I’ve always loved playing ice builds and D2 was no different.
Before Sunder Charm, cold sorc was popular for MF runs because it didn’t need good equipment.
But even getting endgame gear for her, there were monsters whose immunity could never be broken.
This I always saw as a balance:
cold sorc because of CM pierce, could deal great damage with weak equipment and had a faster gameplay start than other builds.
but after getting items that pierce resistances, fire and lightning builds surpassed it.
Prior to SUNDER CHARM, COLD MASTERY running at 100% efficiency WAS NOT OP.
Now with SUNDER CHARM cold sorc is TOO OP. We can even do UBER with cheap equipment. All you have to do is get Cold Rupture.
CM should now work at 1/5 efficiency, i.e. work at the same magnitude as other resistance piercing skills.
And even performing this NERF, cold sorc would still be strong, even before getting Sunder Charm.
OBS: This was something begged by several people, streamers, forums.
But blizzard doesn’t care about the opinion of the players. By the way, this is not an opinion, this is an obvious thing.
I wanna see you do uber with “cheap” equipment and what cheap means.
Cold sorc doesn’t get bonus damage like fire and lightning does from mastery. If you factor items that lower the resistances of enemies (e.g. infinity, facets), fire/lightning end up dealing more damage than cold easily. So fire/lightning spec will clear monsters much faster and this is the meta already.
Cold perhaps is better against ubers because it is not subjected to the penalty (and that’s a big perhaps), but it is still behind the other two specs at literally anything else.
It wasn’t. It is an old, un-fun, bad design that just doesn’t need to exist.
Don’t think there is too OP. Everything is supposed to be OP. That is the beauty of D2 that it’s a loot hunting trading game. Monsters are supposed to explode when we look at them. In End gear the challenge is doing 10,000’s of run fast and effectively. This is a game of speed. The challenge is the player getting good at runs and making builds that kills in 1 sec instead of 2.
People that complain about a builds power in PvM don’t understand the whole point of D2.
“It wasn’t. It is an old, un-fun, bad design that just doesn’t need to exist.”
The design in itself aren’t bad, the problem are the monster immunity system was implemented when the game did not have synergies and it was MUCH easier to have elemental diversity in builds. Without synergies it actually makes sense to have monsters with multiple immunities.
The system becomes bad in combination with synergy system. It’s basically two systems working against eachother since synergies kinda forces people to focus almost solely on one element.
I 1000% agree and told them this exact thing during the last PTR.
Its important to factor in the damage PER GEAR cost of each build. The new cold sunder charm totally breaks the curve in terms of farming versatility, farming speed (damage) per rune cost.
Making Cold Mastery only 1/5th power against sundered enemies will allow cold builds to STILL FARM EVERYTHING, but will need infinity, and other decent gear to absolutely shred cold immunes similar to the other elements.
Sunder Charms will only exist in Ladders, not Non-Ladder as it is a Ladder exclusive item and Blizzard has made no mention that these were being transferred to Non Ladder, so it has no relevance to nerf cold mastery. If you nerf a skill, it will be nerfed for Ladder and Non Ladder.
Sunder + CM is how these items should function. It’s ridiculous that LR and Convic get nerfed if the player uses a sunder charm. Honestly, all the sorc masteries should be pierce, like CM, to actually give them build variety without having to find 2 ber runes first.
Yes, before Sunday, CM its OK. But now is just too OP and easy mode.
Poison Necro Build is the biggest disparity.
LR works with reduced efficiency and Poison Nova is not very strong compared to blizzard.
Couple all this with the fact that there is a considerable amount of poison immune, it is extremely unfair to this build that LR works at 1/5 efficiency and CM works at 100%.
Even if CM has reduced efficiency, cold sorc would still be strong and the cheapest character in the game.
This would make people invest more points in CM to gain more cold pierce, instead of just put one point and let increase with +skills items.
While you may see it this way, there are those who played cold Sorc who saw this as “skip these monsters”, which is exactly what they did.
The cat is long out of the bag on this one I’m afraid, hard to turn back now. As others have said, Cold skills can be surpassed in power by both fire and lightning with additional gear.
I was personally advocating for a 1/2 or a 1/3 CM nerf back when it was being tested, just to at least slow her down in cold immune areas.
Not really. The current nerf to convic and LR means that any cold sorc is going to invest heavily into cold mastery to hit max pierce and skip using Infinity. That’s where this disparity comes in, because currently, only cold sorc can really benefit from these sunder charms because their pierce isn’t nerfed. It’s only served to make cold sorcs less interesting to optimize. The conviction and LR nerfs need to be reverted next patch, it’s not even up for debate.
The value of taking resistances from positive to neutral is much more than the value of pushing enemies into negative resistances. That’s why these nerfs to convic and LR was just asinine. Going from 95 resistance to 50 resistance is a 10x damage increase. Going from 50 resistance to 0 resistance will then double your damage. Going from 0 resistance to -100 will then only double damage again. The point being that reducing resistance to neutral is worth substantially more than negative resistances, and these nerfs to LR and convic bury that possibility for just about any build other than cold sorc.
There’s relatively nothing special about cold sorc if Infinity and LR wands are unnerfed. It’s all around less powerful than fire and lit builds for farming. So really, CM+Sunder should be the gold standard for how these charms interact with existing pierce sources. Ideally, lit and fire mastery are turned into pierce skills instead of being synergy bloat for those trees, but that’s a whole other topic.
1/5 just means cold sorc drop only 1 point in CM if they use the charm, just like it means players stop building infinity if they use the charm. It’s an asinine change. If they want to balance pierce with these sunder charms, that they change the game to add, they can rebalance the amount of pierce on these effects or actually balance the penalty for using both effects.
Nerfing convic and LR was already hair brained, adding CM to the list is just more hair brained changes from this dev team. They need to figure out what they want to do with enemy resistances. Should immunities exist? Should negative resistance exist? Should negative resistances have a cap? Should pierce have a cap? Figure that out first.
No it doesn’t, it says they drop from all monsters, not just unique/champ. It didn’t specify that they will drop in non-ladder or that they will drop in ladder only. Dev’s could have clarified this better.
They might have increased the rarity, spread the drops to ALL Monsters and simply avoided a riot by not telling us.
Little ninja nerf to % drop rate but opened up the # of monsters that can drop it.