When I started out in hell as a sorc, I would do 20 points into frozen orb, 10 in cold mastery, everything else in fire tree.
Despite having more than double the amount of points into fire, I still killed things faster with frozen orb if they were not straight up immune to cold.
Cold mastery is that powerful.
Diablo? Making non-sensical and random changes with little or no logic behind them? That’s a first 
That’s more an issue with base fire resist on hell monsters → the raw numbers on mastery are 7% per point in fire vs 5% in cold. If a monster has 0 resist to both, fire should always do more damage, the raw numbers on fire skills combined with the mastery are stronger. The issue happens when you see resists because if a monster has 33% resist, it’s only taking 2/3rds damage, and it takes a lot of +skills to catch up.
On paper, fire is stronger and this change fits the original vision of the skill. Frost is lower but more reliable damage, fire and lightning are stronger but have more risk. That’s how I see the numbers on the masteries work. The original Cold Mastery actually didn’t increase damage after breaking resists, but I think they thought that was too weak which is why they changed the math to what it is now (because they also rebalanced hell difficulty to have much higher health pools).
Howso? as soon as lightning or fire gets the resists down to 0, their masteries are stronger, they’re multiplicative, whereas cold’s would be additive. Infinity makes cold obsolete by default and that’s broken IMO.
The Sorceress is the only character who learns Teleport; she breaks the game enough on her own, she does not need to break cold immunity as well. The game is better harder, like the foundation that holds up your house. Don’t undermine the games foundation.
Lol, okay, I’m just gonna put you on ignore for both our sakes. You dont have anything useful to add to this conversation for me.
frozen orb is very good mid game, when you hit lvl 30 frozen orb is a game changer orb falls off fast endgame as far as damage goes. the scaling of the skill is like 6 damage per point there is also only 1 psynergy for it. It also has nuance where you have to stand a certain distance from a mob to do max dps. If you arent in that perfect range orb is actually terrible.
Yikes, here I am busting my bum in Nightmare doing Countess and Mephisto runs on my Javazon because Hell’s lightning immunity just destroy me from progressing.
If this is factually true, then not wonder everyone and their sons have sorc.
This is really not cool.
Oh yes, that’ll help the conversation. After all, if there’s one way to implement game changing decisions, it’s by ignoring those that disagree with you on fundamental levels.
Frozen orb is better than blizzard for clearing rooms because it is far more reliable at hitting things.
It is still quite a decent boss killer if you do stay in the right range, which in my opinion is not that hard to do. You can also mix in fireballs in between frozen orb cooldowns.
I was killing all of hell with that frozen orb/fire hybrid before I switched to lightning with infinity for more specific farming. Both frozen orb and blizzard are good. I’d say frozen orb is better for starting out like you said because you don’t need as many points in it for it to deal good damage.
Yes, lightning spec tends to be better once you get infinity because you can lower monsters that are not immune almost as much as cold mastery can lower resistances. That would be why a lot of folks wait until they can get infinity to go lightning.
If cold mastery can pierce resistance, then you have a situation where you can just use cold sorc for everything. Lightning would still be doing more damage, but you would be able to use cold sorc even in places she was originally terrible at.
Even with infinity, lightning will be doing significantly reduced damage to monsters that were formerly immune.
Well its more because sorc has teleport than cold mastery, but yeah.
Teleport is one thing but breaking immunities is not okay with just skill points.
You would still need infinity for it to be really powerful. Cold mastery on it’s own only just barely breaks immune, and even then not all monsters will be broken with just that.
Yes I am quite aware of the runeword. And it’s pretty difficulty to have it made this early. The other way to manage doing hell is group play. I hate sorc, always did.
Sigh. Conviction? Lower resist? Amp damage? Ringing any bells? All these are more powerful than Cold Mastery.
But sorcs don’t get access to conviction without having infinity. You could shop a lower resist charges wand I guess.
We are not talking about Paladin. Can you stay in the topic or it’s too hard?
There’s Necro wand that can be bought, this I’m aware.
But on the flip side, Cold is useless if you already have infinity, it’s not competitive with the other elements. It’s not very balanced
Also necros can deal physical damage via minions and curses (by forcing other monsters to attack others), but can also pop physical immune in their base toolkit. Amp target 1, attract target 2, target 2 kills target 1. Done.
Sorcs are strong, but I find them far from broken against other classes. As others have mentioned, hammerdins can clear almost anything on their own.
Yup. But that’s neither here nor there.
I was replying to the dude who actually thought he had a point that you shouldn’t be able to break immunities with just Cold Mastery when Conviction and Lower Resist are in game. You just have to say something to that idiotic logic.
You just can’t pass that up 
trust me, cold sorcs arent just breezing through hell because of this you still barely do damage to them. i got through hell with the help of a hammerdin friend. once you finish act 1 hardly any mobs take damage from you. and the ones that do are like killing bosses. in ancient tunnels the cold immune elites are still immune.