Cold Sorc dead now (again)?

Sorceress
1

Dear D2 Resurrected Team,

you can’t just flat nerf cold mastery to 1/5 effectiveness and call it balance.
Due to the rather low base damage of cold abilities, the cold spec is based around getting enemie’s cold resistance very low.
It’s like nerfing lightning or fire mastery to 1/5 effectiveness against immunes (which would be indeed a real balance between all sorc specs cold, lightning and fire).

So for the next season some suggestions from which you can choose one:

  • revert this nerf or make cold mastery at least 80% effective against immunes
  • complete rework cold mastery to bring it in line with fire and lightning mastery (x% damage increase or a combination of y% damage and -res)
  • increase the base damage of cold abilities and let cold mastery just give -1 res per skill point (with 100% effectiveness against immunes).

Same for FoH-Paladins. FoH itself deals very low damage and hugely depends on resistance lowering by conviction aura.

4 Likes
2

I played a sorc last season both nova and blizzard. Blizzard is in a tough spot because last year and a cold sunder I could do almost any content in mostly mf gear , no need to get beyond an infinity. This year I needed a doom to feel a fraction of that power and I still haven’t gotten to where I was. I think as far as investment goes you definitely need more invested in the cold sorc to do some content, the payout is much less high though when you get further into budget and factoring in something like Griff’s and infinity l, then you’re far behind the other two.

I’d like to see cast rate offer some cool down deduction for orb and blizzard, find something that gives you the feeling of power like the other two when you’re BiS becausee it really doesn’t feel great. It has definitely been humbling to see this season the obstacles that other classes had to overcome that the cold sorc didn’t really have to worry with. Since I just started back last season from many years ago sunders were new to but all I’ve known since returning

2 Likes
3

Reducing or eliminating the cooldown on Frozen Orb gets a massive upvote from me. I don’t like the skill Blizzard and just want to use Frozen Orb. It’s a fun animation, etc. but damage isn’t amazing. (You can really feel it struggle in higher player counts.) The 1s cooldown is a huge part of that.

4

A (chain-)lightning sorc with just low budget Crescent Moon equipped can also farm everything, at least in solo games. Nova is more of a late game thing with good fcr and defense required.
The sad thing about that is that this light sorc has less problems with immunes than cold sorc currently has :frowning:

1 Like
5

Yes or they could just increase the ice bolt synergy damage from a crappy 2% to 3-5%.
At the same time, this it what makes FO an excellent second element damage skill (eg. hydra-orb) of you don’t want to be single element.

6

What they should do is just get rid of sunders completely.

3 Likes
7

But then would lightning sorc be the only useful build again and hammerdin returns.
I really enjoy fire crossbow sorc (maybe bit too op) :slight_smile:

8

Frost nova and Frozen orb were both viable to play on Season 2, now you nerfed the whole tree just to make sure blizzard isnt broken. way to brick all cold builds just to fix 1 build
. NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO PLAY BLIZZARD.

2 Likes
9

lighting has always been better for pvm and killing then cold, with cresent moon u can destory everything with a sunder charm, and with a insight merc never run out of mana. There are less items that give - cold res to enemies and the ones that boost dmage/negative res are extreamly expesnive. They nerf should have only been only 50 percent of cold mastery not 1 out of 5.

10

Has anyone tried Voice of Reason (on top of sunder) for its -cold resistance?

11

I’m not playing this game since this nerf.
I don’t have any other stats revert point and my time from my own life is wasted for nothing.
Thanks Blizzard, I am not wasting my time anymore with games.
That was my favorite game from my childhood and now I hate it because is “balanced”.

12

I dont think Blizz cares anymore, considering D2R has a massive fan base. I played D2 LOD back in the day. A lot of old heads found D2R and play it daily. Where you at Blue?!

13

Frost Sorc is only a B-tier tree.

Lightning is S-tier thanks to Nova, fire is more tactical, slightly below that, but clearly an S/A-tier with Fireball, Meteor, and Hydras.

Frost Nova does too little damage and is demanding in terms of equipment.

Glacial Spike needs penetration, would do a lot of good right away.

Blizzard is okay, but only powerful to a limited extent.

FO is too ineffective on its own.

The strongest combination is FO/Blizzard, but it’s slow and still doesn’t come close to Nova or Fire.

The biggest areas for improvement are Frost Nova, Glacial Spike and the many synergies for it, and FO.

1 Like
14

cold sorc is still S-tier, but there’s so much lack of knowledge about new age cold sorc gearing, i’ve only seen a hand full of people playing it correctly.

15

S-tier?

Um, well, I guess we’re playing different games.

The most powerful Frost Sorceress build is FO/Blizzard.

However, since the gameplay is slow because everything has a CD, you don’t necessarily need FCR, so you can either increase the damage via the usual + Frost Damage items, or you can use RW Doom, save the points for Frost Mastery, and put the points into synergies, which is better in the end because RW Doom also slows down enemies significantly with the Frost Aura.

The kill speed of this Frost Sorc is somewhere in the middle.

You can still play quite solidly with her up to about P5/6, but due to the mechanics of the two spells, it takes time.

You can kill everything much faster with fire and with the Nova Sorc anyway.

If you compare the Nova Sorc as S-tier, with the Fireball/Meteor/Hydra Sorc as S/A-tier and the FO/Blizzard Sorc, then the strongest Frost Sorc is simply B-tier.

Pretty much all other average builds keep up here, such as an S.trafe Amazon, for example.

With an Assa, Java, Nova Sorc, all of which are S-tier, she can’t even begin to keep up, at least from P3 onwards.

In P1/P2, you can actually kill even better/faster with a Frost Nova Sorc than with the FO/Blizzard. On the other hand, the FO/Blizzard plays more reliably and, as I said, it goes a little further than P3, albeit slowly.

Hammerdin, Fire Sorc, and Chain Lightning Ama are definitely stronger as well.

But basically, the Frost Sorceress just disappears in the midfield. I can kill just as quickly/slowly with almost any other class, depending on the situation, and often with much better chances of survival.

16

Cold clears CS faster than Nova on average. On P8 as well. And quite safer.
Nova excels at trash while Cold kills bosses much faster.

i dont think you’ve seen good Cold sorc these days. Too many people watching Llama run around in mf gear with Death’s Fathom.

overall Nova is better, but Cold is right there very close behind.

hammerdin, fire sorc, amazon are all below Cold sorc overall. These builds have amazing strength in specific locations like Andy and cows, but Cold will outshine them in most other locations and doesnt lag far behind in those. Amazon is going to have a slogfest doing Andy runs, while Fire sorc will only kill Andy a second faster than Cold sorc.

if you’re going to play one character, in terms of game strength:
S-tier
Mosaic > Poison necro > Light sorc > Cold sorc > Hammer > Java

nothing else deserves S-tier rating unless you’re classifying one specific job.

17

you can literally roll a character to 90 in less than 5 hours……