zebulin
24-01-2007, 23:11
Hiya, currently my sorc is lv 50. Its 20 blizzard, 20 ice blast, with some points in cold mastery, and 1 point in teleport. Ive been working through NM and have encountered some cold immune monsters.
How should i deal with this? Should i start putting points into a fire / lighting? if so what specific spells? Or should i stay all cold and just get a mercenary? ( i havent been using one of these yet)
Some other questions
Cold mastery. Does the lower resist effect monsters or just other people?
Should i be putting my points into vitality or mana?
Is 1 point in Energy shield worth it?
Is 1 point in warmth worth it?
Which mercenary would be best to use?
Thanks and sorry for all the newbish questions.
Jonny~
Don't bother spending more than 9 points in cold mastery. It is a very strong skill that does indeed lower monster resists but for game mechanics reasons it stops providing much additional benenfit against most monsters after it is level 17 or so and you can expect to eventually get so many items that increase your points in this skill that if you spend 9 or more points on cold mastery you will likely end up overshooting this mark and essentially wasting some skill points.
Is this your starting character? would you like this character to be able to progress solo all the way through Hell without *heavy* reliance on your merc? If so then I strongly advise against remaining pure cold. I tried that. it really really sucked and I almost ruined my restart sorc.
Don't think a point in static field plus merc will save you in hell either. That is obviously a huge help but your merc will often be easily overwhelmed by the huge numbers of cold immunes unless your gear is utterly godly and worst of all it's just slow as hell progressing that way.
Instead in addition to the solid static field/merc approach you'll greatly bennefit from a fire based attack method.
There are two blizzard based builds with fire based secondary attacks that I would seriously consider.
They are blizzballer and blizzwaller.
Blizzwaller takes far fewer fire skill tree points and can do immense damage without synergies making it something like the blizzard based version of a meteorb sorc, but firewall is a much more challenging skill to use as a secondary than the meteorbs frozen orb as secondary is.
Blizzballer requires more points to get good fire damage but it is far more spammable than the firewall attacks and easier to direct against your enemies as well.
If you want the strongest possible blizzard or points flexibility and arent too concerned about your secondary attack being easy to use go with blizzwall, but if you want a fairly strong easy to use secondary and don't mind a weakened blizzard go with blizzball.
I recommend the Nightmare difficulty Act 2 defensive mercs since their holy freeze seems to stack with sorc cold tree chills and in any event it works on immunes so you'll definately see a huge bennefit.
Energy shield isn't worth it for most builds and should only be used IMHO when trying to salvage a character that spent too many points on increasing mana pool.
1 pt of warmth ends up providing so much improvment to mana regen especially when combined with skillers that's it's hard to say you should not spend that one point on it but don't spend any more than the one.
DO not spend any points increasing your mana pool. Eventually they would all seem wasted. Go ahead and put as many points as you want into vitality especially if you aren't interested in spending the huge amount of points most shields require in dex for max block.
How should i deal with this? Should i start putting points into a fire / lighting? if so what specific spells? Or should i stay all cold and just get a mercenary? ( i havent been using one of these yet)
Some other questions
Cold mastery. Does the lower resist effect monsters or just other people?
Should i be putting my points into vitality or mana?
Is 1 point in Energy shield worth it?
Is 1 point in warmth worth it?
Which mercenary would be best to use?
Thanks and sorry for all the newbish questions.
Jonny~
Don't bother spending more than 9 points in cold mastery. It is a very strong skill that does indeed lower monster resists but for game mechanics reasons it stops providing much additional benenfit against most monsters after it is level 17 or so and you can expect to eventually get so many items that increase your points in this skill that if you spend 9 or more points on cold mastery you will likely end up overshooting this mark and essentially wasting some skill points.
Is this your starting character? would you like this character to be able to progress solo all the way through Hell without *heavy* reliance on your merc? If so then I strongly advise against remaining pure cold. I tried that. it really really sucked and I almost ruined my restart sorc.
Don't think a point in static field plus merc will save you in hell either. That is obviously a huge help but your merc will often be easily overwhelmed by the huge numbers of cold immunes unless your gear is utterly godly and worst of all it's just slow as hell progressing that way.
Instead in addition to the solid static field/merc approach you'll greatly bennefit from a fire based attack method.
There are two blizzard based builds with fire based secondary attacks that I would seriously consider.
They are blizzballer and blizzwaller.
Blizzwaller takes far fewer fire skill tree points and can do immense damage without synergies making it something like the blizzard based version of a meteorb sorc, but firewall is a much more challenging skill to use as a secondary than the meteorbs frozen orb as secondary is.
Blizzballer requires more points to get good fire damage but it is far more spammable than the firewall attacks and easier to direct against your enemies as well.
If you want the strongest possible blizzard or points flexibility and arent too concerned about your secondary attack being easy to use go with blizzwall, but if you want a fairly strong easy to use secondary and don't mind a weakened blizzard go with blizzball.
I recommend the Nightmare difficulty Act 2 defensive mercs since their holy freeze seems to stack with sorc cold tree chills and in any event it works on immunes so you'll definately see a huge bennefit.
Energy shield isn't worth it for most builds and should only be used IMHO when trying to salvage a character that spent too many points on increasing mana pool.
1 pt of warmth ends up providing so much improvment to mana regen especially when combined with skillers that's it's hard to say you should not spend that one point on it but don't spend any more than the one.
DO not spend any points increasing your mana pool. Eventually they would all seem wasted. Go ahead and put as many points as you want into vitality especially if you aren't interested in spending the huge amount of points most shields require in dex for max block.