Melee sorc for pvm..

[yerkyerk]

My friend decided to just copy all his runes to attain high runes - and I decided to go with this too. Sure, it ruins the longetivity of the game, but thinking of it, that might be a good thing :)

Anyway, that allowed me to turn my melee sorc into a DualDream sorc - a sorceress equipped with a Dream helm and shield (effectively giving the sorc a permanent lvl30 holy shock aura). Because lightning mastery influences melee attacks twice (or something), the damage boost is huge - I now have between 1k and 30k average damage (mostly lightning, some fire, even less physical) and an aura that's worth a few thousand lightning damage per second. With Passion equipped, the attackspeed is huge too.

This is all nice and fun, but here's my problem:
She's more fragile than a box of wineglasses in a rollercoaster. I thought energyshield would make my character resilient enough (atm I'm maxing telekinesis), but she's still extremely fragile. And melee manaburn monsters are the worst - apparantly they do 256x mana burn damage instead of the 4x they should, due to a bug. Heh, if you think TQ was bugged, you should check out the D2 bugs...

Since we play on /players 8 - everything is much more resilient. Does anybody have any advice what to do? I could make a bearsorc if necessary, but I'm not sure if that would work. I also don't know if I should go max block... this is for pvm only - and I'm starting to suspect a melee sorc is crap no matter how you build here, mostly due to the mana burn bug. I've maxed Warmth and equipped Insight on my prayer merc (around 1000% mana regen), but still, it's too tough.

Any ideas/suggestions to make her last longer in Hell?

[ward_rb]

you definitely want frozen or shiver armor for the defense, and enchant for attack rating. max block is essential for your survival. put just enough points into strength for the weapon/armor you plan to use, everything else in vit and dex.

ditch the prayer merc (worthless unless youre a skellymancer), and get either the holy freeze, might, or blessed aim one. i prefer holy freeze myself, slow baddies are so easy to dodge.

also, equip a bow in your secondary weapon slot. then you can shoot the manaburn enemies without getting to close, holy freeze will help with this also.

[yerkyerk]

Needless to say, I already maxed Enchant :) And I have the frozen armor (dunno if shiver armor would be worth the extra 3 points) - and ofcourse the lone point in Static Field, Fire Mastery and Teleport. As for the bow - I'm afraid I'd find that too slow - though, I might equip some throwing weapons, I guess. I preferred to have buffing weapons in my second weapon slots, so I'm still not sure about that. Iirc, I can use a shield with throwing axes and such - that way I can keep the DualDream aura up - so any crappy throwing weapons would do.

I choose the Prayer merc for the synergy with Insight, but I guess a Holy Freeze merc would grant a lot more survivability.

How's a prayer merc useful for a skellymancer anyway? Good skellies don't die, they're much better of with an Infinity wielding might merc :D

[ward_rb]

How's a prayer merc useful for a skellymancer anyway? Good skellies don't die, they're much better of with an Infinity wielding might merc :D

heh, oops. forget i said that, i was forgetting how they buffed skeletons. pre-buff, prayer was good for them. :p

even so, the healing provided by prayer is really pitiful...unless that got buffed too and i just dont remember it. arreat summit is listing it as only healing 25 per tick at lvl 20...

[yerkyerk]

Yea, 1.10 is a complete deviation from 1.09.

I didn't take the prayer merc for the healthboost, but rather for the synergy he gives to Meditation (a mana regen aura gained from the Insight runeword). I'm not even sure what the synergy does though, lol :) I just looked it up and apparantly it doubles the healing rate or something stupid.. I guess I'd better ditch that merc..

Also, since I decided to ditch b.net for a much better, lagless single/LAN player experience, I decided to use plugY - which, among many other awesome features, allows me to respec my skill and attribute points. So I can experiment quite a bit with skills (and ofcourse I use multires now, since RedVex was kind enough to point that out - and I can play at high resolution, yay :rockon:)

Strangely enough, even my skellimancer (who I levelled up to farm for my sorceress, heh, that's the other way around) finds Hell difficulty on /8 players quite difficult... I guess I played too much Titan Quest :) And wait till I get that torch, anni and other good equipment ofcourse :D

[ward_rb]

I didn't take the prayer merc for the healthboost, but rather for the synergy he gives to Meditation (a mana regen aura gained from the Insight runeword). I'm not even sure what the synergy does though, lol :) I just looked it up and apparantly it doubles the healing rate or something stupid.. I guess I'd better ditch that merc..

so skills gained from runewords get synergy bonuses? i never knew that. then again, i never got any high runes for good runewords either.

[yerkyerk]

Heh - high runes are impossible to find. It's safe to say that the average d2 player never even found a single one in all his gaming sessions - let alone the several that are required for most interesting runewords.
So my friend decided to dupe them (as most of them are on b.net too) - I figured I couldn't stay behind :)

Yeah, synergies work on runewords. I think there's some interesting combinations that can be made with that. Too bad the mana burn bug is crippling my sorceress...