Sorceress build recommendation for soloing NM and Hell easily

Hi,

I am a Sorceress in Act 2 of Nightmare. I've built up on fire element so far but due to the fire immunes I want a change.

My goal: Solo NM and Hell easily or almost easily?

I know that gear is very important here but regardless of the gear, just thinking skill tree wise,

I am thinking of a hybrid one. Which one of these would you most suggest compared to others?

1) orb-

Fireball
2) orb-

Hydra
3) orb - firewall
4) orb +

Nova
5) full blizz
6) blizz +

Hydra
7) blizz+ other fires
8) blizz+

Nova
9) full lightning (because lightning immunes are fewer than cold/fire immunes)

or do you have separate build recommendations for NM and Hell?

Thank you

To finish hell comfortably, you should go with hybrid.

No to Lightning => it need many skill points to shine
So the choice is Fire and Cold

Cold :
Blizz need many points as Lightning.
Blizz is hard to aim.
My recommendation is FO: good AOE.
Max FO + 1 point Cold Master is enough.

Fire:
Firewall is strong, but enemies can move out of it.

Fireball solid choice but my recommendation is

Hydra.

Hydra is now stronger with 2.4 and it is fun to play.

PS: lightning immunes are the most common but their immunity can be break by Infinity.

I would do

Frozen Orb and

Hydra. Max

Frozen Orb,

Hydra and

Fire Mastery. From there, put points into any of the synergies for those 2 skills as needed.

mockingbirdreal wrote: 1 year ago

To finish hell comfortably, you should go with hybrid.

No to Lightning => it need many skill points to shine
So the choice is Fire and Cold

Cold :
Blizz need many points as Lightning.
Blizz is hard to aim.
My recommendation is FO: good AOE.
Max FO + 1 point Cold Master is enough.

Fire:
Firewall is strong, but enemies can move out of it.

Fireball solid choice but my recommendation is

Hydra.

Hydra is now stronger with 2.4 and it is fun to play.

PS: lightning immunes are the most common but their immunity can be break by Infinity.

Seconding hybrid Max FO with 1 point in

Cold Mastery +

Hydra. Sit back, relax and let your hydras kill most things, then launch a few orbs at anything still alive. Then have a reasonably well geared Act 2 merc to take care of dual Fire & Cold Immune uniques.

Holy Freeze aura for more safety to slow down any pesky mobs. Lots of build build guides out there for this particular build, most agree on skill/stat point distribution and gear.

Quite honestly, since they fixed the mana burn bug, I am reconsidering a Orb/

Hydra/EG build for HC, especially since you can be virtually immortal building out

Telekinesis. You lose out on the synergies for Orb, but it's 2%, so I don't mind. With maxed

Telekinesis, 10 points in

Energy Shield and maxed

Hydra/

Fire Mastery it works beautifully.

As a long time sorcess player, I would have to refer you to Maxroll.gg for the right build. They strongly suggest Blizzard since you can easily build a decent budget hell farmer with little down. I did and I would wholey recommend that again!

I personally used Maxroll.gg for a pure blizz and just teleported past cold immunes. It's possible cold fire hybrid would have served me better, but at the character level I was at when entering Hell, I'm not sure how that would have panned out.

Once I got higher level, I went mostly pure blizzard, but with 20 hard points in

Hydra and that got me through very comfortably until I got Infinity.

I was able to make it all the way through hell with a full blizzard build. My merc was using

Tal

Mask, a non

Eth Insight, and Treachery. I pretty much skipped cold immunes and let my merc kill anything else needed. Ancients took awhile to kill but I got through it. Once I beat

Baal I stayed full blizzard and farmed cows,

Ancient Tunnels and

Mephisto.

blizzård and fíreball worked great for me. took it all the way to 94.

focused on icce blasst/blizz and firebollt/ball/mastery. 0 in metėor and only a few in còld masterý

act 2 merc with freeze arua. tål maśk with dureil shell (cant be frozen) and an

Eth insíght if u can get it

Eth. never bothered changing his body amror. found an

Eth andy and now uses that

Another thing...don't discount the various rare orbs you may find. For my FO+

Hydra build, found this little one for my offhand swap, gives me

Energy Shield and

Chilling Armor for zero points invested, with my charms and a cheap Spirit, they're both at Lv 13 to those skills. Also gives me an option for cold+fire immunes to help out my merc in

Thunder Storm, not very fast, but effective.

not mentioned in other posts but keeping something in your cube with -enemy Xelement resist and/or

Lower Resist skill to switch with your swap gear makes not skipping past immunes more feasible.

My first char in D2R is a Sorc and now she's 94, Hydrorber with A5 merc. All I want to say is with a reliable merc you don't need to skip any monster with maxed-synergized

Hydra and maxed FO with a few

Cold Mastery points.

vallya wrote: 1 year ago

not mentioned in other posts but keeping something in your cube with -enemy Xelement resist and/or

Lower Resist skill to switch with your swap gear makes not skipping past immunes more feasible.

-enemy resist from gear does not work against immunes. Only skills can break immunities (but once they do, -res from gear is applied).

Trang Oul wrote: 1 year ago

vallya wrote: 1 year ago

not mentioned in other posts but keeping something in your cube with -enemy Xelement resist and/or

Lower Resist skill to switch with your swap gear makes not skipping past immunes more feasible.

-enemy resist from gear does not work against immunes. Only skills can break immunities (but once they do, -res from gear is applied).

exactly, so getting a switch swap weapon with charges for lower res then applying the - enemy res from gear is a good strat if you're the kind of person who can't just run past immunes, I know I'm one of them lol. Maybe I've been doing it wrong? I used to just skip immunes so I'm not overly familiar with breaking them.

Let me clarify: -enemy res gear does not apply any kind of a debuff on enemies, but is applied to damage calculation "on runtime", on enemies which are not immune (either never been or the immunity has been broken by skills). So while items with -enemy res skills (such as

Lower Resist charges) can be worn on switch, -enemy res items (for example Crescent Moon) have to be worn as primary equipment.

If you meant switching to -res gear, you're correct, but then you'd need 3 setups: primary (skills, FCR), -res skill and -res items (the last two can be combined, but require specific endgame items, such as weapon +

Medusa's Gaze,

Lower Resist wand + 4×Rainbow Facet JMOD or Infinity, to which OP, still being on Nightmare, likely has no access to yet). IMO too inconvenient for regular farming. I'd rather make a hybrid build or skip immunes altogether.