The best hybrid build hand down

Sorceress
1

After spending countless tokens and cycling through every possible gear setup for sorc, I’ve finally found the best hybrid setup which is OrbBaller. This is more powerful than Blizzard and rivals Lightning in clear speed. While it may fall a (super tiny) bit short on raw clear speed, it more than makes up for it in:

Mana & life
Resistance
Full clear
MF
Inexpensive gear

This setup allows you to cast any spell you want anytime you want without tapping mana pot, unless burned. It can 2 shot cows and kill Baal just as fast as Lightning. I spend 3-5 Ist for each of my Cold/Fire 35 lifers. Can you imagine how much it costs to fill a stash full of Lightning 35 lifers? Not to mention griffon, COH/Enigma, etc…

I’ve also come across a lot of hybrid build videos on youtube which all use some variation of Death Fathom, Nightwing, Enigma, etc… which makes me sick to my stomach. Please don’t do that. Full Tal is all you need. I’m not saying this from a budget gear POV - this is an end game MF setup. While expensive uniques can get you 10-15% more Cold OR Fire damage (not both), you’ll have to give up tons of defense, FHR, MF, Life, etc… Please just use full Tal.

Budget gear:
Full Tal (socketed with 3x Cold/fire facets - your choice)
2x BK Ring
Magefists
Wartravs
Gheeds
7x Cold/Fire 35 lifers - your choice
MF + fire/poison res charms (I use only 3, the rest are plain 7% MF charms)
Torch & Anni
Insight Merc

End-game gear
Full Tal (socketed with 3x Cold/fire facets - your choice)
2x SOJ
Magefists
Wartravs
Gheeds
7x Cold/Fire 35 lifers - your choice
MF + fire/poison res charms (I use only 3, the rest are plain 7% MF charms)
Torch & Anni
Infinity Merc

If you feel like 250 MF is enough, you can just replace the MF charm with 20 lifers and get to 3k life at lvl 95.

Your choice of facets & skillers depends on how much cold damage you feel is needed. My preference is 1k Orb damage which one-shots most mobs if aimed right. Everything else is pumped into Fireballs. At lvl 95 I’m aiming for 1k Orb and 9.9k fireball, 2700 life & 1300 mana and 300% MF.

Skilltree:
All prerequisites
Max Orb & Icebolt
Zero into Cold Mastery
Max Fireball
Max Meteor
1 Warmth
1 Telekinesis
1 Teleport
1 Statics
Dump the rest into Firebolt

Skill rotation:
Against fire immune mob: 1x Orb + 2x statics then orb again if needed
Against cold immune mob: spam fireball
Against everything else: 1x orb + 2x fireball then orb again
Baal waves: blanket the spawning areas with meteor, then orb & fireball as needed. Blizzard & static the last wave then orb them down.

short clip doing Baal.

2

Won’t call it the best, but you have got the important point down, a timered spell and one you can spam in between. You can play around with this spell combo as you like, lightning/blizz, lightning/hydra fireball/Orb and so on.

It’s so weird advice for a long time was 2 timered spells (biggest hitters for damage), and then you could cast either one or the other, and then people complained hybrids were half the damage. Well Duh.

3

Fail, not gonna bother reading past this.

5 Likes
4

Tal’s Lidless Eye gives +1-2 Cold Mastery. +Skills add to this. If you’re using cold skill charms, usually can reach a good level Cold Mastery without investing any hard points.

The level of cold mastery is kind of low otherwise, but if you use with Infinity, or if FO is your secondary spell, and you don’t care if it’s dps is lower, perhaps this won’t matter so much.

5

Ya now I realize it’s a noob tals set build. GL with that. IMO any build guide that suggests tals set is not worth the time for me, but people are different.

6

Didn’t read that, wonder why he would chose to do that.

7

What’s your Orb Ball stats using anything but a full Tal set? At lvl 94 mine are

9.6k Fireball
1k Orb
2.65k life
1.3k mana
303% MF
92% HFR
Max all res
-15% EFR + infinity
-150% ECR without infinity

8

Conventional wisdom states that CM need to be at level -150% … number of points depends on number of skillers lol (or/and facets)
Well since Icy Vein is wrong about how Static Work :wink: (I can confirmed that Static keep chopping Mephisto Hell past mark 50%) why not use simpler solution? Old school one - fire FO and zap entire screen with SF several times till timer reset … let Merc tank Cold Immunities with Cold resist 120+ if area’s heavy populated by double cold/lighting immunities why not just fry everything with … FireWall? btw A LOT cheaper compare to Fire Bolt-Fire Ball - Meteor Road…
Lastly … why in the Manitu name you need synergy for FO!!! it give you really minor damage gain … Think proactively … FO/SF … or FO/FB what kill entire area faster? :wink:
Anyway I yet to see faster way of killing bosses but FO and zapping them with SF (FO chills and SF kills)

1 Like
9

That’s what I do to clear fire immune mobs in 1 shot: FO followed by 2x statics. 10k FB 1 shots everything else. Right now I have 3k life and 1k mana with 260% MF. I have yet to hear from the guy above who called me a noob for going full Tal. I wouldn’t called 40% increased damage to FO trivial. 1k orb feels a lot better than 700 orb.

10

I prefer my blizzball.

With Blizzard you can do off screen casting. I can kill baal minions that are not cold immune without even seeing them on screen and they die without even knowing what happened.

Try that with your half screen orb.

11

Bliz only works well when it doesn’t miss like 30% of the minions due to stupid shard placement. What does offscreen casting accomplish when everything already dies almost instantly? Meteor also does the same thing.

12

Having full set of tal rasha can technically ignore mysteries because tal rash ashall provide them already

13

Nice build! Haven’t tried full talls yet, but I’ve been using this build for quite some time now and it wrecks. I just put 1point in cold and fire mastery and focus more on MF I guess. Sitting at 445% with no small charms 7%

14

I try this hybrid build

2 Likes
15

DoomDrake, what would be your points assignement then?