LLD101

[volka]

First of all i'd like to mention that this is the first guide im writing; so if you find mistakes try not to flame but correct them.
I'll probably edit a lot in this topic as its thought as a worktopic.

Im playing LLD since about two years now and since about a half year ive been focusing on lvl 18 chars. Especially lvl 18 casters catched my heart and so i was trying the one or the other guide from this side.
About one year ago i had the idea of making a lvl 18 sorc (of course im not claiming to be the first one thinking of this) and was searching if any suggestions would be findable on the net and i failed. So i made my own thoughts and calculations for this build, but i couldnt realize it due a lack of items and will to try getting them.
Now i have finally made this dream come true and must say even with very medicore gear she's doing great and is really fun to play.
So i decided to share my thoughts and way to build her with the lld101 community and here are the results:


I.) Fire vs. Cold

Before making the sorc i had to decide which element to choose. I dont mention light here because it is doing really low dmg compare to fire and cold as well as needing much fcr for lightning which isnt so easy gettable at lvl 18. So here are the pro's and cons of cold and fire ive thought of:

Pro cold:
- higher damage (576-607 with 100% +skill gear/perfect orb; 515-534 with max +skill gear/no warmth/tele on orb)
- Freezes target
- decent ice bolt dmg (about 100-120 av , depending on gear )

Con cold
- very slow missels, if facing any melee like a zealer you wont want him to come close enough to hit you but at same time you want to damag him
- you wont be able to max out the dmg if you put points in warrmth and tele (unless u get an insane orb); and i strongly recommend using 1 in tele
- higher mana costs per ice blast (15.5 for lvl 20ib)
- can be nerf'd by hawkmail

Pro fire
- very fast missels
- after maxing the dmg skills you'll have 4 points leftover for tele and warmth
- the +fire skills from gear work on warmth as well
- decent fire bolt dmg ( about 110-130 av, depending on gear )
- lower mana cost per fire ball (11.5 for lvl 14 fb)

Con fire
- lower damage (424-498 with maximum +skill gear)
- can be practically nerf'd by spurs/noko (thanks waramp, i forgot due dueling gm pplz only most time )

Considering all pro's and con's ive decided to use fireball instead ice blast since its hard enough to hit enemys with fb's often enough to do good damage and with ice blast near impossible unless you wanne tank. If you like ice blast (wouldnt recommend, really ^^) more then just replace each skill with ice-skills / ice blast in the following.

II.) Stats and Skills

Stats:
str - enough for gear (25 with items in my case)
dex - enough for maxblock (62 with gear in my case)
vit - all leftover
ene - none in my case; few points personal taste but wouldnt recommend it

Skills:
Fire tree
max fire bolt (18 points)
max fire ball (7 points)
2-4 point in warmth (4 possible if can get +tele on orb)

Light tree (optional, if cant get tele on orb)
1 telekinesis
1 teleport

Cold tree
nothing

Some might like a cold armor, but its easy to get it as precast from swich so it would be a waste to put a point here.

III.) Gear:

Before i list the gear choices id like to throw in some breakpoints:
fcr:
20 - 11 frames
37 - 10 frames
63 - 9 frames

fbr:
15 - 7 frames
27 - 6 frames
48 - 5 frames

fhr:
30 - 10 frames
42 - 9 frames
60 - 8 frames
86 - 7 frames

When choosing your gear id recommend trying to get 63 fcr for smooth playing, fhr depends on personal taste (getting 55% from stadart gear) and highest fbr on a lvl 18 shield is 40% (pelta).
A good aim considering charms and gear would be 700+life and 300+ mana with 100+ mana regeneration for a good gameplay.

Helm
The dream helm would be a circ with some following stats:
1+fire skills
10% fcr
20% frw
40 to life
60 to mana
replenish life
resis
2 sockets

But honestly anything with +1 fire skill and possibly second mod does the job. 10 fcr would be most wanted since it gives more freedome in other gear choice.
Im myself using a plain +1fire with 2 socks from larzuk and its working good so far.

Lowcost : Tarnhelm which also add 1 skill to tele and reduces the mana costs per tele by 1 that way


Amulett
Pretty much the same as the helm, try to get something with +fire, fcr life mana and resis.

Lowcost: Eye of Ettlich


Rings
Similar to helm and amu try to get some ring with fcr,mana,resis and perhaps life or stats.
[can get lots of mana here; im using one fcr ring with 40mana/ single resis and one with 10energy/40mana/ single resis which giveing me a total boost of 100 mana]

Lowcost: manald healing (can be favourited vs fcr rings on personal tase if you have 63% fcr and enugh mana from other parts)


Armor
Stealth. This awesome armor gives us 25%fcr, 25%frw and 25% fhr. Along with this the 6 dex, 15% manaregeneration the poison resist and the low price set the cherry on top. In my opinion the only way to go.

Some might want a highdef armor vs zealers, but thats useless for this build in my opinion since it would take much str to wear and a precast cold armor aint giving enough boost to make it viable versus the huge ar lvl 18 melees have. If you want high def, make a pure def soso, but not this.


Boots
Cow kings, typical. Giving 20 dex and 30 frw.
Only alternative are some frw/fhr/dex/resis boots which can be thrown in in duels vs other eledmg lvl 18's.


Glowes
Bloodfist: Cant think of anything that could compete with those on lvl 18 for a caster


Belt
-crafted 8+ fcr belt for reaching the 63% bp
-lenymo for the 30% mana regeneration,15mana and 5 allres
-rare belt with life/mana/life replenish/resis/stats/fhr
-death belts incase you think you'd benefit more from cbf then from other belt in a parcticular situation
Choice depending on personal prefernce and stats of the other gear parts.

Shield
Three possibitys here.
Sigons, pelta or a 30/20 bone shield with good mods.
Sigons is lowcost and gives 1 skill; besides this it got a huge str requirements and zero fbr. I wouldnt recommend using this

Pelta gives along with 40%fbr 2str, 10vit and 10 energy which is really great for the low price and requirement it has. A good choice to use.

Now a 30/20 bone shield can top out even pelta, but is harder to get. It has 20% more block, same blocking frame (27%) and can have 2 socks along with resis or other helpfull mods like resis, d2m or -require. It takes 25 str to wear it but way less dex for maxblock and id suggest trying to get one of those since it offers the most potential.


And now for the most important part part, the orb
Yes, much to dream around here. A perfect orb would be like 1+fire/3+fb/3+warmth/3+tele/10fcr/ene/mana/resis/2 socks. Similar to helm anything with +3fb/mods does the job at start as long as you reach enough fcr from other gear parts

Some might like to use maelstrom wand since it gives 30% fcr and that way the possibility to reach 105% fcr. But over the half of our +skills are coming from the orb, so the dmg with maelstrom would be really low.

Socketings
..are highly depending on personal preferences and charms. Good things to put in helm are perfect rubys, saphirs or skulls. In the shield can be put in either eth runes (15% manaregen per eth) or jewels with stats/resis/-req. Similar jewels would suit a beatiful orb.

Swich gear
a rare orb with + shiver armor + some blocking shield.
It would be an option to put jewels in the shield on first slot and keep a eth'd shield on swich for the manaregeneration

IV.) Charms
Look for any charms that give you life and mana. Perfect would be 15/7 sc's.
Besides those you can use charms to make up for resis or if you prefer over 55%frw or fhr on that sorc go for frw/mana or fhr/mana charms.



Strategys
Generally the game of hitting and not getting hit.

*might follow later*



I hope you liked this beta version of the guide and post lots of usfull comments, questions and tips how to perfectionize it. I posted it here till its enough discussed to become stickyed somewhen hopefully :]


My sorc (german version of D2):



She reaches 55%frw, 30%fbr and 65% fcr. Her mana regeneration is at 155% and she has 10 life replenish. Im playing her on europe sc nonladder.


Special thanks to Lee who greatly financed most parts of all our LLD's.

Now its your turn. Comment! Advice! Ask!

[Roy]

Oh, very nice - I actually built a level 18 Ice Blast sorc a little while back. Didn't have very high expectations, but I found all the gear randomly and I figured that I may as well have it sit on a character instead of in my mules' stashes.

A couple suggestions I can offer:

1) PSkulls are your friend on casters. Life Rep is an underrated affix, at least in level 18 duels where you generally don't have tons of pallies charging around with Cleansing and Insight.

2) It's so easy to hit the 63 breakpoint that it seems silly not to, but I actually dropped my sorc down to the 37 breakpoint. You get 25 fcr from stealth, and if you can find an orb with 10 fcr, all you need is an FCR belt and you're at the breakpoint.

By dropping down to 37, I was able to replace my FCR rings with manald heals and my 1 cold / 10 fcr rare ammy with a 1 cold / 40 life / 8 rep ammy instead. 24 life rep is a nice boost, at least against other casters. The slower cast rate still lets me cast faster than necros with 75 fcr, and Ice Blast has such a high mana cost that I don't mind it casting a little slower.

The only drawbacks to the build are the ridiculously slow projectiles and the low damage against chars with 75% cold resist. Casters who load up on rep life and cold resist gear can pretty much negate the build. On the bright side, with a lot of rep, they can't kill you either, so the duel typically ends in a stalemate.

[volka]

Thanks for comment

1) Im using pskulls in helm myself too; just found it right to post the other possibilitys too and leave it to readers preference.

2) Yea; as i said on top of Gear sections, you should try to get 63 no matter what setup for smooth playing. And since fb needs less mana then ice blast the chance of some double hits are better with the higher fcr for me

Fb needs less mana and leaves more points for warmth. As i mentioned my soso has 143 manarege atm, 200+ reachable with perf gear on fire build. Considering about 400 mana thats 10+ mana per second which is really good in my eyes.

My soso has only 15 lfe repl yet, but in aiming for 20+ on final build, too.
(when replacing 1 fcr ring with manald if get fcr from orb/circ + maybe some from belt/ over 5 from amu)


Ill add some thoughts later, too tired yet.

[Roy]

I think my sorc has only got 200 mana or so (mostly just temp charms), and my regen is pretty decent without any points in Warmth. If you can get over 300 mana with at least one point in Warmth, you can probably start switching your focus to pumping your life instead.

[Waramp]

one con i would add to fire is that hot spurs are easily available to nerf your damage, whereas cold cant really be nerfed at that lvl

[Roy]

Good point - that's another reason I never really bothered with a serious fire-based char. Although Ice Blast shoots so slowly that it's nearly impossible to hit fast casters.

Tele would make Ice Blast much easier to manage, but you'd have to sacrifice synergies.

Fire Sorc seems a bit more versatile in that regard, with the drawback that people can use Spurs.

[volka]

Yes on the one hand a good point; but on the other hand you wont even hit pplz with ib much. And i wont really bother dueling spur users since it kinda messes up every lvl 18 fire build. Id just swich to a physdam char or dont duel such a bad mannered guy at all. (unless he's nubbish enought to get beaten even with spurs)

Anyways i edited it in ^^

[Waramp]

i would consider teleport/ib. my lvl 30 used ib a lot to great effect, granted she did have 105 fcr. tele-bombing is fun

[Roy]

Volka's right - the projectiles for IB are so freaking slow that they really don't work against other chars with good faster r/w speed. However, there are a couple ways to counter that:

1) Load up on mana / faster r/w GC's so that you are running around so fast that you can get relatively close to your target.

2) Load up on Life Rep so that your life heals so fast that your target has no choice but to get close to you instead. (This is my strategy - my sorc uses 42 life rep at the moment). The real drawback to this strategy is that you will stalemate any character with 75 cold resist and decent life rep. But I guess it's better than losing.

3) Use Teleport to tele-bomb them. Although there are a couple drawbacks here. One, I think it's still illegal under the LLD101 rules, and I generally try to follow them at level 18. Of course, I think you could make a decent argument that level 18 Telesorcs only balance out the category more than they unbalance it, but that's a separate matter.

The other drawback to Teleport is that IB has more synergies than can be maxed, and the damage is already pretty low against people with 75 cold resist. Then again, if I could find an orb with +3 IB and +1 Tele....

That goes back to volka's point that Fireball may be a better option - you can max all the synergies with points to go into Tele and Warmth. If only Static worked effectively in PvP, you could have a pretty nice hybrid.

Anyway volka, keep up the good work - I'll move this guide into the LLD guides section because it's extremely helpful, if that's okay with you.

[volka]

[Roy]

Absolutely - zealots dominate level 18 dueling, but ranged/casters are so much more fun to play. I think the best duels I ever had were against ear_god's spear nec on my throwbarb - we were pretty evenly matched (without recast), so the winner of the duel was usually decided by strategy, positioning, and simply who dueled better.

Hopefully this guide will inspire someone to try a level 18 sorc of their own - I'm going to start looking for some 1 fire skills / 10 FCR ammies and Circlets so I can build one of my own

[wfg-dude]

The one stash gear I'd put in your list is deaths set in case you duel cold sorcys. Or find a fcr ring/ammy with HFD on it (Half Freeze Duration).

It seems your fcr bp's are very easy to hit with or without a cast belt so I'd keep that switch handy.

Pskulls FTW! I like the idea of manalds! VBSOD on teh switch with eth runes in it. Before I traded away my hammer... I made sure all his gear had either mana or life regen on it. ON switch I put a +3 medi / +15 rep life scepter and ZOMG... a full bulb in like 10 seconds!!! Ya ... Regen life is DA BOMB DIGGITY!!!

Nice guide bro... good to see you still into LLD!

How do you say KICK ASS in German??? ahahhahaha... nicely done. Definately deserving of "sticky-dom"

[volka]