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Guide to a dualdream zeal echantress
PROLOGUE
Finally she stood against her opponent. She had never been affraid, not even of death, but what she faced now made her tremble as her thoughts shifted back to her childhood.
The aspects of avoiding battles and negotiating were early teachings, with she becoming the future queen. The power at hand to avoid battles and confuse opponents were said to be a womans way of dealing with problems. Many men however had felt the consequences of not listening to her reasening and the last thing they tasted was her steel. The old zealot had thought her the way of the sword well.
As her opponent laugh went from a shrill high-pitched sound to a low groaning she snapped back to reality. This was no time for reasoning nor silly thoughts about how she confused her weaker opponents. She finally faced the woman who haunted her nightmares for the last 15 years. She still saw her opponent as a woman although before her stood a gigantic bear. This ageless creature roamed her world long before she was born. Taking the imbue-ing stance she fastened herself for the battle yet to come. It was time to avenge her beloved villagepeople, all brutally slaughtered by those giant paws. As the bear strode at her she emptied her mind and her sword sparkled with the light from the heavens and the fires from hell. Her whole being radiated an aura of sparkles. As her thoughts grew equally dark as the thoughts from the creature coming at her, she knew this would be the hardest battle she ever was going to face.
A guide to a Dualdream zeal enchantress
There have been many posts in this forum regarding dualdreamsorceresses. The guides that exist are old and in the meanwhile there has been quite some discussion. Divided over ladder 2 and 3 i played quite some meleesorc myself and i thought it was time for a guide containing my point of view. First of all let me tell you that meleesorceresses in general are very entertaining chars. Also let me tell you that they are quite diffficult to either play and build good. There are much more factors to keep in mind then a plain caster, but when you do everything right you will be awarded with an incredible char.
Now over to the build.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 The Two builds
3 General Things to Know
4 The Dualdream Enchantress
A: Items that must be used
B: Mandatory Skills
C: Different Approaches
D: Charms
E: Attack speed tables for a zealing sorceress
F: Differences to think about when focusing on PvM or PvP
1) INTRODUCTION
This guide will cover two different builds.. The Central point in both these builds will be the fact that you are a meleesorc making use of the runeword dream (io+jah+pul) in your helm and your shield. Dream does the following:
10% Chance To Cast Level 15 Confuse When Struck
Level 15 Holy Shock Aura When Equipped
+20-30% Faster Hit Recovery (varies)
+30% Enhanced Defense
+150-220 Defense (varies)
+10 To Vitality
Increase Maximum Life 5% (Helms Only)
+50 To Life (Shields Only)
+0.625-61.875 To Mana (Based On Character Level)
All Resistances +5-20 (varies)
12-25% Better Chance of Getting Magic Items (varies)
Why would a sorceress use this some people might ask themselves. The big catch on this is the fact that if you slap on a dream helm+shield you will be granted a lvl 30 holy shock aura. What holy shock does is two things. 1) The aura will give you a pulse that deals lightning damage, 2) The aura adds a lot of lightning damage to your melee attack.
Both 1 and 2 are being boosted by your lightning mastery. If you do closerangemelee your lightning mastery even aplies twice. You can reach higher possible damage then any other sorceress build out there.
2) THE TWO BUILDS
Let us go on to the two builds that use those dreams.
1) A dualdreamsorc using zeal to attack with.
2) A dualdreamsorc shifting to a werebear and using normal attack then.
This guide will focus on the dualdreamsorc using zeal as her main attack. There is no such thing as a zealing sorc being the better build of the two. Both builds have their advantages/disadavantages. It mostly comes down to your playing style wich of the two you like best. I myself get more fun out of playing the zeal build then the bearbuild due to the fact that you can tele and still use skills like static field. Zeal is uninteruptable and will autoaim when you hold shift down and there is someone in zealing radius, wich is quite handy in pvp.
The bearbuild is limited to walking around and using normal attack, though it reaches far higher attack speeds and life with less equipment commitments. But hey , if you want an elemental damage bear you could just as well make a fireclaw druid.
Don’t expect to be told wich items to slap on and how much to put here and there in your stats and skills. As you will first realize there are many possibilities after wich you get narrowed down to a few wich will seem the best. There are many paths to follow considering all things mentioned in the next chapter.
3) GENERAL THINGS TO KNOW
Start considering this build as a challenge, there are lots of things you need to think of when you are planning and plotting your equipment and your skill and stat setup. First of all let me tell you that your defenses on this char are more important then improving your damage output. 2 Dreams with a decent lightning mastery already does a lot of damage. Factor in an infinity merc and your damage really doesn’t need much improvement. Remember that you will have to attack closerange and therefore take more hits then any other sorc. The real challenge is to turn your sorc into a tank that can take some hits while you are in the heat of combat. This kinda means that high-end expensive charms also help out a lot here.
Things we are going to take into account in the builds are the following:
Attack Rating
Faster Cast Rate
Faster Hit Recovery
Increased attack speed
+Skills
Resistances
To block or not to block?
To use energyshield or not to use energyshield?
The importance of a merc
Attack rating:
Since you are a meleesorc you have to take into consideration that you will need attack rating.
Especially in pvp attack rating has to be high up to hit the higher defense characters. In pvm it still plays a role but it can be minimised down to a lesser need depending on your gear.
Faster Cast rate:
When you go route 2 (bearsorc) you will have no need for faster cast rate. It is not very important but taking the following table into consideration we see that 20 or 37% is easily obtained and makes us much faster. Hitting any breakpoint above 37% can’t be reccomended because you will have to sacrafice to many other important things to gain it.
Sorceress FCR breakpoints: 0% 9% 20% 37% 63% 105% 200%
Faster hit recovery:
Since we stand “toe to toe” with our enemies we are bound to get hit pretty often. Better faster hit recovery will grant us time to retaliate faster or to flee from the battlefield to recover our lost health and mana. Although zeal is uninteruptable when started it still is important, for a sorcbear it’s even more important. Luckily we get huge faster hit recovery from both dreams already (40-60%). I recommoned aiming for either 60 or 86%.
Sorc FHR breakpoints: 0% 5% 9% 14% 20% 30% 42% 60% 86% 142%
Increased Attack speed:
As a zealing sorc you will want some increased attack speed on other items then your weapon. The maximum zealspead you can reach is 10frame initial attack and 7 frame followup zeal.
As a bearsorc only your weaponbasespeed and the ias on your weapon matters. The maximum attackspeed you can reach as a bear is a 5 frame attack
+Skills:
+Skills means more damage off course, but next to that it will raise your enchant meaning you get a bigger ar% bonus, better battle orders when using a cta and better lycanthropy werebear lvl when using beast. +skills to all is also important on the zealsorc, you will want lvl 4 zeal to get 5 hits per zeal, but more on that later.
Resistances:
Needless to say we aim for 75 all in hell. It can be hard considering we don’t get a whole lot of our helm and shield (40max). If all fails you will have to rely on charms. Remember that for builds relying heavily on energyshield poison resistance is more important then the others.
To block or not to block:
If you look at the dream runeword you will see that it doesn’t have increased chance of blocking or faster block rate. It means that if you don’t use other sources of increased blocking you will end up putting almost all your points in dexterity. This is not an option.
If we look at other options from wich we can get increased blocking there are only three of them.
1) twitchtroe armor (25% increased chance of blocking)
2) Guardian angel armor (20% increased chance of blocking, 30%fbr)
3) Crafted safety amulet (1-10% increased chance of blocking)
The 30% faster block rate from guardian angel will bring your block animation from 9 frames to 6 frames. Twitchtroe isn’t very viable since 9 frame blocking is just too slow and annoying. More on these items later when the two builds are discussed.
To use energyshield or not to use energyshield:
Some people say energyshield is not at all viable on a meleesorc and investing in telekineses is a waste. I can say that this is rubbish. Energyshield can be very viable on your meleesorc.
Look at it this way:
1) You will have a high lvl warmth, since it’s a synergy for enchant
2) You will have a high lvl teleport since you will use lightningskillers
3) You only use mana for teleport and zeal wich both have low manacost. A sorcbear won’t even use his mana.
These 3 things together make energyshield actually pretty good for a meleesorc. Just don’t rely too heavily on it in pvm since there will be quite some manaburn. Also if you use it in pvm, DON’T get it from a staff (memory) in your stash. You will often find that you want to recast it in the middle of a battle after you just got manaburned.
Furthermore using energyshield or not is a decision made depending on your skills, equip and at what size you are able to get your manapool through equipment and charms. More about this in the separate builds section.
The importance of a merc
Your merc is what really improves your killingspeed and even makes you a excellent killing machine in 8 player hellgames. I really can’t advice any other merc then an act 3 holy freeze merc with an infinity.
Infinity: 4 socket polearms, Ber Mal Ber Ist
50% Chance To Cast Level 20 Chain Lightning When You Kill An Enemy
Level 12 Conviction Aura When Equipped
+35% Faster Run/Walk
+255-325% Enhanced Damage (varies)
-(45-55)% To Enemy Lightning Resistance (varies)
40% Chance of Crushing Blow
Prevent Monster Heal
0.5-49.5 To Vitality (Based on Character Level)
30% Better Chance of Getting Magic Items
Level 21 Cyclone Armor (30 Charge
His holy freeze gives you a bit more crowd control wich you definately want, his conviction lowers light + fire resistances and removes lots of immunies. And also conviction lowers the monsters defense a great deal. In some occasions you will meet a boss that’s fire+light immune, your merc will also be able to finish him off. You will also have decent enchant wich will further enchance your merc.
Now the general things are discussed, we will start our journey with looking at the dualdream zeal enchantress.
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Originally Posted by Aeonios
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