What are your tricks for getting decent gear for your freshly created Sorceress? Do you farm NM Andy, Mephisto, etc. to try to find those jordans, shakos, occy, etc.? Do you refuse to move onto Hell before getting her geared the best you can first? Just bored and wanting to have a chit chat. Love ya hope your day kicks rear end.
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You can do alot of damage with normal runewords, Lore, Stealth, Ancients Pledge or Rhyme until you can make a Spirit Mon, Spirit sword, basic Res gloves and boots, 10fc rings and ammy.
Beef up a merc, and you can handle certain areas of hell, Hell Andy is great for finding the occy, vmagi, shako, ect that you upgrade to, once you get to a high enough level, Hell Meph.
Using an Orb/Hydra sorc, You can farm Hell Andy, Pits, AT, Meph until you gear up for the Chaos Sanc, Worldstone, Cows, ect.
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Level firebolt until 12, level fireball (telekinesis+teleport optional) until 26 (before izzy), get prereqs for Frozen Orb, you’ll have 2 points for Frozen Orb+Cold Mastery when you hit 30. Level Frozen Orb 2 points to 1 point Cold Mastery. You’ll cruise through most of nightmare. At the end of NM, you can keep going FB/Orb, or respec to Blizzard or whatever.
Starter gears:
Ancients Pledge shield + 3 socket axe with 3x Tirs for killing trash, also 2 socket helm with Tirs, until you can get Lore runeword. Tirs keep the mana full, little worries about mana pots until you can get Insight runeword for your merc, then you can go Spirit crystal sword.
Shop Akara for a +3 fireball 2 socket staff, Leaf runeword for bosses/hard targets. (Make sure it’s not a mechanic’s staff!)
Stealth breast plate.
Whatever other gear you find/gamble/shop for other slots.
Farm up norm countess for runes.
Prayer A2 merc helps with health potion management. (Note: prayer aura synergizes with the meditation aura, increasing the healing amount of prayer, making you and your a2 merc tanky)
Only enough str to equip gear, rest into vitality. Get your mana pool from your gear.
ezpz
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Thanks for saving me the time of writing out all the cheap yet still OP gear there is
Only thing I’d say is go Orb/Fireball instead, but I guess Hydra would be okay/better now too.
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Hyrda is OK, but I don’t like the delay between cast and when they start attacking. Yeah you can cast them out very quickly now, and they are very useful for attacking around the corner while staying safe. Of course safety is always a plus for Hardcore.
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I have never been a fan of this… I get Fireball is very powerful, and you can run it basically from Fire bolt start, I just never liked it as much as a good Forb, and now that Hydra is viable, it rocks any Fire Immunes while you spray orb goodness at the rest.
Another viable build I have run when I want to add countess and rock the Chaos, is Orb Lightning. Get Orb up to about 500 damage with -100% res, then pump Lightning. Its not as melt your opponents as other builds, but it works well enough in areas like Tower or Chaos, to enjoy.
Currently running novaorb, you ought to give it a try if you haven’t already. I like it. I like it a lot. And I don’t even have infinity, and only +7 to skills. 
Yeah I have tried it, I actually ran my ladder build with this for awhile, it works good, Ive switched builds a few times with my 2 sorcs.
Works good for arcane, I just dont have the patience to do all out arcane runs though even though they can be quite profitable.
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Edit:SirPokesalot =
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Baal nm and i farm him on quest bug solo or with few feeders who let me distribute loot.
Then meph hell again on questbug.
After i have good stuff from meph i move to area85 zones.
I play through norm → hell a5 with a group and farm meph hell. Or farm CS / Cows with the group, when I got my merc geared enough I add keys.
I scream, you scream, we all scream for Ice-cream.
I do not gear up for leveling at all, I just go until Hell. Sometimes I still have a normal mode blue items on when I get there. It will be fine. Spec fire for start and Andy will melt. I farm Andy until I have a couple pieces, then I make a spirit and follow by farming countess until I can make HOTO, and I just hit up Meph until I get a Mara’s, any any pieces I am missing like A shako and hopefully ye old Arach. I stay at him farming along with countess and various areas until I have some trades in toe or good rune drops and make a pally that will farm up that sorc torch and an anni.
TBH I just see the sorc is a stepping stone to gearing up a pally by running keys… get the pally strong enough to farm itself a torch then hit up diablo until your eyes bleed. Then go make w/e build you actually want to play. Alternately setup a barb or pally for trav if that’s your thing.
Revisit the sorc after you have the runes for an Infinity to go lightning if you want.
I skip the whole andy/meph stage entirely as to me it just feels like a waste of time. You’ll find your sojs/bks/shakos while farming for runes anyway. Spending dozens of hours farming bosses for uniqus feels like a real waste a couple months later when you are literally struggling to find people to give those uniques away to lol.
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