Frostdin

[Chaerophon]

You found an HOZ? Nice. Are you on ladder/west?

And yea, frost zealots are one of the great budget melee builds, they don't necessarily need a great weapon to do well.

Yup, I'm on ladder/west. We should play some time (though I'm severely restricted in how much I can play these days - a comprehensive exam in less than 2 weeks plus various other stressful school-related things). Someone traded me a low-defense HoZ straight up for 15 pgems and an Oculus I found on a free for all clickfest NM Baal run. Based on what I can tell, I think I did pretty good on that deal. Seems as though HoZ is more coveted than I remember. Did the drop rate change at some point? Maybe it was duped and I didn't know about it back in the old days.

Anyways, I started doing this thing where I leave games open with "x 4ur y" and run bloody foothills or rof/chaos sanctuary looking for flawless gems, waiting for people to show up. It worked out on several occasions. I also traded a bunch of low-level set stuff for pgems using the same tactic. I ended up trading 7 pgems for my (less than perfect) ravenfrost, 20 for nosferatu's and 18 for soul drainers (or the other way around).

I couldn't afford to get too wrapped up in the game at this point due to past history with getting "carried away", so I restricted myself to only one character - no MF specific builds, etc. Turned out to be a lot of fun getting to know the game again, and "gem-hunting" can be done in a lot of interesting places you don't ever see when mfing. It's definitely a whole 'nother world compared with the 1.09 days.

As for the build; I agree, you don't need high-end weaponry to make it work in hell. However, it certainly helps. I didn't get the stuff off my friend until a couple of weeks ago. Until then, I was doing alright (not great, just alright) with an Atlantean someone gave me for free. The extra frame zeal and additional damage make a pretty significant difference.