Imo Arcane Orb should be changed back to Arcane Nova, which would increase the Detonation Radius to 20 Yards, or maybe even 25 Yards, preferably with the unruned version as the visual base.
That definitely would turn it into a trash clear rune.
Maybe the orb itself should deal increased damage on impact in a ~5 Yards radius, while enemies within the rest of the detonation radius take the normal damage. That would help with elites as well.
Scorch just should be turned into “Fireball”, which would also detonate on impact for increased damage instead of piercing through enemies like Scorch.
All the visuals for that are already in the game.
Simply take the Fallen Shaman’s Fireball and the current detonation from Scorch and let it deal increased damage on impact (without reducing the detonation radius like Obliteration).
535% damage as Fire within a 15 Yards Radius on impact is good for a Fireball rune on Arcane Orb (unruned is 435% damage within 15 Yards, so Fireball would be a ~20% increase in damage).
Okay, Clueso, in the interests of saving everyone a lot of time mocking your math, I need you to realize that Frozen Orb deals damage multiple times, and a rune that does 535% damage once just isn’t viable. Try to understand Orb needs to do a TON MORE damage on every rune to be competitive. Scorch for example could do 800% fire in a 20 yard radius and be in the ballpark. 535% is just not enough to be viable.
Shard AoE: 308.825%
Orb Pierce: 635%
Orb Explosion: 950%
If you hit with all three you get a grand total of 1893.825% per cast.
EDIT: Not trying to be mean here, but you don’t seem to have an understanding of Orb mechanics and your ideas are simply not up to snuff. Your damage numbers are WAY off. If you want to leverage Scorch as a trash clearing alternative to Obliteration, that’s totally cool, but it needs to have viable radius and damage.
I remember back from my D2 days, that you actually had to position and aim FO in order to kill elites / bosses to get the most damage out of it, you couldn’t just throw it in their direction and hope for the best
Once more am let down by Blizzard intent regarding the updated wizard items / sets, everything will be very demanding to perform at it’s peak yet the results are still subpar compared to all the front runners with much simpler builds.
I think you just nailed Wizard design in a nutshell. “Don Vu” Design annoys the crap outta me. Ridiculously more complicated for less damage is not fun.
What would you say if this legendary property was added to Mirrorball? You’d have to sacrifice Wizardspike, cause Wizspike + Unstable + Triumvirate + Mirrorball isn’t doable without 4 cube slots. Also, it might be too powerful with Wizspike.
Mirrorball or any weapon would do the trick imo. As you said, it would be too powerful if it was added to an armor/jewelry piece since it could combine with wizspike, unstable scepter, and triumvirate. At least with a weapon or source, a person would have to choose one of them to leave out. Of course, this is all assuming that the 4th cube slot is temporary.
As much as I would love to see piercing Arcane Orbs… Mirrorball is currently a Magic Missile item and I’d rather it stays that way and gets updated to one of these two:
Mirrorball:
Magic Missile gains the Charged Blast and Seeker runes effect, deals 450-500% more damage and fires two extra missiles.
Mirrorball:
Magic Missile now pierces, deals 500-600% more damage and fires two extra missiles.
Now, as for Arcane Orb… there’s always the option of adding a pierce effect to a new item, maybe rework Oculus or Primordial Soul since they are useless right now:
Primordial Soul:
Increases the bonus of Elemental Exposure to [40-50]% per stack and your projectile based attacks now pierce and detonate on every enemy they hit.
That is right, I do not, especially since I do only rarely play with Frozen Orb, Scorch or Spark, because, as I said, I have a strong dislike for their graphics.
But I appreciate that you clear it up for me.
That certainly is possible. I am primarily interested in the mechanics and design philosophies (like increasing the AoE of the Arcane Orb explosion on a rune), less in the numbers.
For example, I would very much prefer to see and to play with a rune that simply increases the damage of the base skill and does no other changes aside from graphics (like the Fireball rune I suggested) then to play with something like Scorch.
How would you balance these runes in regards to damage, if I may ask?
I will eventually include your numbers when I suggest the changes again:
Arcane Orb - unruned (Damage currently 435% in a 15 Yards Radius)
Arcane Nova - new rune, replaces Obliteration (Increases the size of the explosion from 15 Yards to 20 or 25 Yards, but maybe can be higher if you think so. Also, should orb impact damage be higher than explosion damage?)
Fireball - new rune, replaces Scorch (Detonates on impact, just like the base skill. Simply increases base damage by xx% - fill in the number. In general, damage increasing runes increase the base damage by ~20%).
Frozen Orb - mechanics remain the same, just numbers change. How would you adjust the numbers so that the other runes can still compete with this skill? imo it should be nerfed…
The idea is to bring all runes (at least more or less) on the same powerlevel, so that there are more options instead of just FO.
Then to make the skill competitive in the endgame, legendaries and sets would be adjusted to compensate for eventual nerfs.
Anyway, I thank you for your feedback!
You might not perceive it this way, but I appreciate it.
I never came here claiming that I am a huge expert on numbers, but rather that I would like to see certain changes in regards to how skills work and how they look like, so when you fill out the numbers me, that is more than welcome.
First of all, Frozen Orb doesn’t need to be nerfed. Get that out of your head. From there, balance the other runes approximately on Frozen Orb’s level. Scorch will never be usable with it’s current mechanics, so it’s unlikely I, or Blizzard, can ever make it work with simple tweaks.
From there:
Unruned AO: Launch an Arcane Orb, that deals 870% damage as Arcane in a 15 yard radius.
Scorch: Cast a Fireball, which leaves a burning trail of fire that deals 734% damage as Fire over 3 seconds, and explodes for 800% Fire damage to all enemies within 20 yards
Obliterate: Launch an unstable arcane orb that explodes on contact, dealing 1400% damage as Arcane to all enemies within 8 yards.
Spark: Bounce an orb of lightning forward, dealing 349% damage to enemies it touches, and explodes in the targeted area for 800% damage to all enemies within 15 yards. (Spark has good mechanics, it explodes where you cursor is, I believe, and thus is usable, just requires 2x damage buff)
Those are some rough numbers on making other runes usable, simply doubling everything. Scorch would have to be tripled, minimum. It’s awful.
@Cratic can double check my numbers, but I believe you literally have to double the runes on Arcane Orb to make them viable. Frozen Orb used to do 435% or something, now it deals 950% and is usable. Was literally doubled. You’d have to do the same for the rest of the runes. I was shocked that this was never done. But you know.
My concern is about early game balance, and apparently Blizzard cares about that as well to a certain degree, although D3 is already an 8 year old game and only gets a few new players as times moves on. Blizzard apparently stills wants new players to have a good experience where at least things are more or less balanced in the early game.
I base this assumption on that they mostly adjusted legendaries and sets in the past and overbuffed them, but not the skills and the runes themself, with only a few exceptions (Frozen Orb is one of them).
So if you overbuff Arcane Orb in the early game, it will be overpowered for that period, although it is just the early game.
Also keep in mind that when you compare Arcane Orb to Disintegrate, that the tick rate of Disintegrated is bugged in a way that it ticks too often (iirc).
And this also leads me to another question:
“WHY do you think that all other runes should be buffed, instead of nerfing FO and adjusting the items?”
This part here I wrote after finishing the whole post:
But maybe you are right. After comparing AO to HotA and Cluster Arrow, they eventually could use a buff.
At first I was thinking that this might be too high, but after comparing it HotA and Cluster Arrow, I would say that could very much be appropriate.
You have stated these before, but I was actually asking about your thougts on the numbers of some new hypothetical runes: “Fireball” (increases damage of the base skill) and Arcane Nova (increased AoE of the explosion and how large the increase in detonation size should be in your opinion).
Frozen Orb was buffed from 393% to 950%, which is about a 2.5 times increase in damage (2.417 times increase to be more precise), while all other runes remained untouched
Wizard is probably the class that had the most outrageous nerf hammers in the past that all add up to hurt is nowadays more than ever, right?
Like, CM nerf
that immortality shield nerf whichs rune is now completely useless
So many skills where most runes are just simply trash and literally never used.
the horribly destroyed procc coefficients
the pants with 100% damage for generators are still not working for wizard, right? Was nerfed because gen wiz op afaik.
Teleport stuck on every little stone and mapedge
basically all this can be reverted nowadays and would to lead a QoL buff for wizards of an unbelieveable amount.
They work. Wizard’s signature skill’s don’t generate AP by default, so it’s correct that Depth Diggers won’t work with them. But if you wear Shame of Delsere, they become generators and Depth Digger works. But it’s still not consistent, because iirc DD does not work when you use the Prodigy passive (well, who does that, urg)… at the very least, that should be done.
And yeah, proc rates are bad because of Critical Mass… that passive created a mess, they nerfed the proc rates over and over again and finally gave up on that and removed CM. They never brought proc rates back, thouch.
Like you said, look at Cluster Arrow. The skills are very comparable. It’s fine.
On your thoughts of “Arcane Nova” ; it’ll never happen. If it does, it’ll be on Wave of Force.
On Fireball; Could happen, if they redesigned Scorch. I’d be OK with that rune being called Fireball. I think a larger radius lower damage AO is fair for that rune. Base range is 15. Obliterate is 8. A “Fireball” would then logically be about 22 yard radius.
Don’t know if it’s been mentioned already, but it feels awful when running a Vyr Chantodo build that relies on Zodiac when your shadow clone kills off an add you were using to reset your archon cooldown.
Leaves you with no mobility and a longer cooldown for that reset / rotation.
Luckily we will be using Captain Crimson’s this season mostly, so we won’t have this problem after acquiring enough CDR, but earlier in season and with both nephalem and low GR zodiac based builds, it will feel terrible.
Even with Captain Crimson’s, we will still need to stack Chantodo.
I will move over my shadow clone feedback to this thread later today. Posted it in the wrong place. My battery backup died right after PTR testing last night . I’ll have to replace that first.
Fireball… seriously, why is there no such rune on a skill that shoots ball shaped projectiles, it’s beyond me. My thought, or rather my gut feeling, is that Obliterate should be increased to 10 yards while a potential Fireball should detonate over 20 yards.
Just chiming in here to see if it is indeed shaping out to be another season of gimmick channeling to buff other skills? The little I tried on PTR, skipping DW seemed like too big of a dmg increase to pass up, even for FO build.
I mean if it isn’t terribly designed wizard sets then it has to be some weird mechanic abused to maximise dps instead. Can’t have normal strong builds without annoying maintenance buffs or stutter stepping involved can we?
. I’ll have to replace that first.