Season Starter ES Nova Sorc Guide - Fast and Easy Runes and Keys!

Disclaimer:
A number of people have asked about my ES

Nova Build, and were surprised when I said it made a solid season starter. Granted, it will not find the uniques you are looking for such as

Shako or

Stone of Jordan, but will get you runes for runewords, and keys to do ubers which you could do with a budget smiter easily enough to get yourself an early torch. If you have any questions feel free to ask, and if I made any typos or you have a correction or feel like something should be added let me know.

Pros:

• Cheapest and One of, if not the most, cost effective builds
• Safe
  Key and Rune farming

Cons:

• Targeted Build; Can't do all content
• Reliant on trading if using to fully fund another character as there is 0 mf.

Skill Build:

• 20 Telekenesis
• 20
  Energy Shield
• 20
  Nova
• 20
  Lightning Mastery
• 1
  Shiver Armor
• 1
  Teleport
• Rest
  Warmth, or
  Fire Wall for an alternative damage source.

Skill and Stat Explanation:

Energy Shield and Telekenisis work together to reduce the amount of damage you take from everything other than poison damage, and deal a majority of it to your mana instead of your health. This is also why we max Energy instead, as each point of Mana is essentially 1.5 points of health for us.

Blizzard wrote:

Each point in

Telekinesis makes

Energy Shield's damage absorption more effective. By default, for each point of damage absorbed by

Energy Shield, 2 mana points are deducted, a 200% ratio. Each hard skill point in

Telekinesis makes

Energy Shield 0.0625 Mana per point more effective. For example, with 8 points in

Telekinesis, 1.5 mana points are deducted for each point of damage absorbed, a 150% ratio. With 16 points in

Telekinesis, one point of damage absorbed equals one point of mana loss, a 100% ratio. And at the maximum level 20 of

Telekinesis, the ratio will be 75%.

It should be noted that when taking damage with the

Energy Shield on, that resistances do not take effect as long as the damage is being done to your Mana. For example, with level 7

Energy Shield (50% damage absorption) a

Fire Bolt dealing 100 fire damage will apply 50 damage to your mana (before

Telekinesis calculations are done); the remaining 50 damage will be dealt to Life, subject to fire resistance.

We use

Nova as our main skill as it will do enough damage to keep most mobs essentially

Stun locked the entire time we are killing them. This means that a majority of the time not only are we avoiding damage, but the damage we do take is directed to our mana pool instead. Note that it will not

Stun lock uniques or super uniques.

Stats:
Str - 84 or 156 (84 for upped Vipermagi when you can get it, 156 for Spirit

Monarch)
Dex - None
Vit - Enough to hit 400-500 hp for poison damage
Energy - Rest

Gearing Your Sorc:
Generally speaking the stats we are focusing on are Resistances, FCR to breakpoints, Mana, and Mana Recovery. We want to avoid Magic Find at all costs with this build, as it has a negative impact on finding Runes, and has zero affect on Keys.

Starting Gear:

• Helm - Lore
• Weapon - Spirit
• Shield - Rhyme
• Body - Stealth
• Belt - Any
  Belt with mana, resists, or mana regen
• Rings - Any with FCR, ideally with Mana
• Gloves - Aim for ones with FCR and/or Mana
• Boots - Look for any with Life, Max Mana, FRW, or Resists (especially poison)
• Amulet - Anything with +skill, or FCR and Mana
• Charms - +mana, +life, +Resists (especially poison)

Budget Gear:

• Helm - Peasants or
  Circlet with +skills, fcr, and mana
• Weapon - Spirit is still fine here but look into upgrading to a
  Wizardspike which has everything we want
• Shield - Rhyme will still work, but look for a lidless or Spirit
  Monarch
• Swap -
  Lower Resist
  Wand with Spirit or high resits shield
• Body - Stealth into Smoke
• Belt - Gloomtrap
• Rings - Nature's, Rares or Crafted with FCR and either Mana or Resists
• Gloves - Frostburns or
  Magefist
• Boots - Look for any with Life, Max Mana, FRW, or Resists (especially poison)
• Amulet - Anything with +skill, or FCR and Mana
• Charms - Clean Lightning Skillers, +mana, +life, +Resists (especially poison)

Funded Gear:

• Helm -
  Griffon's Eye
  Diadem
• Weapon -
  Wizardspike
• Shield - 35%
  Monarch
• Swap - +9 Memory Staff, or CTA with Spirit
  Monarch
• Body - Smoke into Upped Vipermagi with
  Um
• Belt - Gloomtrap Up'd
• Rings - Sojs (or Natures Ring when doing Neth) or Ring with +FCR, Resists, and Mana
• Amulet - Maras, or Crafted +2 skill with FCR, Mana, and Resists
• Charms - Life Skillers, Poison Resists Small charms, Anni, Torch

Merc Gear:

• Weapon - Insight until you can afford Infiity will serve you very well, and depending on the content you want to do with your sorc will be all you need.
• Armor - Sealth until you can get Trechery
• Helmet - Anything with resists to start, then Tals will be all he really needs. Andarial's with
  Ral is BiS however.

Important Breakpoints:
FCR: With Budget you want to get at least 63% FCR, ideally 105. From there you can decide if you want to go for the last breakpoint, which is 200%. I personally find it's not worth going for it, but YMMV.
FHR: 42, and then 60%. Spirit

Monarch already gives 55%.
Magic Find: Keep this at 0. It has no bearing on

Key drop rates, and negatively impacts rune drops.

What to Farm with Each Build:
Each build can do these fairly quickly and safely once

Nova and Mastery are maxed, and you have at least 10 points into Telekenesis and

Energy Shield.

Starter Build:
Countess - Drops

Key of Terror, and up to

Ist runes. When teleporting to her inside

The Forgotten Tower always turn left from where the entrance square is facing. You're biggest threat here is if her room has Archers. If so

Teleport to the side and wait for her to come out with her minions while spamming

Nova.

Summoner - Drops

Key of Hate. There is no trick to Arcane Sancturary, just pick a direction and start teleporting. If you are in the starting gear with no resists, make sure not to stand in the fire.

Lower Kurrast - Super Chests can drop up to

Ber in a 8 person game.

Teleport around until you find the a campfire surrounded by tiki torches. There will be 3 buildings around it. The chest to the north will have 1 chest in it, and the building to the left will have 2 chests. Each Lower Kurrast will spawn either 1 or two of these camps.

Budget Build -
Once you have the resistances, and more importantly Nature's Ring, you can look into incorperating Nithlathak into your rotation.

Nithlathak - Drops

Key of Destruction. I would not reccomend even trying to kill him until you have

Nature's Peace ring as his

Corpse Explosion will ignore your ES. The way from the waypoint is very easy to figure out. If there are pilars in the WP room

Teleport South West and then North West. Otherwise you are going to

Teleport South East. When you go down find the eyes with a

Diamond in it's left eye and that is the way to go.

Teleport near Nith, and stand still and spam

Nova. The poison will do minimal damage if you don't move.

Nightmare Forge Rushes - At this point you will have enough mana and damage to be able to rush nightmare for forges. NM forge drops

Sol to

Um rune, plus Gems.

Travincal - As long as you and your merc have the resists and charges on your

Wand you can begin to do Council who can also drop high runes. I would suggest proccing

Fade using the fires at

River of Flame waypoint on yourself, then putting it on your merc before going to trav for the extra resists which will help a lot.

Funded Gear -
There really isn't anything you can't run short of Ubers and DClone with this build once you have Insight and Griffons.

Nice build!

I'm confused about focusing on having 0% MF as it could negatively impact finding runes, however. From what I remember, the game first decides which item drops, then only after deciding which item drops the magic find will come into play to determine from top-down if that specific item is unique, set, rare, magic, or normal? So, in the case of the game choosing a rune,

Arrows or gold being dropped, it just skips the MF steps, and in the case the game drops a piece of gear, it then starts determining the rarity and takes MF into account. I could be mistaken on how the process works, so if there's someone more knowledgeable on the game mechanics and/or has a source on how the drops in the game work, I'd happily be corrected on it.

HFA wrote: 2 years ago

Nice build!

I'm confused about focusing on having 0% MF as it could negatively impact finding runes, however. From what I remember, the game first decides which item drops, then only after deciding which item drops the magic find will come into play to determine from top-down if that specific item is unique, set, rare, magic, or normal? So, in the case of the game choosing a rune,

Arrows or gold being dropped, it just skips the MF steps, and in the case the game drops a piece of gear, it then starts determining the rarity and takes MF into account. I could be mistaken on how the process works, so if there's someone more knowledgeable on the game mechanics and/or has a source on how the drops in the game work, I'd happily be corrected on it.

This caused me to look it up again, as when I first started running this build back in the earlier stages of d2 it was believed that it did have a negative impact. While in most cases magic find has no impact on rune drops, it does have a negative affect on countess drops. Countess has a secondary drop chance, which works on a different treasure class system.

To further elaborate, Which I meant to do in that reply and apologize for doing so, this build focuses early ladder primarily on fast

Key and rune farming from Countess and Summoner, as well as farming lower kurrast. As those are the only things we care about, minimizing the rng of

The Countess's secondary drop rate works in our favor reverse what it would be if we were farming cows or such which only acts on the normal drop treasure class system.

Ahh okay! I did find information about

The Countess' special drop tables, but only that having more players (or a higher /players) setting negatively impacts the rune drops. From what I understand,

The Countess can drop three runes at the most, and six(?) items at the most. If the player count is higher and it's more likely she drops items, it's possible the item drops override the rune drops. So essentially you'd want the highest no-drop chance (players 1), to have a higher chance of multiple runes dropping instead of items. I didn't find anything saying that MF specifically would also affect her drops, though.

The best info I could find was here, but I'm not entirely sure how up to date and accurate the information is. And I've found some old discussions talking about /players 1-8, MF and countess drops like here, but no sources to back up what they're saying. It'd be great to know for sure though, in case people aren't aware how it exactly works and are unnecessarily adapting their characters to mechanics that work differently than they think.

Aside from the MF and rune drops, do you think a character like this would be effective as a hybrid as well, adding a lower investment skill like

Frozen Orb,

Fireball or Firewall to deal with immunes? Or would it take away too many points from the Lightning skill tree to still be effective enough as a season starter in that case? Having a Blizzballer right now, I'd definitely be interested to see how a lighting sorc would play. My only comparison for a light sorc would be the Javazon I play I guess, who'd have similar problems with lighting immunes throughout the playthrough, but different ways of dealing with them (no

Teleport to get past them more easily, but a

Valkyrie that can tank and do physical damage for example)

Depending on the gear setup you could run with a lower base into Telekenesis and

Energy Shield, especially if you have a high +ES Memeory, and use those points into a secondary skill for sure to open up the versatility. And while I have not found any confirmations other than old data miners back in the day posting things in forums in regards to her secondary drop table, I have found personally that lower mf has yielded me more runes over time from her.

Now im tempted to do about 1000 runs with my standard setup and a mf setup with 250% mf and check the results....

Great write-up! I love seeing guides like this.

Milestone wrote: 2 years ago

Great write-up! I love seeing guides like this.

Thanks, I appreciate it. Just doing what I can to help out.