Entire classes. Poor Amazons.
Make strafe and fend great again.
Edit: I wouldn’t say it broke the entire class though. Javazon is one of the more powerful specs you can play, especially with infinity. Explosive and freezing arrow zons can be pretty potent as well.
At least we can all agree nham should be fixed.
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I went and looked at patch 1.10 btw (aka the one where they started using immunities to balance elemental specs, something I never really agreed with).
- [Lower Resist] and Conviction skills now work properly against immune monsters.
- [Cold Mastery] has been changed to a constant amount.
- Elemental Piercing versus immunities has been changed to a constant amount.
They specifically mention the change to conviction and lower resist working on immunes, and specifically note that cold mastery was changed to a constant amount. Those are buffs to all 3.
I still think it was deliberate that cold mastery was not also allowed to pierce resistance. The way it stacks with conviction seems like it is just too potent.
Patch 1.08 was released in July of 2001, the same day as the Lord of Destruction expansion. In the twenty years since then, the original developers had plenty of opportunity to renege on that decision. They chose not to, Why? Good game design.
Edit: I was trying to respond on my previous post. I dunno how these forums work lol.
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You may be right, it could be too potent. It still should work just like Conviction and Lower Resistance does, particularly for a class that is supposed to have mastery over the elements, but ends up being ineffective against over roughly 1/3 of the monsters in the game.
Is the game balanced around having Conviction or not? It seems like it is. Having Cold Mastery actually WORK is a nice change though. Maybe it does need to be halved. I’m not disagreeing there may be a balance issue here, but the change to Cold Mastery makes logistical and thematic sense.
Maybe Conviction is the issue, and not Cold Mastery, if you have to have it to play a single element.
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I think the biggest mistake was having cold mastery function the way it does in the first place. Adding damage and completely removing all resistance a monster has are very different power levels. Being able to get enemies to -100 resistance reliably completely removes resistance as a balancing tool.
That’s why I think they left cold immunes unaffected by cold mastery.
They are different mechanics, yes. But the choice is an interesting one, if Cold is more reliable but Fire and Lightning can more damage than if you have both Conviction and Lower Resist.
I don’t know if that’s the case, but it’s a step in the right direction.
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I just dont see the problem, maybe thats because im actually playing cold sorc and not just speculating. Ignoring infinity as a balancing tool this actually wont effect hell farming at 24 skill points. All good builds scale well in the 30-40 pt skill levels. If blizzard was on left click i might play that to see how much better it is but i would assume its really not. if orb does .00001% of their health per cast blizzard wont be too gamebreaking. If blizzard was worried about balancing they would have removed one of the psynergies from blizzard and blessed hammer.
If it was intended, and is just a bug fix it still doesnt seem to be a problem. you still do no damage to cold immunes in chaos and baal runs. i havent tested every cold immune but those are the 2 most farmed end game areas with a group. i doubt youre going to be running pits for mf as a cold sorc without a good merc either.
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Actually the description of the OG skill says that it should and previous versions used to break immunities. There was a version that did not actually increase cold damage, like it couldn’t turn resists negative, BUT after they changed it to do increased damage to negative resists they implemented to CI change much to the chagrin of the community. I was actually really upset when this happened. I’d rather they keep it as that was the ORIGINAL intent of the CM. Not some random patch BS.
Here’s the description of the skill:
Blockquote
Once mastery over this powerful elemental force is attained, a Sorceress achieves perfect command over this school of magic. Her freezing spells are now of such potency that those adversaries formerly impervious to their effects soon find themselves the surprised victims of a vicious, chilly assault.
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Working as intended.
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im of the camp that i think this was a silent fix.
If you look at the description of the skill it specifically states that it pierces their resistance-- to me that should let it break immunity, in d2(not r) i used to always think it was dumb that it didn’t break immunity.
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It’s nice if you can actually contribute in Chaos Sanc and Throne of Destruction. Which is why I’m in favor of it as well. You mean Cold isn’t useless now? Sign me up.
If Cold Mastery needs to be nerfed because it’s too good now, fine. That’s fair. If Cold is Reliable, but Fire and Lightning have the potential to do more, that’s good gameplay.
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The thing is that if this change stays cold sorc is better than the other elements in almost every situation once you get an infinity.
I have played cold sorc a lot, it is by far the easiest element to start out with in hell IMO. You can deal incredible damage to everything with just a little bit of +skills. By comparison Lightning spec is barely playable in hell until you get infinity because most things have a decent amount of resistances even without being immune.
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OG descriptions says it should make formerly immune monsters no longer immune.
it doesnt break immunities to the mobs in chaos or throne.
Even with Conviction, high level Cold Mastery, and Lower Resist? I find that hard to believe. You could be right, though.
Above is the manual’s description of the skill. It used to break CI, this was always intended, it was random they took it away. And the raw numbers of other elements make them better in other scenarios. It’s not like you can’t just get Reaper’s toll and use an A2 merc to kill everything else if you pick a different element. There’s more than 1 way to skin a cat.
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idk man, does anyone here know the real answer to that question? if they all stacked would lower resist and conviction not just break every immunity as well? i dont remember ever using a lower resist wand with infinity on a cold sorc, its a waste because it never broke all the immunities. the immunities arent being broken in game though. in hell when you hit a cold immune monster its like fighting baal in a p8 game with low level frozen orb. youre barely even winking at them
And saying its effective to kite and kill cold immune monsters is laughable if it takes 10 minutes to kill a monster thats dozens of possible meph kills
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I mean I think it should be a feature, there is no reason why it shouldn’t. It’s not like the wording on it is very different from like Conviction aura or lower resistances. In fact presumably the only reason Conviction works only on lightning is probably because enemies don’t have a lot of lightning resistances.
While it is definitely a change from original D2, I think it is one that makes sense, also it requires a LOT of investment probably to break higher monster immunities because they will have much higher cold resistance, and even then you might not do a whole lot of damage to them. I don’t see a reason it should be removed, people saying “that’s not how d2 was!” are being silly, there was no reason why it shouldn’t have broken immunities in the first place.
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