Diablo 1 HD Hellfire Mod | Awake

Hi All,
I've read a few threads on here that contain posts saying things like "chain lightning is OP, CHain lightning is too strong, chain lightning spam clears whole caves in 20s"

or the ever popular: "sorcs can breeze through early to mid game content"

mostly in threads relating to quad immune / resist monsters and how that negatively impacts late game sorcerer play.

I'm not saying those assertions are wrong, I haven't made it to end game content yet. I am struggling to understand when (what level of sorc / spell level) this CL spam becomes viable. Could a few of you please help explain this to me? I've just got chain lightning and the damage on it seems absolutely terrible:

18 mana for max 3 beams that do 3-6 damage per second for 0.3s. (according to the tooltip, anyway). When I use it I find I need to cast it 5-8 times to kill mobs that I 1-2 shot with regular lightning.

things like basic goatmen archers, skeleton archers and plain overloards take multiple hits to drop with CL, whereas one bolt of regular lightning drops them instantly (and whatever was behind them too).

Is there something wrong with the damage scaling that makes higher levels of the spell cranking out absurd dps compared to other spells?

when you start seeing monsters with lightning resistance (or god forbid immunity) I presume that this DPS inefficiency gets worse, not better.

There seems to be more efficient / situational AOE spells available. (lightning, guardian, firewall, lightning wall to name a few early game spells).


Or is it simply the case that I'm playing the class wrong? I typically run around with lightning on left click and firewall on right click with mana shield up and I hit darkpact on cooldown, chug pots as needed and swap to either firebolt for single target or guardian when i'm able to break LOS and put it through a door or around a corner and I'll swap to circle of ice when I'm trying to kite and things are hot on my tail.

That's pretty much all I'm using in combat right now. every time I try experimenting with chain lightning I come away from the experiment completely underwhelmed.

Am I supposed to run around the whole level, gather up every mob, pack them all into one room and then spam CL? That seems like a lot of effort and risk.

Although I am only level 19. maybe if I had 1,500 mana instead of 350 then spamming CL would be viable?

Since I've put almost all my points into magic (for the mana shield skill) I see the mana pool as both my Health and my Ammo. spamming CL drops that so damn fast it scares me.

Sorry for being a noob guys, any advice would be greatly appreciated.
-Exo

You'll completely stop using what u're sing now by mid-end Nightmare, which is not even half way thru the game. I dunno your spell's level but at 20+ levels it's tens of beams and hundreds in dmg, for every square form the length of the beam that passes the enemy, sure %spell dmg and -%target lightning resit add to it, but you can simply not believe what you've read and continue onward, you'll figure it out if it's good or not.

PS: 1.5k mana is obtainable by endgame, it's not maybe if...

Oh I see what you're saying, so when people say "early game" they aren't talking about normal difficulty at all, it's Hard -> nightmare and that CL becomes powerful when you have a bunch more levels in it?

Makes sense. I'll keep plodding along with regular lightning and firewall then.

cheers.

Imo endgame is Torment difficulty dungeon lvl 13 and up, where you'd grind over and over to reach max lvl and where you'd want to keep farming afterwards for every recipe/set/uniq item you are missing. Mid game would be Hell difficulty, and here also from dungeon lvl 13 the 3+ and sometimes all immune mobs appear as per the discussions you've read, and Sorcerer begins to feel it's falling behind without proper immunity breaking, until then it's much easier to just learn most spell levels and switch to one that the monster is not immune to and do lots of dmg. Most ppl have no problem increasing the monster power since early game (Normal and Nightmare) since it's just more monster hp to go through and spells have the dmg output to still take them out quite fast.

But on the other side fighter characters can't as easily do this cause they make use of physical dmg, and sure there is no physical immunity but monster AC increases with difficulty and with monster power and since you rely on a weapon type and there are 2 tiers of weapons, it's a continuous process to level up in order to have the req lvl to equip better gear with higher affixes to have that higher weapon speed, %ED, raw +dmg, % crit chance/dmg, life/mana leech and others to keep the dmg output up and relevant, even Ignore Target Defense becomes a must in Torment difficulty to go over monster AC, anyway what i'm saying is caster characters have access to learning spell levels much easier since earlier on and and staff type or tier doesn't matter, plus affixes on staves are in lesser nrs then affixes on other types of weapons, so overall easier to find/craft a good staff and equip it and learn many spell levels just with spellbooks, also they have multiple elements he can rely on and spell dmg doesn't care about monster's AC increasing with difficulty or the monster power command line. This is why there were discussions to smoothen the caster characters spell dmg progression and in turn lower monster resistance/immunity in higher difficulties, so you don't get as high spell dmg early on and then by Torment difficulty can't do any dmg in some cases with all immune monsters, cause you absolutely needing to have immunity reducing affixes and enough of them to then do even a small % of dmg, unlike before when just switching the spell was required to kill something.

Also the nr of monsters that you find now in an entire level will be the equivalent of what you can find in one screen in Torment difficulty, and their overall speed increases with each difficulty so an auto target all around spread spell like Chain Lightning will be much more useful while you need to constantly move around and not get caught by speedy mobs, this besides Meteor Cluster and Blizzard since they're 9 square AOE dmg, and for sure you'll see that these will be better then the single target spells you use now in Normal/Nightmare, also with their monster speed increased they won't stay as much under Fire/Lightning Wall to take dmg as they do now. Thinking about i feel it doesn't take more then 6-8h max to finish whole Normal difficulty, while it takes up to 1h sometimes up to 2h to clear just one dungeon level in Torment even with better spells and top gear now. So, there should and will be some changes in Tchernobog build but not a straight nerf to Sorcerer/Necromancer, just better spell level scaling with difficulty and the immunities will be less of a solution to high spell dmg in higher difficulties and more in the line of switching spells as now in early game.

Thanks for the detailed reply DacianDraco, That makes a lot of sense and I see exactly what you mean about spell scaling. I managed to find a couple more chain lightning spellbooks last night and here's what I discovered:

At level 1 the chain lightning does 4-6 damage. for 18 mana (i.e. completely useless)
@ level 2: 4-16 (still not great) for 19 mana
@ level 3: 4-26 (now we're getting somewhere) for 20 mana
@ level 4: 4-36 (actually usable now) for 21 mana.

so we can see that the max damage goes up by 10 per spell level and the mana goes up by one.
i.e. it scales VERY efficiently. perhaps too efficiently.

Would it make more sense to start it off at say 4-36 damage @ level 1, for 15 mana and scale up by 5 damage and 2 mana instead of 10 damage 1 mana per spell level?

That would mean @ level 20 the spell is doing 4-136 instead of 4-206 and costs 55 mana per cast instead of 38.

That's an immediate reduction in max spell damage, but it would also mean it's immediately useful to the player when the spell is first learned.

If the rest of the auto target aoe spells were scaled in a similar manner: Have a higher base damage and lower mana cost at level 1 and scale up with less bonus damage and more mana cost per spell level.
That should negate the need for quad immunity. If quad immunity was dropped but high resists still retained, that should normalize the DPS of maxxed out sorcs: Instead of being able to instantly kill a whole cave one second then spend 1 hour killing a quad immune mob the next, it should bring their time to kill on trash mobs up while still making the low and mid level sorcs be viable, right?

I know I'm a newbie, but that *seems* like a logical conclusion. It might not be a complete solution but it seems like a step int he right direction, at least.