1.10 sorc

[MongoJerry]

Now, what do I mean by being critical? As much as I've enjoyed MongoJerry's accounts, several points have ruffled me the wrong way. First were the cross character skills -- as you may have seen in a previous thread, I'm dead set against any and all cross class skills. Specifically, Gunter: as a friend pointed out to me, Gunter was essentially a firewall sorc with much higher life and resists and access to a nearly irresistible, stunning telekinesis that covers half the screen. To MongoJerry: please don't let my criticism stop you -- we need more accounts like yours. My criticisms is more directed at the direction blizzard has chosen for the patch.

I'm glad you've enjoyed my accounts, despite your feelings regarding cross-character skills. However, your animosity toward cross-character skills seems to have clouded your reading of the accounts of Gunter, so I'd like to correct your impressions of a few things. First, War Cry doesn't cover half the screen. In fact, it has a small radius -- perhaps 1/3 of the screen wide which in two dimensions means that it only reaches 1/9th the area of the screen. One can't saunter into a room and expect to stun everything in sight with one War Cry cast. It takes time and sometimes tactics to gather all of the monsters to you.

Second, without fire mastery or synergies, the firewall granted by the Trang Oul's set doesn't do very much damage. Gunter couldn't do nearly the damage that a true firewall sorc could do. Despite how pretty the firewalls made the screenshots, Gunter was really a singer barbarian who on occasion cast a firewall to kill physical immunes or slightly increase the damage dealt against individual opponents. It was war cry that did 90% of the damage Gunter himself dealt -- not the firewall. If I hadn't chosen to make a pure casting barbarian for character reasons, Gunter could've done just as well by having a decent weapon on weapon switch and placing a point in Berserk for use against physical immunes. Actually, since he had found the runes and a 4-socket phase blade that would've allowed him to make an unwtinked 'Passion' phase blade, he wouldn't have needed to divert any skill points to the combat skills tree to get Berserk.

My second beef with your characters, btw, is that they begin in hell difficulty, usually with their endgame equipment. I like that most (if not all) the equipment was found, but what I'd really like to see is how a no-twink character does straight from act 1 normal to hell baal.

I hope you know that I don't use a character editor for any of my characters. I started Grizabella, Gunter, and Maldar at level 1 and did every quest and hit every waypoint along the way through normal and nightmare. I twinked Grizabella with equipment, but Gunter and Maldar were played completely untwinked in normal and nightmare difficulties. In fact, in Gunter's case, he was played as a pure singer barbarian throughout nightmare difficulty in 8-player mode (although he had constant mana problems).

I start my accounts in hell, because for the most part I think the adventures of the characters in normal and nightmare would be uninteresting to read about for most people. Let's face it, it's not like normal or nightmare difficulties are very dangerous. They're just the long slow grind that one has to get through to get to the "big show" in hell. Besides, if I talked about an oddball character's adventures in nightmare difficulty, I'd end up discussing a lot of tactics that I would end up using in hell which would take away a lot of the "tension" from the story. For example, there are a lot of people over at diabloii.net who think that Maldar is going to get slaughtered by the hell Ancients and the intrigue and general "how's he going to pull this one off?" feeling is keeping people interested in Maldar's adventures. I won't say that I think the hell Ancients will be easy, because they won't be, but I think that if people knew how Maldar beat the Ancients in nightmare, there would be less interest and intrigue in his story.

Besides, while telling Gunter's story, I had a hard enough time coming up with new ways of saying I taunted/war cried/firewalled/killed things. If I had told Gunter's story in nightmare, can you imagine how many times I'd end up saying things like "Just like I did in nightmare, I taunted and war cried these guys to death. Oh, just to make a pretty screenshot, I threw in a firewall for good measure?"

With early testing, sorceress are worthless in 1.10 without a godly merc/party. Fireball seems to be the only skill that actually deals 1.10 levels of damage, and only by maxing it out. Meteor doesn't do that much more damage than fireball, I imagine, if you consider cast times, and firewall... again, requires a merc/party. I'd love for people to come up with more than one or two ways for 1.10 sorcs to work. Fireball and MAYBE nova are the only ones I can think of having a hope of functioning, or MAYBE firewall. I don't have the patience to whip up a sorc with slvl30 skills and a godly merc though, and that's just twinking anyway.

I've been so busy playing my oddball characters that I haven't played a cookie-cutter sorceress in 1.10, yet. However, the fact that my varient characters have managed to get through hell tells me that what you're saying can't possibly be true. If my varients had access to the high-powered area of effect spells that normal sorceresses do, they would totally destroy 1-player hell.

My guess is that you're thinking of 8-player hell and I suspect that your definition of "worthless" is a character who can't walk through 8-player hell and destroy anything in his or her path without being touched. Personally, I like that Blizzard has increased the difficulty of the game. "Hell" is supposed to be challenging and 8-player hell should be something that requires a party to succeed in.