User blog:Brainwasher5/Meteorb notes

There have been a few excellent guides on meteorb (like this ) but there's sooooo much information on them. I'm condensing stuff here for easier reading.

Skill Distribution
Cold: 20 Frozen Orb, 5 prerequisites, a total of 17 Cold Mastery (including from +skill items)--at least 26 skill points. Don't bother with ice bolt as the synergy's too tiny to matter and your points are scarce. Cold armors are nice but not essential; you can get them from an orb and save some points.

Lightning: 1 Static Field, 1 Telekinesis, 1 Teleport--three skill points.

Fire: 1 Warmth, 4 prerequisites, 20 Meteor, 20 Fireball, 10-20 in Fire Mastery, rest in Fire Bolt. How much in fire mastery vs. fire bolt is dependent on how much one uses fire ball vs. meteor: fire bolt benefits fire ball more but fire mastery benefits meteor more. Basically, fire mastery benefits the fire damage by multiplying the total damage AFTER all the bonuses, while fire bolt does so BEFORE. Things start to tilt more towards fire bolt being better in the higher levels, especially for fireball.

Stats
Need to figure out if having a shield and 75% block is worth it as of the last patch, or if I should ditch dex and just pump vit.

Equipment
Sorcs possibly benefit more from +skills than any other character, due to the sheer amount of skills that benefit most builds. Meteorbs are one of the biggest examples of this. Resistance and absorbs are good as usual. Life and mana are great, though mana is not as big of a concern here since Meteorbs aren't that mana-hungry due to their casting delays. Cold Skill +damage (-resistances is pointless cause you should be getting it from your skills) and -enemy fire resistance is great.

Some interesting things: FRW is not as useful cause there's teleport (but still nice); faster cast rate's not that useful due to cool downs but still nice; cannot be frozen is not that useful because freezing does not slow casting rate.

Any items with the above are good. Listing the best below:

Helm

 * Harlequin Crest: Maybe better for a meteorb than any other character.


 * Nightwing's Veil: skills, cold skill damage.


 * Tal Rasha's Horadric Crest: see note on set.

Amulet

 * Mara's Kaleidoscope: +skills, resistances.


 * Tal Rasha's Abjudication: +skills, life, mana, lightning resists. See note on set.


 * Rare: Hypothetically, somewhere out there there's a sorc ammy with +2 sorc skills, +2 fire skills, +2 cold skills, and up to three other amazing modifiers. Good luck finding it though. Crafted amulets with plus skills on top of their innate bonuses and some resistances or other excellent mods have the potential to be the best amulets in the game.

Weapon

 * Heart of the Oak: Too many great things to list. The runes are expensive but not nearly as bad as most other classes' top tier runewords.


 * Occulus: Another amazing all-round choice. The random teleport can get VERY annoying, however.


 * Death's Fathom: Cold skill damage.


 * Tal Rasha's Lidless Eye: see note on set. Fairly mediocre without the set.


 * Leaf: I'm putting this here out of stubborness, since people seem to discount it. It's one of the cheapest runewords in the game, you can wield it in your teen levels, and it gives a whopping at least +6 to warmth and +3 to all your other fire skills, as well as mana per kill. In the early game, where you can run out of mana at the drop of a hat, this cannot be praised highly enough. An extremely powerful weapon considering its cost and its early-game availabilty, and potentially something you'll be using all the way to the end game assuming you're not duping/twinked.

Body Armor

 * Chains of Honor: God dammit. I'm sick and tired of saying this, but this armor is once again one of the best choices. Blizzard killed all hypothetical meta-game diversity when they made this, though thankfully it's hard as hell to make.


 * Enigma: Same as the above.


 * Tal Rasha's Guardianship: see set note.

Sorcs have so many great options in body armor I'm not going to list them all, but the above's generally the best.

Shield

 * Stormshield: the huge 35% damage reduction is what stands out. Good resistances too.


 * Spirit: If you're set on resistances and you can't find Stormshield, then just use this. It's cheap as hell to make and almost all of its considerable assets are geared towards making sorcs amazing. I'm a little shocked that the guide I cited above didn't note this.

There's a bunch of shields that are good at blocking that I'm not putting in here for now because my sorc simply does not wade into the thick of fighting and start punching people with her bare hands, so she's rarely in danger of physical attacks anyway until she inevitably gets mauled by a group of archers.

Gloves

 * Frostburn if you have mana troubles.


 * Magefist is easy to find and one of the few gloves that actually directly add to your damage.
 * Crafted gloves can be very excellent. Even the crappiest caster gloves give mana per kill, which is very useful for not running dry; the mana bonuses are almost as good as Magefist. Other tasty mods include increases to dex, strength, magic find, gold find.

Belt

 * Arachnid Mesh: +1 skills, mana, cast rate.


 * Verdungo's Hearty Cord: Any sorc welcomes extra life.


 * Tal Rasha's Fine-Spun Cloth: magic find and mana. See set notes.

Boots

 * War Traveler: everyone likes MF, and the rest of the stats aren't too shabby, either.
 * Silkweave: mana.


 * Tearhaunch: +10 all resists.


 * Rare boots with good resists, magic find, faster run walk.

Rings

 * SoJ. Two SoJs might be the best out there.


 * One of the absorb rings. Wisp projector might be best.

Tal Rasha's Set
There's a lot of numbers to compare between this set and other equipment. I'll just show this.

TL;DR: Tal Rasha's set, as opposed to occy+hoto and then partial tal's set, deals way more damage among all three combat skills, more life, more defense, more resistances, fhr.

Basically, if you have full tal's (which is wishful thinking admittedly), use it. The only way full tal's gets outclassed is if you have the ABSOLUTE BEST equipment in every category, and even then it's a pretty close call.

I'm just bitter that they made Tal Rasha's Guardianship nearly impossible to find. It only drops from lvl 85 areas...Baal is the best bet, followed by Pindleskin possibly. Nihlalthak is often suicidal to get to. Snapchip, Thresh Socket, Diablo.

Apparently the amulet drops most from nightmare or hell andy (or maybe andy drops the same amount but is easiest/safest to kill). I don't know why, it's just what they said. Already got belt and mask but if anyone's wanting to get them they drop quite commonly as far as I can tell.