Fire/Lightning Hybrid Questions

[mystique missourian]

Ok...got a few questions for you i play single player and this is what my charecters stats,gear,skills,exc......i always get my butt kicked in nm blood moor
Thors' Wife
lvl 43
str 104
dex 31
vit 74
energy 100
life 267
mana 440
Fire skills
lvl 7 warmth and inferno
lvl 5 mastery
lvl 4 fire wall,hydra and blaze

Lightning skills
lvl 11 charged bolt
lvl 8 mastery
lvl 6 regular lightning
lvl 5 chain
lvl 3 storm
lvl 2 static
lvl 1 nova

gear..... 2 soc crown 1 p sap 1 flawless sap
2 soc staff leaf
whitch one ? stealth or 1 soc sparkleing mail 1 flawless paz
sig belt
16% mf gloves
ring 1: 3 str 32 mana
ring 2: 8 life 39 mana
vidalas boots

WHAT DID I DO WRONG?

[sirpoopsalot]

You've got quite a variety of skill points there. When version 1.10 came out the game became harder in many ways, and it became almost 'necessary' to use the synergies to gain more firepower for your skills. From what I can see, you're not doing that very much, so you have a hard road ahead of you - and if you think NM's tough, wait till you get to hell.

Aside from your wide diversity in skill placement, your equipment honestly isn't very good (to say it politely) - and you've spent too many points in Energy.


... so, it seems like you have two options (plus the bonus explained below :wink3:).

First option - abandon this sorc. Have a look at some of the guides in the FAQ and put a little more fore-planning into your next one. In the end, this will be much quicker than option two, but less satisfying.

Second option - Try to salvage this sorc. To be honest, this is going to be very, very difficult. If you're dedicated to taking this approach let me know and I'll try to help you out as much as I can with advice. It'll take me a while to type it all up - so I didn't bother until I could gage your dedication (i.e. if you really, really want to take this character through the game I'll do my best to help - otherwise, I recommend abandon and...


Bonus option *here comes the sales pitch :badteeth:*
If you play Single Player (SP) all the time, you'd probably be more suited to looking around the Single Player Forum (aka SPF) (http://forums.diabloii.net/forumdisplay.php?forumid=3).

A lot of the class-specific forums on this site have a very high proportion of BNet players, and the items available in BNet tend to be much higher-end than the ones you'll find in SP. As a result the SPF has very wide variety of players that have tackled the game with various under-powered builds using less than optimal equipment (for example, the Infinity runeword is almost unattainable in the SPF - but you'll notice that it's discussed here often). There are a few people with very, very good equipment that rivals the best of BNet, but generally there are more people that started with 'virtually nothing' and built themselves up - and that community is very active.

The SPF also has a lot of character guides that are more suited to SP play (i.e. without a huge emphasis on equipment sometimes), you should have a look in the FAQ on that forum to gain some ideas too.

[mystique missourian]

I am going to dump the sorceress what build would you recommend best a meteorb or im open for anything.

[Hork]

Yup, dumping your current sorc is probably your best option. Sorry about that, but synergies make it really really hard to do dual tree without cold just because frozen orb does so well without any synergies and only about 7 points in cold mastery thanks to deminishing returns on the mastery.

What you do depends on what you want. If you want a fully functional mf'er than can solo hell baal once you are rich enough, I'd suggest meteorb for starting out. If you want to get rich quick, blizzard is great for running nightmare mephisto.

[mystique missourian]

Meteorb it is is saving your skill points over the levels for the synergys and prequesits or just wasting them on stuff?

[sirpoopsalot]

Yep, Frozen Orb kicks butt all the way through Nightmare, so you shouldn't have any problems. Usually by the time you're in hell, a Meteorb has a very respectable Fireball too (which will probably be your primary fire skill when questing - even more than Meteor).

Blizzard sorcs are one of the best MF characters there are, and some people do take them through hell in SP. Ancient Tunnels is a lvl85 area that does not have cold-immunes, so Blizzies are very popular there, as well as running Meph and Pindle - two of the most popular MF targets in SP.

Finally, if you want a rune hunter, a CL/FO sorc is probably the best build for running the Countess.

[Hork]

"Meteorb it is is saving your skill points over the levels for the synergys and prequesits or just wasting them on stuff?"

I'm not sure I follow. I think you are saying that you decided on meteorb, but I'm not sure what your question is.

The guide here is pretty good. You want to save points so that you can get the most out of the big levels that you hit. I like to save tons of points (say from 25 to 30 - including izzy) so that when I turn 30 I can pump FO and CM for the next few levels. While doing your normal baal runs for xp and then in NM, you'll appreciate the added effectiveness of FO this provides.

[sirpoopsalot]

What's the point of "wasting them on stuff?" - if you burn the points in skills you won't ever use they never benefit you. If you save the points for a few levels until you can put them in a primary/synergy skill, you'll gain a lot of benefit from your patience later in the game.

Save the points until you can spend them on a skill you'll use.