Meteorb sorceress - Fire or Cold biased?

[mouseman]

I'm planning on making a meteorb character as my first character in SP. I've made plenty of characters in bnet and I think this one is probably best because it can be played fully from start to finish. I need some expert help with the skills, however.

Usually a meteorb is played full fire until level 30 and then full frozen orb until Hell forces you to use both. That's great because fireball owns pretty much before lvl 30 and FO is great in NM. However, there seems to be a lot variation between where people put their focus with synergies. Some take more fire synergies, some stick with cold synergies. One could say there are two different Meteorb build-lines. It seems to be a prefence matter but I think there's also a mathematically sound reasons to limit cold / fire masteries to certain level to reach a balance between the two.

IIRC, you get very little from Frozen Orb synergies (2% dmg per skill level?) so some people skip them altogether. Cold Mastery is of course more important, but it's bound to have diminishing returns also. What is the level of CM I should aim for with +skills from gear?

And what is more important, to max fire mastery or fire synergies?

At the moment I'm thinking something like this:

20 Fire Ball
20 Meteor
10 Fire Mastery

20 Frozen Orb
8 Cold Mastery

And a few points to pre-reqs, firebolt and to get teleport.

What do you think? Will I just end up using a weak Frozen Orb all the time in Hell, since so many monsters are fire immune? What about MF runs?

[stephan]

Do you want to run Baal or not? If not either way will work.

For Baal I recommend:

20 Fire Ball
20 Meteor (or Fire bolt, but then there is no reason to call it a Meteorb anymore)
1 FM (a Tal Sorc could do without)

1 Static
1 Teleport

20 FO
level 27 CM with +skills (-150 res)
rest Ice Bolt.

For Baal runs you need more Cold focus because wave 5 is always FI, and wave 4 has default 95 fire res. The only fixed CIs are the skelly mages of wave 2, but those can be handled with a 40 point FB just fine. I chose level 27 CM because Lister's pack (the most difficult one) has 50 cold res, and so does Baal himself.

I prefer the above build for all-round PvM as well, but opinions differ.

[Noite Escura]

I was about to tell the same. Go with Cold only if you intend to run Chaos or Throne. Even though I would prefer Blizzball myself for that task.

[mouseman]

I was about to tell the same. Go with Cold only if you intend to run Chaos or Throne. Even though I would prefer Blizzball myself for that task.

*Only* if I want to run Throne? Is fire better elsewhere? I'm torn between the two options. I would want to run most areas of the game so it's hard to make decisions. Arreat summit says that cold mastery adds -5% eCR every point and fire mastery +7% fire dmg every point so there's no diminishing returns helping me choose good point to aim for. Although fire ball gets a hefty +14% synergy from meteor/fire bolt so it's better to pump the synergies than the mastery (though meteor gains 2% more from the mastery). How are these numbers calculated? Does the game just add every +% first and then calculate the damage? Or first from the synergies and then from mastery (so that mastery percentages weight more?)

But Cold Mastery beats ice bolt synergy, right? Because the -5% eCR is always better than +2% dmg?

[stephan]

FM and synergies are not additive but multiplicative, therefor you can't say one is higher than the other so that one is better. On top of that FM works with +skills and synergies don't. It would be best to play with a skill calculator to find the optimal distribution between FM and the second synergy for FB damage, according to your own amount of +skills.

CM versus Ice Bolt is even more difficult, because if a monster is at -100 cold res extra points in CM won't do anything anymore. Ice Bolt always helps even it is just a little. It's best to find a target like Meph or Baal and get your CM to a level where it will turn his resistance to -100. (that's why I recommended level 27 for Baal runs)

For Andy obviously the fire centric build is better, but I feel for just about anything else putting more focus on cold will benefit you more, or at least will not make you weaker.

[Noite Escura]

*Only* if I want to run Throne? Is fire better elsewhere? I'm torn between the two options.

Though people say there are more FIs than CIs in the game, in the areas I'm used to MF fire damage is better IMO. There are lots of FI ins Andy's room, but she's easy to kill and her death wipes out everything else. And there are no strong CI either. Although Countess is dual immune her gang is CI, better dealt with fire. Only CIs in The Pits are Carvers, and they are easily dispatched even with a weak Orb. Meph is piece of cake with both, but I prefer to tank him to avoid my merc dying. At point blank Fireball is more effective that Orb, which must be fired from a perfect sweetspot to deal ideal damage. With reasonable tweaking you can kill a tight group of 4-5 monsters with 1-2 Fireballs, while with Orb you may need 3 or 4 to do the same. Consider you can only fire an Orb per sec but can fire 3 FBals in the same time.
With Throne is different because the strongest monsters there are Fire Immune(in fact there are no CIs other than the weak skellies in Wave 2)

[jackthelad]

20 FB- 5k ish dmg
20 meteor- 10k ish dmg
10 FM

10 ice bolt
20 FO- 550 ish dmg
10 CM

tele + pre reqs, finished at lvl89.

Bang. Done.

Edit: With +12 or so skills ofc!