I have recently obtained a 4 socket body armour and am not sure if sticking 4 perfect gems into it would be a complete waste or if there is any other way of using it effectively as my lvl 63 tesladin is struggling to survive hell act 1 as there are a lot of lightning immunities. I am trying to stay as a tesladin as it is a challenge for me but am keeping in mind that I have 2 respecs left and would very much like to not waste them on a recommended build that I am under geared for due to it being for a completely different build.
Any suggestions that would help me, would be most appreciated.
Just respec holy hammerdin for now, until you find some decent gear.
Melee builds in diablo 2 just don’t work in Hell until you find some good weapons and armor, or runes to make those.
Holy hammer will be able to just breeze trough everything as monsters do not have holy resist.
Just play hammerdin until you have enough wealth / gear to make a melee character again.
Builds that rely on weapon damage are garbage unless your weapon is extremely good.
So apparently a Hammerdin is the top tier build for Pally if you are prepared to respec. It has the advantages that almost nothing is immune to its damage type (Magic) and it requires no special gear. Having said that, I recently respecced my Pally to Hammerdin and I found it severely lacking, to the point I do not have any inclination to play him any more. I just find the Hammer a crappy ability in terms of the way they move. And it is more mana-intensive than any other build I’ve tried, by a LOT. One spam of Hammers to take out a single pack takes me a full mana globe.
As for your armour, if it is grey or white you’d almost certainly be better putting a Runeword into it. If it is Blue or Yellow, so can’t be used for a Runeword, I guess you might as well socket it up. However appropriate Jewels might be a better choice than Gems?
the hammer is annoying to use as a balancing feature.
This skill does insane damage on it’s own and you can wreck every bosses in the game almost naked.
The downside is the difficulty to aim properly with it and it can be very annoying in close space.
For the mana, spend points in energy, find energy ring, and then later you can respec with 0 energy spend with a double spirit setup and a mana regen merc from act 2 from the insight runeword.
Imo theese donwside are needed because with double spirit and crapy items, you can easily do 5k+ damage with each hammers, and because there is no magic resistance in the game, theese damage are almost pure damage and you will destroy everything you touch.
I have taken both advices into account and have respeced (temporarily of course as per my challenge) until I can get perfect items. The hammerdin is certainly op at the moment as I have cleared Blood Raven and Tristram but struggled when it comes to close walls and caves. I have had a blast with it so far, hopefully I can go further and get better gear, but for me personally I really need to rune farm for better items rather than get to act 3, 4 and 5 as I have socketed items that can be utilized with runewords.
Thank you all for the tips and feedback.
strange, i have the opinion there are not so many light immune enemies there but a lot of fire immune. playing fire sorc and struggle here a bit too. i also take some frost spell in account for fire resistant enemies but it does significant less dmg then fire .
hardest is countess cause she has frost and fire immune
@Goldgoblin, That is what surprised me the most that the shamen were the only encounters (including elite/champions) that were fire immune. Besides them and the normal monster and their respective immunities, all the champions/elite packs were all lightning immune. I don’t recall there being many (if any) lightning immunes until at least act 2.
Btw, I have found another 4 socket body armour. I will keep both until I reach the countess, then make some runewords. Any advice on what runewords are the best for survivability for a tesladin?
Thank you, I am trying countess Hell difficulty for runes. So far I’ve done 32 runs and got no rune over Hel rune. This is gonna take a long time with such an under geared character