By now, my Wussie Girl has access to Blizzard @ 1. You might think this is meaningless. How effective can blizzard be at slvl 1? A sneeze lasts longer. Well, that's true, but stack a few of them, each individual hit doing as much damage as one slvl 1 Glacial Spike, chill some council members already wounded by Static Field... you've got yourself some kills. Worked on Mephsito, too. Blood Lords, on the other hand, I had to spam the SF then spam the GS. Lot of castings for few kills, but I've been through far worse.
Poor Wussie Girl, already clvl 25, and still no sign of a GS staff. If I don't find or buy one soon, I might as well suffer all the way to clvl 30 on slvl 1 GS and lots of mana. Heh. Oh well, that would be doable, if a little slow. However, I've been through slower, so it's no biggie to me. Somebody wake me up when we get to Frozen Orb, please.
On the up side, Mephisto's uberdrop was a dream come true: just LOOK at all the gold saved not having to gamble for my Wall of the Eyeless. Thank you, Meefy!
Act Four: GS GS GS GS GS, some SF now and then. I'd list the details of the fights, but that's good enough to paint the picture for you. Repeat repeat repeat.
Wussie Girl full-cleared Act Four four consecutive times. I paused after the first to run and do the Den of Evil in Nightmare and grab the first waypoint. Why not? Then back to Normal.
Each time through Normal, I forced a new map. Incredibly enough, this kept my head from exploding, kept me sane, kept from doodling on my mousepad in abject boredom from stopping to "level up" a bit. I didn't really NEED to level up, but why wait until halfway through Nightmare just to get hold of my main skill, and not have it decently strong until Hell? I've been down that road, I have nothing to prove here. Wussie's a big party girl, she's all about having some reckless fun, you know. (Let's not talk about how reckless, OK?)
Somewhere in there, I got my hands on my first ever Culwen's Point. Not that Wussie would even dream of having the strength and dex to use it. Heh.
So the Culwen's got sold.
Did you know that Hephasto can do over 100 damage in one swing in Normal? Yep. Double that if you are cursed, too. These are relevant facts to a no-Vit softcore wussie. But... who cares? Seriously. Heph was at least interesting. I did not pass him up. Wussie killed him over and over and over (and he was quite eager to return the favor, but we're not discussing that).
Static makes Diablo even easier, but what the hey. Poor guy can't even kill a softcore wussie without lag help.
Oh look. After all this time, the game finally decides to offer me that +3 GS staff -- and with much needed fire resistance!
Too little, too late. Wussie is clvl 29, halfway to 30, and NOW I can buy a staff? Yeah right. No thanks.
The game got into an ironic mode and dropped two +3 GS staves after that, just daring me to use them. I sold em. Wussie reached clvl 30 at the tail end of her fourth full-clear of Act Four.
I added points to Frozen Orb (YAY!) Cold Mastery, Lightning Mastery (all the better to spam you with SF, my dear) and Hydra.
Hydra? WTF is that doing in there? Well, cmon now. My girl's a wussie, but she's not outright stupid. Hydra scouts are pretty darn useful, you know. All the better to Orb the enemy to oblivion, indoors, by raising some guard dogs and letting them bark. Besides, hydras are just so incredibly stylish, I can afford the points just for the coolness factor. After all, Softcore Wussies do not need to be efficient. If something goes wrong, just follow along: wake up in town, kissing the ground, dust yourself off, at death we do scoff. There is nothing to fear. The wussie path to victory is clear. If at first you don't succeed, try try again -- you'll get through somehow, somewhere, somewhen.
Orb Sorcies make for pretty Dames. They can spin all that ice across the screen... very catchy looking from the sorcie point of view. It's not so pretty from the other side, though, thanks to double draw bug. Just looks like a big spam of color obscuring almost everything. It was cool to get to see, for once, how it is SUPPOSED to look.
I headed on to Nightmare and cleared the first part of act one. I was practicing with Frozen Orb, mainly, having never actually used it before. It took me all of two minutes to figure out the vitals: do not shoot the orb directly at terrain obstacles or targets; shoot the orb past approaching critters thus that the targets line up on the port side of the orb. Any targets moving away from you, shoot the orb so they line up on the starboard side. Why? Well, there is no particular pattern to the random sprayings of bolts while the orb travels. It spits them straight out, on all sides, at regular intervals. However, when the orb itself detonates, it throws out a concentrated pinwheel of bolts, but not on a ray from the center, rather on tangents to the detonation circle. It doesn't much matter against a stationary target, but against a moving target, you want your targets to travel parallel to the tangential paths of that final explosion. This will ensure more hits. If the targets are moving perpendicular to the tangential vectors, they will get hit by fewer bolts even than those targets who stand still.
Now if you didn't understand that, here's a simpler explanation. Picture your sorcie in an open area. Some monsters are above you on the screen, near the top of the picture. If those enemies are moving toward you, shoot your orbs slightly to the left, past the targets. The targets will be to the right of your orb path. This will ensure the most hits. However, this doesn't hold true if the targets are running away. In that case, shoot your orb slightly to the right, so that the targets are to the left of the orb path. Targets standing still will take a certain number of hits without regard to your aim, for the most part, unless you aim too far away. The thing is, if the targets are below you on the screen, all those "left/right" factors get jumbled, so that's why I explained things with nautical terms: port and starboard. Those hold true regardless of your north/south and left/right orientation.
One of the great advantages of knowing how to maximize your orb efficiency is the tactical possibilities this opens up. They reach far beyond just getting more hits, or killing with fewer orbs. I need more experience with the skill to gather more data, though, so I'll hold off on advanced discussion until I've applied my theories to a wider selection of situations.
After rescuing Cain and full-clearing all areas up through the Dark Wood, I quit out and returned for a fifth and final pass at Act Four Normal. Wussie Girl was nearly clvl 31 now, and would level up one more time in Normal. I wanted the practice. I wanted to try this skill out against Act Four targets. Well, even slvl 1 Orb just blew them away in single player. No more worries about dying now, at least for the most part. (Let's not talk about it, OK?)
There's a look at my skill trees as of clvl 31. Let me tell you, it made a BIG difference going from slvl 1 Glacial Spike and slvl 1 Fireball to slvl 1 Frozen Orb backed by slvl 1 Cold Mastery, with slvl 1 Hydra support if I cared to bother with it. Now that Wussie Girl has her skills in hand, it's on to Nightmare for real, and time to kick some bootay. See you again soon.
- Sirian
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