When you have to farm literally 100s of 1000s sometimes even 10,000s of games to find the good stuff who wants to play like that?
gl killing bosses with corpse explosion.
Why do all that work when you can just hit blizzard and stuff dies.
Hammerdin is just horrible to play sometimes with positioning. Ive tried the melee assasin thing, but anything it can do a paladin can do better.
also youre blowing it out of proportion, youre misreading everything people are saying. You cant just run around killing cold immunes on a cold sorc right now. Theyre literally still immune shy of maybe 2-3 diff kinds of mobs. that leaves roughly the same total of like 30-40 mobs taht are immune to cold.
Me i guess. Keeps me awake at the wheel. Like i said, don’t have an issue with simpler playstyles being viable or even situationally good. Them being optimal is my problem.
Necro sucks at boss killing, no argument there. Still does ok with a decent merc, decrep and Bone Spirit. Its called a weakness. Classes need some to feel balanced.
Try something that can do more than Andy/Meph/Ancient Tunnels then, variety is the spice of life and all.
I’m aware that it doesn’t break all immunities btw. I just hate the that the door was even open. I’m all for balance changes but the last place they should look at is Sorc and Paladin.
Typically do mausoleum, cows, andy, anc tunnels, meph, diablo, pindle
Farm countess/sum/pindle when i need a keyset.
Not many other places to farm that are near the speed to clear as these. Cows is a bit iffy as well since i run cows with 0 mf javazon usually since its faster and better
I will say this though… technically speaking with 40+ CM, a few facets, a pally and a necro you can actually break just about every mob in the game. Dunno who has personal pally/necro slaves that follow them around… but you can.
Example 40 CM + 3 facets + conviction + LR = break anything below 190 resist.
I don’t think you have any clue what your talking about, tbh. No argument Hammeradins are the most powerful class in the game. I highly doubt Cold Sorc is #2. Lightning probably is.
and Necros being unable to kill bosses? That’s not a weakness, that’s a fault in game design.
And how do you figure that? Most classes can farm runes faster. Runes > Everything. All Hammerdins are actually better at than Sorcs is running Chaos, Baal. And Zon’s beat them at Chaos.
Hammerdins are great if you want to farm every zone… but being able to do that really amounts to nothing when other classes can farm a few level 85 zones faster. Ya only need to be able to farm 1 85 zone as fast as you can after all. A Cold Sorc will farm Andy/Meph/Ancient Tunnels as fast as a hammerdin farms Chaos. A Light Sorc or Zon Will farm Chaos faster than Hammerdin.
Honestly best part about hammerdin is you can respec it into something useful for farming ubers.
This is a common, wrong misconception about cold mastery. -100% is the bare MINIMUM you want your cold mastery to be as it takes a monster with zero resist down to -100. Many/most nonimmune monsters in hell have 25-50% cold resist so you need 125-150 cold mastery to take those all the way down to -100.
It’s true though that the higher your CM gets the more monsters it “overkills” though but it’s still better overall for the ones that have higher resistance.
And this was all before the recent bug/change which increases the value of CM even more. Not sure how I feel about this. If it works at 1/5th effectiveness as people say, it doesn’t seem like an issue as you’d still want a 2nd element, but it does further buff an already very strong tree.
I like how a bunch of people complaining are dumbass druids or necros who were clearly never interested in playing the meta to begin with. D2 “boomers” (who were the sh@#ers that got bullied in pvp and had sh@# gear back in the prime days) are seriously the worst. If you were so concerned about ‘competing’ in a solved, 21 year old dungeon crawler, you wouldn’t be playing summon necros and whatever dogsh#$ druid build you are using. There’s a reason this game even got a resurgence in the first place, and hint-hint, it was off the back of the bliz sorc and pluggy. Bow and thank her, scum.
You say the Blizz Sorc is largely responsible for the resurgence of D2… So why does she need to be buffed? I mean she was carrying the game on her back just fine before right? So well that she sparked remaster correct? So why does she need a buff? I mean there are 6 other classes in the game maybe they should help carry the load?
Theyre still a waste, theyre not useful in all cases. if cold mastery gave so something every point it would be relevant past x points. The power per point isnt near the same on cold mastery as other masteries. Assuming this is what is happening to cold mastery its probably still not worth maxing out with infinity and lvl 40 skills. but we will see once someone tests it on single player.
If the -res from cold mastery could actually break immunities and do real people damage it would be worth spending 20 hard points. if you dont care about going dual elements you could just cap cold mastery i guess. but then merc has to kill all cold immunes.
An idea I had, which I hadn’t tested, is to go big i n the cold tree and also put a bunch of points into static. I guess that kind of makes it dual element but the point is that you’ll be able to static down entire screens of mobs that either remain cold immune or that you can barely damage after breaking their immunity. This would make it a lot easier for the merc or you to finish them off for a minimal investment into a 2nd tree.
The truth has been right infront of you this whole time. The best build is enchant werebear sorceress. I know it, you know it, we all know it but still we pretend that it isn’t.
I don’t think Infinity+Cold Res is worth it when reapers toll is so much better but honestly there are so many cold builds that I guess it doesn’t matter. Facets+Fathoms vs Infinity/HoTo/CoH its all the same in the end.
It’s capped at -220% resist for cold/fire/light so anything over -220% does literally nothing.
which means a max of -44% for light/fire/cold against immunes
Anything over with over 144% resist can’t be broken. Ever.
Cold has 52 enemies that won’t break if you only have infinity (like if cold mastery stopped working) and 21 of those can never be broken even if you manage to hit the max -220%
Fire has 36 it won’t break if you only have infinity and nothing else lowering resists. 1 of which can never be broken
Lightning has 12, mobs that won’t break with only infinity (less if they actually wield infinity instead of giving it to a merc). 1 of which can never be broken
Enemy cold resist is significantly higher than other elements in D2, which leads to more immune enemies with staggering resistance numbers. This was purely based around the idea that they could naturally lower resists/potentially hit the resist cap. It’s also why druids do cold AND physical so it has away around the significantly higher frost resist without also needing a cold master for one spell.
The general idea is that frost with max cold master + infinity was supposed to be on par with light and fire + infinity. Except the damage of frost is so much lower that even when it does break immunity to allow the same % of damage, that damage is noticeably lower and it can be impossible to kill some enemies do to their regen being more than your damage. The best you do in those situations (which there are many) is apply a very very short lived slow so your merc lives longer to kill them.
Also frost isn’t the only class with immunity breaking built into their spec. Lower resist curse for necros hits the resist cap for poison and Amp damage breaks physical immunity if they go skellies.
But this is also assuming the class is solo which wasn’t the core design of a group based game. A necro lowering resists is going to stack with light/fire sorc infinity. Where Frost would benefit more from Amp Damage. Though frost still ends with way more it can never break.
Just because sorc and paladin are Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen doesn’t mean Steve Kerr and Dennis Rodman can’t also do some things. Which is to say, all the classes are completely viable, and they all have their niche. Are some better for some things over others? Of course. But you don’t have to be Michael Jordan or Scottie Pippen to enjoy playing and succeed competing in the NBA
And do we honestly think it was their intent to have a skill that literally had no affect past 17 points? Literally none whatsoever? Because if frost mastery doesn’t break immunities (like it did before they broke it when the expansion was released) it has zero affect after 17 points because anything over that is immune and it wouldn’t affect them.
That’s not quite correct. That 17 point thing is only for enemies with 0 cold res. Enemies that start at 0 gain no benefit from more than 17 points in Cold Mastery, since that brings you to -100.
However, you can have enemies that have more than 0 but less than 100 cold res and aren’t immune. And you can still bring them to -100. So more than 17 points is beneficial there.
Hell Mephisto has 75 cold res. Cold Mastery works on him up to 32 points.
QoL iomprovement and buff to the already strong Cold Sorceress.
It follows the same rules at Conviction and Lower Resistance and works at 1/5 the effectiveness. This is hardly a buff and you still cannot reliably kill Cold Immunes with it. Your merc will still kill them 20 times faster.
