Wanted to quickly share my findings on playing an orb/nova hybrid to any other nerds out there that still pvm
Starting out from 1-12 is a bit tedious because I was holding back my skills so I didn't need to reset skills later, but it was worth the minor hassle, I used level 1 ice blast to kill until I got nova
Playing nova from 12-29 is really fun and easy, norm diablo is a bit dangerous, and so are lightning enchanted bosses.
I did my run un-twinked, so my gear was super basic, but still didn't have any issues playing through nightmare, once I hit 30, started using orb, was easy.
Coming up to hell, I was level 51, and I discovered as I leveled, while trying to keep a balance of skills, knowing that hell would have immunes, a ratio of 1 point into cold for every 2 points in lightning seemed to be pretty efficient
This kept my orb a bit weaker, but still viable for 1-2 player games, while my nova was still able to kill, and in fact, towards the end I increased the ratio on the lightning side because my nova needed more help than my orb.
The areas this build struggles against is ghoul lords, and any cold immune lightning enchanted monsters. The cold/light immune combos were super rare and weren't an issue. Stygian dolls are always a threat also.
Otherwise, there wasn't any area where I really got stuck, but then again, I really took my time and leveled in hell, by the time I finished act 2 hell, I was level 70
I used energy shield level 3, because I ended up investing a descent amount into energy, and wanted to continue pumping energy, so energy shield made it viable. I like to play with mana and not have to chug pots all the time,
its really just a personal preference, I know its really not optimal, but I do prefer the energy/ES when playing a pvm sorc.
This build really struggles in games with 3 or more players, so I wouldn't recommend it for anything like that. And this build isn't good at Chaos, or doing meph runs, and I see no benefits this build would have for rushing, so really, I can only recommend
this to players looking to solo through hell and slow play, outside that there is no advantages to this build that I could see.
I think next I will play a fireball/orb sorc and see how that one compares to the nova/orb combo, I think it'll be very similar, maybe a little better
/e one other thing i wanted to add is that nova is really good against melee monsters in general, as long as it does enough damage to engage their FHR
never use it when it doesn't do enough to engage FHR, which you will run into in hell with some lightning resistant cold immune monsters
This post was edited by SagittariusA on Aug 23 2019 05:52pm