 |
|
|
I'm creating a new Sorceress character named Nova with the intention of exploring Diablo 2's postgame content, the terror zones and hidden superbosses that only unlock after defeating Baal on Hell difficulty. I've never taken the time to investigate this portion of Diablo 2's content because it typically requires some of the very rare high end gear to complete, and the only way to obtain that stuff is to spend long hours farming for loot drops against various bosses. The notion of sitting down and killing Mephisto 137 times in a row has always sounded ungodly boring to me, with no guarantee that the gear that the player wants will even appear. My preference has always been to create new characters and start a fresh journey from the beginning, exploring new skills and new item builds along the way rather than running the postgame stuff into the ground. I also usually play some pretty underpowered character builds that wouldn't really stand a chance against Pandemonium Diablo anyway.
None of that will be the case with this character. Nova will be running an unrestricted Sorceress build from a skills perspective, with Fireball and Meteor as the core skills backed by full synergies and Fire Mastery. This is a standard lategame build and outputs an insane amount of fire damage when buffed up with a bunch of +skills items; you can easily be fast-casting Fireballs that hit for more than 10,000 damage apiece. As an unrestricted build, I will also have access to a single skill point in Static Field, Energy Shield, and Teleport - I'm the insanely rare player who usually does *NOT* run Teleport on his Sorceresses to make the gameplay more challenging. Teleport is so strong that it's the centerpiece of Enigma, the game's best runeword, which unlocks the skill for every class in the game. These are extremely strong tools that further compliment a fire Sorcie and require little in the way of investment to be useful.
The other massive difference for Nova is that she will be completely unleased when it comes to equipment, with full gifting and twinking of gear from the collected pool of my other characters. I've saved up a lot of stuff over the years and Nova has access to all of it. Furthermore, I will also be making full use of the recent gambling hack located at Deadlybossmods.com that makes it vastly easier to find unique and set items via the gambling mechanic. I wrote about this new tool in my Faustus report, but as a quick refresher, this gambling hack makes it fairly easy to find any desired set or unique item which has a normal or exceptional item as the base type. Elite items are much harder to find via the gambling tool but still possible; I was able to find a Harlequin Crest shako after some poking around, for example. There are some exceptions, such as not being able to gamble for class-specific items like wands or staves and not being able to tell WHICH unique amulet will be the one gambled, however the tool is still insanely useful for an offline player like myself. I'll be using this gambling hack along with the collected items from half a dozen prior characters to kit Nova out in some very, very strong equipment. She has a decent chance of being able to put together the full Tal Rasha's set which I think would be really fun to see in practice.
I'll also be using an Act Two mercenary buffed up with state of the art gear as well which should make it far better able to tank for Nova. I'd like to use a Holy Freeze mercenary since the fire Sorcie lacks much in the way of crowd control, then stuff a bunch of items with physical damage reduction on the mercenary so that it can tank much better. This will also be my solution for Fire Immune opponents, at least until hitting CLVL 75 when Nova will unlock the fire sundering charm that Usain Bolter helpfully found for me last year, after which fire immunity won't be a problem any longer. The Act Two mercenaries don't unlock Holy Freeze until Nightmare difficult though so I'll skip hiring any of them until the second difficulty, since there's no need for them in Normal. One other thing that I do not have access to is the high tier runes (nothing beyond Mal at the moment) which rules out any of the truly insane runewords. Therefore this playthrough will focus heavily on the unique and set items that can be gambled using that hacking tool which I suspect will be more than good enough to get the job done. My ultimate goal is to clear Uber Tristram for the first time which hopefully will be doable. The word online is that it's very difficult to beat the uber versions of Mephisto/Baal/Diablo, but then again this is coming from the people who are used to bulldozing the normal version of these bosses with ridiculous gear. I'm hoping that if I can take wacky variant builds like Corvus and WillPower through the whole game using only self-found items, I'll be able to surmount this challenge using completely unrestricted skills and gear.
I'm going to try to keep the reporting fairly sparse through the first two difficulties, at least for me anyway. This character's focus is the postgame content so I'll try to speed along there, though of course I'm a chatterbox so I won't be able to stop myself from talking at least a bit about what was happening in Normal and Nightmare. This should be a fun experiment and hopefully I'll be able to find more lategame items that could lead to further character builds down the road. Wish me luck! 
