nova sorc weapon choice

Hi,

I am new to

Nova sorc. I see some people recommend Infinity

Scythe.

Eschuta's Temper/Insight vs Infinity

Scythe /Insight merc vs

Crystal Sword+

Monarch shield filled with light facet/Infinity merc .

Scenario: 1p solo single player.

Baal run

I am wondering if

Crystal Sword+

Monarch shield would be good choice? I havent try yet.

Nova itself is a godly farming-zeus itself already, so what left in my exp is the trade off between Magic Find and Survivability, I myself is a MF at heart so can't afford to let MF below 200 (Enigma + War Trav +

Gheed + 9 SC MF 7% if not wearing Enigma) but then the chance to survive through bunch of Soul at the

Baal Throne entrance is quite low, I'm used to die instantly. To up the survivability you would need to replace almost MF items with Light Res pieces but then all the drops are crappy (I saw there are guys said MF does not matter when it comes to unique item drop, that's false assumption I tested myself in number of hours and it's really different). For all those 3 builds, not much different, a slightly tweak is that for the Eschuta build I'd prefer Infinity on mer due to big source of Mana that would unlikely to drop, if you look for budget build then Eschuta is the easy choice.

Another build that i found balance my thirst for MF and survivablity is Obsession, worth to test it out, best to find a good Staff base with 2-3

Nova 2-3

Lightning Mastery, highest damage among the builds but obviously extremely expensive.

I end up having 2 builds and swap between each other, 1 is MF all-in Infinity + Enigma + War Trav +

Gheed + all SC MF, 2nd one is Survivability focus to deal with place like

Baal Throne or

Frozen River. I think (1) works with 95% of the maps already.

If you mean best in terms of damage, the most important concept is -enemy lightning resist.

Lightning Mastery already gives you a ton of +%lightning damage (~400%), so adding a little more (eschuta's) only has a small effect on your overall damage

Imagine your

Nova does 1000 damage, and the monster has ~80% lightning resist after Infinity. So your

Nova does 200 damage. If you increase your overall lightning damage by a few percent (eschutas), it doesn't really matter--maybe you do 220 damage with eschuta's. But if instead you put Infinity on your sorc, you now get the -enemy lightning res effect and decrease the monster's resistances to 30%, so now you do 700 damage

So generally Infinity

Scythe + Insight merc is best.

Crescent Moon sword + Spirit is also good and much cheaper.

And yeah technically if you have 10 5/5 light facets on single player (and no other possible use for them), then I think you would do a bit more damage with them than with an Infinity

Scythe. Using less than perfect facets is definitely not worth it, and consider that you are also losing some other nice things on Infinity, especially self-cast

Conviction aura which is really nice for survivability, some MF, some FRW...

Using Infinity yourself limits your FCR potential quite a bit.
As marl mentioned, -res is generally much more impactful than +dmg. However if you really need to know, you need to test this for each monster indiviually, as their native light res might vary. Best is to check on maxroll for your DPS for specific monsters you care about.

LoTra wrote: 3 months ago

y you would need to replace almost MF items with Light Res

Isn't res supposed to be useless with

Energy Shield ?
I'm not talking about your mana drops to zero but when ES is up.

Tornado_OLO wrote: 3 months ago

LoTra wrote: 3 months ago

y you would need to replace almost MF items with Light Res

Isn't res supposed to be useless with

Energy Shield ?
I'm not talking about your mana drops to zero but when ES is up.

The souls very quickly take out your mana then with a little life... die.

It depends on your level of ES. A lvl 40 ES with full

Telekinesis synergy—yes, resistances mean nothing. Poison res is still important, but a Cure helmet on the merc fixes it.

Tornado_OLO wrote: 3 months ago

LoTra wrote: 3 months ago

y you would need to replace almost MF items with Light Res

Isn't res supposed to be useless with

Energy Shield ?
I'm not talking about your mana drops to zero but when ES is up.

Ungern wrote: 3 months ago

It depends on your level of ES. A lvl 40 ES with full

Telekinesis synergy—yes, resistances mean nothing. Poison res is still important, but a Cure helmet on the merc fixes it.

Tornado_OLO wrote: 3 months ago

LoTra wrote: 3 months ago

y you would need to replace almost MF items with Light Res

Isn't res supposed to be useless with

Energy Shield ?
I'm not talking about your mana drops to zero but when ES is up.

for majority of mob I agree, but with souls with LR under 50 it still very hurtful, can be easily killed if you

Teleport to the middle of soul group mistakenly, with 75 LR i have enough time to drink Full Rej and jump out alive

Yes, fair enough. With negative LR, even with maxed ES, souls can be a problem,

LoTra wrote: 3 months ago

for majority of mob I agree, but with souls with LR under 50 it still very hurtful, can be easily killed if you

Teleport to the middle of soul group mistakenly, with 75 LR i have enough time to drink Full Rej and jump out alive

Suggestion from my stay-in lvl-98-forever exp is that if you strike

Baal chamber don't use Infinity, your little earning exp won't cover your lost :v max out LR first or switch to fire sorc using

Hydra to scout before

Teleport :v

I use Infinity

Scythe myself and even though it's suboptimal, I simply put my sunder charm in cube when meeting soûls, getting back to 75 lr.

Conviction is enough to break their light immunity and they don't have much life.

Losing a few secs but saves lives

I just ran the numbers on maxroll and it looks to me like an Infinity

Scythe outperforms 10 lit facets in

Crystal Sword+

Monarch. Also, with my ES

Nova sorc at -100 light res I can stand in a pack of souls in hell at P8 and not die.

Now, if my mana is erased by something else I can be one-shot to oblivion by souls. But with full mana souls are not a problem. I don't bother with LR at all. -100 is fine.

There are combos that are problematic. Crushing blow monsters can be an issue. Mana burn is an issue. Life is mana is an issue. Super poison can be an issue. It's not an indestructible build, but it is just about as close to it as exists.

I think if I were playing hardcore I would spec her a little differently.

Anyway, self-wield Infinity

Scythe with Insight on merc and

Energy Shield is a godly setup. If the goal is truly

Baal, I would make sure you have 1 more point of life than mana to avoid the life is mana curse.

Edit:
Also, I don't see how Obsession can outperform Infinity

Scythe either. I ran the numbers and it looks worse even when changing the whole build to support it.

departure wrote: 3 months ago

I just ran the numbers on maxroll and it looks to me like an Infinity

Scythe outperforms 10 lit facets in

Crystal Sword+

Monarch. Also, with my ES

Nova sorc at -100 light res I can stand in a pack of souls in hell at P8 and not die.

Now, if my mana is erased by something else I can be one-shot to oblivion by souls. But with full mana souls are not a problem. I don't bother with LR at all. -100 is fine.

There are combos that are problematic. Crushing blow monsters can be an issue. Mana burn is an issue. Life is mana is an issue. Super poison can be an issue. It's not an indestructible build, but it is just about as close to it as exists.

I think if I were playing hardcore I would spec her a little differently.

Anyway, self-wield Infinity

Scythe with Insight on merc and

Energy Shield is a godly setup. If the goal is truly

Baal, I would make sure you have 1 more point of life than mana to avoid the life is mana curse.

Edit:
Also, I don't see how Obsession can outperform Infinity

Scythe either. I ran the numbers and it looks worse even when changing the whole build to support it.

Self wield Infinity does the most damage and has by far the best QOL -

Prayer,

Meditation and

Cleansing is hard to beat. If wearing Sandstorm treks, poison is basically a non issue especially in conjunction with Cure.

Unsure how you fare so well against souls though, I regularly get deleted by them with 4.5k Mana and full ES buff (CTA with +3 ES).

Obsession is only really used for the 200 FCR version. A decent base is expensive though.

M1ck wrote: 3 months ago

Self wield Infinity does the most damage and has by far the best QOL -

Prayer,

Meditation and

Cleansing is hard to beat. If wearing Sandstorm treks, poison is basically a non issue especially in conjunction with Cure.

Unsure how you fare so well against souls though, I regularly get deleted by them with 4.5k Mana and full ES buff (CTA with +3 ES).

Obsession is only really used for the 200 FCR version. A decent base is expensive though.

How are you running 4.5k mana?

I would suggest that you may be getting deleted by souls with mana burn or near other monsters with mana burn or some kind of might aura combo. I ran the experiment in single player, just plopped my sorc down in a pack of souls on p8 and she was fine. But there are some interesting super pack monster combos.

Crescent Moon

Crystal Sword

Crescent Moon Runeword