11-05-2003, 12:31 PM
Bowazons: all the elemental arrows work properly now [the physical part is no longer auto-hit, and they all carry physical damage now, including EA], but the removal of the area effect CtC on Freeze Arrow nerfs this skill a tad, and none of the elemental arrows does enough damage to make them worth using. Strafe is bug-ridden, but even after the bugs it is a helluva strong attack now, because of the huge range and minimum number of arrows. Multishot is as good as ever with a good bow. Guided Arrow has been over-nerfed and might as well not have been there anymore.
As for elemental damage, either invest in Magic Arrow which converts a % of physical damage to magic, or get level 1 Lightning Bolt which converts 100% of your javelin damage into lightning!!! Most of the difficulty of 1.10 is negated by a very strong Valkyrie tanking for you; D/A/E and IS are still useless.
Spearazons: the physical spear skills are weak and not worth using, and Fend still has the damnable whiff bug from the beta. This is the weakest branch of any tree in the game [yes, including creepers]. The lightning spear attacks are good now, most of the 1.09 bugs have been fixed, but a new bug has been introduced that makes stacking Lightning Strikes ineffective, and because of this Charged Strike is actually better. But the lack of a ranged attack still renders this a variant build. Slow Missiles would have been good if it had a longer range.
Interestingly, if you insist on using physical spear attacks, Passion gives you level 1[+adders] Zeal and Berserk, which is a lot better than anything you can get in the actual spear skill branch!!
Javazons: Plague and some poison items is now actually a good attack. Lightning Fury has pathetic synergies [1%!] and the lack of huge cow-like monster packs also nerfs the skill somewhat, but it's still strong stuff. Again, Valkyrie negates the increased difficulty of 1.10.
Elemental druids: the Armageddon synergies have been doubled since the beta, and it now does a lot of damage per slow-moving random unreliable short-ranged no-AoE meteor hit. Boulder and Volcano do physical damage in addition to fire, which is good because all of the fire skills are synergized and all of the wind skills are synergized and you need to pour all 110 points into one or the other to even do any damage at all. Unfortunately, Boulder and Volcano also stand out as having the worst synergies in the branch. Wind druids are sacked because of the lack of a decent cold skill, fire druids suck at killing fire immunes because of the low physical damage on Volcano, and in 1.10, you can't use wind and fire unless you want to suck at both until you get like +20 elemental skills.
Spirits die in two hits now, and are not worth using unless you have a strong meat wall, which you won't have because of all the points wasted in synergies. Vines are still as useless as ever. SoB is still completely useless.
Shapeshifter druids: can now cast Armageddon in wereform, and Fire Claws gets some impressive synergies from elemental fire skills! The fact that no one ever used Fire Claws is another matter, and in either case, you need so many points in the elemental tree to do any damage that you'd have no points left for shapeshifting skills. Rabies now has a long duration and a synergy with Poison Creeper, carries weapon damage, and is now actually useful as variant material. Other than that, nothing has changed. Except for the fact that spirits lose their PI in Hell and die in two hits, of course.
Trapassins: traps receive godly synergies from pretty much anything and everything else in the tree. CBS can get a lot of bolts and a lot of shots, LS can do thousands of damage, and Fire Blast has had its dynamite charge replaced with a small thermo-nuclear device. The one skill that stands out like a sore thumb is WoI, which is pretty useless even with all the synergies. But FB is good enough for the occasional LI, and that lightning tears everything else to pieces. Trapassins are actually better than MAsins now!
Sorceresses: lightning-wise, Nova and CB have disappeared into the variant tray unless you have tons of godly elite uniques and 5%/5% Rainbow Facets. ES has a synergy that reduces the amount of mana damage taken, which is very good; the only problem is that the synergetic skill is Telekinesis. Lightning is better than CL now, but neither is very good because of the animation-lock. Thunderstorm is 'decent', but due to the lack of a good attack spell in the tree, it would be hard to justify parting with 40+ points to get one passive attack skill that distributes so-so damage to single targets.
The cold skills are still as useless/useful as ever, so in fact nothing has changed except for the added synergies. Orb is still uber, everything else is garbage. The worthless cold armors get worthless synergies.
Fireball, Hydra, Enchant and especially Meteor are godly skills. Fireball/Meteor/FO is the big combo these days, and Enchant does a lot of damage, about 100x more than in CD2 1.03!! :) The left-hand branch of fire skills [Inferno, Blaze, Firewall] is irrelevant; neither Blaze nor Firewall gets a synergy at all, and Inferno gets a useless synergy with the useless Warmth skill.
A very nice bonus for the class is that the CtA runeword gives level 1-6[+adders] BO, which can get to be quite high for sorcies, since the majority of their +skils adders are general +all skills, which includes barbarian skills!
Necromancer: skeletons are good for the most part, but they totally suck in areas like the BF and CP, where they get tangled up on obstacles and destroyed from afar. Skeletons are actually better than mages now, and even better if you have an Enigma to teleport them around. Revives are quite good now because of the improved monster stats, but they can't be relied on like in the good old days. Golems are totally worthless and die in two hits, even your expensive IG. All in all, you can mostly ignore this entire tree unless you like skeletons.
Bone-wise, BS hits for a lot of damage if you have all the synergies, but LR no longer affects it! CE is back to its 1.09 status but the reduction of monster HP in large player count games and the removal of the 50% resistance made it somewhat better. Poison skills are useless again because of the Bramble nerf.
Curses are very important, especially DV and to a lesser degree Attract and Decrepify. The problem is that CtC curse mods are abundant in 1.10, and your curses will constantly get overwritten by that moron with his Dracul's Grasp ['omg use loh u noob!!'] or Exile shield or Delirium or Reaper's Toll or Scarab or whatever he has that casts random curses at what seems to be 50% chance when doing anything at all. As for actual necromancer curses, IM seems strangely useless for some reason [bug?] and in most cases the damage curses are not worth it anymore!
Hammerdins are the best paladins right now, even though they need to max a bunch of useless synergy skills. But BH ignores undead and demon resistances, and there is exactly 1 magic immune animal in the game, and it's stashed away in an area noone ever goes to anyway.
Nothing much has changed about other skills except for a couple of synergy bonuses: Fanaticism is still the best aura in the game; Holy Freeze is now doubly useless because of Doom; Defiance is now doubly useless because of Exile; Holy Fire has a worthless melee damage bonus and is now doubly useless because of Hand of Justice; the single resistance auras have a worthless maximum resistance bonus and an even more worthless passive maximum resistance bonus [60 points into resistance auras = 1 Guardian Angel]; the worthless Cleansing and Meditation auras acquire a worthless healing effect when you put points into Prayer; the worthless Holy Bolt skill gets a gigantic damage synergy from a bunch of worthless skills and ignores resistances [as if there are any undead in the game beyond act 2], and also gets a worthless healing synergy...
You may want 1 point into Salvation 'just in case'. Big deal.
One big and underrated change is the fact that Holy Shield boosts your overall defense!
Barbarians: a couple of melee skills get a synergetic % conversion to magic damage from Berserk, which annoyingly reduces your damage output against magic immunes, and Berserk itself gets a synergy bonus from Shout, adding up to 20 extra wasted points to kill PIs. This class has seen a lot of changes; the most obvious one is the fact that WW is very dangerous to use now, between the cooldown timer and the increased lethality of the monsters; Concentrate may well be the way to go. Frenzy has been removed from the skill tab. Double Throw has a damage bonus and would have been good if they hadn't fixed the mastery bug, which neatly cancels out the ED bonus, and if there were any useful unique throwing axes to pass the time until hell freezes over and you get an ethereal 450% ED rare axe with self-replenish. One of the new elite ones has about half the elemental damage of Hellrack and sucks in every other respect, and the other has 33% Amp which would have been useful if it didn't have that damnable HCMTF on it which nicely overwrites the Amp Damage.
The character has a lot of options to weaken, slow or stop enemies, but they only work on enemies that are already on top of you and have about the same cast 'speed' as CL. But if you can get off a Warcry before you die, then everyone will sit there stunned until the universe collapses in upon itself, and you can kill them with zero risk.
The majority of the new unique weapons and all of the new unique armors are total garbage. You're better off shopping for Cruels and/or using your old uniques.
Overall rating:
Sorc
Amz [because of WF]
Asn
Nec
Bar
Pal
Dru
As for elemental damage, either invest in Magic Arrow which converts a % of physical damage to magic, or get level 1 Lightning Bolt which converts 100% of your javelin damage into lightning!!! Most of the difficulty of 1.10 is negated by a very strong Valkyrie tanking for you; D/A/E and IS are still useless.
Spearazons: the physical spear skills are weak and not worth using, and Fend still has the damnable whiff bug from the beta. This is the weakest branch of any tree in the game [yes, including creepers]. The lightning spear attacks are good now, most of the 1.09 bugs have been fixed, but a new bug has been introduced that makes stacking Lightning Strikes ineffective, and because of this Charged Strike is actually better. But the lack of a ranged attack still renders this a variant build. Slow Missiles would have been good if it had a longer range.
Interestingly, if you insist on using physical spear attacks, Passion gives you level 1[+adders] Zeal and Berserk, which is a lot better than anything you can get in the actual spear skill branch!!
Javazons: Plague and some poison items is now actually a good attack. Lightning Fury has pathetic synergies [1%!] and the lack of huge cow-like monster packs also nerfs the skill somewhat, but it's still strong stuff. Again, Valkyrie negates the increased difficulty of 1.10.
Elemental druids: the Armageddon synergies have been doubled since the beta, and it now does a lot of damage per slow-moving random unreliable short-ranged no-AoE meteor hit. Boulder and Volcano do physical damage in addition to fire, which is good because all of the fire skills are synergized and all of the wind skills are synergized and you need to pour all 110 points into one or the other to even do any damage at all. Unfortunately, Boulder and Volcano also stand out as having the worst synergies in the branch. Wind druids are sacked because of the lack of a decent cold skill, fire druids suck at killing fire immunes because of the low physical damage on Volcano, and in 1.10, you can't use wind and fire unless you want to suck at both until you get like +20 elemental skills.
Spirits die in two hits now, and are not worth using unless you have a strong meat wall, which you won't have because of all the points wasted in synergies. Vines are still as useless as ever. SoB is still completely useless.
Shapeshifter druids: can now cast Armageddon in wereform, and Fire Claws gets some impressive synergies from elemental fire skills! The fact that no one ever used Fire Claws is another matter, and in either case, you need so many points in the elemental tree to do any damage that you'd have no points left for shapeshifting skills. Rabies now has a long duration and a synergy with Poison Creeper, carries weapon damage, and is now actually useful as variant material. Other than that, nothing has changed. Except for the fact that spirits lose their PI in Hell and die in two hits, of course.
Trapassins: traps receive godly synergies from pretty much anything and everything else in the tree. CBS can get a lot of bolts and a lot of shots, LS can do thousands of damage, and Fire Blast has had its dynamite charge replaced with a small thermo-nuclear device. The one skill that stands out like a sore thumb is WoI, which is pretty useless even with all the synergies. But FB is good enough for the occasional LI, and that lightning tears everything else to pieces. Trapassins are actually better than MAsins now!
Sorceresses: lightning-wise, Nova and CB have disappeared into the variant tray unless you have tons of godly elite uniques and 5%/5% Rainbow Facets. ES has a synergy that reduces the amount of mana damage taken, which is very good; the only problem is that the synergetic skill is Telekinesis. Lightning is better than CL now, but neither is very good because of the animation-lock. Thunderstorm is 'decent', but due to the lack of a good attack spell in the tree, it would be hard to justify parting with 40+ points to get one passive attack skill that distributes so-so damage to single targets.
The cold skills are still as useless/useful as ever, so in fact nothing has changed except for the added synergies. Orb is still uber, everything else is garbage. The worthless cold armors get worthless synergies.
Fireball, Hydra, Enchant and especially Meteor are godly skills. Fireball/Meteor/FO is the big combo these days, and Enchant does a lot of damage, about 100x more than in CD2 1.03!! :) The left-hand branch of fire skills [Inferno, Blaze, Firewall] is irrelevant; neither Blaze nor Firewall gets a synergy at all, and Inferno gets a useless synergy with the useless Warmth skill.
A very nice bonus for the class is that the CtA runeword gives level 1-6[+adders] BO, which can get to be quite high for sorcies, since the majority of their +skils adders are general +all skills, which includes barbarian skills!
Necromancer: skeletons are good for the most part, but they totally suck in areas like the BF and CP, where they get tangled up on obstacles and destroyed from afar. Skeletons are actually better than mages now, and even better if you have an Enigma to teleport them around. Revives are quite good now because of the improved monster stats, but they can't be relied on like in the good old days. Golems are totally worthless and die in two hits, even your expensive IG. All in all, you can mostly ignore this entire tree unless you like skeletons.
Bone-wise, BS hits for a lot of damage if you have all the synergies, but LR no longer affects it! CE is back to its 1.09 status but the reduction of monster HP in large player count games and the removal of the 50% resistance made it somewhat better. Poison skills are useless again because of the Bramble nerf.
Curses are very important, especially DV and to a lesser degree Attract and Decrepify. The problem is that CtC curse mods are abundant in 1.10, and your curses will constantly get overwritten by that moron with his Dracul's Grasp ['omg use loh u noob!!'] or Exile shield or Delirium or Reaper's Toll or Scarab or whatever he has that casts random curses at what seems to be 50% chance when doing anything at all. As for actual necromancer curses, IM seems strangely useless for some reason [bug?] and in most cases the damage curses are not worth it anymore!
Hammerdins are the best paladins right now, even though they need to max a bunch of useless synergy skills. But BH ignores undead and demon resistances, and there is exactly 1 magic immune animal in the game, and it's stashed away in an area noone ever goes to anyway.
Nothing much has changed about other skills except for a couple of synergy bonuses: Fanaticism is still the best aura in the game; Holy Freeze is now doubly useless because of Doom; Defiance is now doubly useless because of Exile; Holy Fire has a worthless melee damage bonus and is now doubly useless because of Hand of Justice; the single resistance auras have a worthless maximum resistance bonus and an even more worthless passive maximum resistance bonus [60 points into resistance auras = 1 Guardian Angel]; the worthless Cleansing and Meditation auras acquire a worthless healing effect when you put points into Prayer; the worthless Holy Bolt skill gets a gigantic damage synergy from a bunch of worthless skills and ignores resistances [as if there are any undead in the game beyond act 2], and also gets a worthless healing synergy...
You may want 1 point into Salvation 'just in case'. Big deal.
One big and underrated change is the fact that Holy Shield boosts your overall defense!
Barbarians: a couple of melee skills get a synergetic % conversion to magic damage from Berserk, which annoyingly reduces your damage output against magic immunes, and Berserk itself gets a synergy bonus from Shout, adding up to 20 extra wasted points to kill PIs. This class has seen a lot of changes; the most obvious one is the fact that WW is very dangerous to use now, between the cooldown timer and the increased lethality of the monsters; Concentrate may well be the way to go. Frenzy has been removed from the skill tab. Double Throw has a damage bonus and would have been good if they hadn't fixed the mastery bug, which neatly cancels out the ED bonus, and if there were any useful unique throwing axes to pass the time until hell freezes over and you get an ethereal 450% ED rare axe with self-replenish. One of the new elite ones has about half the elemental damage of Hellrack and sucks in every other respect, and the other has 33% Amp which would have been useful if it didn't have that damnable HCMTF on it which nicely overwrites the Amp Damage.
The character has a lot of options to weaken, slow or stop enemies, but they only work on enemies that are already on top of you and have about the same cast 'speed' as CL. But if you can get off a Warcry before you die, then everyone will sit there stunned until the universe collapses in upon itself, and you can kill them with zero risk.
The majority of the new unique weapons and all of the new unique armors are total garbage. You're better off shopping for Cruels and/or using your old uniques.
Overall rating:
Sorc
Amz [because of WF]
Asn
Nec
Bar
Pal
Dru
Nothing is impossible if you believe in it enough.
Median 2008 mod for Diablo II
<span style="color:gray">New skills, new AIs, new items, new challenges...
06.dec.2006: Median 2008 1.44
Median 2008 mod for Diablo II
<span style="color:gray">New skills, new AIs, new items, new challenges...
06.dec.2006: Median 2008 1.44