This is how I made all my shekels back in the day, but I don't play this dead game, so it doesn't hurt my prices to share my secret:
- Start the ladder by building a sorceress on classic
- Play through normal by maxing charged bolt at every level, which provides the best early game
- Once level 24-30, respec to the full build (listed below) and use blizzard/frozen orb from there on out
- Acquire most of the rudimentary sets/uniques listed from either trading or by MFing normal mephisto/diablo or nm andy/meph/diablo
- Play through all the game
- Level up in classic chaos runs to ~70
Your sorceress, with minimal investment, is now ready to classic rush even in 4+ player games.
Here is the complete build:
Quote
Skills: (you should hit level 70 before crushing, leveling via chaos runs)
20 Frozen Orb
20 Teleport
17-20 Cold Mastery (20 recommended, greatly helps vs meph)
1 point thunder storm
1 point lightning mastery
1 point fire mastery
5+ points static field
2+ points firewall
0 warmth
0 cold armors
Items:
Iratha's Crown
Iratha's Gloves
Iratha's Belt
Iratha's Amulet
Twitchthroe Armor
Spectral Shard Dagger
The Ward Gothic Shield
2x FCR rings with resistances
Hotspurs (or rare resist boots if you can't get spurs)
Fill your inventory with tomes of TP and belt with HP & Mana regen, and you're good to go.
Stats:
Str/dex: Enough to use gear
Vitality: All the rest
Energy: 0
You kill non-cold immunes with orb/static
You kill act 2 vipers with static + firewall
You kill lord de seis & toorc icefist with static until low, then spam nova while TS hits
You kill bosses by kiting with orb + static
This build can be online to crush on the first day of ladder. Because demand for rushes is so high at that point, and providers are non-existent, you can charge extremely high rates- I used to do it for 200 fg a slot on day 1, down to 100 fg a slot after a couple days
There are many tricks and techniques you can use to speed up crushes:
- Clear the chaos sanctuary and spawn diablo while players are entering the normal/nm games, so you are using that time people spend dicking around joining the game to speed it up later
- When in hell, tell your leechers to wait 10 seconds to join the game, while having one leecher make the game early. Prespawn the hell travincal with only 2 players in the game, then have everyone else join- this way even in an 8 player game, hell travincal is only players2 strong
- When clearing hell travincal, leave your leechers dead in the middle of the fight by giving them a tp that leads to instant death and having them stay dead. They can then watch as you clear it
- Clear travincal by just pulling all the council to one side, then teleporting back and forth past them throwing frozen orbs so they are herded into the middle. When too many hydras get stacked up, just teleport out and back again after a few seconds (with hotspurs, hydras are no obstacle)