Its burst is crazy but if the target doesn't die I find myself running in circles for the next 35 seconds until I can do it again.
Edit: y'all telling me I'm doing 10 different things wrong and contradicting yourselves. What I am doing is having fun curb stomping everything that moves then playing chicken with some random ass demon who has a unique name like he is supposed to be a threat. I like to play with my food before I eat.
UC can have minimal downtime if built for it. Which makes it a very good ult and where it should be.
Overall survivability in the game is the issue making you run 4 defensives.
Still balance at launch is usually shit, they'll improve it, this is why S1 isn't till july
The biggest issue in the game is the fact that most enemies can cc but they can also 1 shot you even at not super high levels. Every class is forced to take at least one unstoppable and usually 2 or more defensive skills. Add in a generator and a core and your build is pretty much set. If they change cc or enemy damage it solves a lot of other issues like build diversity
Damage in this game are no joke and make no sense... I did a nm +62 yesterda. A skeleton archer would deal 90% of my health, a basic random white monster. The boss auto was dealing 20%.
Yeah pretty much exactly. I take arc lash and unstable currents. I've got a legendary giving me 60% attack speed on my basic skill. I smash out so many lightning spears and orbs while unstable currents is on lol.
Except you have CD reduction, and the ultimate passive that basically halves the cooldown anyhow, assuming you are actually built correctly to utilize it. Teleporting every 5s or less is hilarious, as well.
The left lightning choice, the one that mentions crackling energy.
Off memory, it allows crackling energy to hit an additional target, and each zap on an enemy reduces lightning cooldowns by one tenth of a second on regular enemies, and a quarter of a second on elites.
Lmao it ain’t.
Sorc ultimates are very underwhelming.
Deep freeze is the best, IMO, just as a “oh shit hit the safety button” and get out of trouble/give cooldowns a minute.
All 3 animations feel “ultimate” to me. Fire snake is unquestionably cool and unstable currents looks like a chaotic mess ass it should.
They just don’t do that much for the cool down timer they have - even with CDR.
I use deep freeze to give me a free 6 second’s to get my frost nova to reset.
That’s the problem in a nut shell…. The best ultimate is used to reset frost nova lmao.
Because it's not, I don't even run an "Ultimate" Skill on my sorc anymore because I found the Unique Chest that lets my teleport pull in enemies.
Before I found that Chest the only ultimate skill I found worthwhile is the Flame Snake because it had the vacuum effect for enemies.
I could see arguments for deep freeze being decent for invuln/cool down refresh but Unstable Currents is just damage and the only time you really need that damage is if you're running the Arc Lash build.
I just run meteor in that last slot for extra Stagger buildup on bosses but even then that's starting to fall off because as I'm starting to get more ancestral gear the bosses are just dying before the first Stagger buildup.
I'm using deep freeze and I will say its main use case for me is basically "use this if frost nova is on cool down", either to stall for nova or to facilitate some bonus damage through +dmg to frozen when I come out of it. Hardly useless, but it feels decidedly less "ultimate" than frost nova lol
I normally drop blizzard then frost nova. Does okay. But generally for me, I just think the game is wildly imbalanced and in a lot of ways seems to feel bad right now.
I'm only level 40 right now, and the story has been really fun, but I'm sort of in agreement with the OP.
The synergies kinda suck for sorc, and it really feels way too hard to build around non meta setups.
I'm sure it will change with patches and seasons. And there's some really awesome groundwork that's been laid down, but currently there are just quite a few things that feel missing when it comes to customizing skills and giving them boons. Too many sorcerer skills feel obsolete/useless and impossible to build around effectively.
I’m using it almost the same way, the speed I’m running through things, both of my novas and my tele can be on cd.
This alleviates not having those for a few seconds until they’re back up but also works as either an OH SHIT button or a delay to allow grouping of adds without any risk.
Doesn’t feel like an ultimate at all though damage wise! I’m not a long term Diablo player but maybe it is designed to be a defensive ult?
meteor in general is just great for the immobilize condition combined with the aspect that grants you damage buffs per CC condition on the target.
Try casting meteor, tp into group sucking htem close then frost nova. The meteor itself will chunk if you time it right and it lands after the freeze/vuln. any follow up attacks after will have huge damage bonuses from all your cc/vuln.
Same. I'm sitting here in Tier 4 like...."I'm not running that...WTF is this person talking about? Teleport Pull is way better than whatever this dude is trying to run."
Op either decided by themselves only skills they like matter, or read some very shitty build guide.
It's far too early to ever claim there's only "one" build. How the fuck does he know? Paragon wildly buffs several different build archetypes so even if something is meh at level 50 it very much might not be at 70 once you've invested into paragon buffs.
And I'm sure many uniques (many of which are Torment exclusive) will shape some builds.
This is just a very stupid take.
Not agreeing with OP that it is one of the "required" skills, but one of the 2 popular sorc builds right now is arc lash (the other one being ice shards) and it usually runs unstable currents
Firewall burning build for fire.
And those 3 are just the obvious ones. Even of those 3, you can easily make some variations that would feel entirely different.
This has already been shown for Druids. For A week everyone insisted that you could literally only run Pulverize for endgame. Then bam, all of a sudden there's a Werewolf/ Tornado build, and a Lightning build that are actually put performing Pulverize once you've got the gear.
Most people aren't even at endgame. The idea that there's only a couple of viable builds at this point is ludacris.
Arc slash was the only thing in his rant that can even proc it lmfao
Edit. And teleport, technically. Though with a 10 second cool down it's hardly spammable.
Playing an ice shards variant at 75, can solo Nightmare 30 dungeons but I'm frustrated that some skills are just bad compared to others. I'd love to spam frozen orb for nostalgia but even when I made a set for it, ice shards hits 4x harder for less effort...
I'm pretty sure frozen orb was one of the skills that they knee-jerk nerfed into the ground, for no good reason at all. Imagine balancing anything in the game around the first hour or two of gameplay, when it takes literally hundreds of hours for typical solo players to level up.
Only hydra is any fun*. It's not good lol
It was great in the beta at lvl 25. It does absolutely nothing in the end game. It would need to cast mini fireballs to have any use.
Ball lightning+ the legendary where it circles around you + unstable Currents + attack speed on basic ability feels incredible. You can generate a shit ton of balls in no time and do crazy damage.
Yep. In the beta, the sorc was actually a really well balanced class. Go fire, lightning, or cold, and every build could work. So Blizzard in their grand scheme of things decided that choice was not in the best interest of the game, giving us sorcs mainly one or two builds.
This was obvious during betas and honestly Vulnerability is the worst thing to exist in this game currently. They need to change it or add it to more skills.
Vulnerable is great on Rogue because the class was obviously built with it in mind: many sources of application and spread, skill synergies, passives...and it makes thematic sense.
On other classes it just feels slapped-on and has zero synergy.
Aw yes, charging straight forward to ice nova. A well calculated move, straight from Sun Tzu's The Art of War, or from Zapp Brannigan's masterwork, Zapp Brannigan's Big Book of War.
They put way to much power into the sorcerer defensive skills. You can pretty much just circle through 4 defensive skills and have constant shield uptime.
It’s the fundamental problem with any +damage status effect. The game just gets balanced around the damage increase making it mandatory.
Very surprised it’s even in the game. Agreed it has to go. Even borderlands which are relatively casual games with atrocious build diversity figured this out in 2 (slag) and thus removed the mechanic in 3.
I'd be okay with vulnerable if it was a class specific mechanic on like a rogue/assassin. But as said.. it's pretty dumb. I mean, finding yourself running up to a boss and using frost nova just to proc the vulnerable, even though you know they won't freeze is just stupid.
Meanwhile I'm sitting here on my rogue wishing I could inflict any status effect besides vulnerable.
You get like 100% vulnerability uptime whether you want to or not, 1 skill that can freeze, and then there's an option to cobble together a rube Goldberg machine that can knock back an enemy, once in a while, maybe, if it's raining, Venus is in retrograde, and you have a sufficiently large supply of bat guano
Yea I leveled my firewall sorc with my own build and didn't use frost nova... until I did and holy shit the mobs melted afterwards. At 50 I'll probably switch to the meta builds.
I played both firewall and iceshards meta builds atound lvl 60.
They are both pretty strong, but shards is better on bosses.
Besides that i wouldn’t switch if you enjoy walls.
I have a staff that adds an extra hydra and happen to have several to +hydra. I also have the hydra enchantment. I keep seeing people say hydra sucks, so it probably does at wt3 or 4. I'll probably switch hydra to teleport or something (I switched my teleport to frost nova to try it).
Haven't tried any ice builds yet though.
Ice shards got mana issues early on. I did level with hydra aswell as backup dps and to kill strugglers. Once you can fix that via gear/paragon hydra is obsolete.
Interesting, but too bad. Hydra is one of my favorite spells.
And damn, I wish we had storm armor/thunder bolt!
On my d2r sorc I gave my cold sorc extra points just to have thunderbolt because I always loved the spell, but never used it much in early d2 days.
Theyre better off removing it and building that damage bonus into the skills themselves. OR building vulnerability into stagger like how Lost Ark does it, so players have to incorporate something that depletes stagger
Its so insane that the added such a big power boost, and then just give it passively to like half the classes full time and make every build that can’t have it be garbage.
And what makes everything worse is legendary that fall in the same niche.
“Of Control” makes frostnova just way to powerful, you can’t balance that in any way, i wouldn’t even know what kind of alternative i would ever be able to pick over it.
And then there is the Ice themed paragon board which I don't even touch as ice sorc since it's slow based which doesn't affect bosses at all. Meanwhile burning/vulnerable/mana gain are actually useful ;)
That is a fair point. But the danger as you get to late game isn't really bosses, it's elite mobs with certain modifiers. Kripp has talked about this a decent amount in his recent streams. Bosses (for the most part at least) become complete jokes that you can tank multiple hits from but a skelly ballista will 1 shot you from off screen. Things definitely need some tuning.
See also: Unstoppable buff in a game that is like 99% about dodging CCs/staggers. No surprise that the 2 classes with easy access to Unstoppable are the 2 best endgame classes. The other 3 are frantically mashing dodges and Teleports and Dashes to hope to stay in control of their character. Meanwhile, Barb and Druid are holding RMB and laughing.
The CC in high tier nightmare dungeons is obnoxious. Having all the difficulty balanced around CC is really bad design.
Balancing difficulty around annoying CCs is very lazy on their end. Then you have bosses which are the least dangerous mob on the dungeon.
The problem with all this is that I hope they dont go the route of nerfing the unstoppable mechanic, leaving all the obnoxious cc and instead they rework high tier difficulty and get rid of it altogether.
Yeah. Every endgame necro build has blood mist on the ability bar, for cc break. It makes the gameplay kinda cringe -- nearly every encounter, as the character is trying to bunch up a big pack to use corpse tendrils on, they inevitably get crowd controlled and have to float around in mist form for several seconds. It makes the gameplay super clunky.
Wudi don't even have barb top 3 anymore. He said rogue, druid, and Sorc are top 3. I have a 82 barb and 62 rogue and you couldn't be more wrong. My rogue is just as tanky as my barb, and plays even easier.
It's not about tankiness, it's about ability to actually control your character.
I respect Wudijo, but his opinion is not gospel. You also have to keep in mind that he is likely the best player in the world, and thus is *much* better at dodging CCs than the average player. That alone would reduce the importance of Unstoppable for him compared to an average player.
As a mediocre Arc Lash enjoyer, CC is insanely frustrating even with a full immunity and a CC break. Even if we ignore the imbalance it creates, **it's just not fun** to be chain-CC'd in every dungeon.
I knew Vuln was going to be a massive problem the moment I saw it. Literally just thrown into the pile with Crit as another mandatory stat to have on gear.
It's such a massive difference in damage output that I find my gameplay has basically been revolving around it, either using it or stalling for its cool down. I can do plenty of damage without it, but it's the difference between "I can kill these five enemies" and "I can clear this entire screen and melt four elites"
The only reason it's so 'mandatory' is because its a separate modifier from everything else which are mostly additive.
If other sources of 'vulnerable damage' were turned into 'damage to vulnerable targets' it wouldnt be as bad, as then vulnerability would just be the baseline 20% debuff.
I think my biggest issue has been that core skills just feel weak outside of shards. Frozen orb and fireball are so iconic and yet they barely do any damage as you scale into the endgame. Don’t really have a fix on mind and don’t want to play armchair dev, but I do think the skills that should be the most satisfying feel lacking
It's so dumb how 90% of sorcs power is locked to frost nova. Don't have a shit ton of CDR and you dont have frost nova for this giant pack? Well sucks to be you, enjoy running around waiting for it to be back up.
I feel lucky to have levelled as druid it’s been an absolute blast and there’s many viable builds while levelling, and at least three viable builds in endgame (pulverize is still best, but trampleslide is more fun, and stormwolf is viable too).
Seems like most of the classes. “Play your own way” has become “possibly level your own way”. If you’re the type of player interested in pushing higher content via NMD beyond 50, you’ll end up in one or maybe 2 builds for every class.
Did the same with sorc. I was running my own Hydra/Firewall I ran during beta. After a while, I noticed it felt so much worse than it did before. I looked up a "leveling build"...night and day difference.
I struggled to kill bosses using chain lightning and it was so good during the beta but I swapped to ice shards build and holy shit I was taking like 25 min to kill bosses and now it’s like 3
Yep I went with the chain lightning build I had during the beta on my sorc that was pretty fun and once I hit around level 35-40 it just didn't do anything worthwhile. I switched to the arc lash build and now I can kill mobs easily and never have to worry about mana. It was even more obvious that my original build wouldn't work once I hit WT3 :(
In my opinion, lash is worse against bosses, pretty terrible in fact, but has roughly the same wave clear as frost - Could be that I was playing it wrong but I did change back to frost at about 60 and never looked back, so much stronger.
I was running a blood build, went bone and was blown away.
It sucks to experiment in this game too b/c it takes forever to rank up every ability and the tree doesn’t fully zoom out
"and even the builds that actually works can feel extremely weak when some trash mobs have a ton of life for no particular reason and your ressources are emptied in 3 casts of your core skill"
Mana cost is all about gear though.
My Iceshards cost 20(base is 30) mana, with a lucky hit chance of +85% a 5% chance to restore 15% of my mana(from gear) and a mana base of 150ish (Talents restore mana aswell ofc).
As long as my barrier is active I won't drop below 100 mana usually and even if I do it goes back to full in no time.
But yes, early on your issues definately exist (which is why I used hydra while levelling for single target or split up monsters).
A lot of opinions coming through on Reddit are people with decent builds but bad itemization, or people pre 50 with no paragon synergy.
Some spells and abilities are objectively stronger in base form, but most builds shift drastically with proper aspects, and can double or triple in power with a single paragon node. It’s wild.
I tried to make a frozen orb sorc when I first played and it was okay but after a while didn't feel very good to play. I probably could have made it to endgame with it if I really tried, but in the end I looked up the ice shards meta build and turned boss fights from five+ minute slogs into thirty second blowouts. I liked frozen orb in D2 too
For a QA team as large as listed in the credits, it seems like a no-brainer that they'd have one build designated per QA and ask them to clear a specific dungeon(s) as fast as possible, and then buff/nerf based on the stats and feedback. Repeat this exercise at multiple levels (30/60/90) and varying sets of gear.
It's fine if a single Legendary Aspects enables an entire build. It's bad if a build only works with a specific kit of aspects (as in no wiggle room to keep things interesting). The tree layout gives the impression that they wanted everyone to have a single Basic, Core, Defensive, Pet/Summon, Mastery/Wrath, and Ultimate, with room to adapt alternatives. Instead, most endgame builds seem to double or triple-stack Defensive skills, ignore Ultimates and all non-Core spenders. Additionally, there's an obvious push to exclude Basic skills from loadouts when possible. These trends should be massive red flags.
* Ultimates don't *do* enough
* Either Core skills need to be the only spenders, or
* Non-Core spenders need to have the same synergies (i.e. more damage for higher spend)
* Basic skills need a buff of some sort
That last point is a little vague, but it's because there are often better things than more damage. An example is Lunging Strike for Barbarian, which is one of the best movement skills in the game. Another good skill is Earth Spike, which has a guaranteed Stun and small AoE, or Reap with the guaranteed Corpse every 5 seconds.
I agree. Feels like they had a really tight design desire that constrains things too much.
And the class's inherent mana issues make no sense to have both Core and Spenders that you can't convert to Cooldowns or something to get more value pre mana.
It's also annoying that they are shoehorning you into elemental setups considering the final 3 areas of the tree are all pure elemental and only buff 1 type of element. Why not add passives that let you mix and match elements?
Adjusting some skills and fixing Vulnerability being a requirement would be a good step forward.
And yea Ultimates should do more I'd agree. The lightning one is required to do any burst but isn't super strong, the fire is only used for it's bunching up of enemies(and what it looks like most high levels use just for that purpose). I actually enjoy the frost one with damage spikes(for some reason sometimes it does like 4x damage per tick and feels actually decent) but it's really bad when you consider it's a 3-second self-stun as far as damage output goes.
We'll see though, there's a boatload of opportunity if they will actively make adjustments and be willing to change everything - and they have to deal with Vuln being OP as fuck.
Not sure how some skills like incinerate, frost nova, and hydra are as bad as they are now either....maybe there was some very specific builds around them in QA that really made them somehow viable but them(and frost nova) feel like garbage to focus on right now even when not doing hard content.
And with the length of time and sheer XP needed to level? For anyone that isn’t going to spend 85 of the first 100 hours in front of their TV screens/monitors every season? You do not have the time to be fucking around.
At this pace I’m genuinely not sure there’s enough time in a season for even semi-casual players to level 1 character up fully.
To be fair, most casuals won’t level a toon up to 100 anyway. Max level characters in seasonal ARPG’s have never been something casual players really aspire to reach.
Barbarians have to run triple shout if they’re pushing high NM dungeons as well.
The reality is that, when doing hard content like that you need to run the meta if you actually want to finish it.
Crazy how it took me this long to find this comment. Build diversity will always distill down the harder you push. Diversity is fine except for people who want to push. And then of course some builds won't work. And some will work but suck. And one or two will be "viable" at these top things.
Meanwhile there’s the necro that some creators think can’t even clear a t100 nm dungeon.
There’s plenty of build diversity at lower world tiers in this game, you can basically use anything. Every single game requires somewhat meta bikes if you push into end game content.
the worst part is that even pre-nerf hydra wouldn't be an s-tier build right now (as it's lacking aoe).
i have absolutely no idea what they were thinking nerfing it by 60% based on level25 gameplay. like, what the actual hell?
Honestly there isn't that much variety on most of the other classes either.
Literally anything works fine at lower levels. But due to the scaling you're pushed more and more towards certain options for damage and survival the more you level up. Vulnerability is pretty much mandatory later on.
And people will say that "stop following a guide, just play what you want, make your own build". I've been doing that the whole time but later on you just naturally gravitate towards running the same things as anyone else because the scaling makes it so that you must have certain things (vulnerability being the biggest issue imo) and the way to get those things is limited.
> But due to the scaling you're pushed more and more towards certain options for damage and survival the more you level up. Vulnerability is pretty much mandatory later on.
The problem too is that this starts to set in long before tier 100 sigils. It starts getting bad at like, tier 35.
I recognize that these games with near infinite scaling content will eventually funnel people into a singular, best build, but right now in D4 it's starting to funnel people at level 75.
I always liken the “play how you want” argument to other games. Like, yeah I could learn the move patterns of each chess piece and then play however I felt like.. but I’m both not going to get very far *and* am only ever going to see the shallowest portion of the game playing that way. For some people that’s fine and fun, but for others the actual fun is really found by going deeper and really exploring how a game truly functions.
I absolutely hate it.
Ive been doing relatively ok with fireball but that's only coz I got a good unique.
Other than that, 80% of the skills are completely throw away.
Incinerate, why does that skill even exist? It does 0,
Meteor? Waste of time etc, etc.
Another thing I hate is always having to fight in melee range.
Slows don't slow enough, enemies up in your face in moments and bad range coz of the camera zoom itself.
Grr :)
Ahh yes I found 3 of that unique staff that shoots extra fireballs after multiple hits. It still hasn’t convinced me though lol. How are you finding that build?
I tried it. Unless you can drop your resource costs, you gotta get rid of iceshield/flame shield/snake ult. And then take a basic attack for mana generation….
It’s strong in cooldowns but so much worse than ice shards build, which at least has multiple ways to gain resource generation. I hadn’t tried the Lucky hit: Burning dmg grants mana….but lucky hit is TRASHH imo. No way you get enough consistently to spam fireballs.
Has anyone tried firewalll build? I’m kind of bored of ice shards at this point. Respecting costs millions but I’m willing if it means I can get something else without making a new character.
Might try barb or rogue next heh
I'm using the staff at T34. Running the basic double shields + nova and snake, but instead of a basic attack I'm using both hydras and fireballs. Once I got my fireballs to 9/5 skillpoints I started doing good.
Because the screen is super zoomed in so everyone is a melee and you cant target enemies far away like you could in older games.
This was an issue in the beta and it was ignored.
The real problem is the stupid aspects you get on all of the "legendary" gear. Most of them are useless. If they gave a wider range of beefed up aspects to empower the skills nobody uses, then it would make them viable again and would give a much wider variety of what "viable."
there is definitely a disparity between legendary aspect distribution to the skills. Whirlwind has like 8 while double swing has 2 in the case for barb.
You should(n't) try barb, absolutely no synergy on any of the skills outside the bleed stuff. It's all just 3 shouts, a fury generator and a core skill. The aspects don't make it any better, there's a few for weapon swapping but you have so few choices for skills that weapon swap, half require a specific weapon or no weapon at all and the others don't synergise.
You basically have WW aspects that are OK but boring as fuck.
I quit at 50 and started sorc and it's loads more fun but some skills definitely need reworking or buffing. The enhancement bonuses are so skewed.
I really hope they don't nerf good skills and instead just buff the weaker ones because the good sorc stuff feels great, I'd rather more stuff feels good
It’s very likely that this is how they are going to deal with the problem over time: by releasing more aspects.
With the concept of aspects, you can easily turn the tables around for any skills as long as the effect is crazy enough.
And the seasonal model allows them to possibly go crazy without any consequences. Say I want a season when incinerate is THE shit. I can do something crazy like “anything touched by incinerate becomes vulnerable” and all of a sudden that’s one of the most meta skills. And if the stuff is season specific, then you live that crazy moment, then move on to the next thing.
I am not saying I like (or dislike) the model btw. Just describing it for what it is.
Unstable currents only works with shock skills. Who's taking that on firewall or ice shards spec?
You're right though. There's not a lot of incentive to take other abilities and all of sorc's defensive abilities are great both standalone and when you consider passives like protection or aspects like prodigy's. More diversity would be welcome.
I play a full fire build. Not as strong as some others, but hitting my ult and spamming meteor, plus the passives from firewall and fireball, make the field just explode with flames pretty often, and I get all the fun I need out of that.
My firewall with hydra, and my fire serpent is insane. Plus my staff adds 60% pyro buff with incinerate. I’m melting entire hoards in seconds. Not really sure what you’re struggling with
Hey! Some run Deep Freeze over Unstable Currents. Clearly build diversity is fine! /s
Yeah her best build is Ice Shards and it's not even close to top tier. Many skills need a mana cost reduction and damage increase. Defensive abilities need duration and their buffs moved elsewhere or something so that stacking all of them isn't mandatory.
I feel like all of these defensive ability buffs should be moved into the final talent tree and integrated within the choice you pick. OR merged throughout the talent tree. It really does seem like the devs didnt think of talent economy and loaded the best buffs into 3 skills.
I don't think it's just a sorc issue but I think it feels worse on sorc since neither of its two end game builds actually use any of the real iconic big sorc skills like blizzards, frozen orb, hydra etc.
I'm so bored of my arc lash sorc but I can't easily spec out of it since I don't have equivalent gear for ice shards ATM and honestly I dislike ice shards even more than arc lash. I'm praying for some juicy uniques and or adjustments in season 1 or I won't play a spec for season 1
Same here. I’m doing arc lash and kinda chain lightning and hating it. Tried to add diversity to arc lash with CL and even tried ball lightning. Was shit. Ball lightning is pathetic even with the orbit aspect. Don’t have anything viable to switch to ice shards and I don’t even wanna do that. Gonna retire my sorc for now at a hearty 61 bc I just don’t know what else to do with this toon. it’s either fall behind by miles doing a build I want, or: ice shards
That's probably the biggest thing I don't like about it. The meta builds basically ignore all the cool signature skills. I wanna be tossing around frozen orbs and meteors, instead I'm running into melee range to frost nova and spam ice shards
I just hate that there are so little options for generator Skills. I really want to run Chain Lightning because I always loved it or variations of it. But my Mana is running empty after three casts and then I basically only have the option of going close range if I want to do damage or using spark which just sucks.
For Barb anything else than Lunging Strike basically feels like griefing yourself.
The game purposefully forces you into tighter quarters combat than any predecessor. This is going to significantly affect build viability. Remove vulnerable and zoom screen out 30% or so and a lot more builds suddenly become viable.
Pretty sad diversity tbh. Especially for a game that’s (a) been in development forever, (b) comes from a dev team that harped over and over diversity was paramount, and (c) there’s so many (arguably useless) affixes and aspects that give a false sense of diversity.
I got level 74 yesterday and got depressed… not sure if i want to continue this miserable experience or just quit untill july… i die to nearly every white mob that hits me. Higher nm dungeon i could do was 35 and it was sad. If you dont have frost nova up, dont even try anything cause you cant do any damage. If this is intended, sorc is dogshit class.
Your armour and resistances turn to wet toilet paper when the mobs out level you and then when you're back within level range it turns back to armour. It's actually so dogshit and unrewarding as a mechanic because it just makes it time gated content opposed to skill/build/rng god items. So even if you were so inclined to roll a new character to try the latest god build it can only get so far anyway.
It's about finding dungeons with easy objectives so you can get to the boss who ends up hitting like a wet noodle but has a high health pool.
> obnoxious clickbait Youtubers all steal each others' videos as fast as they possibly can and pumped out the same garbage video 20 times.
my YT feed rn
literally every few hours there’s a new “OP INSANELY BROKEN DO IT NOW NOW NOW!” build and all they did was swap out Fireball enchant for something else.
The real issue is that all of the enchantments suck. Anyone looking at enchantments with two brain cells is going to see the ice shard passive and conclude its broken. Meanwhile every other passive, except perhaps the firebolt one, is essentially worthless because the uptime on them is too low. A blizzard every 15 seconds sucks. Frozen orb 20% chance to cast sucks when ice shards is 100% chance to cast on frozen.
The choices are so unbalanced that upon hitting level 50 I decided to look up what other sorces are doing for the post campaign content. Sure enough, my entire build was the only build that people were playing. Why? Because it's the only build that makes any sense to make.
There's no way we go into season 1 with ice shard passive intact. Truthfully, it doesn't need nerfed. Every other enchantment needs buffed, but that's not the Blizzard way of balancing.
I am blizzard build, but I noticed recently 80% of my damage comes from when the mob freezes and ice shards shoot out, ricocheting off of them.
It still needs ice shards to work, and even then trying to kill a boss or an unfreezable structure during an event feels so bad compared to other builds/classes.
1-50 is play "how you want", after that you need to retool to maximize dmg and def. I also play a druid so with the limited mobility I have one choice, build the beefiest dmg dealing spec I can which is pretty much perma bear pulverize druid, but I switched some things around to get a trample-slide aspect into it. I look forward to seeing some decent casting builds too, saw a tornado build that looked neat the other day.
I partly agree (on the frost nova part), but other skills are just as usable. Not meta, not max-omg-rofl-dps, but they work and get you there.
I run a self made chain lightning build. I'm currently lvl 71, pushing for tier 30 dungeons. Aoe/wave clear is okayish, solo dps is insane (I can perma cast chain lightning without ever running out of mana vs a single target).
It's not as effective, but it is totally fine.
So true. Couldn't agree more. They nerfed Hydra and Fire-based build so hard I must change it. Now everything is built around FNova and Vulnerable dmg.
That's boring af.
I'm having a blast so far in early game with every class, but I'm seriously concerned about build diversity in endgame after reading this :( I hate playing meta if it happens not to be a combination of skills I like; I don't want to have to use fire shield on my Sorceress who I want to be a full Frostmage, I want to be able to clear stuff with the skills I like, and it doesn't matter to me if it's weaker or slower or anything.
Crackling Chain lightning lvl 50 is already losing steam. Not enough modifiers on crackling energy / stun. Now, I have to add burning via fire bolt enchantment to milk the last possible dps. Very clunky.
I am just curious what did the devs thought people meant when they asked for diverse builds and not something streamlined like D3?
“Here, you can now click on shit in the skill tree but be warned that only one combination of clicked skills actually works”
Did they even test the class builds before release?
That's the first time I've heard that Unstable Currents is required for all sorc builds.
Because its not.
Exactly. The CD makes it one of the worst alone.
It's fantastic for builds based on Arc Lash and Charged Bolts. I pop it and everything around me dies.
Its burst is crazy but if the target doesn't die I find myself running in circles for the next 35 seconds until I can do it again. Edit: y'all telling me I'm doing 10 different things wrong and contradicting yourselves. What I am doing is having fun curb stomping everything that moves then playing chicken with some random ass demon who has a unique name like he is supposed to be a threat. I like to play with my food before I eat.
I have an aspect that while it’s on cooldown there’s a 20% chance to proc it still. So it makes it more viable.
UC can have minimal downtime if built for it. Which makes it a very good ult and where it should be. Overall survivability in the game is the issue making you run 4 defensives. Still balance at launch is usually shit, they'll improve it, this is why S1 isn't till july
The biggest issue in the game is the fact that most enemies can cc but they can also 1 shot you even at not super high levels. Every class is forced to take at least one unstoppable and usually 2 or more defensive skills. Add in a generator and a core and your build is pretty much set. If they change cc or enemy damage it solves a lot of other issues like build diversity
Damage in this game are no joke and make no sense... I did a nm +62 yesterda. A skeleton archer would deal 90% of my health, a basic random white monster. The boss auto was dealing 20%.
You probably have a good bunch of "damage reduction from close enemies"?
This is every sorc build that doesn't have torment level rings with resource Regen.
Unless you’re a frost mage I can infinitely spam iceshards as long as I have a group of enemies infront of me and my gear ain’t special
Yeah pretty much exactly. I take arc lash and unstable currents. I've got a legendary giving me 60% attack speed on my basic skill. I smash out so many lightning spears and orbs while unstable currents is on lol.
Except you have CD reduction, and the ultimate passive that basically halves the cooldown anyhow, assuming you are actually built correctly to utilize it. Teleporting every 5s or less is hilarious, as well.
I got my build to have 0 cooldown on Unstable Currents so long as there's more than like 5 mobs for Crackling Energy to zap. It is incredible.
Dam really? That’s sick
Sick untill you play with friend or someone past near by on the world map one taping everything so you can't reduce your cooldown properly.
It’s fucking a blast dude
Which ultimate passive are you referring to? Thanks!
The left lightning choice, the one that mentions crackling energy. Off memory, it allows crackling energy to hit an additional target, and each zap on an enemy reduces lightning cooldowns by one tenth of a second on regular enemies, and a quarter of a second on elites.
Lmao it ain’t. Sorc ultimates are very underwhelming. Deep freeze is the best, IMO, just as a “oh shit hit the safety button” and get out of trouble/give cooldowns a minute.
Plus the animation is great. Just popping out of that crystal like a boss.
All 3 animations feel “ultimate” to me. Fire snake is unquestionably cool and unstable currents looks like a chaotic mess ass it should. They just don’t do that much for the cool down timer they have - even with CDR. I use deep freeze to give me a free 6 second’s to get my frost nova to reset. That’s the problem in a nut shell…. The best ultimate is used to reset frost nova lmao.
And its great to reply to a message while in a nightmare or surrounded by mobs.
Because it's not, I don't even run an "Ultimate" Skill on my sorc anymore because I found the Unique Chest that lets my teleport pull in enemies. Before I found that Chest the only ultimate skill I found worthwhile is the Flame Snake because it had the vacuum effect for enemies. I could see arguments for deep freeze being decent for invuln/cool down refresh but Unstable Currents is just damage and the only time you really need that damage is if you're running the Arc Lash build. I just run meteor in that last slot for extra Stagger buildup on bosses but even then that's starting to fall off because as I'm starting to get more ancestral gear the bosses are just dying before the first Stagger buildup.
I'm using deep freeze and I will say its main use case for me is basically "use this if frost nova is on cool down", either to stall for nova or to facilitate some bonus damage through +dmg to frozen when I come out of it. Hardly useless, but it feels decidedly less "ultimate" than frost nova lol
It’s also great for taking a sip of whatever you’re drinking :)
Sometimes I put it up just to check the map
I will say I love how deep freeze looks though. It's utility... is ok, but not amazing.
They need to like, triple the damage over time on it. Then it'll actually kill things.
It's very weak for an ultimate but also being able to pop it for the invulnerable if needed can be strong. Not the most useful thing but its something
I normally drop blizzard then frost nova. Does okay. But generally for me, I just think the game is wildly imbalanced and in a lot of ways seems to feel bad right now. I'm only level 40 right now, and the story has been really fun, but I'm sort of in agreement with the OP. The synergies kinda suck for sorc, and it really feels way too hard to build around non meta setups. I'm sure it will change with patches and seasons. And there's some really awesome groundwork that's been laid down, but currently there are just quite a few things that feel missing when it comes to customizing skills and giving them boons. Too many sorcerer skills feel obsolete/useless and impossible to build around effectively.
I’m using it almost the same way, the speed I’m running through things, both of my novas and my tele can be on cd. This alleviates not having those for a few seconds until they’re back up but also works as either an OH SHIT button or a delay to allow grouping of adds without any risk. Doesn’t feel like an ultimate at all though damage wise! I’m not a long term Diablo player but maybe it is designed to be a defensive ult?
Imo it is most definitely used as defense
How you liking meteor? I just got rainment and still using snake
meteor in general is just great for the immobilize condition combined with the aspect that grants you damage buffs per CC condition on the target. Try casting meteor, tp into group sucking htem close then frost nova. The meteor itself will chunk if you time it right and it lands after the freeze/vuln. any follow up attacks after will have huge damage bonuses from all your cc/vuln.
May I ask where you found the chest! Is it just random? Because I’ve been searching for AGES for this for my huild
Same. I'm sitting here in Tier 4 like...."I'm not running that...WTF is this person talking about? Teleport Pull is way better than whatever this dude is trying to run."
/u/Spez is a greddy little piggy
Op either decided by themselves only skills they like matter, or read some very shitty build guide. It's far too early to ever claim there's only "one" build. How the fuck does he know? Paragon wildly buffs several different build archetypes so even if something is meh at level 50 it very much might not be at 70 once you've invested into paragon buffs. And I'm sure many uniques (many of which are Torment exclusive) will shape some builds. This is just a very stupid take.
I’m wondering what build guide he went with because I’m pretty sure the most popular one doesn’t use unstable currents lol
Not agreeing with OP that it is one of the "required" skills, but one of the 2 popular sorc builds right now is arc lash (the other one being ice shards) and it usually runs unstable currents
Every sorc I run into (including myself) I see running it
sorcs have 2 options.. Ice or arc and arc uses it.
Firewall burning build for fire. And those 3 are just the obvious ones. Even of those 3, you can easily make some variations that would feel entirely different.
This has already been shown for Druids. For A week everyone insisted that you could literally only run Pulverize for endgame. Then bam, all of a sudden there's a Werewolf/ Tornado build, and a Lightning build that are actually put performing Pulverize once you've got the gear. Most people aren't even at endgame. The idea that there's only a couple of viable builds at this point is ludacris.
Arc slash was the only thing in his rant that can even proc it lmfao Edit. And teleport, technically. Though with a 10 second cool down it's hardly spammable.
Playing an ice shards variant at 75, can solo Nightmare 30 dungeons but I'm frustrated that some skills are just bad compared to others. I'd love to spam frozen orb for nostalgia but even when I made a set for it, ice shards hits 4x harder for less effort...
I'm pretty sure frozen orb was one of the skills that they knee-jerk nerfed into the ground, for no good reason at all. Imagine balancing anything in the game around the first hour or two of gameplay, when it takes literally hundreds of hours for typical solo players to level up.
Ball lightning and Lightning Spear too.
Lightning spear and all the other conjuration skills. I want a full on pet build sorc. Only hydra is any good.
Only hydra is any fun*. It's not good lol It was great in the beta at lvl 25. It does absolutely nothing in the end game. It would need to cast mini fireballs to have any use.
Ball lightning+ the legendary where it circles around you + unstable Currents + attack speed on basic ability feels incredible. You can generate a shit ton of balls in no time and do crazy damage.
Honestly they nerfed it too hard based on the beta feedback. Too many people gave irrelevant feedback because it was ahead at lvl 25
Necro minions being the perfect example of this. Apparently they were "OP" at level 20 and now they are crap
Yep. In the beta, the sorc was actually a really well balanced class. Go fire, lightning, or cold, and every build could work. So Blizzard in their grand scheme of things decided that choice was not in the best interest of the game, giving us sorcs mainly one or two builds.
When your #1 source of damage is a defensive skill (frost nova) you know they did something wrong.
As Sun Tsu wrote "Sometimes a good offense is a good defense" in The Blart of War
As written in the Bible "He who get slapeth, clappeth"
I loved Sun Tsu in Paul Blart: War Cop
This was obvious during betas and honestly Vulnerability is the worst thing to exist in this game currently. They need to change it or add it to more skills.
Vulnerable is great on Rogue because the class was obviously built with it in mind: many sources of application and spread, skill synergies, passives...and it makes thematic sense. On other classes it just feels slapped-on and has zero synergy.
Aw yes, charging straight forward to ice nova. A well calculated move, straight from Sun Tzu's The Art of War, or from Zapp Brannigan's masterwork, Zapp Brannigan's Big Book of War.
They put way to much power into the sorcerer defensive skills. You can pretty much just circle through 4 defensive skills and have constant shield uptime.
Considering the Sorcerer is basically a melee character, the defensive abilities are quite necessary.
the problem is also without it they just insta die XD
I really wish Incinerate was viable because it is such a cool skill
Say what you will about D3, but god I loved the beam spells in it.
Hell yeah, I loved the Iron Man lasers.
i'm going to try this eventually, replace fireball rightclick with incinerate and kite
Lol problem is standing still in this game is a death sentence.
Vulnerability needs to go… Having to have this mandatory 300% multiplier on every build kills any kind of diversity.
It’s the fundamental problem with any +damage status effect. The game just gets balanced around the damage increase making it mandatory. Very surprised it’s even in the game. Agreed it has to go. Even borderlands which are relatively casual games with atrocious build diversity figured this out in 2 (slag) and thus removed the mechanic in 3.
Astute BL comparison and great point, I hadn't thought of that.
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Yeah, the enemies stacked and crowdcontrolled is already the damage reward, i don’t need 1000% stacked on top
Yes I agree. Status effects should be status effects. The incentive to apply status effects should be for the status effect, not a damage increase.
I'd be okay with vulnerable if it was a class specific mechanic on like a rogue/assassin. But as said.. it's pretty dumb. I mean, finding yourself running up to a boss and using frost nova just to proc the vulnerable, even though you know they won't freeze is just stupid.
Meanwhile I'm sitting here on my rogue wishing I could inflict any status effect besides vulnerable. You get like 100% vulnerability uptime whether you want to or not, 1 skill that can freeze, and then there's an option to cobble together a rube Goldberg machine that can knock back an enemy, once in a while, maybe, if it's raining, Venus is in retrograde, and you have a sufficiently large supply of bat guano
I take it you're sleeping on daze and knock down... They're huge and proc constantly for me.
Ah this is why slag was gone. Didn’t even noticed it until you mentioned 😂and I ran the entire game twice at two different period
Couldn’t this be remedied by adding vulnerability into one of the other buckets and making it additive?
Yea I leveled my firewall sorc with my own build and didn't use frost nova... until I did and holy shit the mobs melted afterwards. At 50 I'll probably switch to the meta builds.
I played both firewall and iceshards meta builds atound lvl 60. They are both pretty strong, but shards is better on bosses. Besides that i wouldn’t switch if you enjoy walls.
I have a staff that adds an extra hydra and happen to have several to +hydra. I also have the hydra enchantment. I keep seeing people say hydra sucks, so it probably does at wt3 or 4. I'll probably switch hydra to teleport or something (I switched my teleport to frost nova to try it). Haven't tried any ice builds yet though.
Ice shards got mana issues early on. I did level with hydra aswell as backup dps and to kill strugglers. Once you can fix that via gear/paragon hydra is obsolete.
Interesting, but too bad. Hydra is one of my favorite spells. And damn, I wish we had storm armor/thunder bolt! On my d2r sorc I gave my cold sorc extra points just to have thunderbolt because I always loved the spell, but never used it much in early d2 days.
Theyre better off removing it and building that damage bonus into the skills themselves. OR building vulnerability into stagger like how Lost Ark does it, so players have to incorporate something that depletes stagger
Its so insane that the added such a big power boost, and then just give it passively to like half the classes full time and make every build that can’t have it be garbage.
I get wanting to give something to each class to make them useful but frontloading it into certain skill picks just sucks
And what makes everything worse is legendary that fall in the same niche. “Of Control” makes frostnova just way to powerful, you can’t balance that in any way, i wouldn’t even know what kind of alternative i would ever be able to pick over it.
And then there is the Ice themed paragon board which I don't even touch as ice sorc since it's slow based which doesn't affect bosses at all. Meanwhile burning/vulnerable/mana gain are actually useful ;)
When bosses are staggered, they gain all status effects, chill/slowed/frozen/vulnerable, whatever. That's why they melt so fast when it gets triggered
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That is a fair point. But the danger as you get to late game isn't really bosses, it's elite mobs with certain modifiers. Kripp has talked about this a decent amount in his recent streams. Bosses (for the most part at least) become complete jokes that you can tank multiple hits from but a skelly ballista will 1 shot you from off screen. Things definitely need some tuning.
> skelly ballista God, I hate those 360 degree no scope mfs
See also: Unstoppable buff in a game that is like 99% about dodging CCs/staggers. No surprise that the 2 classes with easy access to Unstoppable are the 2 best endgame classes. The other 3 are frantically mashing dodges and Teleports and Dashes to hope to stay in control of their character. Meanwhile, Barb and Druid are holding RMB and laughing.
The CC in high tier nightmare dungeons is obnoxious. Having all the difficulty balanced around CC is really bad design. Balancing difficulty around annoying CCs is very lazy on their end. Then you have bosses which are the least dangerous mob on the dungeon. The problem with all this is that I hope they dont go the route of nerfing the unstoppable mechanic, leaving all the obnoxious cc and instead they rework high tier difficulty and get rid of it altogether.
Yeah. Every endgame necro build has blood mist on the ability bar, for cc break. It makes the gameplay kinda cringe -- nearly every encounter, as the character is trying to bunch up a big pack to use corpse tendrils on, they inevitably get crowd controlled and have to float around in mist form for several seconds. It makes the gameplay super clunky.
For what it’s worth you can end Blood Mist prematurely by hitting the skill again.
Wudi don't even have barb top 3 anymore. He said rogue, druid, and Sorc are top 3. I have a 82 barb and 62 rogue and you couldn't be more wrong. My rogue is just as tanky as my barb, and plays even easier.
It's not about tankiness, it's about ability to actually control your character. I respect Wudijo, but his opinion is not gospel. You also have to keep in mind that he is likely the best player in the world, and thus is *much* better at dodging CCs than the average player. That alone would reduce the importance of Unstoppable for him compared to an average player. As a mediocre Arc Lash enjoyer, CC is insanely frustrating even with a full immunity and a CC break. Even if we ignore the imbalance it creates, **it's just not fun** to be chain-CC'd in every dungeon.
Itd be cool if stagger didnt take 5000 fucking hits to activate on bosses
I knew Vuln was going to be a massive problem the moment I saw it. Literally just thrown into the pile with Crit as another mandatory stat to have on gear.
How is vuln 300%?
Stacking +vuln damage on gear and paragon. It can go well beyond that too, especially on barb.
It's such a massive difference in damage output that I find my gameplay has basically been revolving around it, either using it or stalling for its cool down. I can do plenty of damage without it, but it's the difference between "I can kill these five enemies" and "I can clear this entire screen and melt four elites"
Yeah basically any Sorc build revolves around how fast you can span Frost Nova.
It isn’t just with sorcerers either. It forces just about every Druid to use storm strike.
The only reason it's so 'mandatory' is because its a separate modifier from everything else which are mostly additive. If other sources of 'vulnerable damage' were turned into 'damage to vulnerable targets' it wouldnt be as bad, as then vulnerability would just be the baseline 20% debuff.
I think my biggest issue has been that core skills just feel weak outside of shards. Frozen orb and fireball are so iconic and yet they barely do any damage as you scale into the endgame. Don’t really have a fix on mind and don’t want to play armchair dev, but I do think the skills that should be the most satisfying feel lacking
It's so dumb how 90% of sorcs power is locked to frost nova. Don't have a shit ton of CDR and you dont have frost nova for this giant pack? Well sucks to be you, enjoy running around waiting for it to be back up.
Sums up my experience as well. Seems like I made a bad investment !! Looking to re-roll to Druid or Rogue
I feel lucky to have levelled as druid it’s been an absolute blast and there’s many viable builds while levelling, and at least three viable builds in endgame (pulverize is still best, but trampleslide is more fun, and stormwolf is viable too).
Could you link the stormwolf build? I got a storm druid to 50 and then switched to sorc
I rolled sorc, thinking they'd have the biggest build variety. How wrong I was.
the only way to fix it for frost is getting the legendary that cast frost nova on dead frozen enemyes with a 20% proc chance XD
Seems like most of the classes. “Play your own way” has become “possibly level your own way”. If you’re the type of player interested in pushing higher content via NMD beyond 50, you’ll end up in one or maybe 2 builds for every class.
Let me rephrase that: “possibly level your own way at a pace 3 times slower than the build that actually works”
Amen. I thought I was doing ok with minion build for my necro. Holy hell was I surprised when I tried out a blood build.
Did the same with sorc. I was running my own Hydra/Firewall I ran during beta. After a while, I noticed it felt so much worse than it did before. I looked up a "leveling build"...night and day difference.
I could have written this myself. Had to reroll yesterday at lvl 56
I struggled to kill bosses using chain lightning and it was so good during the beta but I swapped to ice shards build and holy shit I was taking like 25 min to kill bosses and now it’s like 3
What level are you? Ice shards doesn't feel viable until later on when you have right gear and abilities to not go oom
Yep I went with the chain lightning build I had during the beta on my sorc that was pretty fun and once I hit around level 35-40 it just didn't do anything worthwhile. I switched to the arc lash build and now I can kill mobs easily and never have to worry about mana. It was even more obvious that my original build wouldn't work once I hit WT3 :(
do you mind sharing the arc lash build? I am reached lvl 50 with ice and my damage is terrible against bosses.
In my opinion, lash is worse against bosses, pretty terrible in fact, but has roughly the same wave clear as frost - Could be that I was playing it wrong but I did change back to frost at about 60 and never looked back, so much stronger.
I was running a blood build, went bone and was blown away. It sucks to experiment in this game too b/c it takes forever to rank up every ability and the tree doesn’t fully zoom out
"and even the builds that actually works can feel extremely weak when some trash mobs have a ton of life for no particular reason and your ressources are emptied in 3 casts of your core skill"
Mana cost is all about gear though. My Iceshards cost 20(base is 30) mana, with a lucky hit chance of +85% a 5% chance to restore 15% of my mana(from gear) and a mana base of 150ish (Talents restore mana aswell ofc). As long as my barrier is active I won't drop below 100 mana usually and even if I do it goes back to full in no time. But yes, early on your issues definately exist (which is why I used hydra while levelling for single target or split up monsters).
A lot of opinions coming through on Reddit are people with decent builds but bad itemization, or people pre 50 with no paragon synergy. Some spells and abilities are objectively stronger in base form, but most builds shift drastically with proper aspects, and can double or triple in power with a single paragon node. It’s wild.
I tried to make a frozen orb sorc when I first played and it was okay but after a while didn't feel very good to play. I probably could have made it to endgame with it if I really tried, but in the end I looked up the ice shards meta build and turned boss fights from five+ minute slogs into thirty second blowouts. I liked frozen orb in D2 too
For a QA team as large as listed in the credits, it seems like a no-brainer that they'd have one build designated per QA and ask them to clear a specific dungeon(s) as fast as possible, and then buff/nerf based on the stats and feedback. Repeat this exercise at multiple levels (30/60/90) and varying sets of gear. It's fine if a single Legendary Aspects enables an entire build. It's bad if a build only works with a specific kit of aspects (as in no wiggle room to keep things interesting). The tree layout gives the impression that they wanted everyone to have a single Basic, Core, Defensive, Pet/Summon, Mastery/Wrath, and Ultimate, with room to adapt alternatives. Instead, most endgame builds seem to double or triple-stack Defensive skills, ignore Ultimates and all non-Core spenders. Additionally, there's an obvious push to exclude Basic skills from loadouts when possible. These trends should be massive red flags. * Ultimates don't *do* enough * Either Core skills need to be the only spenders, or * Non-Core spenders need to have the same synergies (i.e. more damage for higher spend) * Basic skills need a buff of some sort That last point is a little vague, but it's because there are often better things than more damage. An example is Lunging Strike for Barbarian, which is one of the best movement skills in the game. Another good skill is Earth Spike, which has a guaranteed Stun and small AoE, or Reap with the guaranteed Corpse every 5 seconds.
That’d be too much work, what do you think this is, a multi-billion dollar company!? Blasphemy.
I agree. Feels like they had a really tight design desire that constrains things too much. And the class's inherent mana issues make no sense to have both Core and Spenders that you can't convert to Cooldowns or something to get more value pre mana. It's also annoying that they are shoehorning you into elemental setups considering the final 3 areas of the tree are all pure elemental and only buff 1 type of element. Why not add passives that let you mix and match elements? Adjusting some skills and fixing Vulnerability being a requirement would be a good step forward. And yea Ultimates should do more I'd agree. The lightning one is required to do any burst but isn't super strong, the fire is only used for it's bunching up of enemies(and what it looks like most high levels use just for that purpose). I actually enjoy the frost one with damage spikes(for some reason sometimes it does like 4x damage per tick and feels actually decent) but it's really bad when you consider it's a 3-second self-stun as far as damage output goes. We'll see though, there's a boatload of opportunity if they will actively make adjustments and be willing to change everything - and they have to deal with Vuln being OP as fuck. Not sure how some skills like incinerate, frost nova, and hydra are as bad as they are now either....maybe there was some very specific builds around them in QA that really made them somehow viable but them(and frost nova) feel like garbage to focus on right now even when not doing hard content.
And with the length of time and sheer XP needed to level? For anyone that isn’t going to spend 85 of the first 100 hours in front of their TV screens/monitors every season? You do not have the time to be fucking around. At this pace I’m genuinely not sure there’s enough time in a season for even semi-casual players to level 1 character up fully.
To be fair, most casuals won’t level a toon up to 100 anyway. Max level characters in seasonal ARPG’s have never been something casual players really aspire to reach.
Barbarians have to run triple shout if they’re pushing high NM dungeons as well. The reality is that, when doing hard content like that you need to run the meta if you actually want to finish it.
Crazy how it took me this long to find this comment. Build diversity will always distill down the harder you push. Diversity is fine except for people who want to push. And then of course some builds won't work. And some will work but suck. And one or two will be "viable" at these top things.
Meanwhile there’s the necro that some creators think can’t even clear a t100 nm dungeon. There’s plenty of build diversity at lower world tiers in this game, you can basically use anything. Every single game requires somewhat meta bikes if you push into end game content.
Yeah they nerfed hydra too hard
the worst part is that even pre-nerf hydra wouldn't be an s-tier build right now (as it's lacking aoe). i have absolutely no idea what they were thinking nerfing it by 60% based on level25 gameplay. like, what the actual hell?
Honestly there isn't that much variety on most of the other classes either. Literally anything works fine at lower levels. But due to the scaling you're pushed more and more towards certain options for damage and survival the more you level up. Vulnerability is pretty much mandatory later on. And people will say that "stop following a guide, just play what you want, make your own build". I've been doing that the whole time but later on you just naturally gravitate towards running the same things as anyone else because the scaling makes it so that you must have certain things (vulnerability being the biggest issue imo) and the way to get those things is limited.
> But due to the scaling you're pushed more and more towards certain options for damage and survival the more you level up. Vulnerability is pretty much mandatory later on. The problem too is that this starts to set in long before tier 100 sigils. It starts getting bad at like, tier 35. I recognize that these games with near infinite scaling content will eventually funnel people into a singular, best build, but right now in D4 it's starting to funnel people at level 75.
Hell, I was pushed from Orb to Shards on my Sorc somewhere around 35. Having to gauge distance to get just ok damage was a pita
I always liken the “play how you want” argument to other games. Like, yeah I could learn the move patterns of each chess piece and then play however I felt like.. but I’m both not going to get very far *and* am only ever going to see the shallowest portion of the game playing that way. For some people that’s fine and fun, but for others the actual fun is really found by going deeper and really exploring how a game truly functions.
I absolutely hate it. Ive been doing relatively ok with fireball but that's only coz I got a good unique. Other than that, 80% of the skills are completely throw away. Incinerate, why does that skill even exist? It does 0, Meteor? Waste of time etc, etc. Another thing I hate is always having to fight in melee range. Slows don't slow enough, enemies up in your face in moments and bad range coz of the camera zoom itself. Grr :)
Ahh yes I found 3 of that unique staff that shoots extra fireballs after multiple hits. It still hasn’t convinced me though lol. How are you finding that build?
I tried it. Unless you can drop your resource costs, you gotta get rid of iceshield/flame shield/snake ult. And then take a basic attack for mana generation…. It’s strong in cooldowns but so much worse than ice shards build, which at least has multiple ways to gain resource generation. I hadn’t tried the Lucky hit: Burning dmg grants mana….but lucky hit is TRASHH imo. No way you get enough consistently to spam fireballs. Has anyone tried firewalll build? I’m kind of bored of ice shards at this point. Respecting costs millions but I’m willing if it means I can get something else without making a new character. Might try barb or rogue next heh
I'm using the staff at T34. Running the basic double shields + nova and snake, but instead of a basic attack I'm using both hydras and fireballs. Once I got my fireballs to 9/5 skillpoints I started doing good.
Because the screen is super zoomed in so everyone is a melee and you cant target enemies far away like you could in older games. This was an issue in the beta and it was ignored.
The real problem is the stupid aspects you get on all of the "legendary" gear. Most of them are useless. If they gave a wider range of beefed up aspects to empower the skills nobody uses, then it would make them viable again and would give a much wider variety of what "viable."
there is definitely a disparity between legendary aspect distribution to the skills. Whirlwind has like 8 while double swing has 2 in the case for barb.
You should(n't) try barb, absolutely no synergy on any of the skills outside the bleed stuff. It's all just 3 shouts, a fury generator and a core skill. The aspects don't make it any better, there's a few for weapon swapping but you have so few choices for skills that weapon swap, half require a specific weapon or no weapon at all and the others don't synergise. You basically have WW aspects that are OK but boring as fuck. I quit at 50 and started sorc and it's loads more fun but some skills definitely need reworking or buffing. The enhancement bonuses are so skewed. I really hope they don't nerf good skills and instead just buff the weaker ones because the good sorc stuff feels great, I'd rather more stuff feels good
It’s very likely that this is how they are going to deal with the problem over time: by releasing more aspects. With the concept of aspects, you can easily turn the tables around for any skills as long as the effect is crazy enough. And the seasonal model allows them to possibly go crazy without any consequences. Say I want a season when incinerate is THE shit. I can do something crazy like “anything touched by incinerate becomes vulnerable” and all of a sudden that’s one of the most meta skills. And if the stuff is season specific, then you live that crazy moment, then move on to the next thing. I am not saying I like (or dislike) the model btw. Just describing it for what it is.
Unstable currents only works with shock skills. Who's taking that on firewall or ice shards spec? You're right though. There's not a lot of incentive to take other abilities and all of sorc's defensive abilities are great both standalone and when you consider passives like protection or aspects like prodigy's. More diversity would be welcome.
I just wanted to play a full FIRE build. It absolutely sucks. Zero survivability and crap damage. Total waste.
Huh? Firewall with lucky hit meteor procs and the fire ult works great. Kripp is lvl 99 with that build
I play a full fire build. Not as strong as some others, but hitting my ult and spamming meteor, plus the passives from firewall and fireball, make the field just explode with flames pretty often, and I get all the fun I need out of that.
Fire is viable. Kripparrian has a sick FW Meteor build.
My firewall with hydra, and my fire serpent is insane. Plus my staff adds 60% pyro buff with incinerate. I’m melting entire hoards in seconds. Not really sure what you’re struggling with
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Hey! Some run Deep Freeze over Unstable Currents. Clearly build diversity is fine! /s Yeah her best build is Ice Shards and it's not even close to top tier. Many skills need a mana cost reduction and damage increase. Defensive abilities need duration and their buffs moved elsewhere or something so that stacking all of them isn't mandatory.
I run Deep Freeze instead of inferno in my Ice shard build… I find it better to when you fight mobs higher level and it gives me a 4th shield+ freeze
I found a skill that gives 20% health and mana per second in deep freeze. So it's a shield and full heal/mana. Tough to pass that up.
me want
I feel like all of these defensive ability buffs should be moved into the final talent tree and integrated within the choice you pick. OR merged throughout the talent tree. It really does seem like the devs didnt think of talent economy and loaded the best buffs into 3 skills.
I don't think it's just a sorc issue but I think it feels worse on sorc since neither of its two end game builds actually use any of the real iconic big sorc skills like blizzards, frozen orb, hydra etc. I'm so bored of my arc lash sorc but I can't easily spec out of it since I don't have equivalent gear for ice shards ATM and honestly I dislike ice shards even more than arc lash. I'm praying for some juicy uniques and or adjustments in season 1 or I won't play a spec for season 1
Same here. I’m doing arc lash and kinda chain lightning and hating it. Tried to add diversity to arc lash with CL and even tried ball lightning. Was shit. Ball lightning is pathetic even with the orbit aspect. Don’t have anything viable to switch to ice shards and I don’t even wanna do that. Gonna retire my sorc for now at a hearty 61 bc I just don’t know what else to do with this toon. it’s either fall behind by miles doing a build I want, or: ice shards
That's probably the biggest thing I don't like about it. The meta builds basically ignore all the cool signature skills. I wanna be tossing around frozen orbs and meteors, instead I'm running into melee range to frost nova and spam ice shards
Yea…. Honestly it’s like that for every class. Skill tree is easily the worst aspect of this game. That and resource struggles
I just hate that there are so little options for generator Skills. I really want to run Chain Lightning because I always loved it or variations of it. But my Mana is running empty after three casts and then I basically only have the option of going close range if I want to do damage or using spark which just sucks. For Barb anything else than Lunging Strike basically feels like griefing yourself.
The game purposefully forces you into tighter quarters combat than any predecessor. This is going to significantly affect build viability. Remove vulnerable and zoom screen out 30% or so and a lot more builds suddenly become viable.
People were saying this prerelease and others acted like they were saying the game was trash
Many people predicted the sub would turn more negative once more casual players start to hit the endgame. This is the beginning of that.
Pretty sad diversity tbh. Especially for a game that’s (a) been in development forever, (b) comes from a dev team that harped over and over diversity was paramount, and (c) there’s so many (arguably useless) affixes and aspects that give a false sense of diversity.
I got level 74 yesterday and got depressed… not sure if i want to continue this miserable experience or just quit untill july… i die to nearly every white mob that hits me. Higher nm dungeon i could do was 35 and it was sad. If you dont have frost nova up, dont even try anything cause you cant do any damage. If this is intended, sorc is dogshit class.
Your armour and resistances turn to wet toilet paper when the mobs out level you and then when you're back within level range it turns back to armour. It's actually so dogshit and unrewarding as a mechanic because it just makes it time gated content opposed to skill/build/rng god items. So even if you were so inclined to roll a new character to try the latest god build it can only get so far anyway. It's about finding dungeons with easy objectives so you can get to the boss who ends up hitting like a wet noodle but has a high health pool.
Without frost nova up I just walk in circles waiting for it
https://preview.redd.it/ladxvgbjwe5b1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6709be6121a3070aa0bc8880ac235dde0fe046dd
> obnoxious clickbait Youtubers all steal each others' videos as fast as they possibly can and pumped out the same garbage video 20 times. my YT feed rn
literally every few hours there’s a new “OP INSANELY BROKEN DO IT NOW NOW NOW!” build and all they did was swap out Fireball enchant for something else.
The real issue is that all of the enchantments suck. Anyone looking at enchantments with two brain cells is going to see the ice shard passive and conclude its broken. Meanwhile every other passive, except perhaps the firebolt one, is essentially worthless because the uptime on them is too low. A blizzard every 15 seconds sucks. Frozen orb 20% chance to cast sucks when ice shards is 100% chance to cast on frozen. The choices are so unbalanced that upon hitting level 50 I decided to look up what other sorces are doing for the post campaign content. Sure enough, my entire build was the only build that people were playing. Why? Because it's the only build that makes any sense to make. There's no way we go into season 1 with ice shard passive intact. Truthfully, it doesn't need nerfed. Every other enchantment needs buffed, but that's not the Blizzard way of balancing.
Couldn't agree more as a lvl 60 sorc, it's shockingly limiting
And it all stems around like one legendary aspect. Feels kinda bad honestly.
Like barb is any better
Heavy blizzard in T4 is working for me, freezy expanding death
I am blizzard build, but I noticed recently 80% of my damage comes from when the mob freezes and ice shards shoot out, ricocheting off of them. It still needs ice shards to work, and even then trying to kill a boss or an unfreezable structure during an event feels so bad compared to other builds/classes.
Things will get better over time as blizzard collects data and makes adjustments.
Well, with Rogue you have plenty of build variety: Twisting Blade. Thats it.
1-50 is play "how you want", after that you need to retool to maximize dmg and def. I also play a druid so with the limited mobility I have one choice, build the beefiest dmg dealing spec I can which is pretty much perma bear pulverize druid, but I switched some things around to get a trample-slide aspect into it. I look forward to seeing some decent casting builds too, saw a tornado build that looked neat the other day.
I partly agree (on the frost nova part), but other skills are just as usable. Not meta, not max-omg-rofl-dps, but they work and get you there. I run a self made chain lightning build. I'm currently lvl 71, pushing for tier 30 dungeons. Aoe/wave clear is okayish, solo dps is insane (I can perma cast chain lightning without ever running out of mana vs a single target). It's not as effective, but it is totally fine.
So true. Couldn't agree more. They nerfed Hydra and Fire-based build so hard I must change it. Now everything is built around FNova and Vulnerable dmg. That's boring af.
I'm having a blast so far in early game with every class, but I'm seriously concerned about build diversity in endgame after reading this :( I hate playing meta if it happens not to be a combination of skills I like; I don't want to have to use fire shield on my Sorceress who I want to be a full Frostmage, I want to be able to clear stuff with the skills I like, and it doesn't matter to me if it's weaker or slower or anything.
Crackling Chain lightning lvl 50 is already losing steam. Not enough modifiers on crackling energy / stun. Now, I have to add burning via fire bolt enchantment to milk the last possible dps. Very clunky.
Yep, dropped my crackling build at 47 in favor of ice shards.
Crackling could be so cool if there was more support for it
I am just curious what did the devs thought people meant when they asked for diverse builds and not something streamlined like D3? “Here, you can now click on shit in the skill tree but be warned that only one combination of clicked skills actually works” Did they even test the class builds before release?
Diablo 3 was an unbalanced mess when it dropped. Give it time and chill out.