With the fire and lightning trees, all you can do is pump up the damage. Monsters that aren’t cold immune will have their resistance reduced, possibly in the negatives, which is a pretty significant advantage. The biggest advantage with cold skills in general is the piercing of resistances with cold mastery.

This is my first time playing a sorc, so maybe I am just a nutter butter who doesn’t know anything about Fire, Cold, or Lightning.

Feel free to tell me I’m out of my mind if you’d like. Since you’ve actually tried Nova+Hydra, I’d really love to hear your thoughts. Another question/thought I had was that since iThunderstorm’s synergy bonus is higher than Nova’s, you get more raw damage from it than Nova, and since you want to be, and are already away from the monsters with Hydra already, Thunderstorm gives you range that Nova doesn’t, but everyone I’ve asked so far has just ignored the question or said “it won’t do any damage, just use Frozen Orb”, without actually looking at numbers on say Max Roll for example. I can’t even find a discussion on why Thunderstorm isn’t a viable hybrid alternative for a Hydra main. I’m curious what you think about this, as I can’t find any real information about this and I’m everyone just seems to be defaulting to Orb+Hyrda, not doing any Hydra+Lightning builds (whether with Nova or Thunderstorm). I find that there are many monsters that are both fire & cold immune or just many areas (like the Pit & Chaos) that have both cold and fire immunes and was thinking that Hyrda+Nova may perform better overall. I don’t have a torch yet, and am running Skin of the Viper with 4 piece Tals. I have +9 to all skils with an extra +1 to fire skills right now, putting Frozen Orb at level 19 and the the Fire Tree at level 30. I am currently running Hydra fully maxed (Firebolt, Fireball, Fire Mastery, and Hydra) all Masked with 10 points into Frozen Orb.

Diablo 2 blizzard sorc merc