Thanks!
I've always found these kind of quirks very interesting myself, and I used to (many years ago) be a system administrator with a strong passion for programming so I always found myself trying to understand what's going on in the technical aspects.
The way I played the barb was mostly killing champion and minion packs in RoF and CotD. I actually found that to be a lot of fun. I would usually do CS runs with my Sorc in TCP/IP games so my Barb could kill Diablo by himself in 8-player games, so I guess I got some good experience from that as well. Even with the occasional EXP shrine that my Sorc found in CP or SF!
But mostly just champions and minions. There were many runs...
As for other characters, I did indeed have a Sorc which I used. Since spells don't have a timer, the spells are nerfed in that sense because they cost so much mana and you can't just spam 20 frozen orbs or spawn 10 hydras to quickly kill a pack of monsters.
Charged bolt, nova, lightning, chain lightning and thunder storm are all terrible spells. Can't even clear kill creeps in one player games in Hell Act 4, they are all utter trash.
Why? Because lightning mastery only reduce the mana cost of the lightning spells. Well played Blizzard....
Ice bolt, ice blast, frost nova, blizzard and frozen orb are not good spells either. I mean, frozen orb does a ton of damage (and has that quirky behavior as in 1.07 that you need to aim on the side of monsters) but cost more
than 75 mana at a decent level. Glacial spike is actually pretty decent though with good FCR in one player games.
Fire bolt, fire ball, inferno, blaze, fire wall and hydra is bad as well. Fire wall is probably the best spell the sorceress has in terms of damage, but too bad that it costs 75+ mana at a decent level making it useless.
So what am I trying to say? Well unfortunately for sorceress' there really is only one build that is optimal in 1.00, and that is static field + a spell to finish creeps of. Meteor has a lot of damage like fire wall and costs half
of what frozen orb, hydra and fire wall does and has a nice AoE. So you put 1 in lightning mastery, enough in teleport for it to be very low mana cost with your +skill on gear, max static field, warmth, meteor and fire mastery. You want good damage on your
meteor against monsters with high lightning resistance.
This is by far the best 1.00 character in terms of kill speed if you want to get a high level character, as you simply teleport to the seals, drop one or two meteor and cast static field untill monsters are dead. Rinse and repeat on all seal minions and kill Diablo.
With the 12,5% chance to get a rare item from minions you can find some very good items this way as well, although I preferred to run gold find runs with my barb and level him instead. If I remember correctly my sorc was at least level 92, so not too shabby.
Just make sure you have a good shield, lots of resistance and lots of life so you can tank the creeps while they burn up from meteor and static field. 63%+ FCR, 30% faster block rate on shield and 48%+ FHR is required as well, mine had 86%+ FHR I beleive. Alternatively you could use Wall of the Eyeless with low block to free up 20% FCR and just tank the damage instead. Also has the nice MPK mod.
Then you have the Cheese'o'mancer. Honestly, it's pretty good but nothing like the Sorc or the Barb. Thing is that it rocks in player one games, but with more players it takes too much time to get the first corpse. Poison Nova sucks, so you have to use bone spirit or bone spear and even with Lower Resistance that takes a while.
If you enjoy clearing CS in player one games then the Necro works wonders with CE obviously, and you can farm items with bone wall.
Never really enjoyed the Paladin in 1.00, but you can run a Hammerdin with concentration. It was a bug back then, and it does a ton of damage. Works very well, especially in one player games. Then you the thorns paladin which is super broken as well in player one games.
More monsters only increase health in 1.00, so the thorns effect is not as strong then.
Amazons sucks. Bows damage doesn't work and the spells are alright I guess, but cost a lot of mana and is kind of awkward with pierce. And since Javelins can only be as good as superior you cannot have attack speed on them. Doesn't matter though because the javelin skills sucks as well.
Amazons however is probably my favorite one player CS clearer in 1.04 with multi arrow and a good bow. It is super fast and super fun to play! Probably the fastest full clear one player CS runner in pre-lod, but only 1.04 though because of the "nice bugs".
I have always been kind of an optimalist when playing Diablo 2, so I only really cared about the barb, sorc and 1.04 bowazon. I am sure you can find viable builds in one player games, but that is not my cup of tea.
However, the one build I found fun to play which was not optimal by any sense of the word was my Singer barb. I made Freddie in 2009 (
https://www.purediablo.com/forums/threads/freddie-the-in-progress-hc-untwinked-1-06-singer.746534/) and actually proved to be a useful character in player one games. So I made one in 1.00 too with my uber gear, and he is a beast. :d There's this technique you can have where your war cry hits a monster twice, effecitvely doubling your damage which makes the build pretty good in terms of kill speed, you just have to pick up all mana potions and rejuvination potions and spend time using 'Find Potion' if it doesn't
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