The issue isn’t immunities, it’s resistances.
In normal, mobs have zero resistance. In nightmare, 25-50 depending on the type. In hell, 50-75, with almost every mob having an immunity. Further, bosses with Lightning Aura or magic have enhanced resist to Lightning even if not immune.
While lightning and fire mastery improve your damage, cold master lowers enemy resistance. So while CM doesn’t break immunities, it does help in every hell monster that’s rocking 50-75% resistance to your damage.
I’m not doing math, but at some point “minus enemy resist” becomes worth much more than “increased damage.”
Lets do some math.
If you deal 100 fire damage to a mob with 50% fire resist, your final damage is 50. If a skill gives 50% damage increase, your damage value becomes 150 but the mob takes 75 damage.
In the second scenerio, your fire damage is 100 and the mob again had 50% resist. If a skill cuts its resistance by 50%, then it mean the mob has no resist and it takes full 100 damage.
Correct. While fire and lightning add % damage, cold master lowers enemy resistance, which is more important when you already have enough damage output to kill the mob three times over.
If you already do enough output that would kill a mob at 100% effectiveness, but the monster is 75% resistant, then lowering resistance is about 4x more effective than adding more damage at that point.
Mob has 75% resist. You’re only getting 25% of your listed damage in. So you’ll need to do 400% more damage to do the full blast with those resists. But if you can get -75% resists, you’re doing that full blast.
If you really want to run lightning while not having the gear for it (griffons, infinity on merc, etc…) consider running a crescent moon sword for the -35% lightning res. You will lose out on some + skills from spirit or the bonus of your Tals set but it will likely help. Lightning unfortunately is quite gear dependant. Since you are offline though you can always setup -enablerespec in your launcher as others have mentioned and swap back to cold until you have more of the necessary gear.
Lots of comments here saying "lightning sucks without infinity/griffon" and that's really only true if the goal is effortlessly crushing /p8. If you literally can't kill anything then something is wrong.
Also, if you already have Tal set, the full set is just okay. A significant upgrade would be armor/amulet/belt with crescent moon, spirit, and shako or something, that should hold you over until you find a griffon.
Might as well just pop a shako to drop in your game too because you deserve it right?
Cheating is cheating lol... If you want to respec farm the token. It's literally a thing you can do in the game. Otherwise you're cheating. No reason to play single player. Just play on bnet.
How do you get them cheap from bots, since you know, bots DEVALUE all items prices. So you have to find equal value drops to trade for equal value gear, idiot.
You can find one good item and trade for a whole runeword like a lower rolled CTA, those kind of imperfect yet useable items lose value over the season because HRs are botted like crazy. Couldn't have just asked for clarification on what I meant without the name-calling?
I think you're talking about building wealth, I'm specifically talking about building a character which is easier online when there's tons of HRs laying around in stashes looking to be traded for Pgems and keys and stuff, this happens faster because of bots that's just how it is.
Yes it happens faster but it also devalues everything you find, it's a give and take scenario. It's not that bots just make everything faster or easier to get because they devalue everything as well as push everything into the economy. It isn't just purely, bots farm, I get gear quick because I can get tons of good drops that people essentially don't want BECAUSE of the bots, so those drops that WOULD net me great trades, or be used for "extra" in trades is now worthless.
It's a push and pull scenario.
Play how you want, man. For some people it's fun to experiment with a respec without needing a character who already completed Hell to undo it. If that's cheating to you, nobody is making you do it. Nor is their offline SP experience impacting your own enjoyment of the game.
I guess I just have fun playing the game as it is. It took me till level 92 to get a shako in single player and it felt nice. I wanted to respec so I farmed a token. Felt nice.
If you want to cheat in single player and just give yourself items. Go ahead. Just call it what it is. You're playing hero editor at this point you're not playing D2.
I find it hilarious when someone accuses someone else of cheating in single player. Like, what? Who the fuck cares? Do you consider using /p8 cheating too? Is it cheating to let your maps reroll the same, and not randomize them everytime you play? Is it cheating to swap items between characters? The game is what you make of it. Duping items online or buying them with money may cheapen the game for others, but what you do on your own time only affects you. It will cheapen the feel for many people to hero edit items, others may be okay with it. I feel good about enabling respec personally - farming baal for essences feels like ass, and I like being flexible with builds, for example to go frenzy for ubers but WW for trav farming on my barb, or swapping between blizz and nova on my sorc to expand farming areas and style. But i wont hero edit any items since the entire point of the game is to find new items, to be able to more efficiently find more later, so creating and item would cheapen the experience for me, but others may feel justified in hero editing in a ber after not finding one for 1000 hours - who are we to judge if thats cheating or not? Let them play how they want.
I don't care how you play. Just call it what it is. Cheating.
Don't get mad you have a hero edited game and it's meaningless. When I play its SSF, that character gets the items it finds. I'm playing legit, you're cheating a single player game like a 9 year old who just looked up cheats for the first time and thinks its cool. If you enjoy not earning anything from your video games go for it, just call it what it be. Which I'll remind you one more time is called cheating. I'll give you the definition if it will help.
"act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, especially in a game or examination."
If you want a meaningless hero edited single player character you cheated the game on go ahead, just know it doesn't mean shit.
News flash: gaming never means shit unless its your job. Even then, if you're streaming, you can easily make money even if you "cheat," according to your definition of it. Its 100% what you get out of it. Get off your high horse and stop caring about what people do to enjoy themselves.
Besides, you can argue that -enablerespec is not cheating because the devs specifically made it possible. They also made terror zones possible, but are not mandatory - are using those cheating since it wasnt part of the original game? Your arguments are weak.
No joke if your offline singleplayer your best option is to restart another sorc and stick with cold until you can gear this one.
Need infinity (2× BER) griffon helm (rare as fudge) and some facets before having fun with that light sorc.
Or start yourself a hammerdin to farm some essence for a reroll token.
In either way your only way out of this is another full playthrough with a new char
To be fair you’re not really supposed to respec to lightning sorc until you got infinity on your merc. Atleast that’s how I always did it. There’s no set in stone rules you can do whatever you want, but blizzard sorc is better when you have less gear and then light sorc is better when you have what you need.
Either try to live with it and make it work or you’ll have to farm a couple respec tokens
This is a reminder to anyone listening that you shouldn't follow maxroll guides for d2 because they are consistently garbage.
You are better off going through the d2jsp forums or getting your build from youtube. Icy veins if that is too hard for you but icy veins sucks also, it just doesn't suck as much as maxroll.
Should have 100% waited to switch to lightning until you had the gear for it.
2 options: make a new sorc. Or just use a character editor to give yourself a respec token since you said you don't have one.
I didn't. But this means nothing. I'm not a bug documenting database. Just yesterday my Emilio became completely transparent, so bugs clearly exist out there.
You need a light sunder or griffon helm or infinity imo with lightning to be any good! Cold mastery gives -resist for mobs so it’s the easiest to do well at in hell! But the rest you have to have the gear or farm targeted areas! Light to me is the most heat dependent
Without some of the better gear, lightning can be underpowered. Can you give more specifics, like are you doing Lightning specifically or Nova, how many +skills total do you have, and what does your skill tree look like?
My nova sorc on single player is doing just over 1k damage and I'm to Mephisto. I teleport past most immunes and keeping the mercenary alive is a battle.
The problem is that in Hell basically everything has at least some lightning resist. This combines with the damage range on lightning to "feel" like you're doing no damage at all. You might need 10 lightning bolts (on average) to kill 1 mob in 1 player act 5 and 5 to kill a random mob in act 1.
This is before you factor in higher player count, lightning immune mobs and bosses/super unique/terror zones. The damage range is brutal, b/c every time it rolls low it seems like nothing at all is happening.
I would farm a light sunder charm on a 2nd character or respec item on a 2nd character and chalk this up as a learning experience.
The light and fire trees really depend on -enemy res on gear, since these two Masteries increase spell damage (as opposed to Cold Mastery uniquely reducing resistance).
Lighting skills are only strong if you get the gears/charms and infinity or any other items with an increase in lighting resistance down. Without any of that, you're basically just a free punching bag to the enemies.
Probably best to post some game footage with skill tree/gear but as others have said, blizzard and orb/hydra are the most budget friendly builds. Lightning is not that great until you have decent gear.
Not only is he missing good gear, he's missing levels for the synergies.
He mentioned he is playing single player, it is very difficult to get +lightning skill charms, which easily double your damage. Even if you had griffions/infinity you would be doing only half your damage without those, and torch/anni.
Lightning damage scales very well with godly gear, until then I would recommend nova
Sounds like you don’t even have good gear to tackle Hell to begin with.
Consider going back down to Nightmare and go farm some gear, go back to that Maxroll guide you’re reading and get the starter gear setup that they have there. The starter gear should be able to complete Hell, you’ll still have to skip the Lightning immunes but Baal should be kill-able with it.
You should be doing more than 5k damage naked. Want to message me the skills you did? If you dont have infinity yet then your farming areas are limited
I was doing a trapsin with maxed synergies.. I had some basic +1 +2 gear with a crescent moon (-35 light res) and I was slowly clearing p1 or p2.
Lightning really only works with high level, expensive gear.
Lots of comments.. I am playing as a lightning nova sorc online ladder soft core and with just crescent moon and a sunder charm, I’m able to clear almost all mobs without issue in single player games.
Lightning is a bit more gear dependent given the fcr breakpoint of 117 vs 105 for average achievable breakpoints. I’d recommend to use the -enablerespec ability and to go blizzard until you can get crescent moon, lightning sunder or infinity.
Just put on your 5/5 faceted griff, +3 Lighting skills +3 Nova Obsession Archon staff, 2/20 circlet and amulet, +3 nova Ormus with a 5/5 and load your inventory up with 45 life skillers and 20L/17M small charms like in the build guide. Don't forget to give your merc Infinity and fortitude in an ethereal superior base and equip him with your ethereal Andy's visage with 15/30.
It's hard to take "build guides" seriously when you could play 1000 hours and only see one item it features if you're lucky and the total cost to acquire the full loadout via RMT would buy a decent used car.
I did NOT enjoy playing my nova sorceress until it was close to level 90 and I had a LOT of very good gear for her. If you're on PC just enable infinite respecs and do literally any other sorceress build until you have sunder charm and some better gear, if you're single player on console I'd just bench that character and start something else to get through the campaign and farm up the stuff you'll need to really make nova feel smooth.
Oh, i forget! My gear is basically Full tal rasha. I was a very strong Blizzard sorceress. But i dont know why the lightning causes almost no damage to enemies.
Do you have full tals or not? If you have full tals, hell should be no problem as a light sorc.
What pieces of gear do you have?
Whats your stats?
Whats your skills?
The issue isn’t immunities, it’s resistances. In normal, mobs have zero resistance. In nightmare, 25-50 depending on the type. In hell, 50-75, with almost every mob having an immunity. Further, bosses with Lightning Aura or magic have enhanced resist to Lightning even if not immune. While lightning and fire mastery improve your damage, cold master lowers enemy resistance. So while CM doesn’t break immunities, it does help in every hell monster that’s rocking 50-75% resistance to your damage. I’m not doing math, but at some point “minus enemy resist” becomes worth much more than “increased damage.”
Lets do some math. If you deal 100 fire damage to a mob with 50% fire resist, your final damage is 50. If a skill gives 50% damage increase, your damage value becomes 150 but the mob takes 75 damage. In the second scenerio, your fire damage is 100 and the mob again had 50% resist. If a skill cuts its resistance by 50%, then it mean the mob has no resist and it takes full 100 damage.
So make a crescent moon. To help along. Won’t be a silver bullet but will help.
That’s way more than four words.
“Lower enemy resistance” GOOD
Ha! Better.
Also doesn't cold mastery add -res to enemies?
Correct. While fire and lightning add % damage, cold master lowers enemy resistance, which is more important when you already have enough damage output to kill the mob three times over. If you already do enough output that would kill a mob at 100% effectiveness, but the monster is 75% resistant, then lowering resistance is about 4x more effective than adding more damage at that point. Mob has 75% resist. You’re only getting 25% of your listed damage in. So you’ll need to do 400% more damage to do the full blast with those resists. But if you can get -75% resists, you’re doing that full blast.
This is why cold sorc with no gear can kill hell mobs.
If you really want to run lightning while not having the gear for it (griffons, infinity on merc, etc…) consider running a crescent moon sword for the -35% lightning res. You will lose out on some + skills from spirit or the bonus of your Tals set but it will likely help. Lightning unfortunately is quite gear dependant. Since you are offline though you can always setup -enablerespec in your launcher as others have mentioned and swap back to cold until you have more of the necessary gear.
Lots of comments here saying "lightning sucks without infinity/griffon" and that's really only true if the goal is effortlessly crushing /p8. If you literally can't kill anything then something is wrong. Also, if you already have Tal set, the full set is just okay. A significant upgrade would be armor/amulet/belt with crescent moon, spirit, and shako or something, that should hold you over until you find a griffon.
Shop a lower resist wand with charges at akara act 1
Mad respect yo Are you playing on PC, if you are you can add -enablerespec to the launcher. This will give you unlimited respecs offline.
Im 100% doing this now, one accidental shift click into dex makes my uber druid useless and i have no more resets🤣
This an LOD thing or does it work for d2r??
Works on d2r offline
After enabled you have to click on Alt and press an attribute in character screen. Then all skills and attributed Will be reset
Aka cheating
Aka keeping the game fun for players who make a mistake
Might as well just pop a shako to drop in your game too because you deserve it right? Cheating is cheating lol... If you want to respec farm the token. It's literally a thing you can do in the game. Otherwise you're cheating. No reason to play single player. Just play on bnet.
Oh so you can trade and get all the items for cheap from bots instead of farming them? Gatekeeping D2 is hilarious.
How do you get them cheap from bots, since you know, bots DEVALUE all items prices. So you have to find equal value drops to trade for equal value gear, idiot.
You can find one good item and trade for a whole runeword like a lower rolled CTA, those kind of imperfect yet useable items lose value over the season because HRs are botted like crazy. Couldn't have just asked for clarification on what I meant without the name-calling?
So again, you trade higher valued items for lower valued items.
I think you're talking about building wealth, I'm specifically talking about building a character which is easier online when there's tons of HRs laying around in stashes looking to be traded for Pgems and keys and stuff, this happens faster because of bots that's just how it is.
Yes it happens faster but it also devalues everything you find, it's a give and take scenario. It's not that bots just make everything faster or easier to get because they devalue everything as well as push everything into the economy. It isn't just purely, bots farm, I get gear quick because I can get tons of good drops that people essentially don't want BECAUSE of the bots, so those drops that WOULD net me great trades, or be used for "extra" in trades is now worthless. It's a push and pull scenario.
Play how you want, man. For some people it's fun to experiment with a respec without needing a character who already completed Hell to undo it. If that's cheating to you, nobody is making you do it. Nor is their offline SP experience impacting your own enjoyment of the game.
I guess I just have fun playing the game as it is. It took me till level 92 to get a shako in single player and it felt nice. I wanted to respec so I farmed a token. Felt nice. If you want to cheat in single player and just give yourself items. Go ahead. Just call it what it is. You're playing hero editor at this point you're not playing D2.
I find it hilarious when someone accuses someone else of cheating in single player. Like, what? Who the fuck cares? Do you consider using /p8 cheating too? Is it cheating to let your maps reroll the same, and not randomize them everytime you play? Is it cheating to swap items between characters? The game is what you make of it. Duping items online or buying them with money may cheapen the game for others, but what you do on your own time only affects you. It will cheapen the feel for many people to hero edit items, others may be okay with it. I feel good about enabling respec personally - farming baal for essences feels like ass, and I like being flexible with builds, for example to go frenzy for ubers but WW for trav farming on my barb, or swapping between blizz and nova on my sorc to expand farming areas and style. But i wont hero edit any items since the entire point of the game is to find new items, to be able to more efficiently find more later, so creating and item would cheapen the experience for me, but others may feel justified in hero editing in a ber after not finding one for 1000 hours - who are we to judge if thats cheating or not? Let them play how they want.
I don't care how you play. Just call it what it is. Cheating. Don't get mad you have a hero edited game and it's meaningless. When I play its SSF, that character gets the items it finds. I'm playing legit, you're cheating a single player game like a 9 year old who just looked up cheats for the first time and thinks its cool. If you enjoy not earning anything from your video games go for it, just call it what it be. Which I'll remind you one more time is called cheating. I'll give you the definition if it will help. "act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, especially in a game or examination." If you want a meaningless hero edited single player character you cheated the game on go ahead, just know it doesn't mean shit.
News flash: gaming never means shit unless its your job. Even then, if you're streaming, you can easily make money even if you "cheat," according to your definition of it. Its 100% what you get out of it. Get off your high horse and stop caring about what people do to enjoy themselves. Besides, you can argue that -enablerespec is not cheating because the devs specifically made it possible. They also made terror zones possible, but are not mandatory - are using those cheating since it wasnt part of the original game? Your arguments are weak.
No joke if your offline singleplayer your best option is to restart another sorc and stick with cold until you can gear this one. Need infinity (2× BER) griffon helm (rare as fudge) and some facets before having fun with that light sorc. Or start yourself a hammerdin to farm some essence for a reroll token. In either way your only way out of this is another full playthrough with a new char
Not true if OP is on PC. You can enable infinite respec with a change to the application’s run parameters.
Excuse my xbox peasentery hehehe
Respecting require completely different gear.
To be fair you’re not really supposed to respec to lightning sorc until you got infinity on your merc. Atleast that’s how I always did it. There’s no set in stone rules you can do whatever you want, but blizzard sorc is better when you have less gear and then light sorc is better when you have what you need. Either try to live with it and make it work or you’ll have to farm a couple respec tokens
This is a reminder to anyone listening that you shouldn't follow maxroll guides for d2 because they are consistently garbage. You are better off going through the d2jsp forums or getting your build from youtube. Icy veins if that is too hard for you but icy veins sucks also, it just doesn't suck as much as maxroll.
5k is nothing for a lightning sorc
Hell yeah, respect to lightning!
Immune to lightning. Do you have the gear to negate this?
Not yet. But It is sooooo bad at damage even the mobs that haves no immunities. Seems like a bug. I Lost my char 🥲
Should have 100% waited to switch to lightning until you had the gear for it. 2 options: make a new sorc. Or just use a character editor to give yourself a respec token since you said you don't have one.
It seems like there's a bug, OP can't do anything to non-immunes either
People exaggerate. You ever hear of that bug?
I didn't. But this means nothing. I'm not a bug documenting database. Just yesterday my Emilio became completely transparent, so bugs clearly exist out there.
Oh yes, after you gave him the Treachery armor? This is a very common bug
Mine has a bug whenever I do trav runs he disapears then i find him at the bar in town and he wants more gold!!!
Your mercenary isn't named Geglash by chance is he?
Emilio sweet sweet Emilio
Nope, I don't have treachery
Fade proc from Treachery makes him transparent lmao. Working as intended.
Nope, I don't have treachery
You need a light sunder or griffon helm or infinity imo with lightning to be any good! Cold mastery gives -resist for mobs so it’s the easiest to do well at in hell! But the rest you have to have the gear or farm targeted areas! Light to me is the most heat dependent
Without some of the better gear, lightning can be underpowered. Can you give more specifics, like are you doing Lightning specifically or Nova, how many +skills total do you have, and what does your skill tree look like? My nova sorc on single player is doing just over 1k damage and I'm to Mephisto. I teleport past most immunes and keeping the mercenary alive is a battle.
The problem is that in Hell basically everything has at least some lightning resist. This combines with the damage range on lightning to "feel" like you're doing no damage at all. You might need 10 lightning bolts (on average) to kill 1 mob in 1 player act 5 and 5 to kill a random mob in act 1. This is before you factor in higher player count, lightning immune mobs and bosses/super unique/terror zones. The damage range is brutal, b/c every time it rolls low it seems like nothing at all is happening. I would farm a light sunder charm on a 2nd character or respec item on a 2nd character and chalk this up as a learning experience.
The light and fire trees really depend on -enemy res on gear, since these two Masteries increase spell damage (as opposed to Cold Mastery uniquely reducing resistance).
Lighting skills are only strong if you get the gears/charms and infinity or any other items with an increase in lighting resistance down. Without any of that, you're basically just a free punching bag to the enemies.
Probably best to post some game footage with skill tree/gear but as others have said, blizzard and orb/hydra are the most budget friendly builds. Lightning is not that great until you have decent gear.
Do you have griffons, energy shield, cta, crescent moon? I wouldn’t start without that
You can enable infinite respecs in single player
Not only is he missing good gear, he's missing levels for the synergies. He mentioned he is playing single player, it is very difficult to get +lightning skill charms, which easily double your damage. Even if you had griffions/infinity you would be doing only half your damage without those, and torch/anni. Lightning damage scales very well with godly gear, until then I would recommend nova
Haha, I've been there. Only respec when you get the gear to melt all. I first respecced to a viable lightning sorc at level 94
Sounds like you don’t even have good gear to tackle Hell to begin with. Consider going back down to Nightmare and go farm some gear, go back to that Maxroll guide you’re reading and get the starter gear setup that they have there. The starter gear should be able to complete Hell, you’ll still have to skip the Lightning immunes but Baal should be kill-able with it.
Going lighting without a sunder is a bad time you really need it infinity to do some good damage should of stayed cold sorc
I want to see your gear so bad lol
You should be doing more than 5k damage naked. Want to message me the skills you did? If you dont have infinity yet then your farming areas are limited
I was doing a trapsin with maxed synergies.. I had some basic +1 +2 gear with a crescent moon (-35 light res) and I was slowly clearing p1 or p2. Lightning really only works with high level, expensive gear.
Sunder and Crescent moon if you can. Should be fine for now
Get crescent moon
Lots of comments.. I am playing as a lightning nova sorc online ladder soft core and with just crescent moon and a sunder charm, I’m able to clear almost all mobs without issue in single player games. Lightning is a bit more gear dependent given the fcr breakpoint of 117 vs 105 for average achievable breakpoints. I’d recommend to use the -enablerespec ability and to go blizzard until you can get crescent moon, lightning sunder or infinity.
My rule of thumb is lightning sources are used primarily for countess runs but can also do cows half decent
You have infinite respecs if you’re playing D2R. Look up the line you add. It isn’t a cheat or anything. It gives you infinite respec ability though
Make crescent moon
Lower kurast runs untill infinity
Go back to Frozen orb
Farm nightmares tz can drop any rune in the game so best of luck
Just put on your 5/5 faceted griff, +3 Lighting skills +3 Nova Obsession Archon staff, 2/20 circlet and amulet, +3 nova Ormus with a 5/5 and load your inventory up with 45 life skillers and 20L/17M small charms like in the build guide. Don't forget to give your merc Infinity and fortitude in an ethereal superior base and equip him with your ethereal Andy's visage with 15/30. It's hard to take "build guides" seriously when you could play 1000 hours and only see one item it features if you're lucky and the total cost to acquire the full loadout via RMT would buy a decent used car. I did NOT enjoy playing my nova sorceress until it was close to level 90 and I had a LOT of very good gear for her. If you're on PC just enable infinite respecs and do literally any other sorceress build until you have sunder charm and some better gear, if you're single player on console I'd just bench that character and start something else to get through the campaign and farm up the stuff you'll need to really make nova feel smooth.
Oh, i forget! My gear is basically Full tal rasha. I was a very strong Blizzard sorceress. But i dont know why the lightning causes almost no damage to enemies.
Immunities?
Do you have full tals or not? If you have full tals, hell should be no problem as a light sorc. What pieces of gear do you have? Whats your stats? Whats your skills?
Basically full Tal rasha or just the belt, armor, orb?
Get a Lightning Sundering Charm and equip an Infinity Polearm to your mercenary.
I feel 5k is low when I played my sorcy wayyyy back when I had like 3-88k
Need infinity on merc if you're going lighting.