THE BASIN

Elemental Druid Review

(cont'd)

V. Equipment

Good equipment for an Elemental Druid is pretty easy to find. Great equipment, on the other hand, is extremely difficult to find. The Elementalist looks for mostly the same things that an Arty Necromancer or a Fire Sorceress looks for on his equipment: +skills, mana, resistances, fast-cast, fast-run, mana regen, fast-hit-recovery. I'll review the general traits you're looking for, then dive into each equipment slot in detail.

Top-Priority Equipment Traits

These are the main things you're looking for as an Elementalist, I'll list them roughly in order of importance.

+skills: Whether it be +all skills, +Druid skills, +Elemental Tree skills, or +individual skills, this is the most important thing for your Elementalist in the long run. The reason is simply that none of your spells are effective in Hell difficulty, even at slvl 20. So you have to supercharge them to levels above 20 with +skills items. You'll probably want to shoot for at least +4 to your favorite skills by the end of Nightmare, and at least +6 or +7 by Hell Act IV (which is significantly tougher than act V for elemental users). Fortunately +skills is available on a much wider variety of gear than in classic Diablo 2. You can get it on hats, amulets, clubs, rings, charms, and various unique, crafted, and Runeword armors, weapons, and shields. Obviously a +2 Elemental tree item is better than a +1 Druid skills or +1 all skills item, since the only spells you cast where the slvl matters are in the Elemental tree. Of course, having a couple extra points in Oak Sage never hurts...
+mana, +Energy, +%mana: You'll need a very substantial mana pool in Hell difficulty, especially in large games. Without enough mana, you'll constantly be dependent on blue potions, and unless you're partied with a barb who regularly uses Find Potion, that's just a bad way to go. How much mana is enough? That depends on your playstyle, but generally 400-500 mana is plenty in Nightmare difficulty, and in Hell you'll probably want at least 500 so you can spam Tornados a lot. A few items, notably Frostburn gauntlets, Stones of Jordan, certain crafted items, and some Runeword combos, will give you a bonus of a percentage of your mana instead of directly adding to mana. These can result in enormous mana gains, because they take effect after gear that gives you +mana. So one of these little gems will effectively increase the amount of mana each piece of +mana gear gives you.
+mana regeneration: This allows you to move along at a quicker pace, and cuts down on your use of blue potions. The purpose of mana regen, for the Elementalist, is to regenerate your mana supply quicker between battles, so you don't have to stand around (or make a town trip) just to refill your blue ball. Elementalists are unlikely to be able to get enough mana regen gear to be able to chain-cast Tornado or Arctic Blast indefinitely - you'd have to have a mana regen rate of about 20 mana per second, which would equate to 1200 mana and +100% mana regen, which just isn't gonna happen. Having enough to regenerate your ball faster between battles, however, will save blue pots in large or fast-paced games. Ideally you'd like to have at least +100% mana regen gear total, but that will chew up a lot of equipment slots, and having only 50 or 60 percent is reasonable and pretty easy to get. If you like to play in large games, however, getting a lot of mana regen gear is a good idea, because your +mana/kill gear becomes much less useful, and you will have to spend a lot of mana to kill anything at all.
+mana per kill: Triumphant and Victorious items, plus socketed Tir runes and certain Unique and Crafted items, will give you mana every time you kill something. This is your primary source of mana recovery during a battle in smallish games, where you don't have to cast very many spells to wipe out whole mobs. In large games this becomes much less useful, since (a) you probably won't deliver all that many killing blows in a party - the zons and sorcies will do most of that, and (b) you'll have to fire a lot more spells to kill anything, so the return rate isn't as good. For instance, five high-level Tornados will wipe out a whole crowd of skeletons in a single-player game, and cost 50 mana: if you have +8 mana per kill (total) and you just killed 8 skellies with your 5 tornados, you came out ahead. Those same 8 skeletons will probably take something more like 20 or 30 Tornados, and a couple Armageddons, to kill in an 8-way game. They still only give you the 64 mana from killing them, even though you spent more like 350 mana to do it.
resistances: Every class needs resistances. That's all there is to it. So get as much as you can, but you probably don't want to sacrifice +skills over resistances. If you're happy with your mana pool and recovery rates, you can cut back on +mana, regen and +mana/kill gear in order to beef up your resistances if you're really hurting. In addition to resistances, you can sometimes find (or craft) gear with magic damage "absorb" which functions as a second layer of resistance and is really worth double its value. This is quite rare, however.
Faster Run/Walk: Maneuverability is very important to an Elementalist, especially if you make heavy use of Hurricane and Armageddon. You'll want to be able to get close to an enemy to tag him with your spell, then run away when he chases you. Being able to run fast is critical in this equation. Plus it helps you keep up with your speedy Assassin and Sorceress pals.
Faster Cast Rate: This is only really useful for one spell, Tornado. But it is quite useful for that one purpose, so you'll want to have a fair bit of stacked Fast Cast items. I would recommend a total of at least 30% faster cast, but going full-tweaker mode à la CD2 sorcie style is probably not a good idea since its value is restricted to just the one spell.
Charges of Lower Resist: This is fantastically useful, and is almost "required equipment". You can get these charges on wands, and supposedly (according to the Arreat Summit) on hats and rings as well, but I've never actually seen it on a hat or a ring. Keep it in your off-weapon slot and do a quick swap to tag everything with lower resist if it's heavily resistant to Fire or Cold, depending on your preference. Keep in mind that it won't work on Immunes. Supposedly it's available in several slvl varieties, but the only one I've seen first-hand is slvl 1. Slvl 1 LR subtracts 31 from the target's resistance, so it's quite substantial. Start looking for it about the middle of Nightmare difficulty.
Magic Damage Reduced By (MDR): Having at least a little bit of MDR can be a real boon, mainly because of the firewalls that the vampires tend to try and lay down on you, and the infernos that the Imps throw at you. MDR 3, coupled with high fire resistance, can completely negate these fire walls. It also helps out in reducing the impact of all the little minor elemental hits you take in places like the act 2 palace, the finger mages in act 4, and the imps in act 5. Keep in mind that Cyclone Armor appears to kick in after your resistances and MDR, so items with MDR will improve the durability of your cyclone armor as well.

Medium-Priority Equipment Traits

These traits aren't as important as those listed above, and can be readily sacrificed in order to improve your high-priority traits. That is unless of course you're seriously deficient in any of them: in that case sacrificing your only source might be a bad idea.

+Life, +Vitality: I put this in the Medium-priority area because it's so easy to get Life. Still, you'll want to get some +Life gear, and remember that your Oak Sage (assuming you're using one) will enhance each piece of gear you get. Look for +Life as a 'bonus' mod on any equipment that meets one of your primary needs. Just one "of the whale" blue magical item can nab you about 100 points of Life before Oak, and assuming you've got a couple +all or +druid skills items, about 140 life including your Oak bonus.
Regenerate Life: This is awful handy to have, especially in significant (more than 5) quantities. It lets you regenerate your life slowly between battles. If you take minor damage in a fight, and then get in a few more battles where you take either minor or no damage, without life regen gear you're probably wasting a red potion about now. With life regen gear, you've maybe filled back up again. It's a handy thing to have, if only to reduce your red potion consumption slightly. But then again, a full belt of reds is cheap, and only a town portal away. Life regen gear is worthless in combat situations anyway: it's just too slow.
Shield Blocking: Shield Blocking is nice, but not at the expense of Life or resistances. It's just too flaky and relies too heavily on your Dexterity skill. If you're going for a warrior-mage type, then shield-blocking will be very important to you (as will raising your Dexterity).
+Dexterity: This really only helps out in the shield blocking equation. 2 points in Dexterity is usually worth at least 1% block rating, so if you find some gear with +10 dexterity, that's 5% blocking, which is pretty nice. Not nice enough to sacrifice resistances for, though. High priority to Elementalists who like to do their own tanking.
Faster Hit Recovery, faster Block Rate: Typically, if you get severely mobbed, you're dead, unless that's your playstyle: get mobbed, rain Armageddon, tank, and take the hits, chugging red potions (believe it or not, this actually works reasonably well). If that's you're playstyle, then Hit Recovery (which is very easy to get) and Block Rate (which is really hard to get) become more important, but still not "top-priority" since Hit Recovery is so easy to get on a wide variety of equipment, and the fact that you don't actually need to cast spells continually to rain Armageddon death on your enemies.
Magic Find: Magic find is nice. I would look at it as a useful bonus mod on any piece of equipment, but not a deal-maker or deal-breaker. The primary purpose of magic-find is to generate large amounts of cash for you, so you can fuel your gambling habit, your merc ressurection fees, and repairing your wand charged with Lower Resist (you did get one of those, didn't you?). Plus, a lot of the best mods for Elemental Druids are only available on Blue items, such as gaean, bahamut's, chromatic, etc. With enough magic find gear, blue items pretty much start raining from the sky. Of course, since the Elementalist isn't really a melee fighter, you could deck him out in MF gear and use him as a treasure hunter.
Damage Reduced By: If you can find a circlet or amulet with a great big fat Damage Reduced By attribute (Life Everlasting, it's called), then it can be handy, but not as handy as great big fat MDR, since a good portion of your damage will come from elemental missile attacks. In addition, a very few unique items will reduce all damage you take by a percentage, which is, needless to say, incredibly useful.

Low-Priority Equipment Traits

These traits are somewhat useful, but don't go out of your way to get them.

Defense: Defense is quite useful in Normal difficulty (especially with the help of a Defiance merc from act 2), and mildly useful through the first half of Nightmare. By the middle of Nightmare, though, you'll be unable to get a Defense rating that's meaningful, partly because you probably won't have the strength to wear big armor, and partly because you'll probably be much lower level than the monsters you're fighting. And you don't generally want to get into melee range anyway. On the other hand, if you're playing an Elemental Tank variety, then defense will be very important to you, and you'll want to bump it up to a top priority. Of course, some of the best possible armors for a Druid are Runeword armors, and you can pick and choose from the various categories. In this case it behooves you to select the highest defense armor you can find with the right number of sockets, keeping in mind that you won't even have to repair it often since you won't get hit very much.
Release Frost Nova when Struck: This releases a low-level Frost Nova sometimes when you get hit. The chance is usually small, about 10% or 14%. This is kinda handy for chilling your enemies when you get mobbed, but if you really needed em chilled, a casting of Hurricane or quick sweep of Arctic is a much more reliable way to do it. This is tactically nice, but annoying, for a melee guy who gets hit a lot. Give it to your barb merc if you don't want it.
Charges of Telekineses or Teleport: Keep this in your off-weapon slot (on a weapon) and do a quick switch to use TK to grab loot, either to piss off your friends, or to thumb your nose at the annoying sorceress in a pubby game who keeps nabbing all the good drops. Not worth sacrificing a Lower Resist charged wand if you've got one, though. You can use the TK charges quite a bit, since it's dirt cheap to repair (unless, of course, it has other mods on it). You can also get it on rings - look for it as a bonus on a rare ring but don't go out of your way to get it. Teleport is significantly more useful in the long run, but you'll want a permanent hotkey for it since it's an emergency-use spell, so look for it on a ring. Very handy in certain situations, such as Baal, escaping PK's, rescuing your merc, or playing completely minionless.
Charges of Dim Vision: If you like Volcano and can handle a somewhat slower playing pace, this is a whole lot of fun. Blind everything and then fry them one by one with Volcanos. Since it typically only appears at slvl 1, though, its duration is extremely short, especially when it's halved and quartered in Nightmare and Hell. Fortunately it's pretty cheap to repair (assuming no other mods), but if you use it, the charges go awful fast because of the short duration.


-% requirements: This allows you to wear heavier armor and weapons. But the only purpose of heavier armor is to get better defense. And heavier weapons only allow more damage. The only reason I could see using this would be to socket a Hel rune in a piece of rare armor, or a Druid hat, that's just out of reach for you at your strength, has really great mods, and you don't want to spend the few strength points. Probably a bad idea, since Hel runes are pretty rare and would be better spent in a big-damage big-requirements weapon like a Great Thresher or something like that for your werebear. But if this mod turns up on something that would otherwise be out of reach, more power to ya.
+strength: This falls under the same category as -% reqs: it really only allows you to wear bigger armor. If you have some nice +str charms before you spend the skill points, you can use them to get up to 45 or 60 strength, but in general this isn't a mod you look for.

% to cast Amp Damage on attack: This would be something nice to give to a merc, if it's otherwise usable, since this mod only occurs on weapons to my knowledge. Since you won't be attacking, it's useless to you, but on a merc it's nice because it doubles (or triples, in Hell difficulty) your Tornado damage output. If you can find an item with charges of Amp Damage (which I don't think exist) then you're really set. Grab it and use it: it will be a tough call whether you want charges of LR (for your big-damage elemental spells) or if you want Amp to beef up the effectiveness of Tornado.
Prevent Monster Heal: This is another one that's good to give to your merc. Everything he tags with it will no longer regenerate, which is quite handy in Hell.
Damage Taken converted to Mana: This is slightly useful, but in general you'll have plenty of mana and want to avoid taking damage at all costs. This is much more useful, however, to a tank elementalist who goes for a high life, low mana build. Remember that it only works for melee damage: damage delivered at range (including most elemental damage) isn't converted to mana at all. Unless, of course, they fixed that bug/feature in the latest patch and I just didn't notice.
Attacker Takes Damage Of: This is quite useful at extremely low levels, especially when coupled with Damage Reduced By. You can walk through whole crowds of Fallen who will kill themselves on your thorns gear. This has extremely low long-term value, though, although you might occasionally kill something with ATD 15 or so in Nightmare.

Useless Equipment Traits

Weapon damage, +min damage, +max damage, +% damage, +elemental damage, increased attack speed, +AR, knockback, Monster fle, ignore target's defense, hit blinds target, etc: You won't be swinging your weapon much, if at all, so the weapon-only mods are all useless to you. The only exception I can think of (beyond Act 1 Normal, where you'll be forced to swing your weapon because you don't have enough mana or spell damage yet) would be beating down Barricaded Doors with your weapon in Act 5 Normal to save on mana. Once you hit Nightmare everything (including the doors) just has too much life for a spellcaster to really even make a dent in. Hit Causes Monster to Flee, coupled with Ignore Target's Defense, might be kinda nice, but still, you want to avoid swinging your weapon at all costs.
Life and Mana leech: Again, since you're not swinging a weapon this is just a wasted mod slot. Now that the level requirements on decent amounts of leech have all been sent to the stratosphere, this isn't even useful to you anymore in Act 1 Normal to cheese your way through because low damage + tiny leech = useless.
Most of the "cast spell" modifications: I'm not quite sure what Blizzard was thinking when they added the ability for items to cast spells when you strike a monster, or a monster strikes you. The spells cast are always of very low slvl, and so they end up being useless curiosities rather than desirable traits. There are a few exceptions. Frost Nova on striking (or being struck) is helpful for a little bit of chilling crowd control. Amp Damage on striking is quite useful, even if it only occurs 5% of the time. In general, though, these mods are pretty useless: the charged spell items are much better because you can control when you use them.

Undesirable Equipment Traits

These are modifications which you should avoid if possible. None of them are terribly hazardous, but they're all completely useless, and either annoying or potentially dangerous to you or your teammates.

Release Charged Bolt when Struck: LEB's, universally regarded as some of the most dangerous monsters in the game, emit lightning sparks just like this mod. The sparks have a characteristic sound that every seasoned D2 veteran can recognize instantly. Unfortunately, if you wear this mod and get hit a lot, you begin to sound like an LEB, which does two things. First, your friends (and you) will get scared every time it goes off, thinking there's an LEB nearby. Second, once everyone becomes used to this, when a real LEB shows up it can surprise everyone because they'll think it was you. This will earn you dirty looks if someone gets killed (or nearly killed) because of it. Sorcies who make heavy use of Charged Bolt have the same problem. This would be somewhat mitigated if the charged bolts did any real damage, but most of these are slvl 3 charged bolts, doing 3-5 damage, and so it's a moot point.
Life Drain: A very few Runeword and Unique items will slowly drain your life away. The upshot is that they usually provide hefty benefits to counteract this drain. The most famous example is the Constricting Ring, and there is at least one Runeword weapon (Malice) I can remember which does this. These items are mainly for physical-damage classes who constantly regain life via life leech. If you happen to get one of these items and are determined to use it, you'll want to counteract its effects with life regenerate items. Failure to do so will result in wasting red potions and more town trips, but that's about all. You might also get caught by surprise while your life is low and you didn't notice it because your Life Drain sucked it all away.
2-row Belts: At first blush, Lenymo, the unique sash, looks like a good idea, with the mana bonus and mana regen bonus. But the fact that it only has 2 rows for potions means you're going to be popping in and out of town more often than you'll be able to stand, since you will be drinking plenty of red and blue potions in your career. Plus it means that you have to carry around more reserve potions in inventory, which means that you might have to drink from inventory, which is tricky, and also leaves less space to carry the good charms and pick up good loot.

Equipment by Slot

Let's run through the various slots where you can equip items. In general, there's usually a choice you have to make between offensive firepower and defensive safety, so I'll try and present options for both. A lot of this gear you can make yourself, either through Runewords, socketing magical items, shopping at the vendors, etc.

Hats

Hats are most likely going to be your main source for +skills. It is theoretically possible to get +7 to three of your favorite skills, all from a single hat. You'll never see one of these, but you'll probably spend a good deal of time looking for it. You will definitely want to wear a Druid hat if you can find a good one: they are the only piece of equipment which can have bonuses to individual Druid skills. They can also have +1 or +2 to all skills or just to the Elemental tree (which pretty much amounts to the same thing for an Elementalist), and +3 to the Elemental tree, but only on blue magical items, never on yellow rares. All the +skills modifiers are prefixes, which means that the best blue magical Druid hat you could hope for would have +3 to Elemental skills and one other (suffix) modifier, and the best yellow rare Druid hat you could find would have +2 to all Druid skills and +2 to the Elemental tab. In practice, getting a blue hat with +3 to elemental skills is much easier, and it very likely won't have good bonus skills. You could run your character all the way up to level 99 and never find anything better than a hat with +1 to all Druid skills and +2 to Hurricane, for instance, and it still wouldn't be better than a hat with +3 to elemental skills and nothing else.

In lieu of a Druid hat, you can also get +skills on Circlets, and you have the advantage that you can gamble for Circlets. Plus they look a lot better than the Druid "pelts", epecially the hawk helm, which looks pretty lame. Some people like the Antlers hat, and some don't. The wolf hats are generally pretty bland looking. For a shapeshifter it's not an issue since you can't see your hat in were-form, but as an Elementalist you'll be staring at your character for a long time. With the circlet, you kind of look like an Irish hippie with the red ponytail, but at least it's preferable to looking like a minotaur. The main disadvantage of using a circlet is that you can't get bonuses to your favorite individual skills like you can on a Druid Pelt. Otherwise they're identical.

You can also +1 to all skills from the unique items Tarnhelm & Peasant's Crown, the set item Sazabi's Mental Sheath (although it requires 82 strength) and the Lore rune word ("Ort Sol"). You can get +2 to all skills on the unique Shako "Harlequin Crest" (elite version of a cap), which also gives you 50% magic find and a 40% bonus to Life. This hat might be more valuable to you than a +3 to elemental skills Druid pelt: you'll have to make the call. In general, though, it commands huge trade value from many other classes for the +2 skills/40% life combo. Its level requirement is 62.

I can't really imagine using anything other than a Circlet, a unique, or a Druid class-specific hat, since these items can potentially give you such a huge skill bonus, which is what you need more than anything else. But you might find a really kick-ass helm which adds huge resistances, Life, and Mana. If so, wear it until you can find a better Circlet or Druid hat. Circlets can get all kinds of great mods, including prismatic resistances, life and mana leech (useless to you, but since dual leech ammys and rings are history, this is the only non-weapon way to get decent dual leech so it has huge trade-bait value - you can also get minor dual leech on high-level gloves now), big damage and magic damage reductions, +skills, faster run/walk, faster cast rate, etc. So you should probably spend most of your dough gambling for circlets until you find one you really like. If you find a Circlet with +3 to elemental skills, chances are you won't be able to find a better Druid hat, so keep it and use it.

If you can't find any hats with +1 or +2 to all skills on them, you can instead use a 2-socket Druid hat with some nice +individual skills on them, and stick in Ort and Sol runes to make the Lore runeword. The individual skill bonuses will be preserved, and you'll get +1 to all skills and some nice other mods to boot.

You can gamble circlets, but you can't buy them. You can buy Druid pelts from Elzix in Normal and Nightmare difficulty (but he doesn't seem to sell them in Hell), but you cannot gamble them. Of course, you can find either by killing monsters as well. The Flayers in act 3 seem to drop a lot of Antlers.

Body Armor

The Druid has a number of good choices for Body Armor. From this slot you're usually looking for resistances, +life/mana, and maybe some Defense. It turns out that some of the best Druid gear is available on Armors, and here's a partial list:

Socketed Body Armor: There's all sorts of good things you can stick in a socketed body armor. The absolute best thing you can do for a low-level elemental druid (un-twinked, of course) is to put 3 chipped sapphires in a 3-socket Studded Leather. This will give you a +30 boost to your mana, which you sorely need at levels below 20, and gives you decent defense without a huge strength requirement. I was actually using one of these on one character until about level 30 or so, when I put together some Stealth armor. Other good things to put in are Tir runes and Eth runes (mana regen). I learned the hard way that chipped skulls don't really do squat, so don't bother putting them in an armor - go for the chippy sapphires for mana instead.

Heavenly Garb: The unique Light Plate, Heavenly Garb's chief attraction is its 25% mana regen bonus. It also has a minor (10%) prismatic resistance benefit. Stealth pretty much outstrips it, and Garb is reasonably hard to find as well, although you can typically trade for it fairly cheap these days. The only possible benefit over Stealth would be to socket it and add either an Eth rune (for 40% mana regen total) or an Um rune (for 25% resist all total).

"Stealth" Runeword armor: This is very easy to make: the formula is "Tal Eth" inserted in that order into any non-magical, two-socket armor. The benefit is that you can choose the best armor you can find and get some free defense with this armor, which offers terrific mods for a spellcaster, and unusual ones for an armor. No +life/mana, and very little resistance, but the other mods are hard to beat: +25% faster cast, faster hit recovery, faster run, and 15% mana regeneration, +30% poison resist (which you can no longer neglect in the Xpack), and a couple other minor mods. This is a great armor to use in your middle levels, since it takes care of a lot of your needs but doesn't provide the resistances which are critical at higher levels. Plus you can stick it in Light Plate or Demonhide Armor or even Mage Plate if you can find a 2-socket version, and get pretty good defense on top of it, which is helpful through about level Act 2 Nightmare or so. The "fast run" mod is particularly great, considering that the only other places to get it are on boots, charms, and circlets. Getting 25% fast run on your armor gives you a much wider selection of boots you can use - boots are no longer automatic throwaways if they don't have fast run on them. This armor beats out Heavenly Garb any day. If you can get good resistances from your other gear you can use this armor indefinately.
"Smoke" Runeword armor: +50% resist all and +75% defense are the key properties of this one. The formula is "Nef Lum" and you need a 2-socket armor to make it. Lum runes, however, are pretty uncommon: by the time your Druid reaches Hell difficulty he might have collected one or two of them. In any case, definitely wait until you find a 2-socket Mage Plate to use this in: the +75% defense will be a wasted stat otherwise. This armor is awful hard to beat, because of that massive +50% resist all. The Hell Forge quest in Nightmare difficulty seems to have a propensity toward dropping Lum runes.
Goldskin: Goldskin is the unique Full Plate Mail, and is like a wimpier version of Smoke. Still, +30% resist all can't be ignored. The big downside is that you have to go up to 80 strength to use it, which most likely will be wasted later in your career when you find a Lum rune and 2-socket Mage Plate to make Smoke. One benefit of Goldskin is that it's cool-looking in your inventory. Another benefit is that you can trade it usually for one SoJ (which is much more useful to you) to a newbie who doesn't know any better. Once you get a good variety of Smoke armors made up and stored on your mules, you'll toss Goldskin to the gutter like the trash it is. The only benefit to Goldskin over Smoke is that you can socket it and give it one more bonus - an Um rune for 15% additional resist all is the primary candidate. Or, you could go for an Eth rune to give you a little mana regen or even waste one of your precious Ohm, Lo,Vex or Gul(?) runes to improve your maximum resistance to a particular element, although why you'd want to use Vex in anything other than a Silence runeword is beyond me.
Silks of the Victor: Yeah, you can wear Silks. I don't really recommend it, because the only worthwhile stat on this item is its +1 to skills - and you need 100 strength to use it. I'd rather stick with 55 strength and get a Smoke mage plate, which is much easier to come by than Silks. Unless of course you already have some Silks on a mule and want to twink it up. Most likely, however, one of the yet-to-be-released Runewords will have +1 to skills on an armor, and then Silks becomes totally out of the question: you could put that Runeword into some Mage plate and avoid Silks' hideous strength requirement. Patience, grasshopper. There are better options among the unique exceptional armors as well.
Unique Exceptional armors: The Spirit Shroud and Skullder's Ire offer +1 to all skills like Silks of the Victor, but have lower strength requirements (38 for shroud and 92 for skullder's) and better secondary mods. Shaftstop, Duriel's Shell, and Skin of the Flayed One offer very nice defensive mods, but no good spellcasting mods. Que-Hegan's Wisdom is decent, too. Of them all, Skin of the Vipermagi is probably the most attractive (see next), but it has no +skills mods. If you really want +skills, the Spirit Shroud is hard to beat.
Skin of the Vipermagi: This is the unique Serpentskin (exceptional leather) armor, and has a bunch of nice properties including 35% resist all, 30% faster cast, and MDR 15. It's also not ridiculously hard to find or trade for, unlike some of the other unique armors. Expect to spend a few SoJ if you want to trade for it, or cruise Act 1 Hell with a lot of MF and a big posse of your friends, who are willing to help you hunt for a Vipermagi (and won't snag it for themselves when it eventually drops). This would be the chief competition to Smoke, but Smoke is so much easier to find and make that you should probably plan on that, and if you find Vipermagi, it's an unexpected (but welcome) bonus. The loss of 15% resistances is more than made up for by the other two bonuses, and Viper Magi has decent defense as well (but not as good as a Smoke mage plate). Note that it totally outclasses Goldskin, especially since it only requires strength in the 40's. In addition, you can stick a socket in it and put in an Um rune (15% resist all) if you have one - in this case it will completely outclass a Smoke mage plate except for the somewhat lower defense.
Naj's Light Plate: This is not actually a Light Plate at all, but a set item Hellforged Plate (elite Plate Mail) from the Naj set which offers +1 to all skills, very high Defense, 25 to all resists, +65 to life, and 45% damage converted to mana. It requires 79 strength but has a level requirement of 71. This is far superior to Silks of the Victor but is much more difficult to come by. The only real drawback (aside from the level reqs and rarity) is that it's Heavy Armor, which will drain your stamina much faster and slow you down a little bit. Socket this with an Eth or Um rune for even more benefits. This is probably the uber-armor for an Elementalist, particularly a be-your-own-tank variety.
Arkaine's Valor: This is the unique Balrog Skin (elite splint mail), with +2 skills, insane defense, indestructible, huge bonuses to Life, 50% fire resist. Yeah right, like you'll ever get 169 strength on an Elementalist. This is pretty much the best armor in the game, especially for warrior classes, except that it's remarkably deficient in resistances other than Fire. Also level requirements of 85, so not much utility in this one. Still, if you can somehow manage to secure one of these and also happen to meet the insane requirements, slap it on and Be Your Own Tank like never before.

Shields

You will want to use a shield: the only reason not to would be to use a two-handed weapon, and there's no motivation to do that. The primary stat you're looking for on your shield is Resistance. Blocking and defense take a definite back seat, unless you're going for a be-your-own-tank elementalist variety. The choice is really between a Gothic, Tower, Large, or Kite shield, because those are the shields which can have 3 sockets. Here's a handy table for choosing which shield you prefer:

Shield Type	Req. Strength	Blocking %	Run/Stamina penalty
Large	37	32%	stamina 5%
Kite	47	28%	none
Gothic	60	37%	stamina 5%
Tower	75	44%	run 5%, stamina 10%

Remember that you can have 2 shields on your person (and you had better if you want to do any weapon-swapping!) and you can switch between them given the situation. For practical purposes, all the shields you'll ever want involve socketing stuff in them, so there's really no difference between Kite, Tower, Large, and Gothic shields for most of your options, except for the blocking and strength requirements and the run speed penalty.

Chromatic/Prismatic Shield of Deflecting, socketed with 2 perfect diamonds: This is the best defensive shield you can get for a Druid. In order to make it, hunt for a Prismatic/Chromatic Shield of Deflecting, which you can even shop for at the vendors. Then take it to Larzuk after you've beaten Act 5 quest 1 in any difficulty, and he will add one or two sockets. If he only added one, you got screwed. If he added two, you're going to come out significantly ahead of a 3DT: a Chromatic shield with +20-30 resist all and 2 diamonds (+38) gives you a tidy 58-68 to all resists, which should go a long way toward taking care of your resistance worries, especially if you couple it with Smoke. The blocking mod is quite nice, especially if you went for a high-dexterity build. Otherwise it's just gravy and you could go for another mod instead, like Life Everlasting (does that appear on blue shields?) or something like that. Don't try this on a yellow (rare) shield, because Larzuk will only add 1 socket to it.
Sigon's Guard: If you're planning on using a Tower shield anyway, then it's hard to beat Sigon's through late Normal and Nightmare difficulties. You might even be able to carry it over into early Hell difficulty if you socket it and add a perfect diamond for 19% prismatic resistance. It's still no substitute for the defensive abilities of a 3D shield, though. This is a great shield to use in areas where you know there's very little elemental damage that's going to be applied, such as the Canyon of the Magi. You could keep it in your alternate slot and switch to it in such areas, but remember to replace it with a 3D shield when you go back to high magic areas or you'll get burned when you swap to your alternate weapon (to cast Lower Resist charges, for example) and suddenly your resistances plummet. You could also socket it using the quest reward and stick in a diamond for 19% resist all. You'd then have a high-blocking shield which gives you a little bit of resistance and +1 to skills. Could be a very attractive option for a be-your-own-tank variety.
3-diamond shield: Then there's your garden variety socketed shield with 3 perfect diamonds in it. Use this if you've gotten to Hell difficulty and haven't found a Prismatic Shield of Deflecting to socket yet. It's also a good (and easy to make) shield to stick in your off-weapon slot. I made the mistake of having a crappy shield in my off-weapon slot for awhile: whenever I switched away from my main resistance shield, my resistances would drop like a rock and unscheduled town trips ensued on more than one occasion.
Ancients' Pledge: This is the Ral Ort Tal runeword that everyone is familiar with from Act 5, quest 2. As soon as you complete this quest for the first time in Normal difficulty, you'll probably want to make one of these shields, because they're almost as good as a 3-Pdiamond shield and chances are you haven't collected enough diamonds by the end of Normal difficulty. Those runes are pretty common anyway, and you've really got nothing else to do with them. The big exception is that if you want to make Stealth armor and haven't found another Tal rune yet, you could make the Stealth armor first. But in general you'll want to beef up your resistances (which Pledge does quite nicely) before worrying about luxury items like faster run and faster cast.
Wall of the Eyeless: WotE offers +5 mana per kill, and 20% faster cast rate. These are nice bonuses but in no way make up for the depressing lack of resistances and blocking on this shield. You could socket it and add a diamond, but that's probably a waste. Remember, Tir runes are easy to get (and put in your weapon) and in the long run it will take large amounts of mana to kill stuff, so mana regen is ultimately more valuable than +mana/kill. And the only spell that is affected by fast cast very much is Tornado. Still, there's some argument for going full-tweaker setup for certain elementalist builds, and in that case this will be standard equipment.
Crafted Druid Shield: There are recipes for crafting items which can give you +1 to skills on a shield. In this case you're hoping for +1 to skills, a large Prismatic type resistance, and other useful mods, to which you can add a socket and a perfect diamond. You'll most likely come out behind in terms of resistance compared to a 3D shield, but the other mods may outweigh this. The recipe is quite cheap to make and requires a kite shield, a couple runes, and another item or two. Diabloii.net keeps a fairly accurate and up-to-date list of crafted recipes.
Unique/Set Exceptional Shields: There are a few nice options among unique and set Exceptional shields, but they all have quite steep strength requirements, and none of them are so compelling that you'd be likely to prefer them over a 3D sheild, anyway.

Weapons

There are several good choices for weapons for the Druid. You're not interested in damage, so you're going for low-requirement weapons with lots of useful non-weapon mods on them. Unfortunately, those type of mods rarely spawn on weapons anymore. Still, you have several 'standard' choices to go with. Most Elementalists will start out with a jeweled or Tir runed socketed weapon and move up to a good wand, and finally to a +skills club when one eventually drops or you manage to gamble one.

Socketed 1-handed Weapons: This type of weapon offers you the most versatility. With a socketed weapon, you can find all sorts of handy Jewels and Runes to put in them to boost things like resistance, mana, life, hit recovery, etc. Note that putting Gems in a socketed weapon isn't a good idea since they all give combat mods. The king of socketed 1-handed weapons is the Crystal Sword, which can have up to 6 sockets (if you find it in Hell difficulty) and has only a Strength requirement of 43, and no dexterity requirement at all. Good things to socket in a weapon: Tir runes, Jewels with resistances, +mana, +life, hit recovery, cast rate. 6 good rare jewels could results in a huge list of minor mods which you don't usually find on weapons. You're unlikely to get a really kick-ass weapon this way, but it does allow you to plug any holes you might otherwise have in your gear. Also, because socketed items drop fairly regularly, as do runes and jewels, you can have several of these weapons and switch them out as your gear evolves. You could use a socket quest reward to socket an item, but information from The Arreat Summit suggests that you'd have to get it from a high-level monster in order for Larzuk to put 6 sockets in it. A 3-socket item is the best you can get in Normal difficulty, so it's best to start out with one of these rather than waiting fruitlessly for something with more than 3 sockets to drop, because it won't.
Necromancer Wands: You can get all sorts of very useful mods on Necromancer wands, including Triumphant/Victorious, +mana, +energy, +life, fast cast, and resistances. You can also get charges of certain useful curses on wands (even rare wands): Lower Resistance is the prime candidate. If you find a good rare Necromancer wand with +mana, faster cast, life or resistance, and Lower Resistance charges on it, you might seriously want to consider keeping it and using it as your primary weapon, even over a Druid club with +1 or +2 skills. It will, however, be fantastically expensive to repair the Lower Resist charges. Until you find a club with +skills, this is probably your best bet (with or without the LR charges).
Necromancer Wand with Lower Resist charges (and that's all): If you can find or purchase a magical Necromancer wand with Lower Resistance charges on it, and nothing else, this is a great thing to keep in your alternate weapon slot. Do a quick weapon swap and tag highly fire-resistant targets with LR, then slap them down with Armageddon or Volcano (or heck, even Boulder). You'll want a wand with only the LR curse on it because recharging it is much less expensive that way (about 15k to recharge 67 charges on a bone wand, for example). If the wand has other stats on it, including +individual necro skills, the recharge cost goes through the roof. Hotkeying the switch and the LR curse can be a pain, since you can't assign a permanent hotkey to the LR curse, because whenever you switch weapons your hotkey assigned to your weapon-granted LR curse will disintegrate. The trick is to mouse-click assign LR to your right mouse button while in alternate weapon mode. Switch back to your main weapon and switch skills normally, then when you want to LR something, hit your weapon-switch key and LR will pop up, even though it's not hotkeyed. Switch back to your main weapon immediately after casting LR, and you'll have no troubles. If you forget, and hit a hotkey for a skill before switching back to your main weapon, you'll have to mouse-select LR again the next time you want to use it. It's difficult to get used to at first, but once you figure it out and practice a little bit you'll rarely screw up, and you'll usually catch yourself and be able to fix it in-between battles rather than during. You also have to set this up once at the beginning of each game and each time you die: the alternate-weapon skill selection disappears between games or if you unequip the wand.
Magical (or Rare, or even Crafted) Clubs: In theory, you can get +2 to all Druid skills and +2 to Elemental skills on a Rare club class weapon. Exactly what a "club" is is somewhat confusing - does it include Spiked clubs? Cudgels and Barbed Clubs? Mauls & War Clubs? I'm not sure but the only weapon I've ever seen druid skills on is a normal club, although others have told me it comes on cudgels as well. You can get all the same nice bonuses you find on Wands on clubs - except for Lower Resist charges. So look for a club with +skills on it - in all likelihood you'll want to prefer this club to any other weapon, and it's also a good candidate for using your socketing quest on. You likely won't ever see one with the beautiful +2/+2 combination, or even the +1/+2 or +2/+1 combinations. So take any one you can get, even blue ones. Get in the habit of picking up every blue or yellow Club, Spiked Club, Cudgel, and Barbed Club you see, and identify them on the spot. If they don't have +skills you won't want to cart them back to town. You can get +3 to Elemental skills on a Club: they have an ilvl of 60, so you don't have any chance of seeing this until Act 4 of Nightmare. And those types of creatures tend not to drop clubs anyway. This type of weapon is every Elementalists' dream, yet very few will actually ever see a good one. The best way to get these, actually, is to gamble for them. They're dirt cheap, especially at the low levels, and +1 to the elemental tree starts showing up from gambles at about clvl 15 (it's an ilvl 20 mod) and +3 (which only appears on blues) could show up around clvl 55 (ilvl 60). You can then take it to Larzuk and if you're lucky he'll add 2 sockets to it, in which you can put useful jewels and Tir runes. Crafting clubs is even possible as well, although it will likely take a ton of crafts to get a +2 to Druid and/or Elemental skills club.
Wizardspike: The unique Bone Knife would be incredibly handy, with 75 to all resists, mana and faster cast benefits. Unfortunately it has rather steep strength and dexterity requirements. If you meet the requirements (and can find one of these beauties) then by all means go for it. I still wouldn't prefer it over a good +skills club, though - after all you do have your shield and your armor to provide you with the majority of your resistances, and if you get your resistances from a Wiz, you'll have to wear +skills gear in shield or armor slot to make up for it - which probably means Sigon's Guard or Silks of the Victor unless you have one of the new nicer uniques. Fortunately if you already meet the requirements for Wizardspike, then the requirements for either Sigon's or Silks isn't terribly out of reach, and your high dexterity will really shine in blocking with Sigon's.
Islestrike: The unique twin axe offers +2 to Druid skills as its primary offering. It requires a fairly substantial Strength of 85 to wield, though, so it is generally inferior to a good +2 club. It would, however, be an excellent choice for an Elementalist who wants to swing a weapon a bit himself. It also gives you a bonus of +10 to all your stats (energy, strength, dexterity, vitality).
Other unique weapons: Ume's Lament, Culwen's Point, Spectral Shard, etc. Basically anything that an old-school CD2 sorceress would consider using, so should you. Note, however, that Shard and Ume's are completely overhyped and any decent blue necro wand will probably beat them out for usability, especially with the availability of some of the nicer blue-only magical modifications in LoD. Culwen's is a good weapon for a Be Your Own Tank type person: you'll have easily met its fairly steep requirements in order to equip your other gear and improve your blocking, and the +1 skills and Faster Hit Recovery are top-notch mods to get on a weapon.

Amulets

Amulets can have an absolute ton of great mods, almost as good as Circlets. Mainly you're looking for +skills and resistances from your amulet. A +skills/prismatic combo (which can only occur on rares) is a keeper and will likely serve you well throughout the rest of your career, regardless of the other mods. You'll have to make the call if +1/prismatic is better than a blue +2, or if +2/prismatic is better than a blue +3. Note that I'm talking skill tree bonuses here, not +all druid skills bonuses: in theory you could find an ammy with +2 to all druid skills and +2 to elemental tree, and prismatic, with energy, life, and fast-cast bonuses. Such an amulet would be the absolute best you could ever get. More likely you'll have to settle for an amulet with +1 or +2 to Elemental tree and some minor life, mana, or resistance mods. But be on the lookout for a good one, and once you gamble/find a good club and circlet (or the price of gambling circlets gets larger than gambling ammys) start gambling on amulets.

Rings

There were rumours when LoD was about to be released that you could get +skills to individual trees on rings. Alas, this is not the case. So on rings, you're looking for what everyone is looking for, minus the life leech: +mana, +life, fast cast, magic-find, and resistances. Note that minor prismatic resistances are available on rings, which is nice. Stones of Jordan are perfect for a mid-level elemental Druid: you need the mana and the +skills desperately. If you're a long-time CD2 player you probably have several of these and can bring them over. Finding them in LoD, on the other hand (for those who want to go no-twink, or "pure" LoD) is quite difficult. You might also look for +strength and +dex rings if you're trying to Be Your Own Tank. And of course +magic find is always nice.

There are recipes to Craft class-specific rings which have not been disclosed yet. DiabloII.net lists these recipes as active, if you throw in a few extra items. You can get +1 to skills on rings and some other nice mods as well. Crafting stuff is a tricky business, but the folks at dii.net have done a good job explaining it. Keep in mind that these recipes will likely change in 1.09. Crafted rings require Hel runes, so save all the ones you can find for this purpose, since they are otherwise pretty much useless to you.

Another unique ring, Bul-Kathos' Wedding Band, gives +1 to all skills, but since it's also a leech ring it commands fat trade value and you'll likely be able to trade it away for something better. The mana bonus of a Stone is much nicer for you, anyway.

Gloves

Unfortunately, only Amazons and Assassins can get +tree bonuses on gloves. It would be nice, wouldn't it? You're looking mostly for life, mana, resistances, and magic-find on your gloves. There are a couple of exceptions, though:

Crafted Caster Gloves: These will give you a small +mana/kill benefit, a small mana boost, and small mana regen bonus on top of any other mods which might spawn on them. Plus they give you the opportunity to re-generate them until you get other random mods that you like. The ingredients aren't terribly expensive, but still they don't grow on trees, and your first priority should be crafting some good Caster Boots anyway (which will probably use a whole fistful of Perfect Amethysts to get decent ones).
Magefist light plated gauntlets: The unique light plated gauntlets are perfect for a Druid, especially one who likes Fire spells and tornados: The +1 to Fire Skills actually works with your fire spells, the faster cast is great for Tornado spam, and the mana regen is great too. It's hard to beat Magefists, even though you'll have to look elsewhere for resistance, life, and magic-find.
Frostburn Gauntlets: These are popular everywhere for their huge 40% mana boost. Unfortunately that's their only decent mod for an Elementalist, although they do have pretty good defense (for gloves, anyway) if you want to Be Your Own Tank. In actuality, however, you probably won't need these too badly once you've built up a good mana pool of your own, so Magefist is actually probably a better choice for the Elementalist in the long run. Still, there are folks who still insist that points into your Energy stat are a waste, and these types universally rely on Frosties and a pair of SoJ to cover their lack of innate mana. If that's your deal, then Frosties will be required equipment for you. The rest of us are happy with our Magefists ;-)
Trang-Oul's Claws: The only real benefit on these set item heavy bracers is the small (+20) mana boost and the 20% faster cast. They are inferior to Magefist in every way, and are much more valuable to a Necromancer for the +2 to curses tree, although most still prefer Frosties. Still, if this is all you've got, they're better than a lot of the crappy rare or blue gloves you can get. Required level is 45, though, which is awful steep considering the limited utility.

Belts

Belts are your "filler" slot. You can't really get much in the way of primary mods on a belt, so you'll be looking to plug gaps in the rest of your setup with your belt. You're looking primarily for 3 or 4 rows for potions, and big fat boosts to resistance, hit recovery, and Life. Belts are also a good place to find Replenish Life, which is kind of handy. If you can find an Amber belt of the Whale (40-ish to lightning resistance, and 80-100 to Life) you just might consider keeping that sucker for the rest of your career, especially if it has 4 rows. Belts, gloves, and Boots are the only slots where you cannot get any +skills. There are a few interesting belts that I'll mention, though:

Lenymo (unique sash): Lenymo offers a small mana bonus and a nice mana regen bonus. The big (huge, really) disadvantage is that it only has two rows for potions. If you've figured out a nifty way to do an Elementalist without drinking a lot of red potions, let me in on the secret, cuz I wanna know. Using Lenymo will get you the mana regen, which should theoretically help you replenish your mana between battles. But what good is that when you're making town trips every third battle anyway to restock on red potions? And if you get in an extended battle, your staying power really suffers with only 4 reds (and 2 purples and 2 blues) in your belt.
Nightsmoke (unique belt): Nightsmoke offers some decent minor mods, including 10% prismatic resistance, 20 to mana, and that oft-misunderstood 50% damage goes to mana. That would be a great stat, if it worked for missiles. Since it only works for melee attacks, you should strive to avoid depending on this (and other vulpine items) because that tactic will get you very, very dead in Hell.
String of Ears (unique demonhide sash): This thing is one of the most highly sought-after items in D2X, since it reduces all damage you take by 15% and gives you 15 MDR. An extremely powerful defensive belt, and it even has 4 rows to boot. You could definitely trade this for several SoJ, and probably a good druid hat or circlet, if you wanted to go offensive rather than defensive, and had this belt on hand. Otherwise, use it, because it's better than just about anything else you're likely to find.
Crafted Druid class-specific belt: The druid's class-specific crafted belt offers a bonus of Life per clvl, which is decent. DiabloII.net lists it as having +2 to Life per clvl, but I made one of these and it only gave me 0.25 Life per clvl, which is pretty wimpy. This could result in some really great belts, especially if you get a Mammoth or Colossus attribute to go with it, and some resistance.

Boots

The primary purpose of boots is to make you run faster. Therefore, any boots which don't make you run faster are pretty much a waste. You can circumvent this requirement with Stealth armor or Circlets with faster run mods on them (or a whole bunch of 5% faster run/walk small charms), but you might decide to retire one or both of those items at some point in your career, and if you don't have some fast run boots, you're in a world of hurt. So the primary goal for boots is fast run, preferably 30% faster run. Once that requirement is met, there are all sorts of cool mods which come on boots, including resistances, Life, hit recovery, bonuses to dexterity and strength, etc. You don't really need any of those except the resistances and Life, though. In addition, you can get some hefty bonuses to your Mana by crafting some caster boots. Here's a sampling of some useful boots:

Vidala's Fetlock: These things used to be common as dirt in CD2, and remain relatively common. My first elemental druid found 2 sets in Act 2 of Normal difficulty. They have a required level of 14, and allow low-level characters to run quickly, practically all day. They give you 30% faster run, and 150 points to stamina.
Treads of Cthon, or Tireless boots of Speed: Once you get past 150 stamina of your own, however, these outstrip Vidala's since they effectively double your stamina with the 50% stamina drain mod. The advantage of Treads is that they have a couple other minor mods, and they're available at lower clvl, since the "of speed" suffix requires level 29 now.
Rare boots with 30% speed boost: Unfortunately, 30% speed boost isn't available until level 29 now. This means you'll have to settle for running slower for most of Normal difficulty. For all us speed junkies, that's a little irritating.
Sander's Riprap: This is an exceptional set item which gives you 40% faster run, which you can also get on blue magical boots. You could wear these, but they are probably better used as trade bait to a PvP type who needs to be able to run faster.
Crafted 'Caster' boots: These are great and are probably the best boots you can get for your Elementalist. They give you a small amount of mana regen (7-15%), a smallish mana boost (10-25), and a percentage boost to your mana (5-10%). This is the only way to get large amounts of mana and any mana regen at all from your boots. They will also spawn with 1-5 additional mods, and you'll just have to keep re-making them until 20% or 30% faster run appears, that's all there is to it. They're cheap to make though: the formula is 1 perfect amethyst, one 'Eld' rune, one jewel, and one set of magical boots. That's plain old magical boots, not heavy boots, chain boots, or any other variety of shoes, and they must be magical, not crafted (rares might work too, I dunno) even though most sites list crafted boots as working. Normal boots won't work. I tried to re-craft some caster boots and that, also, didn't work. This could have been fixed in a server-side patch, though. Once you get the ingredients together, stick 'em in the Horadric cube, hit transmute, and hope for the best. Hopefully you get one that spawns with 30% faster run and some resistances on top of that. Just keep re-making until you do. If you're short on magical boots you can go gamble some up quickly - Note that the quality of the craft is apparently based partly on the level of the item, so although it's cheaper to gamble up some magic boots with a level 1 mule, the resultant mods may be poorer than if you pay the piper and gamble with your high-level guy. There's also an Elite version, which requires magical Wyrmhide boots (elite boots) and a Sol rune, and gives bigger bonuses all around.
Silkweave, Unique Mesh boots: These give a nice (10%) mana boost which will equal the best Caster boots you can manage to craft, and have a very sweet +5 mana per kill, too - the only way you can get that on boots, and 30% faster run to boot.

Charms

Charms are fun, but you'll have to learn moderation when using charms. You'll want to have plenty of space in your inventory to pick up good loot, and charms hamper that. In general, most charms are expendable, and you probably want to avoid becoming dependent or too heavily reliant on them. Use them to plug up holes in your current set-up until you find better gear which plugs the holes for you. Lightning resist charms are quite handy, and you can get up to 30% on Grand charms.

There's a big exception, though: you can get +1 to the Elemental skill tree on a grand charm. It's quite rare, and has a clvl requirement of 42. If you find any of these, obviously you'll want to keep them in your inventory at all costs. You can have as many of these as are practical, but of course you have to find them first. Theoretically you could carry 10 of these (leaving no inventory space left for anything other than potions, really), get a Druid hat with +7 to three of your favorite skills, an ammy with +2/+2 , Sigon's Guard, 2 SoJ, Silks, a +2/+2 club, and Magefist, and walk around sporting your big bad level 50 Armageddon, which would do something like 1300 damage per fireball. But this just isn't going to happen, and so you'll want to grab (or trade, or beg, or whatever) any of these that you find and give them a permanent spot in your inventory. Just don't sell them to a vendor accidentally. Finding just one of these will be one of the premiere finds of your career as an Elementalist. It's unreasonable to expect to be able to find 2 of these, unless you've already collected them on other characters and are twinking them up.

Additional charms which are quite worthwhile to an Elementalist are small charms of Inertia (5% faster run/walk), small charms of Good Luck (7% magic find), and various resistance, hit recovery, and Life charms. Mana charms are generally only useful during the lower levels, before you've built up a mana supply of your own. And of course, all the elemental damage charms are useless to you.

Imbues

Unfortunately, Elementalists don't have very many good options for imbues. You could try to imbue a club for the +skills, but the odds of getting the mods you want are incredibly low, so that's not a very good idea. You're unlikely to produce a rare shield which would be better than a socketed one with diamonds, and similarly the runeword and unique armors are much better than any rare you could create. Imbuing Druid hats is not a good idea because you'll end up with random +individual skills, and the chances of getting the +2/+3 to skills mods are very low. Boots are out, since Caster boots are easy to make, come with better preset mods, and are just as likely to get the fast run/walk you want, and you can make them as often as you want (provided enough ingredients). No gloves you make yourself could compete with Magefist, Frosties, Caster gloves, or Trang-Oul's, although if you're playing no-twink or single-player the chances of finding one of the three uniques/sets are quite slim. Then again gloves are fairly cheap to gamble for. That leaves only belts which might be decent - but the Druid-specific belt crafting recipe beats this out too. You could use your imbues on a belt - almost all the mods which come on belts are useful, and you're unlikely to get something which is completely useless. Of course, you're also unlikely to get something that's fantastically useful. Just make sure to imbue a 4-row belt, preferably one of the low-end exceptionals.

More likely, it would be a better idea to use your imbues on a high-end Elite weapon or armor for one of your melee characters. For the purist, this is a sad but true fact of imbue reality ;-)

The bottom line is that rares are much less useful in LoD than they were in CD2. All of the best gear in the game is unique/set/runeword/crafted anyway, and normal blue magical items can have extremely powerful mods which are restricted from being on rares. This makes the value of the Imbue quest much lower, which is probably a good thing, since it occurs in act 1 anyway.

Socket Quest

The exact mechanics of the socket quest are still a bit nebulous. How will you know how many sockets will be added to an item? Thus far, it seems to be somewhat random, although we do know a few things:

Hell difficulty socket quest rewards seem to result in more sockets on normal items than Nightmare or Normal difficulty rewards
Rare items can only get 1 socket
Blue magical items can only get 1 or 2 sockets from the quest, and the number seems to be totally random. No one has ever reported receiving more than 2 sockets on a blue item to my knowledge.
Normal items which you wish to socket will have a maximum number of sockets determined by both the item type, and the level of the monster that dropped the item. Nightmare monsters can drop 4-socket gear, and only Hell monsters can drop 5- and 6-socket gear.

So, use your Normal difficulty socketing quest on a rare item, since rare items always get 1 socket. Use your Hell difficulty socket quest on a normal item which you want to have 5 or 6 sockets, such as a crystal sword. Make sure that such an item was dropped by a monster in act 3 or later of Hell: that way you're guaranteed that it was dropped by a monster of at least level 85 and should theoretically be able to get 6 sockets. Blue magical items seem to get 1 or 2 sockets no matter which difficulty you do it on.

Good things to socket: Clubs with +3 to elemental skills tree on them, or any +skills clubs. You can put Tir runes or resistance jewels in there. Also, socketing hats with +3 to elemental skills, or any +skills is a good idea: you can put in sapphires for mana or skulls for mana regen. Note that you can never make a runeword in a blue item, even if you have the correct number of sockets (the chief danger is trying to make Lore in a blue hat, which does not work).

Crafting

There are many good items that a Druid can craft using the Horadric Cube. The Caster recipes are quite nice and work well on boots, gloves, and belt. You could even try crafting a Caster weapon and hope for +skills. In addition, they're cheap, but you'll need a whole fistful of perfect amethysts to get anything decent from them. Safety rings are also nice, as are safety belts. Some of the Druid class-specific crafts are quite nice, including the Druid shield recipe and the Druid ring recipe.

To craft an item, you must assemble the proper ingredients and place them in the Horadric Cube, and hit the transmute button. If the ingredients are wrong, nothing will happen (and you won't lose the items, so experimentation is basically free). If they are correct, however, everything will disappear and a new item will appear, normally based on one of the recipe ingredients. All crafting recipes require at least one rune, and almost all require a perfect gem and/or a jewel. The quality of the jewel doesn't matter, so save all the crappy jewels you find until you run out of room on a mule, because eventually you'll want to have a crafting spree. If you're playing single-player, you don't really need to save jewels, since (a) crafting is not currently available in single-player, and (b) if it becomes enabled in 1.09, you don't have enough stash space, and jewels drop pretty frequently.

I've said this several times above, but DiabloII.net is probably the best resource around for finding information on crafting items.

Equipment Strategies

There are several ways to go about getting what you want from your equipment. There are always trade-offs involved. For instance, you could go the route most Realms spellcaster players prefer, and twink your Elementalist with a whole bunch of low-end unique +skills and +mana gear. Tarnhelm, Magefist/Frosties, 2 Stones of Jordan, a +3 to Elemental tree amulet, Sigon's Guard, Silks of the Victor, Culwen's Point, etc. Note that all this gear is frighteningly deficient in resistances and +Life, though: you'll have to get all your resistances from belt, charms, and boots, which is patently impossible. You would, however, have a nice big fat +9 to all your Elemental skills.

Another strategy is to identify which equipment slots fill particular needs, and then be sure that they do it very well. This lends itself toward blue magical items quite well, since they can now get mods which don't come on Rares or many Uniques, and also is more attainable for a no-twink Elementalist. A 3-diamond shield is easy to make, and will provide a nice base for your resistances. A +3 to Elemental skills amulet and club will give you +6 to all your skills, but likely that's the only mod they have, and finding them is difficult (but still within reach generally). Your hat can give you additional skills, say another +2, so now your total is a very respectable +8 to your Elemental skills, and it only took up 3 slots. A Belt of the Whale will go a long way toward easing your Life woes, and a Bahamut's ring will cure all your mana ills. That leaves your armor, boots, gloves, second ring, and charms to build on your base resistance from your shield, which is quite doable. This method will likely give you good +skills, good Life, and only decent resistances.

Another approach is the Rare based approach, in which each item contributes a small amount to your overall total. For instance, your amulet might only be +1 to skills, but it could have some minor resistance and life bonuses, too. Your shield might be a rare one with prismatic resistance, faster hit recovery, bonus to Life, and you socketed it with an additional diamond. Your armor might have a nice fat Defense Rating and Life/Resistance bonuses, and rings, belt, etc. follow suit. Using this method you can get very nice Resistance, Life, and Mana totals, but likely your +skills will suffer because of it, unless you can find/trade for some truly Uber gear, like a +2/+2/prismatic amulet and a +1/+2 club and hat, for example. This method is the most defensive in nature, since it's quite possible to maximize all your resistances in Hell this way, and get a lot of Life to boot.

And then there are the crafted items. Some crafted items can give you +skills, some can give you large mana boosts, and some can give you fat Life boosts, but very few will help out with your resistances innately, although you might get nice resistance mods on the random draw part of it.

Of course, you can always mix-n-match as you see fit. What you want to avoid doing is becoming so dependent on a single item that it precludes wearing a different, superior item. The most obvious case is a set of Frostburn gauntlets. They provide a ton of Mana, but that's all they do. If, later, you decide to specialize in Tornado and Armageddon, you're going to want to use Magefists instead. But will you be able to cope with the huge mana loss which will occur when you do the swap, or will it necessitate swapping out other gear simply to cover the mana loss? This is the situation you want to avoid.

Equipment Summary

You don't have to twink your Elementalist. Really, you don't. You don't have to have a stack of 20 SoJ to finance a trade-fest to equip your Elementalist. He's perfectly playable relying only on what drops in the game, even on Realms where it seems that uber items are the norm rather than the exception. In fact I was once playing in a public game with my Elementalist and one other, the name of whom I mercifully forget. Anyway, my gear was quite unremarkable: a plain socketed druid hat with +2 to volc/nado/geddon and one sapphire in it, Stealth armor, Ancient's Pledge shield, a Belt of the Squid which I bought at a vendor, and unremarkable gear all around - all of it blue I believe. So I had a grand total of +2 to three individual skills, and resistances mostly in the 30's and 40's. The other guy told me he had 2 SoJ, Frosties, Tarnhelm, Ume's, yada yada yada, and the funny thing was that we were rolling together and he was dying and I was not. We were in Nightmare difficulty, so you do the math and tell me who was progressing faster. We were of similar level and were killing things at a reasonably equal rate - he was using Hurricane and I was using Volcano, both of us backing it up with Tornados, but I had a little bit of armageddon and AB, and he had some wolf pups, too. So it just goes to show that great gear doesn't necessarily translate into success. I don't claim to be a particularly good player (just an articulate one), so if I can play an untwinked Elementalist right up through Hell difficulty, so can you.

Of course, if you like, you can load up your beginning Elementalist with all sorts of exotic gear, equipping them as you begin to meet their requirements. Naturally, in order to meet the reqs faster, you'll pump Str and Dex, neglecting Energy. Thus you'll be reliant on your Frosties and SoJ which, of course, you brought over from CD2. Be prepared for a nasty shock when you think you've outgrown your Frosties and are ready to grab some more useful gloves - that sudden drop in mana and corresponding mana regen will hit like a ton of bricks. So I urge all of you burgeoning Elementalists to think like a Sorceress and pump your Energy score early to avoid becoming dependent on Frostburns.

So, what are you going to do with all this gear? Let's talk about strategy!

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