damage, but my philosophy was “max them all and let the game engine sort them out”. I’d do some calculations, except that I’m not certain how damage from mastery and synergies is calculated.
Well, she’s lvl 41 now, and i picked up the radament quest for a skill point. i put one point in cold mastery, and split the other 2 among meteor and fire mastery. I also switched her from the +2 fireball staff to crushflange/sigons guard, which cost us 5 stat points in strength. The damage doesn’t drop that much at all, due to the raised fire mastery level. Feel free to switch it back if you don’t like it, but i think the blocking and higher fire resist make up for it. If we could find a better weapon (perhaps a wand with fcr) she’d get a little stronger, or we could just find a really nice staff (perhaps +skills with +fireball and +fire mastery).’
Also Chronos is right, i ran into a few fire immunes on the way down to radament, mostly burning dead mages and the occasional burning dead boss. lvl 1 frozen orb took them down fairly nicely though. Perhaps we want to sink a few more points in it earlier than i originally thought. I would say we should put 3-4 points in it before we hit lvl 50, with the rest in meteor/fire mastery.
Works for me. I had been tempting to start using the Sigon Shield, but delayed it while I was playing with parties. The +1 to all skills is much better than +2 to fireball. I was hitting Fire immunes in act 1 of nightmare, but only in bosses.
As in, you don’t know if the bonus from Fball for Meteor is calculated before the bonus from mastery for Meteor is calculated, or (less likely) you don’t know which adds more? If the latter, ISTR that mastery adds 7% more dmg/lvl and Fball does 3% more dmg to Meteor/lvl. I’m unaware of a specific Bnet or Blizz word on howexactly dmg is calculated for a casting char if there are synergies involved. I’d imagine, though, that shown dmg is as stated (then you’d have to account for resists and such).
My guess would be that while mastery will increase dmg of both Fball and Meteor, you’ll be using meteor a good bit (esp against NM Duriel or Meph anywhere) as well, so perhaps (after those 5 points into Orb) go meteor/meteor/mastery/meteor/mastery … three rounds of that should take you to lvl 61, which should place you in A4, I’d think. I don’t know how much leveling you’d be able to do in Arcane; I ran it a few times in NM with my sorc, but then that was in varying players X games. I was about level 61 or so for NM Duriel, but then that was under special circumstances and after many, many Norm Baal runs. A1 of NM was, for me, teleporting around for half an hour.
I’d be interested to see what gear is being used atm (other than crushflange/sigon’s).
I can think of a few possibilities in calculations. We have four things that determine damage: Level of the skill itself, level of various synergies, level of mastery, and +x% to fire skill damage (I don’t think this last can occur in Classic, but let’s be thorough here). From these, I can think of at least four possibilities:
1: Take base damage from skill. Add all percentage bonuses together. Multiply base damage by 1+total bonus (this would be the scenario with the lowest total damage).
2: Take base damage from skill. Add all synergy bonuses together. Multiply base by 1+synergy bonus. Add mastery and equipment bonus together. Multiply by 1+(mastery and equipment bonus).
3: Take base damage from skill. Multiply by 1+(first synergy bonus). Multiply by 1+(second synergy bonus) (repeat for all synergies). Multiply by 1+mastery bonus. Multiply by 1+(total equipment bonus).
4: Take base damage from skill. One at a time for each skill point, multiply by 1+(synergy bonus per skill point) (repeat for all skill points in all synergies). Multiply by 1+mastery bonus. One at a time for each piece of equipment, multiply by 1+(individual equipment bonus) (repeat for all pieces of equipment) (this would be the scenario with the highest total damage).
(with a few other possibilities for different ways of combining the bonuses, of course.) Basically, for my later scenarios, I’m compounding my interest more often, and as everyone knows, the more often you compound your interest, the greater the total after interest. One of these times, I should just run the numbers for my sorc, and check when she has various amounts of equipment on.
As for which skill to pump when, it depends on which you use more. With mine, I approximately put points equally into meteor, fireball, and mastery, and then did firebolt. I found that, at any level, meteor was almost always too slow. By the time the meteor landed, everything was already dead from the fireballs. There are only three times I use meteor: First, against some bosses, who can survive three or four fireballs. Second, for indirect fire, as, for instance, if I want to kill an Oblivion Knight hiding behind a pack of Doom Knights. Third, in preparation for where monsters are about to appear (evil urns, Ancients, Diablo seal bosses, Baal’s minions… Note that most of those are expansion-only).
Well, the thing that I have learned from my first experiance with a sorc is to not make her Fire/Lightning. Lightning branch spells take too many skill points to make them useful and even then the range of damage is too high to reliably kill stuff in Hell.
Additionally, those points invested in Lit branch take away from the ones that should be put into fire spells.
Result: A retarded sorc that can’t stay alive/ kill things in Hell Act 1. <sigh>
Can a cold/lit sorc do any better, or is Lightning just crap?
My wolf is doing fairly well now at level 81, so I thought I’d try to go for another high-level character, and I’m attempting a Trap-based assassin. Anyone done this before? I read some good reviews of the class, but I seem to be struggling quite a bit where I am now (Act V Normal). Any suggestions?
I have a pretty dang good one on US West. She is a lightning trap assassin with some fire to back her up against lit immunes.
I do 4k damage per lightning bolt. multiply that by the number of bolts and the number of traps and you have a whole crap load of damage.
Gear: Anything with +traps. She will live and die by skill levels. Get dual claws with +skills on them.
Skills: Max the synergies. Charged bolt is much better than you might think as is death sentry and the little grenade skill. I am split on teh shadow master since she somtimes throws out traps when you would rather she didn’t. Forget the martial arts skills as you don’t want to waste points on something she won’t need to use.
I got mine to about level 82 before I got tired of the build and moved on. They are fun and efficient at running the pit and such where you just gotta kill everything that moves 