Please devs, bring back the old Etched Sigil. It’s been horrible without it, your decision killed so many interesting builds! How can we possibly convince you to revert this horrible idea?
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I have a perfect primal Etched Sigil in non-season storage. And while it’s fun without the support items to boost damage it’s basically useless compared to the current ones. And 150% increased ET damage was the old cap, the new cap is 250%. So even in a straight up ET build the old primal is worse than the new legendary. And since they pumped a TON of extra damage into the support items and spells for Energy Twister they’d have to do something similar for Black Hole, Explosive Blast, etc. or it’ll just be yet another way to spam Meteors. Do we really need yet another meteor spam build?
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I don’t see why that should ever be a real consideration, meteor spam is already the case and it will always be the case, it’s a popular build that is never going away and should not. Nobody is forcing you to play a meteor build. As you can plainly see from the leaderboards, people play all kinds of builds and achieve very high GR clears.
Their reasoning for nerfing it was insanely stupid to begin with. They could’ve just made it say “EXCEPT METEOR” or find any other smarter, more creative way to do it. There are so many other ways of balancing strong builds without killing others that I am shocked this was even considered as a legitimate option.
I don’t care about meta chasing every season. I like spamming Disintegrate for instance. There are no builds where Disintegrate is the main damage dealer unless you’re doing LoN/LoD, and that’s precisely where it would’ve been amazing if I could’ve used Etched Sigil to have it also cast Arcane Orbs, Waves of Force, Hydras or Blizzards to complement the Disintegrate spam and it would’ve been an amazing multi-spell slinging build.
It general Wizard skills suffer from item bloat, too many items affect specific skills directly and consequently limit our other options in designing more complex builds that incorporate multiple spells that all do damage instead of spamming a single one.
It would be infinitely better if in general individual skills only had at the very most 2 legendaries affecting them, and other items were turned into more generalist ones. Also preferably there wouldn’t be two items of the same type (like two weapons) affecting the same skill directly, that’s even more limiting.
In Energy Twister’s case, we’d keep Twister Sword and Ranslor’s Folly let’s say, and redesign Valthek’s Rebuke for Wave of Force for instance (fitting name) and return Etched Sigil to its former generalist glory so it would benefit multiple builds.
Another example, Arcane Orb is affected by Wizardspike, Unstable Scepter and Triumvirate. Wizardspike’s effects could be shifted to Triumvirate (with the important change that it would cast any Arcane Orb, not just Frozen Orb).
Wizardspike itself could be given Triumvirate’s effects but instead apply to some or all Arcane Power spenders, not just Arcane Orb, very fitting for an item named Wizardspike. And if that sounds too similar to the Arcane Dynamo passive, then maybe it could just say “You gain the Arcane Dynamo passive but +X% more powerful” or make them synergistic somehow. It would turn Wizardspike into another generalist item that would benefit many builds.
Don’t even get me started on Hydras, it has 4 items that affect it and two are weapons, it’s one of the worst offenders.
All I’m saying is they could do a lot to improve build diversity by just tweaking some items here and there, and returning Etched Sigil to its former glory would be one of the best things they could do, for starters!
I also have a very old Etched Sigil, but this one is pre-2.6.1, it doesn’t have the +150% damage buff to its casted skills, it’s very depressing.
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i got one in storage too ;-D
I agree that screwing with Etched Sigil was a horrible idea. But they’ve patched so many boosts around its current incarnation they, as you kind of point out, would have to spend a massive amount of time moving abilities and skills around to re-balance it.
I guess we’re going to see after S28 if the legacy team will simply re-use old seasons or actually continue to improve the game. Because the rework you envision (and I’d love to see) isn’t simply “bring back Etched Sigil” it’s a complete class overhaul.
I really want them to make a viable all electric build with Manald’s Heal. Hell… I’d like to see a viable zWiz… imagine a build that boosts everyone’s elemental damage and gives them shields or teleports. There’s so much that COULD have been done that we’ll never see.
Etched Sigil could and should be brought back. It wouldn’t harm anything. They could even leave the buff at 250% as to not nerf Twister while reverting it. That would still not be a problem because the 1 second cast delay already shreds Bazooka and the main offender in that case was always Deathwish.
Another reason is that even at 250% there’s little harmful influence. Firebird wouldn’t really be affected since they made it impossible to trigger it with Arcane Torrent and Mirrorbird is dead as well. Not to mention, legES never really worked with the latter. What it would do is bring Typhon channeling Hydra. Is that so bad, though? I mean be honest - do you like Winterflurry? Urgh, as for other skills… which, then? Meteor is covered by Tal Rasha and ES procs don’t cause Area Damage or trigger Mempo’s Meteor Shower so there’s that. What then? Arcane Orb as well, I mean all items for Arcane Orb are stronger in terms of damage multipliers. So, even then… and again the area damage issue.
I don’t really see an issue in bringing it back.
The Etched Sigil change was originally done to kill Bazzoka Wizard which was ridiculously OP at the time and its timing sensitivity of rotations heavily advocated the use of scripts to run the build. Today the Tal Rasha Meteor Shower with all its variants is at least as powerful as the Bazooka but much simpler to play, doesn’t use channeled skills, etc. Even if the ES change was reverted, the meteor build wouldn’t use so there goes that obstacle.
I really don’t see any harm reverting the change at this point. It might bring life to some underperforming builds without making top builds overperforming since they already have better offhand options if they use one.
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