If someone were wanting to balance the game more without just making Hell face roll easy for every class, it would mean nerfing elemental synergies.
Melee needs very good gear to compete in damage with a sorc that has level 20 frozen orb and cold mastery. It’s even worse for a blizzard sorc that invested heavily into synergies. That’s without even considering the fact the sorc is aoe and the melee is hitting one target at a time.
The synergies are not to blame, not really. It is the damage/targets hit ratio between casters and melee. if a melee guy stabs a stygian doll for 10,000 damage, and a blizzard sorc hit 4 dolls of them for 5k each, we have the sorc doing double the melee’s damage. Maybe the melee needs to hit 2-3 targets (melee cleaving)
That’s what PD2 did, and the game switched over from caster dominion to melee. It was just cleave was too powerful on mercs.
So the casters ended up sort of double dipping. Lesson learned. Mercs don’t get cleave, but Barbs, Paladins, Javazons, they should.
The difference is the sorc doesn’t need a grief or other rare items to hit over 10k. They can do it completely naked, with just synergies.
That is once again without considering the fact they are aoe. The reason (in my opinion) melee synergies are so much worse is that they added op runewords in the same patch. They didn’t want those runewords to be even more broken than they already were. In my opinion it was a non-issue since casters clear faster anyway with said aoe.
I would not mind having a bit of melee splash, though. It should definitely not be allowed on mercs. Something like Concentrate/Berserk can hit 1-3 extra targets nearby, maybe with a stacking AR penalty per target. That’s how cleaving finish in Pathfinder works. It can theoretically hit infinite targets but each hit after the first killing blow does less damage and therefore less likely to kill the next target and get another extra swing. Naturally in D2 it should be capped though.
Even with them breaking cold immunities, the effectiveness of cold skills is 1/5 the regular effectiveness. It is not reliable to use cold skills to kill cold immunes, even with cold mastery breaking the immunity. Your merc still kills them faster.
Also, anyone who spec’s completely one tree as a sorc is going find things they cannot do.
The guy up above mentions Chaos Sanctuary as a Fire Sorc, but there are parts where a Cold Sorc cannot complete it either solo. Examples: Ancients and High Council.
That’s only if you are considering cold mastery alone.
Yes, even if cold mastery can break immunity there is such a small amount left that you barely do damage.
If you stack it with infinity, you break the immunity and still have plenty of resistance reduction left to do tons of damage. It’s only 1/5 effectiveness until you break resistance, after that it is full effectiveness. Even if you only get something to 60% or so resistance you can kill them quite quickly.
Lets say a monster has 135% cold resistance. After infinity (85% lower res, 1/5 effectiveness= 17)they have 118%. Still immune. With level 20 cold mastery you need 90% of the lower resist to finish breaking the immunity. 90% x .2 = 18. So that leaves you with 25% lower cold. Leaving the monster at 75% cold resistance.
That’s low enough to do pretty decent damage, and with plus skills you will have quite a bit higher than 20 cold mastery.
Yes, even if cold mastery can break immunity there is such a small amount left that you barely do damage.
That’s not how it works. Breaking Immunity doesn’t stack. It isn’t the mob’s resistance that is preventing you from doing more damage either. The game is hardcoded so that Cold Skills against Cold Immune will only be 1/5 effective when immunity is broken. Same with Fire Skills against Fire Immune and Lightning against Lightning Immune. Breaking the immunity doesn’t really help and you still will rely on your Merc to kill them.
Source? I’ve never heard that. Lower resistance only has a penalty until you break the immunity, after that it should be doing the full amount.
I’ve never heard of an additional 1/5 damage after immunity has been broken.
https://diablo-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Immune_Monsters_(Diablo_II)
That’s the page I am looking at now, it doesn’t say that.
Because these four skills do not affect the same immunities, not all are as “easily” broken. However, if a monster with an immunity (100% resist or more) is affected by any of these skills, they will only function at 1/5 of their total strength. This leads to the following:
Says it right there.
Actually no. With certain +skills you kill the “immunes” very quickly with a Blizzard Sorc.
That’s only until the immunity is broken.
That’s only until the immunity is broken.
I guess there is one way to test this. Get a cold sorc, necromancer and paladin in the same game and see lol
I mean I suppose I could be wrong, certainly since you can’t actually see what the monster’s resistance is. But I know Light zons can quite easily kill most lightning immunes in the game with just infinity merc, and if infinity was still only working at 1/5 after breaking immunity they would take significantly longer to clear things.
Maybe lightning damage is just that high? I have not played a light sorc in so long I don’t really remember if the numbers were high enough to one shot a monster with 90+% resistance.
Light zons can quite easily kill most lightning immunes
Yeah, but they are also still doing physical damage as well.
From what?
Lightning fury only adds lightning damage. Only the first javelin the zon throws does physical, the rest of the projectiles are just lightning.
Even counting the first hit doing physical damage and lightning, the physical is such a small amount compared to the lightning damage that it barely matters.
That’s true. infinity’s conviction alone isn’t enough to break immunities though so something doesn’t make sense.
Cold resistances are significantly higher than lightning in almost all cases.
Most immune monsters only have 100-110% resistance to lightning even in hell, compared to 130%+ in a lot of cases for cold immunes.
Awe, yeah… alright well I am going to have to test if cold immunity can be broken with Lower Resist, Conviction and Cold Mastery.
I haven’t seen how “too strong” it is. I doubt it’s really all that strong if someone wants to solely spec into cold, there’ll be cold immunes and they’ll have problems with them.