Still running dual spirits, Nats helm, Frostburn gauntlets, Skullders Ire, String of Ears and some other random rare/magic gear to boost resists.
So far no trading, SSF only. I only play maybe an hour or two a night, but that’s OK, I like to span the fun over the duration of the ladder season. Hell difficulty progression is pretty slow, especially in Act 4. Still farming NM for some additional gears, but I’m having fun. Most everything gets annihilated with nova. Screen wide static, wheeee!!!
I’m glad Blizzard brought Nova back! It’s a good change from the usual starter Blizzard or Fireball/Orb sorc.
Also been having fun with a FoH pally, but he’s hit a “beastly” brick wall in Hell A2.
Thank god I found a Spellsteal for my FoH pally, otherwise I’m not sure I ever would have got past Act 2, lol. Also nice for skipping River if it’s Maggot infested, and teleporting to Baal once you get to level WSK3. Great little overlooked item, and generally cheap and easy to find. Of course, any teleport amulet or item will do, Najs staff, etc…but Spellsteal, who knew?
Yeah I’m planning on self-rushing my Pally with my sorc. Start a game with pally, rejoin with sorc, clear up to quest objectives, move on, then rejoin with pally. Probably do that this weekend… Gotta get that pally up to HELL CHAOS!!!11!1
Been running Arcane Sanctuary in Hell with the Nova/Hydra sorc the past couple of nights, hitting all four ends. So far I’ve bagged a Gul rune and a 7mf/10mana small charm… It’s fairly easy to line up the ghosts while zapping with static, then blast them away with nova when they’re on the platform. I try to surround myself with as many as possible, runs go pretty quick. No H keys yet though, summoner being stingy.
Is your Hydra skill for support-only or main(ish)? How good is its damage compared to fireball, firewall and meteor? What are the skill allocation?
Right now I am using a blizz/wall Sorc, but I put points equally on cold and fire (20 Blizz, ~10 CM and IceB, 20FWall, and the remaining on Warmth and FMastery equally split), but I am interested if Hydra is worth to look into from FWall.
+5 to all skills via gear. Running dual spirits and Skullders, plus other random gear to boost resists.
It’s leaning more towards lightning damage, mainly because nova is omnidirectional damage, but the hydras aren’t a slouch. Nova is doing 1273-1764, Hydras are doing 538-616 per bolt. Static goes out to 19.3 yards, which covers the whole screen and extends over a bit.
I am currently running Hydra fully maxed (Firebolt, Fireball, Fire Mastery, and Hydra) all Masked with 10 points into Frozen Orb. I have +9 to all skils with an extra +1 to fire skills right now, putting Frozen Orb at level 19 and the the Fire Tree at level 30. I don’t have a torch yet, and am running Skin of the Viper with 4 piece Tals. Haven’t found much yet in the ladder. I find that there are many monsters that are both fire & cold immune or just many areas (like the Pit & Chaos) that have both cold and fire immunes and was thinking that Hyrda+Nova may perform better overall.
I’m curious what you think about this, as I can’t find any real information about this and I’m everyone just seems to be defaulting to Orb+Hyrda, not doing any Hydra+Lightning builds (whether with Nova or Thunderstorm). I can’t even find a discussion on why Thunderstorm isn’t a viable hybrid alternative for a Hydra main. Another question/thought I had was that since iThunderstorm’s synergy bonus is higher than Nova’s, you get more raw damage from it than Nova, and since you want to be, and are already away from the monsters with Hydra already, Thunderstorm gives you range that Nova doesn’t, but everyone I’ve asked so far has just ignored the question or said “it won’t do any damage, just use Frozen Orb”, without actually looking at numbers on say Max Roll for example.
Since you’ve actually tried Nova+Hydra, I’d really love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to tell me I’m out of my mind if you’d like. This is my first time playing a sorc, so maybe I am just a nutter butter who doesn’t know anything about Fire, Cold, or Lightning.
The biggest advantage with cold skills in general is the piercing of resistances with cold mastery. Monsters that aren’t cold immune will have their resistance reduced, possibly in the negatives, which is a pretty significant advantage. With the fire and lightning trees, all you can do is pump up the damage. When you’re running dual elements, it’s difficult to pump up lightning and fire damage.
Frozen Orb is a great cold damage skill by itself along with some points into cold mastery. Yeah it has a 2% synergy, but maxing it is a waste of skill points IMO. It only needs roughly 35 to 40 skill points invested to really shine, thats why when running dual elements, it is the defacto skill of choice along with your choice of lightning or fire.
I’m just trying out nova/hydra for something different. I’m thinking of switching over to Nova/Frozen Orb just to gain the benefit of the cold pierce, because Act 4 is brutal vs lightning/fire without any reduction on resistances. Yeah I could use a wand with lower resist charges, but that’s too slow.
running nova and lightning tree in general is usually in tandem with energy shield and telekinesis, so there arent many points left over for other elements to function usefully. Plus energy shield is pretty good now.
The only reason people are able to go 2 elements and be strong is because of the way cold mastery works, and frozen orb is very strong. You dont need to put max points into cold mastery, and +skills works wonders. So you’re looking at around 30 skills into the cold tree to be very viable. That leaves you with about 70 points at level 90 to fill out a fire or lightning ability plus 2 masteries.
This can’t really be done well with lightning and fire, since nothing in those trees can be done with just 40 points, let alone 30 points like frozen orb. Everything in fire and lightning need their synergy and mastery with the exception of Fireball, which has synergies that give more damage than putting more than 1 point into fire mastery, but still requires those synergies to be pumped to do good damage. So even fireball needs a good 60 points into it.
So in conclusion, it’s because of the masteries and how cold can be so good with less points into mastery and also doesnt require more synergies to be filled. Frozen orb is king. Never trust a sorc who is dual element but one of them isnt Cold. It just doesnt work well.
@Bravata-11682 I really appreciate you taking the time to write this up. This is incredibly helpful for me (as a long time D2 player, but first time Sorc player) to understand the reasoning behind FO as a hybrid skill. My question about your explanation is this: Is this the only the historical paradigm pre-2.4 or has it also been properly tested by builds since the launch of 2.4?
The reason I asked that question is because, obviously 2.4’s changes didn’t change the meta of Blizzard, Hammerdin, and Javazon, being the best builds, and as such, any hybrid-Sorc is going to be under used in overall build diversity as a whole, so testing will be limited anyway. However, Hydra, Nova, and Thunderstorm were all buffed in 2.4 and I’m just wondering how much real “champion-challenger” style testing has been done to see how well Nova or Thunderstorm can put out enough damage to operate well enough as a hybrid skill after being buffed after + skills are applied.
Why are they diametrically opposite? Strictly because of the range to the monsters? If so, that’s why thought went to Thunderstorm first, but it does require an extra 3 skill points of investment to get it, however you get an extra 2% damage from the synergy.
well, let’s start off with Thunderstorm. The issue with Thunderstorm, other than being one of the most awesome spells in the game, is simply that it doesnt fire off enough. It has a long delay between strikes which makes it bad. It’s a single target spell so i believe it needs to fire off twice as fast as it currently does, but i think the initial developers set this long delay because it auto-targets thinking it would be overpowered. I myself would start it at a long delay and decrease the time between strikes with a synergy to re-balance this cool spell. Get it down to 1 second, or if you dont want it to fire off faster, have it cause a chain lightning on impact and have chain lightning be the synergy. As of now though, it’s a waste of 20 points even with the damage 2.4 added.
K, on to Hydra. They gave it too many needed synergies, only one which is a good secondary (Fireball), and to top it off it needs fire mastery. So to make it viable you need to spend 60 points minimum, to make it good you need 80. If they changed the synergies to warmth and enchant, this spell would have been amazing and you could pair it with another tree. Though If i were the dev’s i’d have made Meteor the ONLY synergy to Hydra. Meteor just seems like it’d play very well with hydras. Plant your hydra turrets, and drop tactical meteors like artillery. The perfect playstyle for fire, raining down armageddon. But as of now, the synergies make it so you must invest everything into fire and play a hydra fireball sorc.
As far as post 2.4, i think most people are just looking to max damage from a single tree while using infinity. There are some gems flying under the radar atm, like Enchant+warmth and enchanting an act 5 frenzy merc. Frost nova is pretty amazing for players 1 hell. Charged bolt is hugely underrated. But they didnt make any of the meta hard hitters any worse, so it’s hard to justify running these other alternatives.
I feel the dev’s 2.4 patch intent was not for mixed element builds. They only had single element in mind in use with infinity. Huge mistake locking down all sorcs to infinity imo. They could have done so much more. But in those regards, i think they did a good job at what they meant to do. If you can get an infinity, there’s is about twice as many spell options as pre 2.4. Sorc is pretty amazing in 2.4 with infinity, but they really left the non-infinity group in the same tired mess dealing with immunes and being locked into Frozen orb, and those people are the majority. Been 20 years of Frozen orb dual specs, couldnt they buff frost nova enough to no need a synergy, or work out the dual element specs better?
I respecced from Blizz/FWall (from now on I refer to this as Blizz) into FOrb/Hydra (referred as Orb), here are my insights:
Blizz setup:
1 pts for Teleport and Static.
20 pts on Blizz, ~17 pts on Ice Blast, about 7-8 pts on CM, so Blizz does about 2-2.1k damage, plus the extra from CM (however this bonus is the same for both skill setup, so we can disregard it for the comparison).
20 pts on FWall, the rest is equally split between Warmth and FM.
Orb setup:
1 pts for Teleport and Static.
20 pts Orb, 7-8 CM.
20 pts Hydra, 20 pts FM and the rest towards FBall.
Blizz Pros:
It is better if your overall defenses are high, so you dont have to be worry about risky mobs, like the souls in WSK2.
It is better for mobs in tight packs, like Cows.
Due to very high Warmth your Mana is always near max, so you could even pick up ES should you want even more safety. Orb on the other hand is brutally mana hungry.
When killing most cold immune elites FWall seemed to have higher average dps, because after casting, it immediately starts damaging the mob, while Hydras need a very short, but noticable amount time to actually start shooting, plus their bolts need time to reach the mob, so in these cases FWall is better (mine does ~9k fire damage per second).
In Arcane Sanctuary Hydras can kill Wraiths while they are not over ground so you can loose loot. FWall can only damage mobs on/over ground. Orb also damages everyone everywhere, while you cannot cast Blizz into void. So if you regulalry visit this place, use Blizz.
Blizz Cons:
When mobs are all around it takes some time to kill everyone. For me in ATunnels Orb works better.
If you are afraid of souls it might be difficult to position FWall to kill them before they can shoot at you. Hydras on the other hand are designed for this. You can place them afar and while you get there everonye died except you.
To make Blizz strong, you need to sacrifice pts from the Fire skills, therefore FWall will never be as strong as Hydra is most situations. When mobs are all around and you want to get rid of them, Hydras can be placed all around and they will do this job pretty well. You cannot do this with FWall in a reasonable time.
For me it looked like bosses take more damage from Hydra. They die faster by about 30-40%.
FWall is much more difficult to place properly.
Gear-wise I dont have too many GG gears except HotO, SoJ and BK. I have Vipermagi, Shako, a +2 sills amu, Rhyme (for resist and CBF, plus I was able to put the not needed Str pts into Vita as I am not wearing Spirit), Magefist and the rest of my gear is mostly about +res, +life/mana.
Overall opinion: I will probably go back to Blizz. But that is mainly because how I use my Sorc.
When it comes to a single target, a well positioned Frozen Orb can do quite a bit of damage… Listed damage is per shard, Frozen Orb deals 44 ice shards total, 28 of those spray randomly while the orb is travelling, the remaining 16 blast out in a circle when it explodes. All of those shards aren’t going to hit the single target obviously, but if you can nail the target with the 16 shard explosion, that’s when it hits hard.
When it comes to killing groups, Blizzard is king, no questions asked.
Blizzard can hit a moving single target harder. When you count invested points, Frozen Orb is a great choice for a secondary element.
Thanks and in your Hydra/Blizzard set up are you running Hydra as main or Blizzard as main skill - or asked another way, which skill tree are you synergies going into?
Thanks, this helps. Any further thoughts on your Nova/Hydra build and how it’s going?
Grats on your Max static + Hydra build, I am sure nova comes in handy occasionally 
You can place them afar and while you get there everonye died except you.