Right now. Wait until you have Torch and lots of +skills.
1 Like
Maybe I’m mistaken then. I seem to remember it being changed at one point to break immunity and then later removed again.
Regardless though, if it was a bug or unintended (which I don’t think is conclusively known) then I feel like it falls under the same category as wsg, ebug, etc. in that it actually contributed beneficially to the state of the game. As it was, there was valid reason to make meteorb, cold sorc, lightning sorc, etc. for MF because you could decide between coverage, raw speed, or efficiency in specific areas. Now, there will be almost zero reason to ever make an MF sorc that isn’t cold. It was already one of the most powerful builds and certainly didn’t need the help. Having build diversity, variety, and not feeling like you’re just blatantly inferior for playing the elemental you like is obviously preferable to one obscenely dominant spec invalidating the others. I’d rather they add a note to the skill description than change how it’s always functioned.
1 Like
youre delusional but keep your hopes 
its cute lol
Once again. Even with BIS gear it will still take TONS of time to kill SOME cold immunes. Makes perfect sense to do MF runs inefficient like that. Brilliant idea!
1 Like
for resistances above 100 you need 5x as much reduction
for instance to reduce from 110 to 100 you need 50 resistance reduction, and 5 more to reduce to 99
cold immune monsters often have very high resistances, won’t be easy to break with 5x needed
2 Likes
This is one of the things NOT allowed to happen!!! This is a major issue! Last time CM could pierce was in LoD Release 1.07 and it was bugged (and that patch lasted a couple of hours only).
1 Like
https://diablo-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Immune_Monsters_(Diablo_II)#Cold_3
Some of those immunes wouldn’t even break with a level 40 cold mastery. This doesn’t seem like as big of a deal as some people are suggesting.
4 Likes
I was thinking a lot about it since seen this thread. And I realized that it is actually not a big issue, even more to say here that cold mastery is expected to work like this, it lowers resistances after all. If you want immunities to work differently then shouldn’t make it like 100%+ resistances in the first place.
And I find cold skills are not that much good to even reconsider balancing with CM fixed keeping in mind. After all CM lowers resistances and due to that it can’t lower them to less than -100%, so the damage is potentially capped at 2x for white mobs. And it is not capped for other elements, especially with lots of +skills items and Infinity.
In addition cold skills have lower damage naturally, I would actually leave cold as is and buff lightning cause it seems underwhelming, and fire damage seems to me a lot more appealing than cold, but fire skills lack of better usability: fire ball is nice but very small AOE, meteor is great damage but hard to use, firewall could be nice too but small AOE again, all fire skills seems worse than blizzard and frozen orb in their usability.
2 Likes
Did some quick tests. Confirmed, with some caveats:
- It doesn’t change much. The break is still at ~20% effectiveness or whatever, and so if you hurt them, they’re still extremely cold resistant. Not reailable for killing in hell. And many, many monsters have cold resist so high even a levle 40 cold mastery won’t break it.
- It appears ALL sources of lowering enemy resists can pierce. Basically, instead of just the largest of conviction/LR trying to break, the largest of ANY -res you have seems to try to break. Verified this by putting two cold facets in my armor with 0 cold mastery points and no merc, and could barely scratch cold immune monsters in the cold plains that had EXACTLY 100% cold resist.
- Adding infinity and a few facets and was still underwhelmed, testing on single player. Chaos Sanctuary Oblivion Knights still took 0 damage (180% base res). I confirmed the [bug/new mechanic] is there, but monster resists and the penalty to -res when breaking mean it’s not going to be a huge meta shift.
TL;DR My cold sorc in hell still runs screaming from cold immunes.
5 Likes
I’m a frozen orb sorc with cold mastery and I couldn’t hurt cold immune mobs at all yesterday evening with frozen orb (as intended).
Not sure what the OP is experiencing, but if he can pierce cold immune I’d say it’s a bug that doesn’t apply to either all sorcs, or all mobs and it’ll need further investigating.
“Fun was detected and will be promptly hotfixed within the hour.”
1 Like
I think the CI’s that people are commonly seeing vulnerable to this are sitting right at 100% cold resist. The monsters in act 5 with 150%, etc. are going to be pretty much impossible to pierce. So yes, not as big a deal as I initially thought. But still curious.
2 Likes
There are many people consider the opposite: challenge is fun. If annihilating the whole screen with no drawbacks is fun for you, then D2 is not a good option for you.
“You’re not playing the game the way I am, therefore you should not be playing the game at all.”
Nice logical fallacy.
1 Like
Well, granted, this is not how it functioned in original D2, so Fajra’s point still stands. Not for the reasons they used, but regardless, it’s still valid to question this mechanic.
Nothing about me. All about game design.
Go ahead and blame match3 not having FPS elements, with the same statement.
Unless you have sworn statements from the original team that worked on Diablo II back in 1997 that clearly states their vision and direction for the game, then anything else is just speculation at best.
In order for the Cold Penetration thing to have some effect you would have to build heavily into it at the cost of other talents. That means that even if you were able to kill a Cold Immune monster at 15% the speed you normally would, it’s not really a problem. It doesn’t affect you, or me, in any meaningful way. If you feel differently then please do provide some examples to illustrate your point other than “this game is not for you”.
Wow! Really? Then how you qualified something doesn’t affect you as “detected fun”?
Because fun is purely subjective and I am not gatekeeping anyone by saying that something is or isn’t fun. You on the other hand were gatekeeping by telling people that this isn’t the game for them if they disagree with you.
Wanna keep going?
1 Like
Would be nice to get confirmation but I don’t really understand some of the complaints here.
Yes the skill maybe didn’t work like this in legacy d2lod but the description on the skill is pretty clear? I’m using a cold sorc right now and it’s still somewhat useless.
Meanwhile there’s other characters or builds in the game that have significant killing power regardless of immunes and those are “ok.” This isn’t as powerful as you guys think for this build.
2 Likes