After being inspired by the Lev99 builds I decided to try a sorc. Here’s a quick progress report so far.
Normal Difficulty- The journey begins for BriarRose.
With no gear the first few levels were her whacking away with a hand-axe on P8, not particularly hard going although I died at the Monastery cloister to my embarrassment.
I did Topaz some socketed caps and armor for 50MF as soon as I got the items and found the odd Cathan’s Mask and Berserker axe, nothing that helped me directly.
Duriel on P1 wasn’t particularly hard, static tends to take monsters down pretty fast followed by Ice blast.
Second death was in the Flayer jungle after the Gidbinn quest spawned a super-fast critter. On the other hand, I did get the Eye of Etlich from the jungle which was awesome.
Chaos Sanctuary was my final death in normal and Diablo was a pain with the hose lightning but went down and off I progressed.
Nightmare difficulty:
Made Ryme runeword in Darkwoods as 2 socket shield dropped-whew!
No real issues with playthrough, once I had Blizzard it was a doddle and I flew through the game picking up a Holy Freeze merc on the way to act as porter and all round monster distraction. I only have to outrun him
Died 5 times in NM-despite being careful…doesnt bode well I know.
Ran Eldritch (one of my fav leveling techniques) until lev 63-super easy and fast..lidless wall dropped which was awesome.
Baal dropped Silks of the Victor..Still no Skin of the Vipermagi or anything really useful.
Wanting to move on I entered Hell at Lev70
Hell Difficulty and the importance of being ernest.
Raven frost dropped in Den of Evil-excellent!
At level 71 a 4 socket non eth Bill drops and I make my first roll-perfect lev 17 aura Insight, 253 damage
This helps a lot.
At lev 73 I ran countess a few times for runes and then started Ancient Tunnel runs usually at P3. At some point I build Wealth runeword for the MF in an Archon plate. Stupidly, this was also the highest def roll I’ve found all game in an Archon. Should have saved it for COH.
Because I was initially a Blova build I also did the odd pit run but I found I wasnt able to scale to a higher P count so ended up re-speccing to pure Blizz around lev 83. I then stuck to AT.
Slogged my way to Travincal and did some Meph runs, watching him dance a little jig while safely on the other side of the moat and throwing blizzards his way. Some audience, I know.
Since he refused to drop anything remotely useful I decided to go rune hunting.
First runs at LK were ‘Why hello young sorceress, what can I do for you’ And I was ‘Please can I have some high runes?’
VEX dropped and I decided to press my luck but LK was now ‘Oh, you again. Hey, how about this EL.’
After some more running, LK was ‘Look, bugger off!’ but I refused to be cowed and kept on while listening to podcasts.
HOTO was built and immediately made a noticeable difference in power/safety. By this stage I'd managed to also roll Spirit so resists were looking good.
After some time over the week, I scored a BER. This went to my first Chains of Honor as Vipermagi had still not dropped.
I had never built this before and noticed immediately that I could now do AT runs at P7 and she was much more survivable. Yes I think Enigma is probably the better armour but I wasn’t willing to add the extra time given I still had to farm for Infinity.
Ideally I knew I needed Shako for DR, life and skills but one refused to drop and I started sacrificing MF for safety as I progressed in levels.
Finally, around lev 89 or so, deaths started to be noticeable for lost time due to xp penalty( At L93 I now stare grimly at the screen cursing my folly/play.)
I was now focusing almost exclusively on AT and Pindle runs. CS was still too hard above P3 for me and at lev 93 I crafted a +2/10/20 amulet in lieu of Mara’s which hasn’t dropped.
I then tried CS at p5 and on the second run after killing Diablo was given a 8% Nightwing's Veil.
Wow.
While it lacks DR/Life, this thing rocks and after also building a CTA can now do AT, Pindle and CS at highest Player settings.
Currently I’m focused on getting to Level 94 and looking for a base for Infinity. If a Griffons drops i’ll prob respec to lightning but I do like Blizzards playstyle a lot. it’s just annoying how cold immunes cant be broken.
Thanks for reading and to all those who shared their knowledge.
Thankyou to PhineasB for encouragement behind the scenes.
I’m fully expecting this to take a year or so, we shall see. Currently questing.