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For a while my favorite build has always been the melee sorc since it is fun, but with my final thoughts on twinking it, it seems it is one of the most powerful builds out there. Ever wanted a build that could solo baal as fast as a Hammerdin, kill a dclone in seconds, have more life than a javazon and teleport fast. For the rich only, is the dream bearchantress. She has stacked and maxed res in hell, deals out up to 500k dps to a single target, realistically closer to 200k with a lower attack rating on bosses since everything else dies in 1 hit either way, has a 5 FPA, up to 100k damage per swing, over 4k life, and so forth.
So how Does she accomplish this?
She uses double dreams for light damage, light damage charms to increase her melee damage, light lifer skillers for large lightning mastery and life, an anni and a torch for goodness, and some more gear detailed below. Lightning mastery applies to melee damage twice, and is multiplicative, so if we have + 400 on our light damage, we do 500% damage, multiplied by itself, is 25 times damage, so every 1 light damage we do is really 25. Since it is multiplied twice, it is a parabolic increase, so each point in light mastery increases our damage by more than the last, so + light skills or all skills is huge.
The stats
Str: what you need, don't worry if it is high
Dex: what you need, don't worry if it is too high, but don't go for max block, sorcs block slow
Vita: the rest, this is nice, but not huge as we will be getting tons of life from our gear anyways and we only get +2 life per point here
The skills
Fire tree:
enchant: max this, good attack rating bonus, optional damage bonus
Warmth: 1-20, optional, our fire damage isn't going to be huge since we aren't getting fire skillers, so this is optional for the damage synergy to enchant
fire mastery: 1-20, mastery works the same as lightning with the twice added, so if you choose to go fire as a second damage skill max this
Cold tree:
Armor: 20 points in your favorite armor for the defense bonus
Light tree:
Teleport: 1
Static:1
Light master:20 (key skill of the build, max it...)
Thunderstorm:1, background damage, isn't much, but worth it for 1 point
And all synergies. If you didn't go for fire damage, I would max out frozen orb and cold mastery for a melee caster hybrid sorc that won't sacrafice any melee power
The gear
Helm: Dream, in whatever base you choose, bone visage is a good choice
Weapon: Her main weapon is a 6 socket phase blade with 5 shaels and a jah. In bear form only weapon ias matters, and we need 5 shaels to achieve a 5 frame attack, which leaves us with 1 open socket. Since our AR is low, a jah helps out a ton on the majority of monsters. Other runes may be swapped out for the jah, but the ITD is the best IMO.
Armor: Chains of Honour archon plate for huge res, SKILLS, damage reduction, awesome armor.
Shield: Dream in whatever base you choose, blade barrier or trolls nest works well
Amulet: This comes down to taste, a maras will give +2 all skills which is good for BO on your CTA, mana in teleing, lightning mastery (more damage), and other such perks. A metalgrid will boost our defense a fair margin, provide a little more res all (shouldn't be needed) and add a large sum of attack rating, which is very nice for us after enchant. You choose
Gauntlets: Since we don't do a lot of physical damage, life tap and life leech are not big here, neither is crushing blow, and all the ias we need needs to come from our weapon. We should have maxed res either way, so best choice is gloves with str, dex, life + any other mods you might like.
Rings: 1 ravenfrost for CBF and AR, then either a SOJ or a BK for the leech and life or for the mana, either offers skills
belt: I like the arach for the FCR which I use to tele and the skills. The other good option is a tgods, the light absorb and max light helps a ton with burning souls and other things we hate, and the 1-50 light damage is added on to base melee damage, meaning it gets multiplied by our light mastery twice so it makes a difference.
Boots: go with waterwalks here, the life gets multiplied by our BO and bear so it gives a lot of life, treks if you want, don't bother with gores as we really on care about light damage here.
Switch: We actually have 2 switches, so 1 stays in the inv. First we use a CTA to use battle commands and BO ourselves, then we swap it for our beast to turn into a bear at will. But a spirit in the offhand. Use this for teleing as well.
Charms: Hugely important. If you can't afford these go for another build. We need the skillers or our light mastery will be too low, + life is huge here, I told you you needed to be rich to make this, right? And add in an anni and torch since they are obviously just good. This leaves us with 10 small charms. The ONLY prefix we want is the shocking prefix, which gives 1-(44-71) light damage, this adds on to our BASE damage before the light mastery is applied (confirmed by me), but not it does not add on to pulse damage. With 30 ave light damage on 1-59 damage charm, it ends up being 1.1k ave light damage per attack. Not bad for a small charm. You can see why we want these. For suffixes, I would be between of storms (more light damage, for you damage crazy folks) or of the vita for the + to life. Either are acceptable as it is between 20 life and 1-23 light damage (around 300 ave) for perfect.
The merc
Act 2 Easy or Hell Defensive for the defiance aura. It will provide you with the huge defense you need. If you really really must go for a blessed aim merc which is easy or hell offensive, then do it, but the AR really isn't that important as it will only speed up the killing time on the occasional monster that doesn't die instantly by half a second to a second. The almost double defense on the other hand. Don't bother with holy freeze IMO, defense is far better. For his gear, get infinity in your choice of bases for the huge conviction aura, your choice of armors (guardian angel with an UM for a tanky merc with massive res, fortitude for offensive) and your favorite helm. I say go for a vamp gaze for the DR socked with an UM for more res or a ber for more DR. His damage doesn't matter since we do all the killing round here.
Our stats
First we NEED to know what our lightning mastery is to get a lot of things. We have +2 on our armor, +1 from a ring, maybe +1 from a belt, maybe +2 from an amulet, +3 from torch, +1 anni, +9 skillers, +1 battle commands, + 20 base = 36-39. To calculate lightning mastery damage do (0.12 * level) + 1.38. So we are between 5.7 and 6.06
So you all want to know, how do we get our damage. A level 30 holy shock from our double dream gives us 1-278 pulse damage, multiplied once by our lightning mastery gives us between 1584 and 1684 MAX pulse damage, cut that in half for average. With conviction on, this stacks up to a respectable amount.
For our melee damage we multiply our base lightning damage by our lightning mastery squared. This is up to 108k max if you have 10 * perfect light damage sc's, a tgods, and a maras (this is a lot of damage at 5 attacks per second) A more reasonable number would be around 80-85k max with sc's that do 1-60 light damage * 10.
Our attack rating will depend a lot on our gear. I won't do all the math here, but expect it to be 4-8 k depending on our gear. Metalgrid is huge here, as is the AR on our ravenfrost (more important than the dex even). With the jah in our weapon, this only matters for bosses and superuniques, if you want killing speed on bosses such as dclone, go for the metalgrid and potentially even double ravenfrost to hit 8k AR or more.
Defense. I again won't go through everything here, but werebear defense is not multiplicative with other ED's, so you have 8 billion defense with frozen armor, but is should be around 7-8k without a merc and close to 15k with a merc (defiance)
Life. Say we have 350 vita (this is actually a very low estimate), we have around 740 base life. Add in 60 for our waterwalks, and up to 645 from charms (well say 400) we have 1140 life. BO at level 15 (slight variance on gear) gives us 72% more life, bear gives us 75% more life (life is multiplicative) is 3.4k. With perfect or near perfect gear, we have around 500 vita (could go higher even), 65 life waterwalks, and 645 life from charms, giving over 5.2k life. Say we don't get this, 4.5k is a reasonable goal to shoot for, if you really want got a hoto as a third switch and throw in an oak sage, but this is overkill.
Resistances: base of -70 in hell (with anya quests) we have + 30 on a maras, 20 on a torch, 20 on an anni, 65 on a COH, 20 on each dream, gives us 155 res all, which is 10 more than needed for 75 res all which gives some room for non perfect gear and still have maxed res.
So to summarize, with good gear, but not perfect, we can aim for 80k max light damage (40k average), 4.5k life, maxed res, 12k defense, and 5 attacks per second. If you have 4k attack rating, which is on the low end, you have a 60% chance to hit, which is around 27% with baals high blocking. Say you deal 40k ave light damage, and baal has a light resist of -35%, you deal 54k ave light damage per hit with 1.35 hits per second. This deals 73k dps to hell baal killing him in 6.8 seconds with good but not perfect gear. With a damage setup and perfect gear you should hit 105k light damage with around 8k attack rating. This all works out to a 5.6 second kill. Add in static field, which is affected by lightning res, this turns out to a 3-4 second kill. Not bad. Dclone is 1-2 seconds slower, so expect him to take 4-5 seconds to die.
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One question though: isn't 100k dmg overkill? Iirc, there is a dmg cap (per frame) of something like 87k, after which dmg 'rolls over', meaning that 100k dmg becomes only 13k. Someone more well versed in D2 statistics may want to hop in to confirm this, and how it combines with Conviction - must it be 'raw' dmg or is it the total dmg after Convic? 
Originally Posted by hubb
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