I've done this same build on SP hardcore with similar limitations before, and I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Many of the thoughts you express in the video were mine as well, and while my build was certainly not optimized, it was enough to get me through HC and have a great time. For the weapon, I tried most of the options you mentioned, and imo Azurewrath felt the most balanced. The sanctuary aura on it is absolutely beautiful and helps this build so much, both defensively and offensively. But the magic/frost damage on it also perfectly synergizes with your glaring weakness: fire immunes. Yes, it's "only" about 1k damage total, but since you are static fielding everything down to low health, it does the trick just fine. Also, I might be wrong, but I think the elemental masteries of the sorc also work on weapon elemental damage. So if you want to add that Forb and CM to your build, now you'd have another bonus to using Azurewrath. Not much IAS required either to get to max (if any at all? Shael might be enough, I can't remember). As for the gear, my idea behind this character was to go the opposite of my usual route and use it as an excuse to finally apply those uniques which I had wanted to use for ages but never found a reason to. I think I ended up using Guardian Angel (maxres &fast blocking), together with a Stormshield and... Kira's Guardian. Made a hell of a lot of difference to the tankiness of the character, and Kira's has CBF built in, so that opens up more jewelry combos. I found that points invested in max block were more useful with this setup than going full Vit. To be fair, I did have a CtA on switch lying around for this build though, so you may be squishy without that. For merc, I went Holy Freeze and Reaper's Toll. All of this stuff together made Hell a lot easier to survive than I had imagined, and... well it was just really fun! Sometimes the least powerful characters can be the most memorable. As a final note, I've also tried adding the frozen orb thing at some point and yes it works. The question to me was purely whether it fit the fantasy of a melee sorc. For me it didn't so much, so I dumped the rest of my points into static field, to just zap the entire screen and laugh. To each their own though of course!
Yes, I don't really want to do frozen orb which I why i put some thought into azurewrath or even kingslayer/vengeance sorc... but I'm having trouble seeing how the build goes without it Thanks for your comment, good stuff.
@@kruggers1329 It certainly is more of a one-target-at-a-time build than most others yeah. The good news is that being able to just aggressively teleport your merc right on top of his next target helps a lot. The classic Reaper's+Treachery+Guil with ias jewel combo really does quite formidable damage if it's not left up to the AI
For a melee sorc, not getting hit and not dying is a better idea to focus on since your DPS is going to be shit. Guardian angel would help with block and to get 90% resist all, and a defiance merc with you having maxed out one of the cold armors will aid in you not getting hit. For a cheap damage increase, a leaf runeword in a +3 to enchant stick will give you +6 total to enchant. Then you could use tgods, sojs, and an ummed kiras helm and a metalgrid. I'd use an upped mosers shield with 2 pdiamonds for massive resists and good block, but gerkes sanctuary or stormshield might be good options too. Delirium on the merc is probably your best bet. Once the masses are confused you could use a demon machine on switch for exploding arrows that pierce 66% of the time. For a cheap weapon you could try a 6 socket phaseblade with 3 shaels and 3 eth runes, a 10 frame standard attack sucks but it might be worth a shot. It also frees up your other slots for defensive stats since all your attack speed will be on your weapon, but your max attacks will only be 2.5 per second compared to zeal's 3.28. You could also dump a lot of points into telekinesis and use a Memory staff with +3 to energy shield (+9 total) to grant yourself energy shield. With warmth, it'll be like having innate damage reduction. If you go down this route, you could use frostburns, sojs and silkweaves for an extra 100% total mana, with maxed out warmth, 90 res all, max block and like a 70% energy shield you might become an unstoppable tank.
I play plugy, but I've never found a Jah rune, so I have never played the dual dream variant of this. But, the big aha moment for me with this build was when I realized that she doesn't do jack anything for physical damage. So you great her exactly like you'd gear a fire sorc, with two exceptions: ar, largely taken care of by enchant, and ias. Your primary damage dealers are enchant and fire mastery. So all in on fire skills and all skills. Coh, shako with fire facet, highlords, ss with fire facet, arach, magefist. And I prebuff enchant and energy shield with hoto and lidless. I don't use frozen or at all. I mainly farm crystalline with this build, but I typically move my infinity over beforehand. So that might be tricky.
Man, I love playing Vanilla single player. It makes it so much more difficult to decide on gear and builds. I've always wanted to make this Enchantress build work too. I've tried a few times but the Sorc is so squishy and has terrible hit recovery and chance to hit, I think. I remember the ones I made wouldhave decent damage but couldn't hit hardly anything in late nightmare. Good luck man. Id like to see an update if you get it to work!
Me too. I really only have luck with a Zealot though cause it's b pretty simple. Stuff like Ancient Pledge and Honor and crafted Blood gear can carry you
It is very expensive, but Doom is something I'm planning to create anyway in single player (an Ohm or Lo away... can cube my 2 Ohms if needed), and might work out nicely for an enchantress (no Zeal then obviously... oh well). A low synergy Energy shield with damage taken goes to mana can be really cool with a nice balance of life/mana (Naj's armor and Snakecord come to mind). You can use Enchant from Demon Limb if you can stand the repair cost, to save 20 skill points on tree and get a stronger 2nd element or something (would stuck with lvl 23 enchant, but still receive the synergies). If you are not planning to use CTA on switch, a Demon Machine + Razortail can be cool AOE clear switch gear (plus hella stylish imo).
hmm from what i've heard its quite important to prebuff your enchant as high as possible and using demon limb would preclude that. I actually have a doom polearm on another character I could potentially swing over.. i'll have to think on it
Enchant aint easy unless you can stack it up to insane levels with skillers and prebuff gear. Frozen orb or blizzard is definately the way to go imo, you can make it do good damage without having to max the mastery or it's synergy (in the case of frozen orb anyways) something i'd consider using is eye of etlich and glacial spike for crowd control, it's good to have a way to freeze enemies for 4-5 seconds or however long it is with hell penalties (also helpful with frozen armor), while you wack them with zeal. As for merc, it's hard, safest bet is probably an act 3 ice merc just for more crowd control, but it feels like a waste since than it's not very useful to enchant your merc you know. Also look into pdr/mdr gear, especially if using energy shield, it's super effective imo and made a huge difference for me. Skin of the Vipermagi (mdr 9-13), Gerke's sanctuary which is a fantastic shield with high block that nobody uses (pdr 11-16 mdr 14-18), vampire gaze (mdr 10-15), string of ears (mdr 10-15), dwarf star (mdr 12-15) and a bunch of sol or better mal runes. edit: i think i remember what i used for gear. You need 40 ias when using zeal in passion right. Pretty sure i used Ik gloves and boots (i know right, this character is a puzzle of weird gear pieces to make it work) and a 15 ias jewel somewhere. Reason why i used those gloves and boots is because the combined bonus gives 25 ias (hence another 15 jewel was sufficient), and it has str, dex, ar and life. Skin of vipermagi, gerke's, vamp gaze, string of ears, dwarf star, ravenfrost, eye of etlich. Cto on switch for the final skill point to zeal.
Best advice is dont make a sp enchantress. But if I had to I would do a bear sorc over zeal if I had griz weapon, -fire res will be super important on this build so you might want to put facets in your gear or something. Treachery is good if you do an area with few elemental damage enemys first, like the pits. After its procs than you can do other areas. If you run without -res the damage will be garbage you max fire damage on sp will be like 4k at best . Its 6k with a torch anni spirit and gear to get a lvl 55 chant.
Yeah, single player is so difficult when it comes to builds without mods. I do the same, I don't use any mods for my singleplayer. It's not easy without Fortitude, Insight, Infinity etc. You have to think a little bit more when it comes to the build and equipment, and you will never be as strong as ladder characters. Also some runes that otherwise would be valuable, are kinda worthless here, since the runeword does not exist where you would use them. I like that you do the same. :)
hell yeah bro Honestly half the D2 builds on youtube are like "okay xyz xyz and oh yeah put infinity on your merc." Like dang any build works with infinity on your merc lol. It really is quite a bit harder when you have to be a hybrid, and don't have cheap ladder only runewords, and dont get all the resistances from anni/torch. Sometimes people give me a bit of crap for playing on players 1, but I think the game is pretty balanced without all that stuff in it.
My dude you already have the gloves. Try Passion , Angelic's combo ,Guillaume face ,RF ring ,Goblintoes.On switch get one of those sexy curse wands and a FCR shield .The murk is only an AR aura to you ,i give mine "Survival gear" .For the skills, the obvious ones and the mandatory 3:Energy shield ,Static field,Frozen Armour .You compliment all that by dumping a shit ton of points in Dex and Energy and some body armour,belt and shield that fill the gaps(resistances and mana steal/regen/when hit mainly).All the gems and jewels you add must be AR/Res ones, that goes for your charms to.
ohh kinda depends on your gear/budget/etc. If you feel like you get hit/die often and need some defense, act 2 holy freeze merc is prettyyy dang useful for that. Or if you're fine and just want more damage, act 2 might merc. For each I usually use the reapers toll/treachery/guillaumes set up. But in any case an act 2 merc is the way to go in my opinion. If you can make the ladder-only runewords, insight is probably a good choice for wep as well
I've done this same build on SP hardcore with similar limitations before, and I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Many of the thoughts you express in the video were mine as well, and while my build was certainly not optimized, it was enough to get me through HC and have a great time.
For the weapon, I tried most of the options you mentioned, and imo Azurewrath felt the most balanced. The sanctuary aura on it is absolutely beautiful and helps this build so much, both defensively and offensively. But the magic/frost damage on it also perfectly synergizes with your glaring weakness: fire immunes. Yes, it's "only" about 1k damage total, but since you are static fielding everything down to low health, it does the trick just fine. Also, I might be wrong, but I think the elemental masteries of the sorc also work on weapon elemental damage. So if you want to add that Forb and CM to your build, now you'd have another bonus to using Azurewrath. Not much IAS required either to get to max (if any at all? Shael might be enough, I can't remember).
As for the gear, my idea behind this character was to go the opposite of my usual route and use it as an excuse to finally apply those uniques which I had wanted to use for ages but never found a reason to. I think I ended up using Guardian Angel (maxres &fast blocking), together with a Stormshield and... Kira's Guardian. Made a hell of a lot of difference to the tankiness of the character, and Kira's has CBF built in, so that opens up more jewelry combos. I found that points invested in max block were more useful with this setup than going full Vit. To be fair, I did have a CtA on switch lying around for this build though, so you may be squishy without that.
For merc, I went Holy Freeze and Reaper's Toll. All of this stuff together made Hell a lot easier to survive than I had imagined, and... well it was just really fun! Sometimes the least powerful characters can be the most memorable.
As a final note, I've also tried adding the frozen orb thing at some point and yes it works. The question to me was purely whether it fit the fantasy of a melee sorc. For me it didn't so much, so I dumped the rest of my points into static field, to just zap the entire screen and laugh. To each their own though of course!
Yes, I don't really want to do frozen orb which I why i put some thought into azurewrath or even kingslayer/vengeance sorc... but I'm having trouble seeing how the build goes without it
Thanks for your comment, good stuff.
@@kruggers1329 It certainly is more of a one-target-at-a-time build than most others yeah. The good news is that being able to just aggressively teleport your merc right on top of his next target helps a lot. The classic Reaper's+Treachery+Guil with ias jewel combo really does quite formidable damage if it's not left up to the AI
Cant remember seeing a geared up low level character. Very refreshing thank you
For a melee sorc, not getting hit and not dying is a better idea to focus on since your DPS is going to be shit. Guardian angel would help with block and to get 90% resist all, and a defiance merc with you having maxed out one of the cold armors will aid in you not getting hit. For a cheap damage increase, a leaf runeword in a +3 to enchant stick will give you +6 total to enchant.
Then you could use tgods, sojs, and an ummed kiras helm and a metalgrid. I'd use an upped mosers shield with 2 pdiamonds for massive resists and good block, but gerkes sanctuary or stormshield might be good options too. Delirium on the merc is probably your best bet. Once the masses are confused you could use a demon machine on switch for exploding arrows that pierce 66% of the time.
For a cheap weapon you could try a 6 socket phaseblade with 3 shaels and 3 eth runes, a 10 frame standard attack sucks but it might be worth a shot. It also frees up your other slots for defensive stats since all your attack speed will be on your weapon, but your max attacks will only be 2.5 per second compared to zeal's 3.28.
You could also dump a lot of points into telekinesis and use a Memory staff with +3 to energy shield (+9 total) to grant yourself energy shield. With warmth, it'll be like having innate damage reduction. If you go down this route, you could use frostburns, sojs and silkweaves for an extra 100% total mana, with maxed out warmth, 90 res all, max block and like a 70% energy shield you might become an unstoppable tank.
I play plugy, but I've never found a Jah rune, so I have never played the dual dream variant of this. But, the big aha moment for me with this build was when I realized that she doesn't do jack anything for physical damage.
So you great her exactly like you'd gear a fire sorc, with two exceptions: ar, largely taken care of by enchant, and ias.
Your primary damage dealers are enchant and fire mastery. So all in on fire skills and all skills. Coh, shako with fire facet, highlords, ss with fire facet, arach, magefist.
And I prebuff enchant and energy shield with hoto and lidless. I don't use frozen or at all.
I mainly farm crystalline with this build, but I typically move my infinity over beforehand. So that might be tricky.
Man, I love playing Vanilla single player. It makes it so much more difficult to decide on gear and builds. I've always wanted to make this Enchantress build work too. I've tried a few times but the Sorc is so squishy and has terrible hit recovery and chance to hit, I think. I remember the ones I made wouldhave decent damage but couldn't hit hardly anything in late nightmare. Good luck man. Id like to see an update if you get it to work!
Me too. I really only have luck with a Zealot though cause it's b pretty simple. Stuff like Ancient Pledge and Honor and crafted Blood gear can carry you
Brain's big, game's good. Interesting build man!
It took me awhile to figure out what "Braincrafting / Theorystorming" means in the title
I would suggest figuring out which IAS and FHR breakpoints you want to hit and then build your gear around those
It is very expensive, but Doom is something I'm planning to create anyway in single player (an Ohm or Lo away... can cube my 2 Ohms if needed), and might work out nicely for an enchantress (no Zeal then obviously... oh well). A low synergy Energy shield with damage taken goes to mana can be really cool with a nice balance of life/mana (Naj's armor and Snakecord come to mind). You can use Enchant from Demon Limb if you can stand the repair cost, to save 20 skill points on tree and get a stronger 2nd element or something (would stuck with lvl 23 enchant, but still receive the synergies). If you are not planning to use CTA on switch, a Demon Machine + Razortail can be cool AOE clear switch gear (plus hella stylish imo).
hmm from what i've heard its quite important to prebuff your enchant as high as possible and using demon limb would preclude that. I actually have a doom polearm on another character I could potentially swing over.. i'll have to think on it
Enchant aint easy unless you can stack it up to insane levels with skillers and prebuff gear. Frozen orb or blizzard is definately the way to go imo, you can make it do good damage without having to max the mastery or it's synergy (in the case of frozen orb anyways) something i'd consider using is eye of etlich and glacial spike for crowd control, it's good to have a way to freeze enemies for 4-5 seconds or however long it is with hell penalties (also helpful with frozen armor), while you wack them with zeal. As for merc, it's hard, safest bet is probably an act 3 ice merc just for more crowd control, but it feels like a waste since than it's not very useful to enchant your merc you know.
Also look into pdr/mdr gear, especially if using energy shield, it's super effective imo and made a huge difference for me.
Skin of the Vipermagi (mdr 9-13), Gerke's sanctuary which is a fantastic shield with high block that nobody uses (pdr 11-16 mdr 14-18), vampire gaze (mdr 10-15), string of ears (mdr 10-15), dwarf star (mdr 12-15) and a bunch of sol or better mal runes.
edit: i think i remember what i used for gear. You need 40 ias when using zeal in passion right. Pretty sure i used Ik gloves and boots (i know right, this character is a puzzle of weird gear pieces to make it work) and a 15 ias jewel somewhere. Reason why i used those gloves and boots is because the combined bonus gives 25 ias (hence another 15 jewel was sufficient), and it has str, dex, ar and life. Skin of vipermagi, gerke's, vamp gaze, string of ears, dwarf star, ravenfrost, eye of etlich. Cto on switch for the final skill point to zeal.
Best advice is dont make a sp enchantress. But if I had to I would do a bear sorc over zeal if I had griz weapon, -fire res will be super important on this build so you might want to put facets in your gear or something. Treachery is good if you do an area with few elemental damage enemys first, like the pits. After its procs than you can do other areas. If you run without -res the damage will be garbage you max fire damage on sp will be like 4k at best . Its 6k with a torch anni spirit and gear to get a lvl 55 chant.
Yeah, single player is so difficult when it comes to builds without mods. I do the same, I don't use any mods for my singleplayer. It's not easy without Fortitude, Insight, Infinity etc. You have to think a little bit more when it comes to the build and equipment, and you will never be as strong as ladder characters. Also some runes that otherwise would be valuable, are kinda worthless here, since the runeword does not exist where you would use them.
I like that you do the same. :)
hell yeah bro
Honestly half the D2 builds on youtube are like "okay xyz xyz and oh yeah put infinity on your merc." Like dang any build works with infinity on your merc lol.
It really is quite a bit harder when you have to be a hybrid, and don't have cheap ladder only runewords, and dont get all the resistances from anni/torch. Sometimes people give me a bit of crap for playing on players 1, but I think the game is pretty balanced without all that stuff in it.
My dude you already have the gloves. Try Passion , Angelic's combo ,Guillaume face ,RF ring ,Goblintoes.On switch get one of those sexy curse wands and a FCR shield .The murk is only an AR aura to you ,i give mine "Survival gear" .For the skills, the obvious ones and the mandatory 3:Energy shield ,Static field,Frozen Armour .You compliment all that by dumping a shit ton of points in Dex and Energy and some body armour,belt and shield that fill the gaps(resistances and mana steal/regen/when hit mainly).All the gems and jewels you add must be AR/Res ones, that goes for your charms to.
Bear sorc
Plague runeword on switch or on merc maybe?
What's the best merc for a blizzBall sorc??
ohh kinda depends on your gear/budget/etc. If you feel like you get hit/die often and need some defense, act 2 holy freeze merc is prettyyy dang useful for that. Or if you're fine and just want more damage, act 2 might merc. For each I usually use the reapers toll/treachery/guillaumes set up. But in any case an act 2 merc is the way to go in my opinion. If you can make the ladder-only runewords, insight is probably a good choice for wep as well
Also, why don't you use infinity!? Just kidding man..
Merc would be sweet with doom and delirium. Then you could still choose another aura and still have holy freeze
Defiance and holy freeze
@Kruggers13 come play path of diablo. its lit
use chilling instead of FO