I’ve always preferred Frozen Orb over Blizzard. It just seems to be a little more “aimable” and less random than Blizzard.
I’ve also considered Meteor over Hydra.
Any thoughts, pros, cons, etc?
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Buff Hydra and Meteor. Reduce Meteor’s wind up time, and allow Hydra to shoot fireballs instead of firebolts and up its damage
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Blizzard vs Frozen Orb comes down to individual preference really. But when used well, Blizzard usually outputs more damage. Also remember that Blizzard synergizes with other skills like Glacial spike and ice blast. Even if Blizzard only destroys 90% of the pack that it was casted on due to the ‘aimlessness’, you can aim your ice blast or glacial spike to destroy the rest as they can be aimed and have been buffed through synergy.
People that use blizzard don’t just use blizzard only, while blizzard is wrecking havoc, they also spam ice blasts or glacial spike, which has added bonus of freezing the monsters.
Can you do that with frozen orb? Not really. It’s used by itself as a solo ice skill. But frozen orb allows you to invest points in other element skill, so you can be a dual element to handle monster immunity.
If you encounter a very dangerous pack, you can quickly cast blizzard and just ‘run around’ since blizzard keeps doing damage in an area whereas frozen orb, you need to continuously cast each one to do dmg.
As for the immunity, it’s true that blizzard sorcs are almost always single element and they can’t effectively handle cold immune monsters (Even with CM breaking a few immunes). They just skip cold immunes. In all honesty, do you really need to handle all immunity to magic find? Not really. As long as there are few good areas that have no cold immune monsters, you can still do very well with a single element build. You can just recreate the game once those area are clear. So it’s usually better to be doing a lot of dmg with 1 element.
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My sorc is level 88 and I do orb/firewall. The build is pretty much max orb and all its synergies and put the rest into firewall and it’s synergies. The beauty of this set up is that firewall doesn’t need too many points to get really strong and the classic meteorb approach means a relatively weak orb because fireball/meteor are point intensive to get up to speed.
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Frozen Orb will never come close to the sheer damage output of Blizzard.
Frozen orb is a great supplementary skill for a Fire build IMO, as Frozen orb does great damage for a skill with junk synergies.
The trick with Blizzard is to lay it down right before a group of enemies walking towards you. If they are frozen, don’t lay it down right on the monster, lay it down with your mouse arrow just to the left of the monster. If it’s a larger monster like a boss, it doesn’t matter as much because their hitbox is larger.
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Love these posts because this is why I love D2! You can do so many different play styles (orb/wall, blizz/spikes/blast, fireball/blizzard, etc.) to fit your play style and in the end they are all pretty effective. Sure, some might be even stronger, but overall they can still all rock.
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If you keep alternating blizzard and glacial everything just explodes in front of you. I always used to think you need to let the monsters walk around in the blizzard, but when you do this for whatever reason everything just starts popping. Works best with your merc doing cleanup.
Orb damage is just too weak.
I love frozen orb. Never seen it’s like in any other game. Even if it’s less damage it’s just so much fun to watch.
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I miss frozen orb with no casting delay(before the nerf) Firing off a bunch in a matter of seconds was a blast, aka fun
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My goto build is HydraOrb. Hydra is the main damage dealer and orb is just there to deal with fire immunes. The really nice thing is that due to the fact that orb has no synergies, it’s very low on skills, so 20 into orb and enough into cold mastery to get to 100 (with gear of course), and you don’t feel like you’re “missing out on damage” by not taking any synergies. So you can max out Hydra/ Fire Mastery and both it’s synergies and still have a few points to spare.
Plus, hydra is a fire and forget type of skill… great for scouting areas in the dark and killing stuff off screen.
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I see you play PD2
I was actually thinkin equal orb/hydra but didn’t want to gimp myself. It seems you can get pretty high in both skills and both masteries.
I’m enjoying orb/chain lightning. Don’t like the orb/fireball/meteor builds. You don’t need 40k lightning damage to clear chaos, you only need so much damage to clear efficiently.
Remember that you don’t need to put more points into cold mastery then your skills will take you to 100. There is no point in going over specifically for cold mastery.
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I’ve always had an issue with the huge damage variation you get with lightning.
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Orb is better for fast single player area clears. Blizzard is the boss farmer and for higher player counts.
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Not exactly true anymore. Cold mastery can punch through immunities so there is potential value in maxing it out. I’m curious to see what a pure cold sorc can do with an infinity, max cold mastery and some facets.
Blizzard does more dmg than Orb.
Orb is easier to make dual element because it relies less on Synergy.
Meteor does much more dmg than Hydra.
Hydra is not really viable… it was overnerfed at some point, and it’s now more of a support skill. Hydra also has a CD, which does not work well for Orb or Blizzard, both of which have a CD too.
If Hydra’s CD was removed, it’d definitely be a good competitor for Meteor or Fireball.
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But they haven’t confirmed if it was intended or a bug. I’m thinking bugged and they will fix it… it didn’t break immunities before, so why would they do it now?
actually, it did… up until 1.08 (so, most patches of the game) CM would break immunes.
People just only remember the last patch because the game was left in maintenance mode for so many years.
1 Like