My first char in 20 years just soloed the whole game, killed baal at lvl 81.
It’s an unusual build but did what I wanted so I thought I would post.
Loved the automatic fire of both elements, and single element immunes were no problem. The ancients were the hardest fight in the game. I used no cheese on the ancients, didn’t bug the merc, I used very few potions, just kited them through a never ending rain of hydras and blizzards. Merc face tanked the last one (who was fire/cold immune) with me tossing him a few potions. I got lucky that he had good armor and an insight polearm with a pretty decent base damage.
For gear I only used what dropped to a newbie char and the game was hard, but not impossible, somehow 20 years ago doing this felt impossible.
If anyone cares, since I know it’s not popular, blizzard and hydra synergize really well as you can fire off hydras while blizzard is raining and cooling down. Hydras act like hunting dogs too, you can cast them in front of you and they will fire at anything nearby.
The synergy allows both elements to do maximum damage simultaneously, so while each does about half with not all the synergies maxed, together the damage output - especially for a single target - was very high. It performed well as a boss killer, the act bosses were relatively easy as a result, just toss the merc potions to face-tank and keep blizzard raining and add a few hydras for the bosses vulnerable to fire.
I also used an unpopular merc: the defensive aura merc that adds to defense (not the holy freeze one). It had the effect of doubling our defense, and really helped that merc face tank bosses. So I traded having to dodge a bit more during the trash mobs in exchange for a better boss kill setup.
So overall this is a cheap boss killing solo build with easily obtainable gear.
I ended up with (base) 20 hydra, 10 fire mastery, 20 blizzard, 20 cold mastery, 10 glacial spike, and spirit +2 to all skills right up until the end when a +2 tal rashas amulet dropped to up it to +4 skills for the baal run. The rest were the usual suspects, 1 pt in the pre-reqs, cold armor, and teleport. I did have to respec when I got blizzard and hydra. I put a pt into static field and ended up never using it, my bad, it could have sped up a few fights a little bit. I just didn’t want to get that close.
You would think it would be a relaxed game play with all the automatic fire going on but it wasn’t when I got to hell, lots of dodging back and forth to avoid getting killed, and teleporting to prevent the merc from dying.
I got both insight (on the merc) and spirit (on a one handed sword), maxed all my resists for both char and merc (a 3 socket perfect diamond shield and lots of resist runes in triple socket armor and crowns for both me and the merc), so a very basic setup anyone could obtain on a first run, no MF sadly. Keeping strength low (and high vitality) limited me to a 3 socket shield, more survivability, but no MF as a result. Farmed all that stuff (except the runes) from vendors, surprisingly easy.
I briefly farmed the countess in NM to get the runes I needed, and spent a lot of time (an hourish) at the beginning of each difficulty farming vendors to get gear to top off all my resists. It was really easy to do, I was surprised, I remembered this game as impossible before without help.
Next up, the summoner necro is performing well too, no dodging, definitely a more relaxed game play (yes I am not as young as I used to be so this is preferred), I am hoping a very high revive count will let me bring in enough minions to take down the ancients solo with decrep, won’t know till I get there…
After that I am going to try a hybrid fire/lightning trapassin, similar to the hybrid sorc.
And lastly, none of this would have been possible without all the great info available on the internet.
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