I did some online ‘trades’ and got a handful of upgrades for my sorcerer who is level 86. I was using a meteorb spec that was absolutely horrible, basically a powerful but slow meteor then frozen orb for fire immune type of monsters. After struggling on Hell mode to get level 86 and losing xp many times due to dying (yes you lose xp when you die in hell mode) I decided to get some help via online trades for gear. This is perfectly legal in D2R and one of the biggest benefits of playing online vs the single player offline mode.
So the sorcerer and act 2 mercenary both got a couple new things, it made all the difference. After getting the new gear I was able to defeat a few mobs/monsters that were big trouble. The A2 merc is much stronger and stays alive much longer, I was able to get a nice eth armor drop that helped even more, but I am still making a fortitude runeward for him to improve more. I swapped to the Infinity from using an insight which gave me lots of mana regen, my new spec does not have any points in warmth yet so at level 87 I will drop a point into it and get the bonus skill points ontop to help.
Below some of my new sorc gear and I respected using a token of absolution to full on blizzard sorc.
- Shako, Helm
- Hellfire Torch, +3 sorc skills
- Arachnids Mesh, Belt
- Mara’s, Necklace
- Magefist, Gauntlets dropped after above ugrades
- Sunder Cold -70%, Charm allows my cold damage to hurt all monsters even cold immune.
Then my Act 2 Mercenary upgrades, all ethereal on him.
- Andariels Visage, Helm
- Infinity, Thresher (this is huge)
- The Gladiators Bane, Armor (this made huge change, but will try fortitude once I find a good base)
Basically the game really opened up and I can finally do cow levels more comfortably, big bosses go down a tad easier. The boss Nihlathak one shotted me to death about 4x earlier but once I landed a good blizzard he went down fast, this was before a couple upgrades though. One huge mistake was my FCR or faster cast rate was way too low at like 53%, now its at 93% which was a night and day difference, the magefist and arachnids belt helped bring that stat up big time.
I have yet to try a Dclone spawn kill yet, I could not even hurt him with my meteorb spec and lesser gear. He has yet to spawn and hopefully this time I can solo him unlike the last time where I had a high level kill him for me so I could get the Anni charm that buffed me a bit. I was watching a level 65 druid kill Diablo Clone a 110 level mega boss on Youtube and damn that’s impressive.