Long, LONG wizard experience HIGHLY makes me doubt that is the case, particularly combined with the reverting of twisters doing more damage, slower. Full disclosure: I’m too busy in school to test, but I bet Blizzard just committed an act of (server) hamster genocide.
Updated Notes for 2.6.10.70985.
https://diablo3.blizzard.com/en-us/blog/23529004
- No revert on Etched Sigil.
- Deathwish - no mention.
- No response to the clunkiness of Winter Flurry.
- Excess Multiplier weapons issue: no mention.
- Placement of Spectral buff; no comment.
- Hydra and Orb: No buffs.
What the heck are they thinking? Where’s the communication on these issues? Even a simple: “We’ve tabled this until later” for a lot of these would be fine. At the minimum, Etched Sigil, Fragment, and Winter Flurry; I expected changes.
Is it sad that I’d rather they would have not touched wizard at this point? Really; 
WTF 
.
I’d rather see Etched sigil stay as in [2.6.9]. Why are we burdened by all these multiplier weapons? Why place a nice, fun, interesting Hydra stacking mechanic on the wrong item. Why?
Did fix the tick rate on Twister in the least. Guess that’s something. Let’s stack our 10 multiplier items and test out Twister!
I really hate being negative; I usually like seeing changes but a lot of these are bad. I enjoy the spectral mechanic, but I feel it’s still in the wrong place. Wizardspike is engaging in nephalems, but still useless everywhere else. Gah!
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Not at all, if these are the changes we should expect going forward for Wizards, then I actually hope that they don’t touch our remaining sets for balancing. That’s how poorly I feel that they handled these balancing changes. I’m actually of the belief that they’ll make the Firebird set worse than it already is! It’s quite upsetting in fact.
These changes almost make me depress. Never in all the time I’ve played as a wizard (which I have done since launch), have I ever been as disappointed in the balancing changes as I am with 2.6.10. Even critical mass removal was less troublesome than this ptr patch.
On a lighter note, I must repeat a previous question:
Or should I wait a bit longer?
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Precise. I echo this sentiment.
I’m too much the optimist here. I’d wait till final PTR notes, then call the TOD.
Can’t say we didn’t try; 260+ comments at this point.
Thanks to everyone for their feedback. Even if this ends less than what we hoped for.
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True enough, thank you and everyone else for the testing that you all did. With that said, I shall be turning in for the night.
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There’s times when I actually hate if my predictions are correct:
Yup, again. They didn’t even bother communicating why they do this. They didn’t even provide number tweaks. Literally NOTHING except Twisted Sword.
In that regard:
You can wait all you want. The result won’t change. Back to Wizdog days.
EDIT:
Well, from my perspective, they can keep these wizard related changes:
- Mantle of Channeling nerf revert
Yup, was unnecessary in the first place. They should have known better, but at least they reverted this. - Typhon (6) and DMO (6)
not saying it’s enough for these two sets, but at least it’s a win, so I’m okay with these. - Fragment of Destiny
I don’t like that the stacks are Hydra only, but the change to all signatures is a big win. - Wizardspike and Twisted Sword
I find these two questionable, but at least they are buffs an we shall see what happens
Everything else what they did to wizards is bad, detrimental, uncalled for and should be removed from the patch completely.
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Yeah, I would vote to scrap all the changes except Wizard Spike and the twisted sword update. I understand that they want V’s Rebuke to make the season theme exciting, so I guess I see that one as well.
All the others are actually detrimental.
Whoops, yes obviously these needed to happen as well.
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It is probably because not many people are working on D3 at this point in time and then there is the working-from-home issue on top as well.
And beyond that Blizzard has changed over the years, with now probably more Activision influence in it than Blizzard.
Just yesterday a story broke out that for WoW there are secret, Privat Feedback Forums for Theorycrafters, and that these have been there for years. I don’t know if these also exist for Diablo 3 or the Diablo franchise as a whole, …
…but my point is that probably the only way we could see larger scale changes is if Blizz would “hire” some of us (secretly) (as unpaid interns) to do some work on the game, especially since making basic changes to D3’s game files is fairly easy to do, even according to the D3 devs themself.
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One of my first changes would be to lower teleport to 10 second cooldown 
then I’d double all arcane orb damage runes except for Frozen Orb.
Then I’d start messing with weapons. Slovaks from 20% to 500%. Woh to 500%. Probably , wizardspike, smoldering core, everything to 500%.
Then death wish is moved to channeling only and I’d half to put the class back together. Hydra would need that 300% back. Probably magistrate and serpent sparkler to make that up. Etc.
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That is just a 1 second reduction in the Cooldown.
The Monks Dashing Strike has 2 Charges with a Recharge Time of 8 Seconds each, so Teleport should be at least that, or if it doesn’t have Charge, a Cooldown of 6-7 Seconds, although I personally would prefer 2 Charges with Wormhole giving another one.
Charges would allow for a certain amount of spamming Teleport like in D2, but not as excessive as it was back then.
Yes, I agree.
After having done the calculations myself and compared it to other skills, I also agree on this.
haha, you mean Slorak’s Madness, not “Slovaks” 
I did d´never knew that this wand has Disintegrate Damage on it…
I think that Deathwish already kinda fulfills this roll of a Disintegrate-buffing weapon (if it gets changed so that it only benefits Channelling Skills), so there probably is not much of a need for that, although I have to admit that I didn’t run the math, so it might be appropriate.
Smoldering Core currently does not a a Damage Multipler on it, but if anything, I would put Nilfur’s Boast Meteor-buffing Special Affix on The Smoldering Core and remove it from Nilfur’s Boast.
The damage bonus to Meteor on Nilfur’s Boast being on boots and not on a weapon or off-hand is the whole reason for why Meteor Channeling and Bzooka Wizard are so overly powerful.
Preferably that Meteor Buffing Affix should be on a 1handed weapon like a Wand or a 1handed sword, because The Grand Vizier is already a 2handed staff that also buffs Meteor.
Something like that should have been done a long time ago and it probably would be easy to change, just like the Teleport change.
If that specific change that you request here would be done (making Deathwish only buffing Channelled Skills, then the Etched Sigil change could be reverted, as well as the 1 second delay could be removed from Deathwish, Etched and Mantle of Channelling, because Meteor Channelling and Bazooka would be gone with it.
For an Etched Sigil / Twister Wizard build we already have the new ly updated Twisted Sword and also Valthek’s Rebuke, so Deathwish would not be necessary for a Twister Wizard.
Or maybe you could place 3 Hydra’s with the Hydra Base Skill and Serpent Sparker would give you +1 or +2 Hydras.
That somehow would also lead to a damage increase (assuming that the Typhoon set would get balanced in return to make up for that).
I know, buffing the damage bonus on The Magistrate or Serpent Sparker is probably easier, but having 3 or 4 Hydras active at one would be much cooler.
I’d already be happy having a lengthy talk with a developer about what should be done, given they have the time to spare and are willing to actually listen - and then get things done.
Hohoho… 5 Mammoth Hydras… not sure, if the servers will like you as much as I’d surely do 
Okay, seriously, if they’d let us… then please go ahead and work on my personal wishlist (far from complete, it will surely grow). But no worries, I don’t expect miracles. You have… hm, let’s say a month or so
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Longer wizard experience tells you you should believe it But let’s not quibble over vanilla OG CM/WW/SNS/ect status here, we’re all very experienced with twisters - there’s no bug here it’s working as intended and I think players are underestimating just how much lag is being caused by the actual PTR servers than Twisters. I’m quite confident if it goes live as is the lag will be improved over current twisters.
But by all means don’t take my word for it, more tests the better guys - check it out!
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I guess explosive blast is completely dead :*(
Oh, I wasn’t thinking about that one, but you are right, the servers probably couldn’t handle that.
But is the problem with Mammoth Hydra actually the Firewall itself, or is it the tick rate of the Firewall + Area Damage?
I’ll take a look at it.
I also decided to work on my own “wishlist”, but it only contains the 5 or 6 things that I consider to be the most important. I had longer lists in the past, but now I realized that I should focus on the really important and realistic things and advocate for these instead of also focusing on medium and less important ones or the ones that are just too unlikely to happen.
I’m against wish lists. I’ve come to accept Blizzard isnt listening.
I think Deathwish as a channeling buff, Sloraks with 500% and the Old etched Sigil would have been a viable chsnneling-centric build. It’s too bad it got nuked from orbit.
Iight of grace is another I would have buffed to 500%
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We really need a channeling build - not a build that channels to buff other skills (though we shouldn’t be losing those!), but a true channeling build. Making Slorak’s the heart of a Disintegrate build, and similar buffs for other secondary (and maybe even primary) skills is top of my wishlist.
Though I’d settle at this point for just a reversal of the upcoming patch changes.
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There are a few things that actually made it into the latest iteration of this PTR Patch, which actually have been discussed by fans, namely
- Twisting Sword now also giving the Raging Storm rune
- the change to Manajuma’s Way that causes chickens to spawn
So it is not like they are not listening, but imo that they rather only have some very few people working on D4 and that they have to be picky about what changes to include.
Therefore I think that if we make “wish lists”, it should only be a few thing that are the most important for us and preferably easy to implement.
Yeah, I hear ya Cratic.
Past PTRs with wizard changes I’ve usually been pretty supportive or at least neutral on. Even the Chantodo’s nerf, I understood the need for it at the time.
This is the first time in the years I’ve been playing D3 where I’m legitimately frustrated with changes, to the point that I’ve posted negatively about it. That’s a first for me, I usually try to be pretty supportive because I understand things are probably a bit more complicated to implement than players would like to believe.
This stuff is really a head-scratcher though.
I guess I understand what they are trying to accomplish, but I really don’t think they’ve done it. Let’s just take a bunch of builds somewhat more “casual” players (I use this term loosely) are actively using, take them away, and replace them with twisters. Because that’s what everyone wants, right?
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They already have. Firebird’s Meteor Shower with Etched Sigil was one of the top actual fire type (as opposed to the FB builds like Star Pact that weren’t actually fire builds) Firebird’s builds.
The Etched Sigil changes are a straight up nerf to both Tal’s and Firebird’s build diversity. Sure, you could do Tal’s or Firebird’s twisters, but we just don’t have as many options as we did before.
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