Re: Hardcore Frozen Orb/Fire Ball Sorceress; Socialism’s “Orb-it-allerâ€
I stayed away from Tals set. Mainly because I just rushed this char and plopped on most of the gear from my pure orber. See, this
is basically an orber, it's just that it has the luxury of a hefty fireball when you really need it. For those, perplexed about the ommision of meteor and the 5 points in teleport, ... read the guide again. This sorc is to be played aggressively. I will quote:
Dual-tree builds keep you self-sufficient and efficient (if you read the
Hardcore forum… you’d know I’m all about efficiency/aggressive playstyles …and that I’m
Awesome [note: general descriptor
and character name]). Meteor’s great, but too slow for me. I’ll prune the 4 skill points.
[highlight]Kill stuff[/highlight]
Frozen Orb on left mouse button (but don’t use shift-click while spellspamming) – this never changes
For big-life mobs that stand up to you:
1) hold down the right mouse button (RMB) to cast Frozen Orb
2) without releasing RMB, hotkey to Fire Ball
3) wait for the 1-second-timer from Orb to expire, then without releasing RMB, hotkey to Frozen Orb
4) if enemy still exists, repeat ad nauseum from #2
Frozen Orb from slvl 1 becomes your primary attack; Fire Ball is just an afterthought for Cold Immunes and helping Orb (in between casts) destroy huge-life-enemies (whee 8-player Izual).
With infinicast Teleport (slvl high enough + mana pool large enough + regen rate fast enough to let me teleport indefinitely), I held down the RMB and never let go… I’d teleport in place while waiting for the group. Enemy pops on screen = hotkey to Frozen Orb, Glacial Spike if necessary, Fire Ball, Frozen Orb, etc—meanwhile, the RMB is still depressed from 10 minutes ago.
Not exactly something that lends itself to meteor. As for the 5 in teleport, well, if you don't play hardcore, then you don't
need them. Pretty simple really. Having said that, it's nice to have that low cost tp if your insight merc dies and since those 5 points wouldn't make a huge difference elsewhere then why not have that nice buffer?
The point in the cold armour is great for areas like frigid highlands where you WILL encounter mass hard hitting ranged attacks and since you don't have block ....
Basically, you need to to think of this as an extension of the pure orber. If you want a meteorb, .... go build a meteorb.
My orb does just over 800 max without anything that adds to cold damage (except + skills ofc) and chews through screens of non cold immunes. My fireball is nicely effective at a bit under 5 k max (could get more but I use a 3 cold ammy), which at my current 105 fcr is more than enough (still gathering the gear to try a 200 fcr version - just crafted a 20fcr ammy tho so almost there
) to take down anything that might give me and my merc some trouble. It's also lovely to have on tower level 5 since, well obviously, it speeds things up greatly.
My current gear is:
Shako "ort"
Upped 35 res viper "Um" (50 res then)
3 cold/ 22 dr amulet
HotO (39 res)
Spirit monarch
Arachnid mesh
Dual sojs
Sandstorm treks
Magefists
Torch/anni
2 or 3 cold skillers (not needed but I had them).
Switch is CtA/Spirit and merc is the Prayer/Insight sort with blackhorns helm.
Level 88 at the moment and extra points have been going into ice bolt.
Due to the amount of + skills I knew I'd have, I only needed 1 point in cold mastery.
If souls really bother you (erm, they bother most people without max res and some sort of absorb btw..) then tele past/around them, go kill baal and then make another run where there might not be souls and you can go hog wild.
If you want to kill everything, every time, then stack lightning res rather than all res, since once all the other res's are near max or max then you don't really need any more. Lightning is the only element that that will one shot omgwtfpwn you, so protect against it. Also, souls are kinda double trouble in that they will gobble your mana too. Take steps to minimise the problems this might cause. A holy freeze merc would mostly likey be the top choice for wsk tbh, since you'll both have a much easier time against souls with his aura but then I've not used a holy freeze merc in a while, so don't take my word on that.
You shouldn't really have any problems with this build unless you're building from scratch as your first character - which would be like completely ignoring the guide in the first place. You do need a teensy bit of D2Wealth to get this one running nicely.
MrGohl - lose the visceratuant, gain a spirit
)
