I’ve justed started playing Daiblo II for the first time, better really, really late than never. Just curious how people usually spread their skill points out. All in one tree? Most in one, a few in another? All three trees? Right now I have 2 low level characters: an assassin and a sorceress.
Usually it is much better to pick one tree and specialize than to spread them out across multiple trees.
agreed, but sometimes there are a couple things that require the investment of only a couple points in another tree that you’d like. I remember necros having a few of those (ass ton of skeletons plus one low-level golem guy or something of the sort just for kicks). Been ages since I played the game, though.
I generally picked two skill trees. I played a Necro and the idea was to have a ton of golems but also have a bone shield and bone spear for tanking and a bit of extra DPS. I was one of those necros everyone hated because I had something like 70 minions on screen at any given time. The best sidekick to have was the archer with ice arrows.
The advice above is mostly obsolete since patch 1.10 or so, when they implemented synergies. Please ignore me if you’re doing single player without patching.
The assassin needs to focus on either martial arts or traps with some excess spent on the third tree. Single points in Cloak of Shadows, Fade, and Shadow Warrior are essential; also take at least one in Weapon Block unless you are going claw/shield (a subset of martial artists, strangely - trappers always use an offclaw for the +skills).
Sorceresses are viable with a single element for a while, but get stumped by Nightmare unless in a group. In my experience, an unsynergized Frozen Orb complements heavy Fire or Lightning pretty well, more effectively with Lightning. Trispec is useless as teats on a boar.
It’s not about trees. It’s about the specific skills that you need to utterly p0wn everything in your path.
There are specific “builds” that people usually use. Typically there are at least 3-4 good builds for each class. Since 1.10 these builds have been modified somewhat to focus on the synergies between different skills. Synergies are skills which add bonuses to other skills. For example, for a Fire Sorceress, my main skill was fireball. There are 2-3 other skills that add damage to fire ball - fire bolt, meteor, etc. The synergies can add quite a lot of damage to the main skill, so you want to max them out as well. I don’t remember specific numbers since it’s been about 4 years, but my fireball sorceress could do a mind boggling amount of damage as long as the monsters weren’t fire immune. Which brings up the next point:
Sorcs are a little different than most classes because most monsters are immune to at least one, and sometimes two, of their skill trees. Typically you want to pick a main attack from one tree and max that and the synergies to it. Then pick an attack from another tree and just put a few points into it. Usually you get at least one point into a third tree for double immunes (no monster is immune to all 3, it would make sorcs pointless). One point into, say, chain lightning doesn’t seem like a lot, but if you have good gear with lots of +skill items it actually does quite a bit of damage.
For example,
Main skill: fireball and synergies. Secondary skills: Frozen Orb and Chain Lightning.
Main skill: Frozen Orb and Synergies. Secondary skills: Meteor and Chain Lightning.
For every class, there’s usually one or two “must have” skills that almost every character of that class uses. For sorcs, it’s static and teleport. Static is awesome because you can take almost any enemies health down to 1/2 or 1/4 pretty much instantly. Teleport can go through walls and allow you to zip around faster. For barbarians it’s Battle Orders, which add massive life to yourself and all party members, including mercs, and Natural Resistance, which raises cold, fire, and lightning resistance. Most paladins use Holy Shield, which adds massive defense. Once you get the must have skills down, then you pick one or two main attacks and focus on those.
With some classes you have to ignore one of the skill trees. Assassins, for instance, usually focus either on melee attacks or the trap tree, but never both. You very very rarely see druids with summoned pets because they’re so weak. Necromancers usually either go summoned monsters or poison and bone.
My advice to you would be to do some research and plan out a build for your characters. It is very, very difficult to level past 85 or so, and I’d plan on being “maxed out” at around that level, with anything past that as a bonus.
Also, don’t neglect mercs! A good merc that complements your class and has decent gear can really be an asset. Sure, they’ll die a lot, but they can save your bacon in some tough situations. Act 2 mercs are fantastic for their auras, although I had a Paladin with an act 1 merc with a Windforce (the most powerful bow in the game) that kicked major ass.
Check this website for all kinds of good Diablo 2 information
Sorry, don’t mean to hijack, but this thread reminds me of how incredibly fun playing D2 on Battle.net in the early days was–and part (a big part?) of that fun was how unbalanced it was. You hardly had to have a real build; you just had to make sure to max the overpowered skill for your particular class. At various points in time/patches, Frozen Orb, Corpse Explosion, Strafe, Blessed Hammer, and Whirlwind were all ridiculous killing machines. Whirlwind was particularly fun because you could right-click on the other side of the screen and cut a path of destruction through whatever was in your way. All in the name of more SOJs…
Thanks for the info. Right now my sorceress is all fire and my assassin is all martial arts (think that’s what it’s called), but they’re both below level 10. I’m familiar with builds from WoW and other RPGs. It sounds like D2 is pretty much the same: heavy in one tree and a few points into another. I don’t know how far I’ll get in the game, just palying single player right now, waiting for D3 to be released (probabaly 2010).
I’ll add something. One things that made the game more fun for me that wasn’t told upfront to me was the Players X command for single player. You may know about it, but if not I’ll tell you. Basically you act like your sending a message and type in players X where X is a number from 1 to 10 and the game treats it like there were that many players in the game and ups the monster’s health and the XP they give accordingly.
Oh, I strongly reccomend against Paladins with Holy Shock, or Holy Anything. It looks nice, and it’s really good up until Hell difficulty Act 5. But unless you have gross financial resources in Battle.net, you’re going to start running into problems. It’s not impossible, mind you, but it gets tedious and irritating without just the right gear.
Too bad, too, because it’s actually a fun build.
Actually, I generally reccomend against Paladins at all. Unless you know what you are doing or are very rich, it’s hard to play one. They need special tactics and a special player skillset. Playing a Chargadin, for example, is neat but very difficult.
Really? I love Paladins. A good mix of Holy Shield, Charge, and Zeal, combined with a fast weapon and (whatever aura that is that gives damage, AR, and attack speed bonuses), and you’re ready to go. Works really well in concert with a Necromancer, too; he’s at his best against single bosses, while the Necromancer is at his best against large groups. You’re right, though, that it gets very gear-intensive once you’re past Nightmare.
More specifically, here are the D2 and D3 forums. Scroll down, and there are strategy forums for each class. Some great info in the D2 Community Forum as well.
I myself love my Skeleton Necro - 20 points in Skeleton Mastery, 20 in Raise Skeleton, one in Clay Golem, 20 in Corpse Explosion, a few in Amplify Damage, one in Decrepify, and one in all prerequisites. I have like 18 unspent skills at 85, and the build is basically finished. With lots of +skills, I’m all but unbeatable thru Hell Baal. Haven’t done the Ubers, though…
Joe
Back in the stone age, I had a Burizon with Multi, not Strafe, a WW Pole Barb, and a FO Sorc - with all 3, Hell Cows were like nothing at all, just a hot knife through butter.
Joe
Back in the stone age, I used to do the Tankbarian pretty well. Farmed up a complete Immortal King set for him, too, which is one of the few high-level sets I’d recommend for post level 80 use.
That my wife played a chain lightning/frozen orb sorc made it all the better. Yes, fools, hit ME! Mwaahhahaa zorch zorch zorch
My last great D2 build was actually a skeleton mage build. I was something of an optimizer and had a few lucky streaks with my earlier MF character, so I was quite rich. I had, if I am recalling correctly, on the order of +18 to my key build skills from gear and charms along, including a ptorch and the dclone drop.
What made the skeleton mage build really pop was Enigma. Skeleton mages themselves are poor meatshields and undirected, do not do a great deal of damage. When properly focused, their damage is outstanding and they made excellent shields.
Enigma focused the mages. All I needed was a flock of a dozen of them or so and a large sized revive. When you teleport using Enigma, you take your whole army with you. If you take a large Revive, your entire army stays in a tiny stack and all of the skeletons focus fire on the nearest target. Believe me, when you spam lvl 30+ Lower Resist, everything dies. And when you are self-collected in your little stack of minions, you take almost do damage at all. Only a catastrophic AoE or an Iron Maiden can kill you. Teleport your stack on any mob and it dies. Quickly.
I should have taken videos of this, but I soloed the Ubers with this build. It was great fun, as teleporting in and out to avoid their AoEs was definitely a challenge. But my mages mostly survived due to some good luck and a bit of practice.
Good times.
It’s worth mentioning that since Rust Storm and the 1.1x patches, Diablo II is a much different world than some of you may be remembering. The Hell difficulty setting is absolutely brutal, with scads of element-immune mobs and a hefty resistance penalty across the board for any player-character in the game.
Min-maxing and taking full advantage of the new(ish) synergies is the only way to remain viable in the upper difficulty settings without a set of twink-gear to accommodate you. Even then, there are many (most?) builds that simply won’t cut it past Act V nightmare or so. Lacking a fairly substantial level of online wealth (generally in the form of the ridiculously overpowered runewords), any character with a single damage source will find sections of the game impassable as you’ll encounter crowds of monsters completely immune to your element of choice. The OP’s sorceress must max fireball, meteor, and fire mastery to remain viable - even then, Act II Hell will be quite difficult with lots of fire-immune skeletons. Martial-art assassins aren’t really a hell-survivable archetype to begin with, and any physical based class needs a lot of top gear to slash-and-hack without getting gibbed in moments.
Hilariously, skele-mancers, once the bane of players everywhere (remember the Maggot Lair when they still had collision? Goddamn…) are one of the better untwinked classes right now, although they lose their potency fast without something like a Beast runeword to keep your pwnzage status high through Hell.
God, I miss that game. 
Maggot Lair and Arcane Sanctuary are still awful for a Skelliemancer without either Enigma or an amulet with Teleport charges. Never used Beast, right now I’m using Heart of the Oak flail, Enigma Dusk Shroud, all the good stuff. All I need is a Mara’s Amulet, a couple of SOJs, and an Annihilus, and I’ll be at like +14 or something all skills, and +17 summoning.
I just started a gold-find Barb. I saw a video of some dude using a leap barb on the council, and getting gold drops of 50,000-75,000 per council member - gold-find in the +thousands of percent…
Joe
The game is very different in single-player and multi-player. In a multi-player game, it’s perfectly fine to be a one-element wonder, since chances are, your party members will use different elements from you. But in single player, there’s nobody to pick up your slack, and so you absolutely must be versatile. I think the only build I would even contemplate soloing the higher difficulty levels of the current game would be a Vengeance/Conviction paladin-- Blessed Hammer paladins can handle almost everything, but in a true single-player game, you’d never get through the Maggot Lair.
I HATE these threads.
Always make me want to dust off my old discs again ;). I’m feeling hopeful about Diablo III.