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The time has finally come for me to create a new Diablo 2 character using my favorite class: the Sorceress. Somehow I've barely written about Sorcie characters in Single Player mode thus far, only featuring this class when playing team variants like Rogue Revival and the Low Rent Legion, then trying the one playthrough using the Hydra skill with Lernie that didn't quite work out the way I wanted. There is a reason for that, namely because I played the Sorceress class to death back when Diablo 2 first came out and before I created my website. At the time of Diablo 2's release, I played one Sorcie after another for a full year before I started to burn out on the game and turned my attention to a new release named Civilization 3, after which the rest was history. But I still love the Sorceress class and I wanted to return to it here with a focus on my favorite skill tree, the Cold spells.
Lernie had dealt fire damage with her Hydras while Electric Tsunami sent out waves of lightning death with her Charged Bolts. This left the Cold skill tree as an obvious area to focus on next and I've always loved the chilling/freezing aspect of these spells. In fact, my very first D2 character ever from back in Fall 2000 was a cold-based Sorcie named Cornelia_Sulla who sadly disappeared back into the Internet ether decades ago. I still remember when I gambled a Frostburn Gauntlet for her and how excited I was at the time. Anyway, this character would need to pick one or two skills to specialize in, and I wanted to rule out the popular stuff like Blizzard and Frozen Orb. Anyone who has played Diablo 2 has seen those skills a million times and their casting delays make them less fun to use anyway. I also thought about Glacial Spike but decided to restrict the variant a bit more to make it more entertaining.
Ultimately I decided to create a character based around the simplest skills in the Cold tree, Ice Bolt and Ice Blast. Ice Bolt is the cold equivalent of Fire Bolt, dealing minimal damage and chilling whatever it hits for a very lengthy duration. I plan to use Ice Bolt as my only damaging skill throughout Normal and Nightmare difficulties, then swap over to the stronger Ice Blast for Hell so that it doesn't take an eternity to kill things. Ice Blast also has the property of freezing opponents and a pretty nice duration of roughly 8 seconds when fully maxed out (though freezing duration is cut in half for Nightmare and by 3/4 for Hell difficulty) which will be extremely helpful for cleaning up corpses along the way. Ice Blast also deals good damage when powered up with synergy skills, its base damage of 273-287 at SLVL 20 increasing by 8% per skill point invested. Ice Bolt and Ice Blast are conveniently both synergies for one another so I'll be able to skill both of them and not worry about having to respec stat points along the way. With a bunch of synergy points and +6 to all skills (which should be easily doable), Ice Blast hits about 2000 damage per casting which is more than enough to be viable in Hell difficulty.
That also doesn't factor in the addition of Cold Mastery which I also plan to employ. Cold Mastery is unique in Diablo 2 for lowering the cold resistance of enemies and therefore increasing the damage of cold skills. This is even better than the percentage-based increases to damage from Fire Mastery and Lightning Mastery in the other skill trees, and it can knock enemies into negative cold resistance where they take even more damage. Cold Mastery used to be able to break Cold Immunity on monsters at 1/4th effectiveness, thus an opponent with 100% cold resistance being hit by -100% resistance from Cold Mastery would function at 75% cold resistance in practice. That is no longer the case in D2R due to some changes made in the recent patches; more on this below. Cold Immune opponents were far and away the biggest stumbling block that I was worried about going into my character's run.
I plan to use a mercenary for these situations and I'd really like to try out one of the mage hirelings from Act Three. This is surely suboptimal as a rogue from Act One with an elemental bow or a barbarian from Act Five with some kind of elemental damage runeword would be a stronger option in terms of pure clear speed. However, I've never tried out one of the mage mercenaries before and I think it would be fun to see how they do. The Lightning option for the Iron Wolves seems to be better than the Fire option since they get access to Static Field along with Lightning and Charged Bolt. Supposedly the Spirit runeword is really good on them, which I'll also want on my character as well, so hopefully I can find the requisite runes and Crystal Swords to equip both party members with that overpowered runeword. I'm not entirely convinced that a lightning mage hireling is going to be sufficient though, especially when dealing with the Stygian Hags and their spawns which are all Cold Immune in Hell difficulty. Therefore I also want to try out this new item for the first time:
D2R introduced these unique grand charms in Patch 2.5 which have the effect of "sundering" enemy magic resistance. There's a charm associated with each damage type, such as the pictured Cold Rupture tied to the cold element, and all of them do the same thing: make enemies which are usually immune to a certain damage type only 95% resistant instead. They come with a substantial resistance penalty to their associated damage type, such as Cold Rupture reducing the cold resistance of the holder by -72%, but the ability to actually hurt monsters which would otherwise be invincible is a true game-changer nonetheless. The sundering charms will only drop in the new "terror zones", locations which only unlock after defeating Baal on Hell difficulty and which are chosen in seemingly random fashion before changing each hour. Every boss or champion pack has a chance to drop a sundering charm in the terror zones and the odds aren't bad by Diablo standards, with the fire and cold sundering charms having 1 in 800 odds to drop on the Players 1 setting, increased to 1 in 200 odds on Players 7. The lightning and poison sundering charms have worse odds to drop, and then the magic damage sundering charm is fully 10 times as rare as the fire/cold ones, though I didn't see the need to search for one of them.
The terror zones can be pretty nasty to clear since the monsters all have higher than average levels, but I realized that I had the perfect character for fast-clearing on a higher players setting: Usain Bolter! I looked at an online schedule and saw that the Cathedral was set to become a terror zone three nights in a row at a time when I could invest the full hour to do some monster grinding. The Cathedral was the perfect spot because there would always be two bosses present plus Bone Ash for a trio of targeted foes, and I could clear them out in about 2 minutes of real-world time. Usain Bolter was perfect for this since he moved so fast, Holy Bolt did excellent piercing damage, and every potential opponent in the Cathedral was undead or a demon. I found that I could get about 25-30 clears of the boss trio in an hour's worth of time, translating into roughly 80-90 boss opponents slain. This was enough to drop the lightning sundering charm in my first hourly session, then the fire sunderer in the second hour, followed by the poison sunderer and then the cold sundering charm in an outstanding run of RNG luck in 30 minutes of a third session. Now I had everything that I needed to run fire, lightning, cold, or poison exclusive builds on future characters - not bad for a few hours of grinding.
I've never used the sundering charms before and my plan is to run this character as an experimental test case. It looks to me that these things actually open up a bunch of variant builds that were formerly impossible due to relying on a single damage type. For example, I'd really like to try a poison-only Necromancer build and see how that goes down the line, something that I could never do under the standard D2 ruleset since poison immunity is extremely common. I'm going to see what happens with this Sorcie and adjust the plan for future builds based on how this goes.
I looked around for potential names for this character and settled on "Blanche", the French word for "white" which I thought would be fitting for someone who focused on snow and ice spells. Snowbelle would be a better name but I already used that for my Diablo 3 cold-based Wizard. As usual for my characters, I intend to do a single pass through the game while full clearing each area one time through. I'll have to make use of what I find along the way without repeating areas or trading/twinking/sharing gear (aside from the cold sundering charm mentioned above). I've always felt that Diablo 2 is much more interesting when each character has to come up with their own stuff rather than pooling it all together and god-moding new characters past every challenge. I'll also be able to play in offline Single Player mode which should reduce issues that can pop up from lag and disconnects when running online characters on the Blizzard servers. I still don't trust Diablo 2 Resurrected enough to create a Hardcore character but I'll do my best to clear the whole game deathless and let readers know if I fall short of that goal (as I've done with several previous characters). This is going to be a backburner project so it may take some time to finish, I intend to proceed at a leisurely pace. It's winter here in the Northern Hemisphere as I write this introduction, it's time for Blanche to send the icy winds of the North Pole against the monsters of hell!
