Sorceress Fast Leveling

[Damien 1,514]

This thread is for comments about our Sorceress Fast Leveling guide.

[Demonae 0]

Level 30 Respec forgot 1 pt into Telekinesis to get to Teleport. That leaves 6 pts for Ice Blast. I put 1 pt into Warmth also and one less into Ice Blast.

[MrLlamaSC 5]

Ya Warmth I usually wait a tiny bit to get later on, but it's not a big deal if you exchange 1 point here and there on the way!

[MiyuSaito 0]

I have never suffered more than playing this build. Please delete. Using Nova is a death sentence, can't cast it more than twice and the damage is too low to kill anything. The Paladin does 4x the damage my level 20 sorc does at level 4.

[BlackMarketBeagle 0]

The problem I have with this guide is that it doesn't make any mention about how experience works in D2R. That might not be necessary in a general guide, but this particular guide is about how to level fast, and claims to be the fastest , not how to finish the game quickly.

This is from the Arreat Summit, and I don't have any reason to think that it's changed in D2R. (I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post links so I'll refrain, I can provide one on request): 

Quote

For any monster above your level, you get EXP*(Player Level / Monster Level).

Every map has a level associated with it that all normal monsters on that map inherit. For the Blood Moor in Hell, that level is 67. The level in the Den of Evil is 79. The author suggests that you should have the Hell Den of Evil skill point available at level 55. If you're in the Blood Moor at level 55, this puts you at gaining only 82% (55/67*100) experience gained, and 69% (55/79*100) in the Den of Evil. 

You may well have finished NM at level 54/55, but moving into Hell at that level will be a really frustrating experience if you're levelling yourself and not being rushed. You won't have enough resistances, monsters will be extremely difficult to kill, and you won't get all the experience you could from killing them if you had just kicked around in NM a bit longer. The most efficient way to level is to find a list of the monster level for each map, and then go kill stuff in the level that matches your character level.

In general I've been really disappointed in the quality of guides that I've seen for D2R builds, here and elsewhere. Like maybe you were rushed to provide the content, or aren't really respectful of it? I dunno. There's a lot of nuance to D2/D2R, a lot more than there is in WoW, where there's no variance in gear unless you get lucky with a third stat, and almost no options for character builds. The WoW guides here at Icy Veins are great - they go into a lot of detail about all of your possible decision points, even though they all end with "sim yourself," which is all you can really do. But they recognize that there's a lot to be said about all of aspects of working with a character. The D2R guides devote a terse paragraph for the same information. 

Perhaps my takeaway should be that it's silly to look for D2 information on what's basically a WoW site. There's a lot more creativity available to a player in D2R than in WoW, because unless you're going complete cookie cutter and trading for high end gear, there are a lot more choices to make. It's why I loved D2 and why I'm finding D2R more compelling than WoW right now. I'd love it if your guides at least hinted at that depth, and offered suggestions on where to find more information, even if providing ALL of it is beyond your scope. (I completely get that it may be.)

[EraserHead 1]

It's important to remember that this guide is based on MrLlamaMC's runs and he is a speed runner.  It's pretty hard for almost anyone to keep up with him.  It is a good idea to watch his YouTube stream and see how he actually does the run - most of his advice is extremely useful.

The guide on this site should include other useful information critical for this build: grabbing non-magical grey (and not "mechanics"!) 2-socket body armor from Charsi (or just finding it) early (leather is fine) and farming for Countess Tal and Eth to make Stealth armor which you can use at 17.  In Act 2 to get a 3 socket shield (you can buy one) for Ancient's Pledge in Act 5 with quest runes and a 2 socket shield to make Rhyme from Sheal and Eth which if you're lucky you'll find in Act 5 (or farm Nightmare Countess later).  You will also want a 2 socket helm to for Rhyme which requires Ort and Sol (farm countess for Ort, Sol you might find in Act 5).  After defeating Baal, farm Cows for a 4 open socket crystal sword to make Spirit from Tal, Thul, Ort and Amn (which you can find by farming Cows as well).  That can be hard to find (make sure magic find is as low as possible) so save any normal unsocketed crystal sword you find which you can take to Larzuk (for guaranteed 4 sockets) or put into the cube for random 1-4 sockets.  Note that crystal swords you find later in Nightmare can have up to 6 sockets, but normal Cows crystal swords can only have up to 4 sockets (even from Larzuk or cube recipe).  You can also make a Spirit shield with the same recipe and a 4 socket shield, but finding one you can wield may take a while (most have high strength requirements).

[CMA 0]

To the guy above, you're not meant to cast frost nova more than that, you need to use static field first and more than you use nova, get jewelry with fcr for faster casting and orb.

But yeah not a great leveling build and i don't like the guy that made this build so that makes it a double no for me, i have 20 years in this game, i don't need to use some streamer's shitty guide.

I can tell you right now the traditional hydra builds beats the socks out of this shitty build, it's faster, requires less mana, requires no active gameplay so you can set your hydras and move away, Llama is not a veteran and i am really disappointed seeing icyveins using his builds, which means i am done using it.

 

To anyone who needs build look for d2 builds and not d2r, blizzard is a copycat of Blizzard North so you can make sure the builds that worked for d2 works for d2r, use those as they are far superior to this, this will waste your time since the build is as dumb as the person who made it.

Edited May 8, 2022 by CMA

[toepin 0]

The video provided is completely different to the build suggested here. MrLlama talks about fire/cold skills and they are much more "user friendly" than the static/nova build here. I honestly think it is a pretty bad guide and needs to be changed. I am a pretty experienced player and struggled with this build, got annoyed and had to respec at lvl15 which was kind of a waste. Start with firebolt/fireball and you will do so much damage and need to chug a lot less mana pots.

[saseith 0]

I decided to try this one out in place of the early fire build I've used for leveling for the last 20 years, and I have to say that if this build works, it's not at all clear how from this guide.  As other users have mentioned, mana is simply insufficient early-on to fuel repeated uses of nova, though the incredibly-small radius of the single-point static-field also makes it impractical for softening large groups of targets up, as one user suggested.  I can see how that would work with skill boosts, though that gear only becomes available after you re-spec out of this build, anyway.  Warmth can help, though it's not actually mentioned in this guide.  Similarly, use of Leaf (also not otherwise mentioned here) can help with mana exhaustion mid to late in the build, but it still seems that the general fire bonuses there pull an early fire build far ahead of this.  Just to add further confusion, the embedded video describes an early fire/frost build that bears no resemblance to this lightning build.  At this point, I'm honestly not certain if something is missing from the description to explain the intended strategy or if this was "theorycrafted" by someone for the site and never actually tested.