Wizard has the worst mobilty among all classes. You never made anything to improve it.
There is no time now for more in depth changes, but there is one simple and quick change.
Please just add 300% damage multiplier to Aetherwalker increasing Wizard’s damage for 5 seconds after casting teleport.
This way this weapon will be useful in higher greater rifts, now no one uses it because there are much better choices in weapon slot.
Every Wizard would be happy with this change.
I wouldn’t say that. However any improvements (especially if they’re major improvements) made to teleport would be appreciated.
One thing I would like to add is if they do implement a damage boost via Aether Walker, the damage multiplier shouldn’t be global as that would affect the archon chantodo waves of destruction (as the archon teleport would most likely benefit from the damage boost).
So instead it should be something akin to:
Casting teleport increases the damage of your skills by 150-225% for 5 seconds. Teleport no longer has a cooldown but costs 25 Arcane Power.
Doing so like this would still bolster our damage as well as our archon skills (which are severely underpowered), but should keep the chantodo’s waves of destruction from getting the buff.
I think rather than getting straight flat 300% increased damage it should add like “Teleport gains the Calamity rune. Each time you Teleport gain a Calamity stack, each stack increases all your damage by 25% stacking up to 250% for 5 seconds. At max stacks gain 10% attack speed and Calamity deals triple damage.”
Also has anyone noticed its not really “no cooldown”? Theres like a .99 sec wait till you can cast again. Not sure why the item legendary power says:
“Teleport no longer has a cooldown but costs 25 Arcane Power.”
Probably for the same reason that the splash screen still says 2012-2019; lack of attention to detail.
Lack of Attention to Detail.
Blizzard in a nutshell…
So which classes have worse mobilty than Wizard? I can’t find any.
Chantodo Archon Wizard was nerfed and is underpowered now, so this damage multiplier on Aetherwalker affecting Chantodo Wave is justified.
Boosting Archon skills with one small multiplier does nothig, they need at least three big multipliers, like in the range of 600-700% each to be viable.
I agree!
If not the damage, any other option would be good too.
WDs comes to mind.
If we’re to get chantodo’s nerf reverted, then yes the effect would need to not affect the chantodo’s waves of destruction.
Of course not, never said it would be enough; only that there would be no reason for the effect to not benefit the archon skills.
To further improve the archon skills, I’d say that vyr could tack on another multiplier that would solely affect the archon skills.
This statement alone invalidates everything you could ever come up with.
25% per stack is a bit much with the oth multiplier. Average archon stacks I get is around 200. So maybe 10%?
If they dont buff aw then then maybe cosmic strand (gives wormhole time) could be given something or both
Maybe, however there’s not that many multipliers that the archon skills can benefit from in comparison to some of the other arcane spenders and/or signatures. That said, the 25% isn’t set in stone and can certainly be adjusted if necessary.
I’d settle for repairing the broken pathing of the skill. I mean it. I would even accept double its current cooldown if it meant you don’t get stuck on literally nothing, just because you’re in a corridor or too close to a rock. I’ve seen my Demon Hunter vault around a corner; don’t expect me to believe a Wizard couldn’t teleport over a blade of grass.
Seriously…it’s really bad.
Hell no… who wants Reversal?! But granting runes along is okay. Yet it wouldn’t be enough to warrant a weapon slot. Mind you, we need damage. That’s the whole point. So it’s runes plus moderate damage plus improving utility a litte. That should be the goal.
Let me state this first - what I’m suggesting is nothing but a band aid that would not fix the nasty pathing, the micro cooldown and all the other ugly things about Teleport. I strongly suggest to rework the skill and related stuff completely to fix all the broken crap that hinders us today. But that needs serious work and some balancing. As a quick fix I’m going to suggest this little idea I posted in another thread:
Aetherwalker :
+Min/Max DMG
+MainStat
+25-30 to Maximum Arcane Power
+3 random magic properties (2/1)Teleport gains the Calamity and Safe Passage runes and attacks 200% faster. The skill no longer has a cooldown but consumes 25 Arcane Power per cast instead. Safe Passage now lasts twice as long and also increases the damage of your skills by 150-200%.
This would greatly improve Aetherwalker and bring it in line with current item design. Admittedly this wouldn’t touch the fundamental mechanical issues like pathing, but it would still be a huge improvement, if you look at the details. The casting animation will be significantly shortened. You get two useful runes and a moderate damage buff (it’s a thin line between bringing this item to a usable or viable state and making it mandatory and I might have crossed it already)
That obnoxious micro cooldown was graciously introduced by the former devs to help us prevent “accidental double casts”… bwahaha. As if anyone cares, this nerf (yes, let’s call it as such) has to go, indeed!
There are better ways to make Teleport more useful than a general damage multiplier on Aetherwalker.
If it buffs all your damage by 300% as you suggest, it might interfere with the balance of certain build, similarly to how Deathwish + Etched Sigil (old version) did.
If you wanna improve the mobility with Teleport, just do one of the following
Doing something like that is really, really easy. I modded Diablo 2 and you could easily change the resource cost of a skill, add or adjust a cooldowns (aka casting delay), change the damage numbers and calculations on a skill or item, add new affixes to items, adjust the range of which an affix can roll on an item, replace one missile animation with another, etc.
For example, the guy in this video is easily changing the resource costs of a skill within 30 seconds:
And in Diablo 3 it is even more easy as the devs have said it themself. They have individual files called ‘Snows’ for every singe skill (and probably every single item and set as well) where they quickly can adjust the numbers.
Well… there might be issues today because of different game versions and whatnot, we might not know. But even if those changes are easy, they might still cause issues at (un)expected places.
You change the mechanic to charges. Simple enough… what will Aetherwalker do? What about the Illusionist passive? What about Oculus? Same for changing to resource. Will also cause issues at some places. This is what I meant. A small example:
You change the cooldown to 6 seconds. Now lets add ~35% CDR to this and the cooldown is reduced to ~4 seconds. Nice. And now we look at Oculus. That item is trash damage wise (same as Aetherwalker) but it has a blue affix, flat 4 second CDR to Teleport - the skill ends up with no cooldown. Hm… okay. That will make Aetherwalker obsolete, because you will obviously wear Oculus instead of using AW in the cube or mainhand. Reason is Oculus grants zero cooldown at zero costs, which is obviously superior. Not going to call that good or bad… just saying.
And yet, number tweaks won’t improve bad pathing which is very annoying and has to be fixed. Not to mention the sh!tty Reversal rune. This is why I would prefer a thorough rework over a bunch of small changes.
I don’t think the developers would make their own life harder with new and improved versions of the game and the developer tools. It is more likely that as the game progressed to develop it got even easier.
I am aware of these, I just didn’t go into detail at first, because it would have bloated up my post, but I know what you are saying, so thanks for mentioning it.
With changes specifically to Teleport, I do not think it would create massive issues, since Teleport does not have many interactions and synergies with other things except the ones you mentioned and they are also easy to fix.
You could do anything with reworking Aetherwalker and Oculus, so I just can come up with a few random examples as I am writing this.
For the Oculus, it could be anything from removing its powers to instead giving Teleport Resource Cost Reduction or Cooldown Reduction and the Aetherwalker can do the same with the addition to giving you e.g. the ‘Safe Passage’ rune and 100% increased damage while Safe Passage is active.
Illusionist can still give you increased movement speed after using Teleport and theoretically you could copy the mechanic from the Barbarian skill ‘Revenge’ into Illusionist that you have a 100% chance to gain a Charge of Teleport when you take 15% of your max health within 1 second, or even simpler, you remove the effect that you somehow gain a bonus for Teleport after you have lost 15% of your health in 1 second.
Yes, disable and remove that power on the Oculus.
Well, I certainly would say that 3 Charges with an 8 second recharge time each or 35 Arcane Power cost are an improvement over the way Teleport is now.
I would say that everything I suggested even in this post is a ‘small change’.
The most easy rework you can do is to
Everything above that, like the changes I mentioned in this post (e.g. 100% increased damage while Safe Passage is active on Aetherwalker or giving you a charge of Teleport when you loose 15% of your health in 1 second on Illusionist) can also be done, but is not necessary for a basic improvement of the Wizards mobility.
EDIT: I just figured out a better way to deal with legacy versions of The Oculus:
Give legacy versions of The Oculus a Level Requirement of 150, or add ‘Level Requirement increased by 150’ to the legendary power.
This will disable the legacy versions of this item.
Just a question - why would you castrate things the very moment you introduce them? I mean, IF Teleport cooldown is reduced to 6 seconds then Oculus having that legacy blue affix suddenly becomes interesting. Now that very item, even without a single change, would in fact have meaning instead of being total trash. Again, not saying it’s good or bad… but personally I would keep it that way since this creates an alternate route to Aetherwalker if you want Teleport spammable.
I’m all game for ANYTHING that will improve the current situation, even if it’s just a little. The current state is really unbearable.
I suggested changing AW for the very reason that it’s a single item to modify and it will still improve things dramatically. Sure, it will become a pain in the rear if you overdo it… anyhow, I would also welcome changes to the skill. Not sure if they want to do that. They rarely change skills these days.
And for a weapon, well, you simply have to add a damage buff on a weapon no matter what. Reason is, if you don’t, such a puny weapon cannot remotely compete with those weapons dedicated to specific skills thus gimping your damage. This remains no matter what, if the base skill has charges, spends resources or has its cooldown lowered. And such a buff has to be a global (at least all skills) buff, otherwise a weapon would not be able to compete.
From my perspective, three things are important:
Or overpowered.
Yes, but then it also could cause what you called “issues at (un)expected places”, not necessarily with Teleport, The Oculus or the Illusionist Passive, but with build balance (similar to how Deathwish + old Etched Sigil did it in the past), at least if the damage bonus is too powerful.
Technical repairs might even a lot more development time than implementing your and mine suggested changes combined, since you first have to find and analyse the issue.
Increasing the animation speed might be easy, depending on what the issue is with it.
But in case it is also a deeper rooted problem, I would not count on that.
Yes, this definitely would be easy.
A few month ago iirc I made an illustration about how it could look like to edit the gamefiles of D3 based on my experiences with modding D2. It of course is very, very, oversimplified.
That estimate was based on how modding worked in D2, which looks like what the guy is doing in the video I linked above in one of my earlier posts, or in these screenshots I made from modding some of the actual D2 files.
According to the devs it is even easier to do these things in D3, and you have individual files (or ‘Snows’ as they are called according to Jay Wilson) for every single skill and probably every singe item as well.
Jay said that you just have to open the file and change the numbers, so it apparently is very easy to do that.
Removing the micro cooldown should also be easy, if it also is located in the game files.
Yeah, that is all nice, but it would not help the general Wizards mobility. You still only would be mobile if you have Aetherwalker and to not overpower the damage bonus, it would not be be competitive, which means it rarely would be used at all, except maybe for niche builds or speedfarming.
My point is that even if you are looking for a easy and quick solution, that still might not be the best one. But you are definitely right that it still would be better than what we have right now.
I don’t think so.
I think 150-200% is reasonable. It’s lower than DW or skill specific items. And it shouldn’t be any lower because then the situation won’t change much from what we have now. It would not be viable at all.
Shouldn’t be an issue - just increase the Teleport “attack speed” by 200% and the issue should be dealt with. Archon Teleport shows how it works at very high aps. Pathing is a different beast, though. EDIT: Teleport might also need a technical change, so that its base speed (at 1.0) is what it’s like today, but then scales with higher attack speed.
As for the micro cooldown. They introduced it later on, they can remove it or set it close to zero. Shouldn’t pose much of a threat. My list at the end should be the bare minimum we need and in the order of importance.
