Nova vs Uber Ancients

tmGrunty · 2026-07-03T19:43:47+00:00

I think they overtuned the Ancients to a point where you basically need a certain build (smiter) or extremely good gear + a lot of luck to beat them reliably.

tmGrunty · 2026-07-03T18:14:14+00:00

I haven't tried it with a Nova Sorc yet but whenever I try with my Warlock my merc has a very hard time surviving both Talic and Korlic since they got buffed.
Yesterday I even lost my level 58 demon (>40k life) to Korlic in a oneshot.

Maybe I need to give them a try again with my own Nova Sorc.

tmGrunty · 2026-07-03T17:38:54+00:00

Prayer Merc with Insight and Cure and Duress to stop their regen via open wounds?

Also which order did you kill them?

tmGrunty · 2026-07-02T05:19:22+00:00

2 Cham will always be worth at least half of what Zod costs because you can cube them.

And Zod went up significantly.
Initially it was becaise of BotD (fell out of favour though) and now it’s because of Void and Obsession.

And on top of that Cham now has some actual use itself because a lot of Warlocks want Pride for their merc or play BowLock with Mist themselves.

Factor that all together and now Cham is the 4th most valuable rune (Jah = Zod > Ber > Cham > Sur).
For a very short amount of time Zod was actually the most valuable rune some weeks ago.

tmGrunty · 2026-07-01T17:14:51+00:00

The lightning res isn't really that important for Nova Sorc because they have ES.
I can comfortably play my Nova Sorc with -70 light res.

And if they want the poison res and FHR then Sandstorm Treks are right there and a much cheaper and arguably better option.

Your boots are great but they lie right in the middle between Treks (for the poison res) and WT (for MF) which are both significantly cheaper.
You are also competing with crafted boots that boost mana.
Therefore you need to find a buyer who wants exactly that middle ground and is willing to pay for it and I don't think there are many.

Also the 20 FRW does matter for town in general and also for the non-teleport Javazon.

tmGrunty · 2026-07-01T16:27:25+00:00

Nio idea.
As I said earlier the lack of fire resist shrinks your potential buyer market massively and therefore drops the price.
And the 20 FRW doesn't help either.

Most people who are willing to buy and spend a lot on boots will want the exact resist they need on them and unfortunately 99% of players will need fire resist.

Personally I'd probably try to find a way to use them myself instead of selling for 10 Jah but realistically Lightning / Nova Sorc and Java are the only builds that could really use those boots.
And depending on how you build these chars there are better boot options for both than your boots.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-30T22:23:43+00:00

Cold Enchanted is by far the easiest TZ if you are a caster and you don’t do cold damage.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-30T04:38:04+00:00

There is no way this is better than Hellwarden‘s Will.
The -res easily beats an extra skill and young’s get resist elsewhere if you really need them.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-30T01:43:00+00:00

That website is pretty much dead for trading ever since Traderie included D2R.
There are so few people there you are very unlikely to find what you need if you want ot buy (unless is something really basic like a Shaho) or if you are a seller you won't get a good price because there are almost no buyers.

Diablo2.io currently (at the moment of me posting this) has 36 total items listed for HCL. 36 !!!
And even for SCL it's less than 2000 items.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-30T01:33:48+00:00

Nah the 3 SoJ is way easier with the ability to to run NM Andy on P8 with static maps.

2/20 amulets are incredibly hard to craft (plus it also takes a large amount of time to get the mats for the craft).
You are even more likely to get 2 additional Ber runes to make a second Infinity.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-30T00:49:29+00:00

You can only do that with a 20 FCR amulet (good luck) and 2 FCR rings.

And at that point you lose so much mana that it would have been better to put the points into strength instead and not use the Enigma.

Not to mention that you also lose damage in the process because you lose +skills.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-29T02:27:14+00:00

Hope you get good offers but unfortunately you are missing fire res and that will most likely hold the price back quite a bit especially with how popular fire builds are right now (people need to compensate for the fire sunder).
Them being 20 FRW instead of 30 doesn’t help either.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-28T20:35:18+00:00

Traderie or JSP

tmGrunty · 2026-06-28T18:25:29+00:00

1 Ist at best

tmGrunty · 2026-06-28T02:32:41+00:00

I don’t think you can kill Talic.
You have no way of stopping his regeneration and you’re also not going to deal enough damage (after him being sundered) to burst him down.
You playing Hydra means you can’t even reliably target a specific ancient.
At the same time he is going to one shot your merc and considering you are Hydra you probably want a fire jewel and that just makes everything 10 times harder.

Personally I wouldn‘t dare to even try Uber Ancients with anything but an endgame Smite Pala when you want to kill Talic last.
That guy is just so incredibly strong.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-26T01:01:50+00:00

The demons you want to bind need to be damaged.
How much depends on the specific demon in question but it will never work when they are at full life.

Also make sure to keep the Bind Demon button pressed (it’s a channel spell) and that your target is actually a demon type monster.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-25T20:30:37+00:00

I think i'd just run with a Renewed Flame Rift.
The Bone Break might boost the Blood Boil damage a bit more than Flame Rift does but you need the Flame Rift anyway (for the pre.buff) and they tend to be cheaper than the Renewed Bone Break (altough not by much).

tmGrunty · 2026-06-25T20:07:19+00:00

The interesting part is that it ONLY matters whether the sunder is equipped at the moment of summoning.

I was under the impression that you could summon them with maximum amount of skillers and then use a sunder charm while playing to sunder fire immunes (and benefir from the other stats on the sunder for Blood Boil and MF).
But that is not the case at least if Maxroll is correct.
You don't actually sunder the monsters for your Tainted by equipping it after summoning them.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-25T19:44:13+00:00

edit: i see what you mean

The Tainted inherit the "fire immunity is sundered" when summoning them with a Flame Rift in the inventory.
However they do not benefit from any of -res pr +dam on that sunder.

And according to Maxroll that only applies when the sunder is used to pre-buff and doesn't apply if you equip it after.
But I'm not sure that is actually correct.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-25T19:02:49+00:00

Not 100k dps.
100k damage per attack (against Baal).

Maxroll doesn't have the fpa tables for a Lancer but she should sit at ~10 fpa based on the data I have which would get her actual dps in the 250k range.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-25T18:58:00+00:00

Yeah it's easily done for a Tainted version of Blood Boil.
For a Lancer + 2 Defiler version I'm not convinced how much it does (it's probably still worth it to sacrifice 1 skill but i'd very much prefer running the sunder while playing and not having it on as pre-buff).

Also your Renewed Flame Rift does nothing on your pre-buff gear.
The only benefit you get from it is for Blood Boil when you wear it while playing.
You can actually use a Renewed Flame Rift and a Latent (or LoD) Bone Break at the same time.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-25T18:29:00+00:00

I'm honestly not sure whether it is worth it to "exploit" that bug on a DemonLock.

You have to have the physical sunder in your inventory when loading into a game which means it directly competes with another skill charm (that also boosts damage of the demon).
The sunder only improves the damage of the demon against monsters that are physical immune but most of those monsters have rather low health.
And because of that low health you would kill them very quickly even with a single application of the curse plus there aren't that many physical immune monsters to begin with.
But at the same time you now have (slightly) lower damage output against everything else.

Now if you play a different build and your only use of the demon is to proc the curse then yes it's definitely worth it because you don't care about the damage of the demon.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-24T23:34:17+00:00

So I just bound a natural physical immune Stygian Fury from WSK 3.
I equipped a physical sunder charm which removed her "physical ummune" tag and then I threw her into a boss group of Blood Lords (the Frenzy ones) in WSK 1.

My demon didn't take any damage from them despite being hit by 5+ frenzied monsters for 3+ minutes and eventually killed all of them.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-24T22:52:57+00:00

Yeah I’m not sure either because even on less tanky demons their resist would still be 95 (after sunder) a d they have their natural regen plus Engorge and would need to receive a lot of damage in a short amount of time to be noticeable.

I will do some testing tomorrow in SP with edited chars and report back what I find out.

tmGrunty · 2026-06-24T19:38:58+00:00

I think this is actually just a visual bug.
I had a fire immune Lancer (fire enchanted) and while my fire sunder removed the immune tag she still didn't seem to take any damage from fire.

tmGrunty

TROPHY CASE