Annotations to VenomousVixen's Sorceress Guide. Philosophy: This is a distillation of my observations as primarily a solo Hardcore Sorceress player. When I first saw VenomousVixen's guide, it became clear to me that writing another Sorceress guide from scratch would be a waste of effort, since I'd duplicate so much of the content of VV's guide. It has an excellent backbone and covers many topics (some of which I personally don't care to write about) to perfection; I'd be a fool to not leverage it. In the meantime, I've certainly got some of my own things to say, and the final straw for me was that the "New section for Hardcore players" never appeared, despite being planned over two months ago. But my comments extend far beyond the scope of merely a focused Hardcore section, hence the annotation organization. One might raise the objection that my recommendations are too rigid. To that, I can only say that this is an artifact of the game design and implementation, rather than closed-mindedness on my part. Whenever possible, I try to solve for the best way to do things; it turns out that often, the solution is simple, and arguably dull. If you want to build the most powerful solo Hardcore Sorceress you can, well, either you decide you didn't really mean "most powerful", or you accept that your answer will be very similar to everyone else's. This document is long enough as is; to try to cater to the most common suboptimal whims as well would be an exercise in futility. (I will occasionally mention variants and the like, but they will cater to my own whims. :)) In the meantime, I present what I believe are interesting and occasionally original methods of analysis; hopefully you can find some value in deriving your own conclusions with them, if you don't like mine. Usage: This is intended to be read alongside diabloii.net's copy of VenomousVixen's Sorceress Guide. It's advisable to have another browser window opened to VV's guide while reading this, since I'll be making constant references to it. There have been some more recent updates to VV's guide which are not reflected on diabloii.net's 28 October 2000 version. From what I've seen, those updates haven't had much to do with what I choose to comment about here. So there's nothing lost in restricting this document to the 28 October version, and in the meantime I'm freed from the hassles associated with chasing a moving target. Almost all of my comments will have a section and subsection reference at the beginning. The reference does not announce a section and subsection in my document so much as it states the subsection of VV's guide that is being commented on. I will be constructing a lot of mathematical models to provide bases for many of my suggestions and comments. These are probably my greatest contribution, but if you're not mathematically inclined, you can skim over all those passages and focus on my tried-and-true practical recommendations. I will mention A LOT of statistics, and often indirectly. If you're ever confused by where a number came from, and it isn't present within the corresponding subsection of VV's guide, you can usually find enlightenment at Blizzard's own Chaos Sanctuary site, http://www.battle.net/diablo2. It may be advisable to keep yet a third browser window open to that site. I will not assume that a reader already knows the semantic content contained within the site, however. Comments on this document can be emailed to me at c3@ugcs.caltech.edu. A.4. Introduction, some assumptions. I make the same assumptions as VV, except the obvious update to #4 (since the 1.04 patch has been released), and #5, which, unlike the Parallel Postulate, I believe is actually redundant. A Sorceress who uses spells for offense and prefers to avoid all melee combat in the long run is "typical" because she is unambiguously most efficient that way, hence #5 can be derived from #1 and #2. I make two additional assumptions. 6. You are soloing. Much of the interesting (in my opinion, anyway) complexity involved in building an effective Sorceress disappears if you never plan to fight on your own. A partying Sorceress can essentially disregard defense and hardly needs to do anything beyond casting Static Field and the occasional Frozen Orb as quickly as possible, while an allied Necromancer casts Lower Resist to make Static Field universally effective. Occasionally, repeat-casting of Glacial Spike may be useful to help protect other members of your party, but that's about it for what I have to say about partying Sorceresses. 7. You are playing a Hardcore character, and you plan to spend a lot of time in Hell/act 4. I am well aware of the fact that this assumption does not strictly apply to the vast majority of readers of this document. If you just wish to "complete the game" according to your own whims, my advice will be overkill. However, beyond this being the base of my own experiences, I offer a few reasons as to why this assumption is a reasonable basis for all my annotations to follow. (i) There is no alternative destination to Hell/act 4. If you put a lot of time into your character, you will eventually get there, and then you will have to stay there if you wish for your character to continue gaining experience at a reasonable rate. (However, I will not consider leveling beyond 90. Thanks to some poorly thought out formulas and statistics, this is unfortunately the realm of teamplay characters only, for all practical purposes.) (ii) If one intends to take a Standard Sorceress really far, they will eventually reach a point where the traditional "sacrifice life and defense for more offensive power" tradeoff is no longer tenable, because the experience penalties for death become too great. My first Standard Sorceress actually stagnated at level 60 because of the death penalties (being afflicted with some irreparable design flaws). If your inclination is to climb the Standard Ladder by yourself (good luck against the teamplay characters, by the way), you can identify for yourself where my comments do not apply to your endeavor. (iii) As mentioned earlier, VV's guide continues to lack a section on Hardcore play. So assuming Hardcore mode simultaneously maximizes the applicability of my comments and fills a hole in the original Guide. (iv) Finally, an aesthetic judgment: a character that can avoid death except in case of disconnects is more impressive than a character that cannot do the same, even if the latter can level faster in Standard mode for the entire journey you plan to make. B. Stats Strength: There is really no reason to raise your base strength above 65. 65 is necessary if you wish to equip the extremely powerful Twitchthroe + socketed Tower Shield combination without being dependent on any +strength equipment outside Twitchthroe's +10. Later, I will justify the supremacy of this combination. With Grim Helms requiring only 58 strength, and belts and boots being unable to combine for the DR of a Grim Helm even while having much higher strength requirements, I think it's clear that there's no point in raising your modified strength beyond the 75 required to wield a socketed Tower Shield. You'd be better off putting the same attribute points into Vitality; soon, I'll provide a framework within which you can derive this fact for yourself. Vitality/Energy: Keep them in sensible balance. If you don't feel like you're ever in danger, add all your points to Energy for your next level. If you are in danger more than you would like, and it's not primarily because of a mana shortage, add all your points to Vitality for the next level. Or you could stick to a formula like 2 vitality + 3 energy for most levels (once base strength is up to 65), deviating sometimes in special cases (e.g. you're preparing to make the jump from act 2 to act 4, so it's probably time to dedicate several levels in a row to all vitality). This is one thing where early "mistakes" don't matter in the long run, since ultimately you need a lot of both. Think you allocated too much to vitality? Well, raise nothing but energy for the next few levels, and the problem will be erased. It's not like misallocated skill points, where you have a permanent sense of loss. C. Items 1. Equipment In Hardcore mode, blocking, resistances, life, and mana are more important than they are in Standard, while cast rate and skill level bonuses are less important. Keep that in mind if you find some of my recommendations counterintuitive. (i) Armor: Here, I present my case for Twitchthroe being the best realistic option for the long haul. The reason, of course, is its +25% to blocking rate, found on no other item. It allows you to have a near-maximal 69% blocking rate while enjoying the massive resistance boost provided by a socketed Tower Shield. To establish an airtight case, I will consider Twitchthroe and the socketed Tower Shield (fitted with three perfect diamonds, of course) as a combination, and demonstrate the inferiority of all other realistically obtainable armor/shield combinations. We start by considering the socketed Tower Shield as a fixture. Since Twitchthroe has lower DR than all other reasonable long haul armor choices, the worst case for Twitchthroe is when all your other items provide negligible DR. Frostburn provides 41-44, the socketed Tower Shield provides 24 (strictly speaking, 21-24, but this item is so easy to obtain, and the perfect diamonds so difficult in comparison, that there's no reason to accept any less than 24), and everything else will combine to at least 15. So for our purposes, we can assume base DR outside the armor slot is 80, and total base DR with Twitchthroe is 130. This is a good time to develop the theoretical framework behind abstracting resistance bonuses to "equivalent" life/mana bonuses, which will aid this analysis as well as subsequent item analyses. This framework will be highly Sorceress-specific, though its ideas can be applied to aid other classes in making more systematic equipment decisions. The basic idea is that, with a socketed Tower Shield, one is in good enough shape regarding Hell difficulty resistances that one does not need to desperately take all the resistance they can get, but instead can make tradeoffs between resistance bonuses and life/mana bonuses on items in a fairly consistent manner. Let's motivate this premise a bit more, and then start crunching the numbers. (Though I suppose I'll crunch a few numbers even while justifying this premise.) In Hell/act 4, you essentially need to max lightning and fire resistance, and cold resistance should at least be near maximum. Poison resistance is next to irrelevant; we will completely ignore it. With the -50 resistance penalties in Hell difficulty, you need to get get about 375 points of non-poison resistance from your equipment. Thanks to inevitable overlap, particularly because good lightning resistance modifiers are more prevalent than those for the other elements, we will "round" this number up to 420 for our model. What am I saying here? I'm flattening the complex reality of needing to individually max or near-max each of three resistances to the simpler approximation "you need about 420 points of non-poison resistance from your equipment". If you aim for the single goal of 420 points of non-poison resistance, you'll probably be able to do well enough on each of the specific resistances. It goes without saying that you have multiple stashed caps, belts, boots, rings, and amulets in storage, and rotate among them as necessary to meet the specific requirements; that's how you manage to keep your "redundancy" to ~60 points or less. Make sure you understand this, because what transpires below are less trivial expansions of the same powerful, basic idea. I'm building "point-count" rules of thumb, similar in spirit to the "Queen = 9, Rook = 5, Bishop/Knight = 3, Pawn = 1" system in chess, or the "Ace = 4, King = 3, Queen = 2, Jack = 1" high card point count in bridge. The specific point count rule I'm about to introduce is very simple on the surface, and you might already be using it. But I will actually justify its validity here with some rigor, and then proceed to use it for analysis. A socketed diamond shield provides about 160 non-poison resistance (52.5 times 3, rounded up slightly because nothing stops you from making multiple shields and choosing the best if you get unlucky on your first try), leaving 260 to come from your other items. A prismatic amulet or high quality rare amulet provides at least ~65 more (19.5 times 3, adjusted upward because you can of course choose a prismatic amulet with better fire/cold/lightning resistances than average), leaving 195. A magical fastest cast wand/scepter provides about 45 more, leaving 150 to come from your cap, belt, boots, rings, and armor, and spillover from a particularly good amulet, or less likely, wand/scepter. It's not hard to see that you can meet this requirement without any help from the armor slot, with a bit of room to spare. It's more difficult to meet the requirement when the ring slots are also prevented from helping. Unless you're twinked, count on being able to use "only" one Stone of Jordan when using Twitchthroe. Realistically, however, this is not a drawback, since by the time another equipment setup would want to equip two Stones, one should have good enough rares to accomplish the same with the Twitchthroe + socketed Tower Shield setup. (Excellent rare Mage Plates do not grow on trees.) So we've established our cornerstone: there's isn't really a nonlinear cost to Twitchthroe's lack of resistances. Now we need to arrive at a good estimate for how much life/mana will probably be gained from each point of resistance your armor does provide in this context. Investigating the affixes available for each item, it becomes clear that the life/mana affixes tend to be for quantities about 20% greater than that for the "standard" (i.e. non-prismatic) resistance affixes. But then, there are less ways to get life/mana affixes than non-poison non-prismatic resistance affixes. Thus, if you have a decent library of equipment, you will usually be able to trade 1 point of resistance for about 1 point of life/mana, though counterintuitively, lightning resistance will be harder to trade off. (Thus, a Ruby/Sapphire Wand of the Magus is probably more useful than an Amber Wand of the Magus, because it's easier for you to get high lightning resistance from your other items!) So we have the golden rule of item analysis: 1 point of resistance is roughly equivalent to 1 point of life/mana (before being modified by Frostburn and/or Stone(s) of Jordan). (And it goes without saying that life and mana are interchangeable for a Sorceress when appraising items. For example, if you get more life than you expected to from items, just raise Energy for the next few levels.) Again, you might have come up with this simple rule of thumb on your own. I've went through a convoluted analysis to arrive at the same destination so that even those who thought the rule of thumb was plain wrong can see its applicability to comparing Twitchthroe + socketed Tower Shield against another armor + socketed Tower Shield, since both setups fall within a range where resistance is neither so scarce nor so plentiful (Goldskin may be an exception, but we'll see that our rating system here marks it as inferior even though it overrates Goldskin for multiple reasons) such that one would need to consistently make tradeoffs at a different ratio. Now we may proceed to efficiently analyze how other armors combine with socketed Tower Shields. If you're lucky, rare Mage Plate provides about 500 DR, and up to about 80 "life points", though we then need to subtract 20 for the effect of Twitchthroe's +10 strength; thus the relative advantage is 60. It's reasonable to have about 600-750 life when fighting in Hell/act 4, and be close to level 75; we'll use these numbers to fold DR and blocking rate into our rating system. The characteristic AR of Hell/act 4 is 1484 (= 371 times 4), and the characteristic monster level is 80. Using these numbers, let's compute your chance to be hit with Twitchthroe, taking blocking and ~60% Shiver Armor into account: 200 * 1484/(1484+130*1.6) * 80/(80+75) [capped at 95% at this point, but this number happens to be under the cap] * (1-.69) = ~28.1%. For the rare Mage Plate: 200 * 1484/(1484+580*1.6) * 80/(80+75) * (1-.44) = ~35.6%. Thus, Twitchthroe gives over 25% better physical defense than a rare Mage Plate, and at least half the danger in the usual leveling areas of Hell/act 4 is physical, assuming you've maxed the relevant resistances. Then, the 60 "life point" advantage, providing ~8-10% better physical survivability and ~8-10% better magical survivability, is seen to be inferior. That's a rather good rare plate I just described, yet we just found it inferior to this commodity armor that anyone can gamble by mid-Nightmare or so. It's all downhill from here. Rare Ornate Plate with the simplicity attribute and ~800 DR can't be counted on for more than about 30 "life points", and that's probably generous. Then, we have to throw in a negative 74 modifier, for the 37 extra points of strength above 65 you need to put in to wear the armor. 200 * 1484/(1484+880*1.6) * 80/(80+75) * (1-.44) = ~29.7%. With such high DR Ornate, you're still more likely to be hit than with Twitchthroe! And this isn't even when you're running! Then, the Ornate's 44 "life point" disadvantage buries it further. Not to mention the incredible difficulty of obtaining an 800 DR Ornate with the simplicity attribute with even one other attribute worth ~30 "life points". Finally, we analyze Goldskin according to this schema. It has an amazing 90 "life points" (remember, poison resistance doesn't count), greater than almost any other armor one can expect to find. Then one must subtract 30 for the 15 extra strength required, so the comparative advantage is 60. Goldskin has roughly 230 DR, so... 200 * 1484/(1484+310*1.6) * 80/(80+75) * (1-.44) = ~43.3%. The 60 "life points" provide ~8-10% better physical survivability and ~8-10% better magical survivability; this is dwarfed by the over 50% physical defense advantage provided by Twitchthroe, not to mention running speed and stamina issues. So, if you're going to go with a socketed Tower Shield, Twitchthroe is the only sensible armor choice for the long haul. We now proceed to investigate the few viable equipment configurations not involving a socketed Tower Shield. As has been seen above, 44% blocking is vastly inferior to 69% blocking; and in the meantime, it's practically impossible to find a shield with better non-blocking attributes than the commodity socketed Tower. Twitchthroe shores up the socketed Tower's blocking disadvantage, and in fact brings blocking to near maximum. But it's only other property that's useful to a Sorceress is +10 strength, which isn't that big a deal. So, the one combination that could compete would be a shield with very high blocking on its own and good other properties (either rare or Sigon's Guard), combined with a rare armor with high DR and good other properties, or maybe a unique armor with not-so-high DR but awesome other properties (i.e. Goldskin). We now investigate exactly how good the rare shield and rare armor would need to be. There are essentially two classes of possibilities, one best represented by rare Bone Shield + rare Mage Plate, and the other by Tower Shield + Goldskin. As we saw earlier, rare Ornate setups can't be expected to be better than rare Mage Plate setups. With 60% blocking and ~600 total DR before Shiver Armor, we can use our formulas to estimate the number of "life points" necessary for the rare Bone Shield + rare Mage Plate to compare to Twitchthroe + socketed Tower Shield: 200 * 1484/(1484+600*1.6) * 80/(80+75) * (1-.6) = ~25.1%. This provides about a 12% physical defense advantage over the Twitchthroe setup. (This is an overestimate since we aren't taking running into account. But it's okay for us to overestimate in that direction, given what we're trying to "prove".) The Twitchthroe setup would need about a 6-7% life advantage to come out equal (since we make the sensible approximation that slightly over half the danger is physical). 150 "life points" (160 useful resistance from the socketed Tower, minus 10 for a strength requirement of 65 instead of 60) on a base of 600-750 life amounts to a 20-25% life advantage, easily exceeding 6-7%; 40 "life points" would amount to about 6-7%. Thus, the shield and armor would need to combine for over 110 "life points" to compete. This is very difficult when we're demanding 500 DR from the Mage Plate and 60% blocking from the Bone Shield. And the real cutoff is somewhat higher than 110, because without the socketed Tower, we are pushed into the realm where one has to make more desperate life/mana for resistance trades to keep the important resistances high enough. In a nutshell, the best rare Bone Shield and best rare Mage Plate you'll ever find probably won't combine to be any more effective than Twitchthroe + socketed Tower Shield. You would need 60% blocking on the shield, ~500 DR on the Mage Plate, about 130-140 points of resistances/life/mana between the two items for equality, and significantly more points to get an advantage remotely worth the effort of obtaining the items. However, this IS the one combination that can conceivably be equal or superior at all, and conveniently, it provides slightly faster running speed as well. (Strictly speaking, this is not true; I'll later mention another setup that's even better, but you'll see why I don't bother discussing it.) Thus, I might even recommend leaving strength at 60 instead of 65, since +strength suffixes are extremely common on rare belts and boots, making it only a minor hassle to make sure you get +strength at all times to enable you to wield the socketed Tower. But do not expect to arrive at this combination for a very long time, probably long after you enter Hell/act 4. It should be mentioned that rare Mage Plate + 64% Tower Shield setups are also part of this class. With the Tower, you lose 30 "life points" from the strength requirement going from 60 to 75, gain slightly more than that from the improved physical defense, but the difference is so small that the running speed disadvantage probably means the Bone Shield is superior. Sigon's Guard looks pretty good on paper here, but in practice you'll end up being too desperate for resistances to end up with an advantage over Twitchthroe + socketed Tower Shield. This can be seen from the "you need ~420 non-poison resistance" rule, and it's borne out by my experience using rare Mage Plate + Sigon's Guard in the past, before I heard about Twitchthroe. For Tower + Goldskin, you have 64% blocking and ~320 total DR before Shiver Armor, so: 200 * 1484/(1484+320*1.6) * 80/(80+75) * (1-.64) = ~27.6%. This is only a 1-2% physical defense advantage over Twitchthroe + socketed Tower. This leaves the Tower Shield the impossible task of providing ~90 "life points" (and that's an underestimate) just for equality, when we're already demanding the +20% blocking attribute on the shield. Sigon's Guard's +1 to all skills attribute can be considered to be worth about 70 "life points" (both from equipment tradeoff considerations (e.g. +1 to Sorceress skills amulet for a prismatic amulet) and utility considerations we shall work out later), which isn't enough, though it'll probably beat any rare Tower you'll find for a while. (ii) Staves: Ultimately worthless. Blocking is too important. Their additional benefits over wands or scepters are minimal; you don't really need any more skill points. As an example of how worthless staves are, consider the Spire of Lazarus. It looks great: all resistances +30%!, and a few other things on the side. But, wait, it takes up the shield slot. I'll let you fill in what that means; suffice it to say that one can leave a hand empty and still do better than the Spire of Lazarus, with an item easier to obtain than the Spire. Or, compare Sigon's Guard, easily found when fighting in the Kurast city portion of act 3, to all the + to all skills staves. You can easily buy a magical fastest cast rate wand or scepter to negate that single potential advantage of the staff. Since you already want at least 55-60 strength for other purposes, no, 75 strength is not a big deal at all. Maybe if good shields required 175 strength and made you incapable of running, a staff might be a sensible choice for a solo Sorceress. Even then, I'm not sure. After all, there's Teleport. (iii) Headgear: Just like socketed weapons, and totally unlike socketed shields, socketed helms are worthless except for the early game, and even then they may be questionable. I'll leave the math as an exercise to the reader; or if you're lazy, I discuss this briefly when commenting on the FAQ. Now that we're considering Twitchthroe and a socketed Tower Shield to be fixtures, the Grim Helm becomes the best potential source of DR. Conveniently, it has a strength requirement below 75, unlike some high-DR main armors I could name. So it's a good imbue target; I'll elaborate on this a bit more when commenting on the imbuing subsection. You're more likely to get crap from your imbues than something permanently useful, however, so don't hesitate to develop a gambling habit to fill this slot. Realistically, no matter how good your Grim Helm imbues turn out, if you gamble hundreds of Caps and Skullcaps, you'll have some occasions to dip into your excellent library of rare hats. The qualities you're looking for are "life points" and fastest hit recovery. And you can afford to gamble hundreds of Caps and Skullcaps, since they're dirt cheap. Since DR is an additive, essentially all-or-nothing proposition, there's no reason to gamble more expensive types of headgear. Only exceptional headgear, which you can't gamble, can provide conceivably relevant DR, and that might be pushing it. A small detail when gambling Caps and Skullcaps: when an item is generated as a unique, but you already possess it, it's discarded and replaced with a rare; if you weren't aware of this, monster drops behave similarly. This can be useful to improve your gambling odds; if you keep Biggin's Bonnet (unique Cap) in your stash, your chance of a rare when gambling Caps is 9.99% instead of 6.99%, and you'll never receive any more otherwise useless Biggin's Bonnets. One could say the same about Tarnhelm, except that Tarnhelms are actually useful (though they aren't so great for Sorceresses in the long run). If a Tarnhelm is generated, I usually want to keep it as a Tarnhelm, not have it morphed into a rare! So what did I do with my Tarnhelms, you ask, since I muled almost nothing? Well, I kept giving them away. A rare instance of intentional suboptimal behavior on my part; but I couldn't stomach the notion of deliberately shunting Tarnhelm generation. (iv) Shields: It may be reasonable to have a set of -magic damage equipment, possibly including Bverrit Keep, for use against Diablo only. (v) One-Handed Weapons: Fastest Cast Rate from this slot is more useful than +1 to all skills; you'll get enough +to all skills from your jewelry, and maybe Tarnhelm early on, while you don't have other good places to get Fastest Cast Rate from. And "faster block" is essentially irrelevant. So Culwen's Point is an inferior choice. Spectral Shard seems to be great, but really isn't much better than a store-bought wand/scepter, let alone any rare wands/scepters you might find later, unless your equipment of the moment just happens to bring dexterity to 51 or more. Dexterity is totally useless for anything else, so don't even think of increasing your base dexterity above the starting 25 to wield the Shard. Maelstrom and Ume's Lament are of similar quality to the wands and scepters Ormus has to offer. For the record, you want to get Fastest Cast Rate and 40+ of a useful resistance (not poison, and as mentioned earlier, maybe not lightning) from a store-bought wand/scepter. A few minutes of waypointing away and back to repeatedly refresh Ormus' inventory should get you one. (vii) Belts: Nightsmoke is overrated. Gamble Plated Belts, and keep Bladebuckle in your stash to increase the probability of a rare. They have the key base property you want out of a belt (16 slots), they're not too expensive (28k per gamble), and their strength requirement doesn't exceed 75. You can get slightly higher AC while still having strength requirement <= 75 with the low-level exceptional belts, but the AC benefit is much smaller than that for Grim Helms versus normal helms. So if you're thinking of imbuing an exceptional belt, imbue a Grim Helm instead. The attributes you're looking for in a rare belt are the same as those you want in a helm. The explanation of why Nightsmoke is overrated will be deferred to my comments on Energy Shield. (viii) Gloves: As a solo Sorceress, you want to balance your need for mana and your need to cast faster. Frostburn's +27-40% mana (it amounts to +32% if you're wearing one Stone of Jordan, or +27% if you're wearing two) is almost always a better call than Magefist's +10-11% cast rate, in my experience. (For the record, the "regenerate mana" attribute of Magefist, Heavenly Garb, and a few other items is a joke for Sorceresses, worth significantly less than a +mana attribute of the same numeric value, because it is merely additive with Warmth, not multiplicative. With slvl 20 Warmth, Magefist would improve your mana regeneration from 358% of base to 395% of base, a less than 11% improvement (and that's including both the "25% mana regeneration" and the additional point in Warmth!). We'll see later that there's little reason not to eventually raise Warmth to 20. Frostburn of course provides a far larger 27-40% mana regeneration improvement.) If you're very lucky and acquire two very high quality Fast Cast Rate jewelry items (which aren't both amulets), Magefist will be able to offer a +25% cast rate improvement instead of just +10-11%. (See my comments on Casting Spells: the Need for Speed, F.2.c.) Under this rare circumstance, if you think your main bottleneck is Static Field casting speed and you feel you have life and mana to burn (unlikely in Hardcore play), you may consider replacing Frostburn with Magefist. (ix) Boots: Demand fastest run/walk, and do the best you can under that condition. Since you don't have any additional demands on your hats or belts, you should be able to get good resistances, life, and mana from there, so you should be able to accept a bit less on your boots. This means that there's a longer gambling curve for boots than there is for hats and belts; you can almost always use better boots. Vidala's Fetlock and Treads of Cthon are good stopgaps before you obtain fastest run/walk boots with "life points" or hit recovery. Since you don't care about AC, gamble plain Boots and Heavy Boots, and keep the relevant Uniques in your stash. You'll need all the gambling chances you can get. (x) Jewelry: You probably want to have one Stone of Jordan. (For those that don't know, there are special gambling rules for the Stone. The quick summary would be, don't sell Nagelring or Manald Heal no matter how useless they may look, keep them in your stash instead. And as with all uniques, you want to be in a private passworded single-player game and not in possession of the unique already when trying to gamble for it.) Often, the second ring slot is best reserved for resistances and life/mana. On your rare amulet, good resistances are essentially a must; then if you're very lucky, you might have +1 or even +2 to all skills on top of that. When thinking of replacing an amulet with great resistances but no skill bonus with one with a skill bonus but poor resistances, consider that replacing a rare ring with a Jordan is probably a better deal. It's instructive to try to use "life points" to analyze this properly. If you've got the resistances and skill point bonuses you want, try to get "Fast Cast Rate" on either the rare ring or the amulet, to reduce your cast delay and increase the effectiveness of Static Field. Usually, getting the attribute on both items provides no benefit over getting it on only one; this will be hashed out later for those unfamiliar with the cast delay mechanics. 3. Using Your Imbue Read the Armor entry, and realize that it doesn't apply to main armor (except the trade item part), but it does apply to the Grim Helm. For the other item slots, imbuing doesn't provide much of a potential advantage over gambling... except in the case of wands or scepters, which you can't gamble. But your chances are exceptionally poor on wands and scepters because you demand fastest cast rate, ~45+% of a useful resistance, and at that point you've only matched your store-bought magical wand/scepter! If you're aiming primarily for resistances, you want to imbue between levels 19 and 23 inclusive (yes, that early), otherwise somewhere between 24 and 33 inclusive makes sense (only three more affixes become available at that point, and two of them provide good mana). If imbuing a Grim Helm, you want to do it at EXACTLY LEVEL 30. That's where the "Holy" (defense increased by 81-100%) prefix appears, and if you go up one more level, two comparatively useless affixes become available ("Serpent's", +11-20 mana, and "of Measure", +2 points to minimum damage). This will almost certainly require some form of muling or trading. I generally avoid both like the plague, but one needs all the help they can get in making an imbue useful. It'll be pretty difficult to get a rare Grim Helm that's better than everything in your library of rare Caps and Skullcaps. So both options are pretty crappy, it's up to you to choose. The new 6 Perfect Skull Horadric Cube formula provides a nice alternative to imbues, though it uses an ilvl of 100 instead of your character level, making it slightly less useful when trying to generate high quality rare Grim Helms or wand/scepters. One could use this to try for +2 to all skills rare amulets, but I think this is a waste since amulets can be gambled, and I think I can tolerate waiting until level 84 while "only" using a +1 to all skills rare amulet. Summary: The "practical dream equipment" setup I recommend for a Sorceress is, from top to bottom: Headgear: Rare Cap/Skullcap, or occasionally a rare Grim Helm with 200+ DR. Amulet: Rare. Ideally with + to all Sorceress skills, but good resistances are more important here. Weapon: Magical or rare Wand/Scepter with Fastest Cast Rate, good resistance(s), and whatever else you can get. Armor: Twitchthroe unique Studded Leather. Shield: Socketed Tower Shield fitted with three Perfect Diamonds. Belt: Rare Plated Belt. Rings: One Stone of Jordan, and one rare with good resistances and Fast Cast Rate. Alternatively, if an amulet with unusually good resistances and no + to all Sorceress skills attribute is being used, a second Stone of Jordan may be equipped here. +2 is a good "+ to all skills" total. Gloves: Frostburn unique Gauntlets. Boots: Rare plain Boots or Heavy Boots with Fastest Run/Walk. You want to be sure to get Fastest Hit Recovery somewhere; -magic damage is good to have as well, and -75% poison length would nicely cover for poor poison resistance. Yes, your high-level Standard Sorceress may have better equipment. But all these items I recommend are attainable by the time one reaches Hell/act 4, without any twinking or even trading. We will assume this equipment setup in the discussions to follow. Later, under "Character Development", I will briefly discuss intermediate equipment priorities. As a nod to the ludicrous before we move on, I'll present my nomination for the absolute best possible equipment set for a Hardcore Sorceress, this time ignoring all considerations of attainability. Since I get to put awesome modifiers on every rare, I can go for 75% blocking, 8 frame cast (see my comments on F.2.c. if this phrase makes no sense), and non-negligible DR, and still have plenty of room to spare on resistances, life, and mana. I will not take magical item finding attributes into consideration, because the Sorceress is not the best class for that; if one is going to heavily optimize magic item find, they ought to choose an appropriate class as well. Without any further delay: Headgear: Rare Grim Helm. Prefixes: Holy, Amber, Dragon's. Suffixes: Colossus, Stability, Warding. Stats: ~250 DR, ~50 lightning resist, magic damage reduced by 1, ~60 life, ~40 mana, fastest hit recovery. Amulet: Rare. Prefixes: Archangel's, Prismatic, Wyrm's. Suffixes: Apprentice, Colossus, Negation. Stats: +2 to all Sorceress skills, ~25 resist all, magic damage reduced by 4, ~60 life, ~60 mana, fast cast rate. Weapon: Rare Grave Wand. Prefixes: Ruby, Sapphire, Wyrm's. Suffixes: Magus, Wizardry, Wolf. Stats: 13-29 damage, ~50 fire resist, ~50 cold resist, ~20 life, ~90 mana, fastest cast rate. Armor: Twitchthroe unique Studded Leather. Relevant stats: 50 DR, +25% blocking, 10 strength. Shield: Rare Grim Shield. Prefixes: Holy, Viridian, Fortified. Suffixes: Deflecting, Colossus, Stability. Stats: ~300 DR, 50% blocking, ~30 poison resist, magic damage reduced by 2, ~60 life, fastest hit recovery. Belt: Rare Sharkskin Belt. Prefixes: Amber, Viridian, Serpent's. Suffixes: Colossus, Titan, Stability. Stats: 36 DR, ~30 poison resist, ~50 lightning resist, ~60 life, ~20 mana, fastest hit recovery, 19 strength. Ring 1: The Stone of Jordan unique Ring. Relevant stats: +1 to all skills, increase maximum mana 25%, 20 mana. Ring 2: Rare. Prefixes: Wyrm's, Prismatic, Emerald. Suffixes: Mammoth, Wizardry, Apprentice. Stats: 15 fire resist, 15 cold resist, 15 lightning resist, ~65 poison resist, ~40 life, ~90 mana, fast cast rate. Gloves: Magefist unique Light Gauntlets. Relevant stats: 11 DR, +1 to all Fire skills, regenerate mana 25%, faster cast rate. Boots: Rare Boots. Prefixes: Dragon's, Ruby, Sapphire. Suffixes: Haste, Titan, Tiger. Stats: 3 DR, fastest run/walk, ~50 fire resist, ~50 cold resist, ~30 life, ~40 mana, 19 strength. Aggregate item contribution: DR: ~650 base. Blocking: 75%. Run/walk speed: Maximum, ignoring Blinkbat's Form. Stamina drain: Normal. + to all skills level: 3. (Note: resistance beyond 75 only serves to reduce the impact of resistance-lowering curses and auras.) Fire resist: ~140, or ~90 in Hell difficulty. Cold resist: ~140, or ~90 in Hell difficulty. Lightning resist: ~140, or ~90 in Hell difficulty. Poison resist: ~150, or ~100 in Hell difficulty. (I would have thrown the Defiance modifier in somewhere, but it's totally unnecessary given this.) Magic damage reduction: 7. Life bonus: ~330. Mana bonus: ~360. Mana multiplier: +25%. Hit recovery time: 1/8. (Each Fastest Hit Recovery item halves the time, and they are multiplicative. Normal hit recovery time is 8 frames, so this cuts it down to 1. Hell Urdar stun time is reduced from 40 frames to 5.) Cast frames: 8. Base strength required to equip all items: 10. (Notice how the Titan attribute on the Boots allows you to "bootstrap" everything else. :)) D. Skills Special topic: Diminishing returns. With the exception of a few skills (namely, Cold Mastery and Energy Shield), you want to put either zero, one, or aim for 20 base points in a given skill. This seems too simple to be the best thing to do. Yet it probably is. Why? Because of the diminishing return characteristics of the skills. Usually, the first point invested in a skill provides a disproportionately large boost. In some cases, the next one or two points or so can provide worthwhile incremental improvements; afterward, the improvements are unambiguously not worth it unless they're for a skill where the improvement directly translates to faster killing. Thanks to + to all skills items, one doesn't even need to worry about occasionally raising a secondary skill to 2 or 3 points (except for Cold Mastery and Energy Shield). Now, for how many skills do additional points translate directly to faster killing? Three, plus your main Mastery. One such skill is Static Field, of course. After 1.04's correction to Static Field's area of effect, you never really stop benefiting from more Static Field radius. And it goes without saying that any efficient Sorceress does most of their damage with Static Field. Another such skill is your main attack spell. All the best candidates for main attack spell can singlehandedly (assuming Static Field support, of course) deal with every situation you regularly encounter. There are no interesting synergies involved in using combinations of main attack spells; this is too bad, but it's the reality. Thus, there is no reason to raise two or more main attack skills above 1 base point until you have skill points to burn. Finally, there's Warmth. Each additional point of Warmth generates 0.1% (exactly! Ignoring internal rounding details, that is.) of your mana pool per second. If you have a mana pool of 1000, that's 1 mana per second. This is not huge, but it is certainly relevant, more so than the increases you get with additional skill points elsewhere. And you can essentially never have too much mana regeneration. If one considers half the benefit of a greater mana pool to be the greater capacity, and half the benefit to be the greater regeneration, we can compute the number of "life points" an additional point of Warmth is worth. We'll assume Frostburn and one Stone of Jordan are equipped, and a mana pool around 800 (which is about right for entering Hell/act 4). And we'll assume that the 20th point of Warmth (after + to all skills items) is being added. Mana regeneration improves from 346% to 358% of base, a ~3.47% improvement, which we translate to a ~1.73% mana pool improvement. Multiplying by 800, we get roughly 13.9 mana. With Frostburn and one Stone of Jordan, this would be matched by an item providing +~8.4 mana; thus, our answer is 8-9 "life points". Earlier points in Warmth actually have similar immediate value, since although the percentage improvement is greater, the base mana pool is smaller at the time. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to observe that except for Cold Mastery and Energy Shield, additional points in any other skills beyond 3 are not worth anywhere near 8-9 "life points", except maybe the 4th and 5th points in Lightning Mastery. Some readers are probably wondering why I don't mention Thunderstorm. I'll get to that. 2. Fire Skill Tree (vi) Fire Wall (FW): The main attack skill candidate that does the best damage in the game. However, its annoying geometry combined with its lack of chilling make it inferior to Blizzard. Remember that Static Field makes raw damage numbers less important than one might initially think; Blizzard ends up allowing one to kill faster because one can cast Static Field more often when using it. The "lack of chilling" comment might make one think that Frost Nova or Frozen Orb has some synergy with this spell, but trust me, if you want area damage combined with chilling, you're best off sticking to Blizzard or Frozen Orb without bothering with Fire Wall at all. 3. Cold Skill Tree (vi) Glacial Spike (GS): It's a good panic button, and thus is a great spell to have on your left mouse button. It's also a reasonable candidate for investment once one has "skill points to burn". The increase in freeze time provided with additional points in GS is depressingly tiny, especially in Hell difficulty (only ~0.025 second per point!), but in my experience, this is still more useful than raising Thunderstorm to high levels. Slvl 20 Glacial Spike DOES allow one to more comfortably deal with Hell Oblivion Knights. However, I have not yet tested soloing Hell Chaos Sanctuary with SF/GS/Blizzard. If anyone has attempted to do so, I would like to hear how effective the combination is. Even if one is planning to eventually max Glacial Spike, it does not deserve more than 2 or 3 base points before one reaches the "skill points to burn" threshold around level 70, and I'd personally keep it at 1. Before you've maxed Blizzard and Static Field, you'll want every point you can get in both skills. An amusing variant (not recommended for Hardcore play!) involves equipping either the Ichorsting or Doomslinger unique Crossbow, for the Piercing Attack modifier. This applies to Glacial Spike. You can figure out the consequences for yourself; I'll just mention that nothing prevents a monster from being frozen and damaged more than once from a single Glacial Spike casting, if you're using one of these weapons... (vii) Blizzard (BLZ): Naturally, Blizzard made sure that their company namesake skill was one of the best in the game. :) In my experience, it's hands down the best solo main attack skill. (In parties, it has several disadvantages to Frozen Orb, which I won't bother to discuss.) The combination of good damage, good geometry, chilling, and stackability is unmatched anywhere else. Running around the perimeter of your Blizzard field, which VV mentions, is usually the best tactic; in more cramped areas or more desperate situations, it may be wise to use it to emulate Blaze, casting it behind you as you run to a safer area (where you can probably switch back to the more efficient run-around-the-perimeter tactic). I personally don't recommend getting in the habit of Teleporting to keep monsters in a Blizzard field because that's probably a waste of your casting opportunities; you want to cast Static Field as often as possible. Teleport is best used for escaping dangerous situations, and for rapidly covering ground if there are no living monsters nearby. It's worth noting that Blizzard is an "n-squared" spell, benefiting from both increased damage per second and longer duration with more skill points, while Frozen Orb benefits only linearly. From slvl 1 to 21, Blizzard's lifetime damage increases 30-fold, and its mana cost is less than doubled, while Frozen Orb's damage increases less than 4.6-fold and has 2.6 times the mana cost. So those who decided that Frozen Orb was better for them from their low-slvl experiences with both skills should try out high level Blizzard; it improves A LOT more than Frozen Orb does. If you develop your "herding" skills, I guarantee you that you'll find Blizzard a more effective soloing spell than Frozen Orb in the usual Hell/act 4 leveling areas, and the long duration makes it safer as well. The veteran Blizzard caster is aware that the spell does have "boundary problems" in a few areas, for instance Durance of Hate level 3 when you're trying to kill Night Lords. This is a potential argument for raising Glacial Spike higher than 1 base point early on, since GS will work in these cases. I've always managed to get by without doing so, however; and I've probably come out ahead, because these "boundary problems" do not really show up in the key act 2 and act 4 leveling areas. (ix) Frozen Orb (FO): I'll have to disagree with VV's claim that high-level Frozen Orb is somehow "bad" for chilling in Hell difficulty compared to Blizzard or Frost Nova. It has a rather good chill time (nearly 7 seconds in Hell difficulty at slvl 20); yes, Blizzard's active duration is not decreased by Hell difficulty while Frozen Orb's chill duration is quartered by the same, but what about the monsters not in your Blizzards? When a monster walks out of a Blizzard field, it does not remain chilled. Needing only 1-2 Frozen Orbs every ~7 seconds, without having to worry about the monsters staying within a confined area, is not a bad deal at all. Then again, covering the entire screen with Blizzards works as well, since there's no longer any concept of a monster walking out of your Blizzard field. :) (Yes, it could walk off-screen, but then it probably doesn't matter so much to you whether the monster is chilled or not.) But the point is, both main attack spell candidates are good in this department. (Otherwise, I don't have anything to add, especially given that I've never used Frozen Orb for combat.) (x) Cold Mastery (CM): Seven to nine points after + to all skills bonuses is probably a good place to stop on this skill; five before you've maxed Blizzard and Static Field. 4. Lightning Skill Tree (i) Charged Bolt: Unlike the other early main attack spells, this one is n-squared, benefiting from both more bolts and greater damage per bolt with more skill points, so it's not as useless as one might think. Of course it doesn't compare with the likes of Blizzard, but it will serve you surprisingly well until late Nightmare difficulty, if you make an effort to pump it significantly beyond slvl 20. In the meantime, the n-squared nature of Charged Bolt bites back in the form of Lightning Enchanted bosses. For some comic relief if you're fighting in a party, you may consider releasing some charged bolts when near a group of monsters; watch your allies instinctively retreat from the bolts... Since Charged Bolt is a prerequisite for Energy Shield, you don't need to go out of your way to pull this trick. (ii) Static Field (SF): Since the 1.04 patch reduced its area of effect (it used to be star-shaped and reach amazingly far in the cardinal directions, thanks to a bug), low-level SF is no longer adequate. As mentioned earlier, you really don't need skill points in many other places, so send this to 20. (viii) Thunderstorm (TS): This looks good on paper. It's passive, making its attacks concurrently with your casting. It's n-squared, benefiting both from higher damage and reduced time between bolts with more skill points. What better place could there be to invest a lot of points after you've raised all your main skills to 20? Unfortunately, it's useless in practice, for several reasons. First of all, it does lightning damage. If the targets have poor lightning resistance, Static Field and Blizzard will kill them all before Thunderstorm will contribute much. If the targets have high lightning resistance, that's when you can actually use help, but Thunderstorm will do pathetic damage in that case. Second of all, it only hits one monster at a time, with poor aim. For it to help out the SF/Blizzard juggernaut, it would need to consistently target the monster with the most life (correcting for how many Blizzards the monsters will be under in the future, cold and lightning resistance, blah blah blah, you get the idea); that would allow the Sorceress to move on to the next crowd a little sooner. If, on the other hand, it targets a monster with comparatively low life, nothing is gained, since that monster would die anyway to the SFs and Blizzards the Sorceress needs to cast to defeat the other monsters. Unfortunately, TS will do the latter more than the former, since it'll target the closest monsters, and those are the monsters that have probably suffered the most from your spells. To add insult to injury, it doesn't even hit the target half the time. (Actually, I'm not certain whether this is still the case in 1.04. If you know for sure one way or the other, email me.) And if you think it's good at dealing with straggler monsters, said monsters will probably die anyway when you engage the next large group, without you needing to divert any resources. Finally, because of factors listed above making it not conceivably worth 20 points, its n-squared nature is actually a disadvantage!! You could throw one point into it to exploit the boost from your + to all skills items, but because Thunderstorm is n-squared, even this isn't worthwhile! If these arguments aren't convincing, I'll add the anecdote that both Nor@d_II's RuthlessPsycho and my first main HC Sorceress threw a lot of points into Thunderstorm, and neither of us put any points into Thunderstorm in subsequent Sorceresses. I'm not saying that Thunderstorm is an absolutely useless skill, period; it's even possible to use it as a main attack spell for a time. But it has no place in the design of an optimal solo Sorceress. (ix) Energy Shield (ES): This is worth about 5 to 7 points after + to all skills items; you don't really need more than this, and you'd start scraping the bottom of your mana pool and thus not gaining the benefit of the extra points anyway. You first need it in Nightmare/act 4. I personally recommend that you max Blizzard first before you put the skill points into the three "extra" (non-Telekinesis/Teleport) prerequisites for Energy Shield. But once you're about to enter Nightmare/act 4, do NOT delay getting Energy Shield any further. VV comments that Nightsmoke is a good idea with Energy Shield. I disagree. The fact of the matter is, because of the combination of mana drain being double the "shielded" life and Nightsmoke mana gain being computed after Energy Shield has reduced damage, Nightsmoke ends up not being worth the opportunity cost. Let's say you have slvl 7 Energy Shield (46%), and you're hit for 100 damage. Without Nightsmoke, you lose 54 life and 46*2 = 92 mana. With Nightsmoke, you lose 54 life and 92-27 = 65 mana. Now, I don't plan to be hit for 100 damage that often. In the meantime, by Nightmare act 4, I've got a pretty good mana pool, and the difference between a 65 mana hit and a 92 mana hit (given that such hits aren't going to happen very often) isn't big. All it does is give me a little more "range" before I'm forced to return to town because of no mana potions and an empty mana pool (in that circumstance, you're practically always better off making a lightning trip to town than waiting for your mana to regenerate, since town trips can take less than 10 seconds, while your mana pool would take at least ~30 seconds to refill), and then only sometimes (since sometimes I'll be forced to return to town because of a full inventory instead). And there's the key: if you want more range, you'll benefit more from a 16-slot belt. In the long run, you'll get better other attributes from rare Plated Belts as well (though Nightsmoke's +10 to all resistances and +20 mana is not bad). In a nutshell: if you happen upon Nightsmoke, use it if it's better than your other choices at the time, but it's inferior to a good rare Plated Belt, and thus should not be a gambling target. It's worth noting that the Barbarian easily makes the best use of Nightsmoke. He doesn't need the extra potion slots, has so much life that he can afford to regularly be deliberately hit for mana, has a poor mana pool and needs mana to operate efficiently, and finally can immediately steal all the lost life back anyway after his mana has been recharged by a hit! Of course you usually want to steal enough mana such that you don't need to use this ability, but in practice you'll run out of mana sometimes, and Nightsmoke makes it not really matter. There's a special tactic that some use with Energy Shield: not putting any base points in it at all (and thus saving the three prerequisite points as well), instead having a +3 to Energy Shield staff (preferably a 1x4 staff to save inventory space) they can equip in town, allowing them to cast the spell before returning to battle (again outfitted with their usual weapon/shield combination). I do not recommend this, since Energy Shield disappears when you run out of mana, and one usually wants to recast it in the field when this happens (after drinking a mana or rejuvenation potion), instead of being forced to make a trip to town. Also, trips to town take somewhat longer because of dealing with the staff; you can't just do a 10 second heal-and-inventory-dump. So I think this "optimization" ends up slowing down your leveling, not speeding it up. Still, this may be worth considering as a temporary measure if one thinks they need "just a few more points" in Warmth and/or Static Field to get themselves over some perceived hump, before they spend several consecutive levels getting the Energy Shield skill points, which provide no immediate offensive benefit. If you're out of mana, not only do you have offensive problems, but Energy Shield also no longer functions. So it may be a good idea to develop a habit of "fighting off the top of your mana bulb", increasing the amount of surprise damage you can handle. But this should be balanced with keeping your killing speed nearly as high as possible, since if you know what you're doing, you shouldn't be surprised too often. I would attempt to develop a mathematical model to describe this, and derive both an appropriate Energy Shield level and life/mana ratio from it, but in my experience this is a very fuzzy, situational thing; I have to admit that I rarely made a specific effort to keep mana in reserve, instead relying on the frequency of mana potion drops and my ability to make quick town trips, and I still performed better than most. So instead, I can only state the numbers "slvl 5 to 7 ES", "600-750 life", and "~800 mana" without anything more than experience to back them up (and in the case of Energy Shield, the obvious diminishing returns beyond slvl 5-7). One may wonder whether it's worthwhile to keep a relatively low life total, relying on high level Energy Shield and a very large mana pool to achieve equivalent survivability, while having superior mana regeneration. Unfortunately, because of Energy Shield's 2 to 1 conversion ratio, you don't really come out ahead; perhaps more important, you'd become too vulnerable to mana draining monsters. (x) Lightning Mastery (LM): Comparable to Warmth, since you need to cast Static Field all the time; however, it has more pronounced diminishing returns. 3 points after + to all skills is nice to have, and should be enough. Ideally, this is achieved with 1 base point and 2 or more points from items. 5. Understanding +Skills Items: The first point or two of "+ to all skills" provide meaningful benefits to Warmth, Glacial Spike, Blizzard, Cold Mastery, Static Field, Energy Shield, and Lightning Mastery. We've computed the Warmth benefit to be about 8-9 "life points". If you cast Static Field a bit over once a second on average (you've got to cast Blizzards as well, and run around attracting monster groups), reducing Static Field cost by 7-8% gets you 0.63-0.72 mana per cast, or roughly the same as the 0.8 mana per second benefit you get from a point of Warmth on a mana pool of 800. The reduction in Teleport cost is not totally useless (and in fact exceeds the reduction you'd get from investing points directly in Teleport), so I'd add 2-3 "life points" to account for this. (On the other hand, I'd offer that the reduction in Energy Shield casting cost is genuinely worthless, seeing how the base cost is 3 mana. :)) So an additional Lightning Mastery point can also be said to be worth about 11 "life points". At this point, I'll estimate the "life point" value of the Blizzard benefit at 16, the Static Field benefit at 12, and the rest of the benefits at 8. Yes, these are intuitive estimates I don't have any "justification" for, deal with it. :) This means the first point or two of "+ to all skills" are worth about 72 "life points" each, which is nicely aligned with what one would generally need to sacrifice to get the attribute. Further points of "+ to all skills" have less value, as Cold Mastery, Energy Shield, and Lightning Mastery exhibit moderate diminishing returns; simultaneously, the sacrifices you'd need to make to get the additional levels of "+ to all skills" increase. So count on getting +2 to all skills from your items for most of your later life. F. Combat 2.c. Casting Spells: the Need for Speed There's an easy-to-memorize frame delay table which is not provided in VV's guide or the Chaos Sanctuary, so I'll provide it here. The "Fast Cast Rate" attribute is worth one "Fast Cast point", while the "Faster Cast Rate" and "Fastest Cast Rate" attributes are both worth two. (The game runs at exactly 25 frames per second.) Fast Cast points | Cast delay -----------------+----------- 0 | 13 frames 1 | 12 frames 2 | 11 frames 3 | 10 frames 4 | 10 frames 5 | 9 frames 6 | 8 frames 7 | 8 frames 8 | 7 frames 9 | 7 frames Now, it's usually said that each "Fast Cast point" provides an additive +10% bonus, which is then mangled by rounding. But if one attempts to come up with a corresponding algorithm to generate this table, one finds that no set of parameters actually fit the data! The closest one can get is to state that the base cast delay is 14 frames, this number is divided by the fast cast bonus, and then the result rounded down. But that doesn't explain why 14/1.0 = 14 rounds down to 13, while 14/1.4 = 10 is not rounded down. (Obviously any other choice of base cast delay mangles either the 0 Fast Cast point value or the 4 Fast Cast point value.) Similarly, if one wants to round up, 12.6 works as a base value, but only assuming idiosyncratic rounding (this time, with the 4 Fast Cast point and 8 Fast Cast Point values). Any other type of underlying computation is less plausible (unless someone disassembles the code and shows me the math), so I'm inclined to guess that there's actually no formula, and cast delay is determined via simple table lookup in the code. In fact, given how both attempts to fit a formula to the table "perfectly fail", it would not surprise me if this table was a mathematical curiosity deliberately conjured up by a bored Blizzard employee for exactly this effect. If you're stuck on a desert island and need to recreate this table, remember this property and you should succeed. In any case, assuming one is using a wand/scepter with the Fastest Cast Rate attribute and a socketed diamond shield, Magefist's Faster Cast Rate attribute only decreases cast delay by 1 frame unless one was at 4 Fast Cast points previously, meaning they're equipped with two jewelry items with the Fast Cast Rate attribute. So, in almost all circumstances (zero or one Fast Cast Rate jewelry items equipped), Magefist provides only a +10-11% cast rate bonus (reducing delay from 11 to 10 frames, or 10 to 9 frames), but if one is lucky enough to be able to regularly equip two Fast Cast Rate items, Magefist provides a +25% bonus (reducing delay from 10 to 8 frames). 2.e. Some Particularly Problematic Monsters (ii) Aura Enchanted: Might eventually needs to be feared as well. In Hell/act 4 it is of high enough level to be significantly more dangerous than the "Cursed" attribute, and of course if you're Cursed while being hit by a horde of Might-enchanted monsters... (iii) Cursed: Be aware that the attack that curses you does not receive the double damage bonus, though subsequent attacks will. So you have a good life total and Energy Shield level, you can often survive one hit from Hell Hephasto. But if you're cursed at that point, TELEPORT OR RUN THE HELL AWAY AND RETURN TO TOWN and get that Amplify Damage removed, or you will almost certainly die. Hephasto hits for 357-537 damage in Hell difficulty without an additional helping attribute (pray that he's not Aura Enchanted with Might; if he has Might and Teleportation, um... don't make a habit of regularly fighting Hell Hephasto, okay?), which you can usually survive at that point... you probably cannot survive a followup hit for double that amount. (vi) Lightning Enchanted: With good Lightning Resistance, these are annoying, but usually will not kill you if you know what you are doing. The real danger is a Lightning Enchanted monster with the Multi-Shot attribute as well. Multi-Shot multiplies the number of retaliatory charged bolts released... and thanks to how Charged Bolt works, these bolts are stacked on top of each other, so you end up seeing thick white "bolts from hell". Continuing to fight one of these is usually not worth the risk; RuthlessPsycho died to one. New entry: Undead Stygian Dolls. Their death explosion damage actually increases with the number of players in the game. Basically, if you're near one when one dies in an 8 player game, you're probably dead. If you see them, Town Portal out and enter another game; don't think about behaving otherwise. They're that dangerous. 3.b. Coping with Lag Your Stamina gives you a good indication of lag conditions. If it's not moving when it should be, it may be time to retreat for a while or Esc-Save and Exit. G. Character Development 1. Character Lifespan Level 1-11: I recommend switching to a weapon/shield combination as quickly as possible. The best available damage-dealing weapons will often be socketed weapons fitted with chipped rubies and/or topazes. Once you reach level 6, Static Field + Frost Nova near waypoints (so you can get mana recharges whenever you want) can be a fast way to level. Needless to say, I do not recommend putting a point in Fire Bolt or Inferno. Also, the Telekinesis point can be delayed until you're about to reach level 18. Level 12-17: I recommend using Static Field + Shiver Armor + melee for killing at this stage. You should have enough money at this stage to buy and use Town Portal scrolls with abandon. Remember, when you're out of mana, it takes a lot less time to get a recharge from town than to wait around. I don't recommend putting a point in Blaze since it eventually goes obsolete, and you don't need it. Level 18-23: Glacial Spike is a godsend. Though it has a rather high mana cost for this stage of your development, so be ready to make trips to town with insane frequency. I wouldn't actually move on to act 3 until level 24 or so. You can get good, safe experience in the Lost City and Ancient Tunnels contained within until then. Needless to say, I don't recommend putting a point in Fire Wall. Get a lot of +life items before taking on Duriel, in a party. It's just not worth the risk of soloing. You can get your uberdrops from Mephisto and Diablo, both of which you can safely solo. You may want to consider temporarily using a + to Glacial Spike staff to speed things up, but make sure you don't endanger your own life in the process. Level 24-29: Buy a good magical wand/scepter. Sigon's Guard is a good shield at this stage, and you may even want to actively look for it (by hanging around the Kurast city portion of act 3). Invest a point in Blizzard every level until it's maxed out when you reach level 43. Level 30-34: Your treasury should fill up around now, which means it's time to start massive gambling. Caps, Skullcaps, Boots, and Heavy Boots are always worth gambling. Since you're not working under any resistance penalties yet, you can probably make good use of Tarnhelm if you get it at this stage. However, your primary unique targets are Twitchthroe and Frostburn. At level 30, I usually put 1 point into Cold Mastery and 1 point into Lightning Mastery, in addition to the obligatory Blizzard point. (These two extra points conveniently match the Izual quest reward.) Level 35-50: Act 1 is stupid. Take advantage of Teleport and zip through the entire act in 30 minutes or so, though pick up your Den of Evil skill point of course :). Again, the Lost City and Ancient Tunnels are the most efficient places to level up in act 2. (If this makes no sense to you, it is instructive to investigate what monsters appear in what areas, what their levels and relative experience values are, and how quickly and safely a Sorceress can deal with the monsters. The Ancient Tunnels stand out spectacularly in such an analysis, and the Lost City containing them is one of the best alternatives. This is borne out by my own leveling experience.) I generally make the jump to act 4 at level 48, when I can no longer receive full experience from Lost City/Ancient Tunnels. You should successfully gamble Twitchthroe and Frostburn during this period, at which point you should start aiming for the Stone of Jordan. In the meantime, Nightmare/act 4 is probably the place to start equipping a socketed Tower Shield. (Sometimes, I only have two perfect diamonds when I reach Nightmare/act 4; I'll still equip the shield in that case, and of course hope to obtain the third diamond as soon as possible.) Level 51 and beyond: If you're playing in Hardcore mode, you probably want to delay entering Hell difficulty to level 61, since there aren't many Hell difficulty games. Otherwise, advance as you wish, and I've provided plenty of advice which has its greatest value in this stage of the game. 2. A Generic Skill Plan I'll provide a not-so-generic plan: 2. Frozen Armor 3. Warmth 4. Ice Bolt 5. (save) 6. Static Field and Ice Blast Den of Evil. Frost Nova 7-9. Static Field 10-11. Warmth 12. Shiver Armor 13-14. Warmth 15-16. Static Field 17. Telekinesis 18. Glacial Spike Radament. Teleport 19-20. Warmth 21-23. Static Field 24-29. Blizzard Izual. (save) 30. Blizzard, Cold Mastery, and Lightning Mastery 31-36. Blizzard Den of Evil (NM). Cold Mastery Radament (NM). Cold Mastery 37-43. Blizzard 44. Charged Bolt 45. Lightning 46. Chain Lightning 47-49. Energy Shield Izual (NM). 2x Cold Mastery 50-60. Static Field 61. Warmth Den of Evil (Hell). Warmth Radament (Hell). Warmth 62-71. Warmth 72-73. Cold Mastery Izual (Hell). 2x Glacial Spike 74-90. Glacial Spike Remarks: Obviously, some details of the ordering are somewhat arbitrary. ("SF, SF, SF, Warmth, Warmth, Warmth, Warmth, SF, SF...") But there are a few things to note here. Because of how rounding is used in the Mana Regeneration formula, slvl 7 is a good place to park Warmth for a long time. (This provides 202% of base mana regeneration. This 202% is multiplied by an integer and then rounded down; obviously, you're not going to lose more than 2% in the rounding down. Compare to, for instance, the 166% provided by slvl 4 Warmth. If only it were 167%...) Thanks to the prevalence of mana potions in act 4 in 5-8 player games, the ease of town recharges, and the 1.04 correction of Static Field area of effect, maxing Static Field is a higher priority once Warmth is at 7. Of course, rounding behavior is specific to the slvl of Warmth after modification by + to all skills items, and during the long time I recommend that one park Warmth at 7, one will usually start getting +1-2 to all skills from their equipment. To this, I'll offer that slvl 9 Warmth (after modification), at 226%, also exhibits good rounding behavior. Though slvl 11 is better at 250%, so if you're that sort of micromanaging type, you may try to arrange for post-modification Warmth to sit at 11 for a long time. You'll need to freeze your + to all skills level to do this effectively. As discussed earlier, Blizzard benefits hugely from more points, hence the mad rush to max it that I recommend. Remember, you get a THIRTY-FOLD improvement from slvl 1 to 21 (because as a solo Sorceress, you'll be able to use much if not all of the 24 second duration if you maneuver properly). Note that, even with my somewhat ruthless specialization, I'm not "out of the woods" regarding skill points until level 71 or so. It does take a while to get to level 71. So even though I'm throwing points away on Glacial Spike with abandon afterward, I do not recommend engaging in that practice prematurely. There are a few nice small-scale details embedded in my plan which I'll leave you to notice on your own. I. Frequently Asked Questions (iv) Q: How many skill points should I have in Warmth? If only the answer was actually as complicated as VV states. It's obviously 20 in the long run because one runs out of other meaningful places to put points. (vii) Q: What is the best weapon/shield combo? Actually, for all practical purposes, this does have a definite answer in Hardcore Hell/act 4, which has been discussed earlier. Rare Fastest Cast Rate wand/scepter + socketed Tower Shield, with Twitchthroe boosting the shield's blocking. (ix) Q: Should I get a gemmed helm? I've never found a gemmed helm to be better than my other options. By the time you can get decent gems for a helm, you can get Tarnhelm and/or a good rare, since Caps and Skullcaps are so cheap to gamble. Mana regeneration is overrated in the early game. Remember that the cost of Town Portal scrolls can be ignored after level 12 or so; thus, even with a skull or sapphire helm, you'd be best off getting much of your regeneration from lightning town trips. (Run to the healer, and start running back to your portal as soon as he/she starts talking.) So sapphires are better than skulls (and you should be saving skulls for the rare cube formula anyway), but you can probably do better with the magical and rare helms that you find, even before you start gambling. (x) Q: Which is better: Heavenly Garb, Goldskin, or Silks of the Victor? If you happen upon it, Heavenly Garb is good stopgap armor before you get Twitchthroe; in fact, it's probably better than Goldskin since you aren't so hard-pressed for resistances at that stage of the game, while Goldskin's running speed decrease and heavy stamina drain are quite annoying. (xi) Which is better: Frostburn or Magefist? One way to put it: if you really don't need any more mana, then you should probably pump only Vitality for a long time and still use Frostburn. You can never really have too much life in Hardcore Hell/act 4. Use Magefist at your own peril. (xii) How much mana should I have? I've personally found ~800 mana to work sufficiently well in Hell/act 4, and I used this figure in an earlier computation. (xiii) How much life should I have? I've used "600-750" in an earlier computation, so you can guess my answer here. :) This number is based primarily on my experience; if you have a significantly different playing style, you may find a different level suitable, and can check how many of my item and skill recommendations still hold in that case. But most other high level HC Sorceresses I've communicated with aim for roughly the same range. Beyond 600-750 life and ~800 mana, one probably wants to raise both mana and life, favoring life to some degree. Concluding thought: You have not really lived until you've been locked in a room with Hephasto the Armorer with nothing but Telekinesis at your disposal. VV: I've heard that you're working on a large update to your guide, ETA about two or three weeks from now. Feel free to use any of the content contained herein. -- Dog of Justice, 9 January 2001.