Mobility, Mobility, Mobility!

Wizard
1

Wizard badly needs Teleport to:

  1. reduce cooldown to 4 seconds, or
  2. cast at will at the cost of AP (redo Illusionist to incorporate Aether Walker)

No one wants a wiz as a party member for the effing heavy balls-n-chain it drags and the lag it brings.

For the class that has mastery over magic, Wiz sure suck at it.

4 Likes
2

Can only agree that this has to be addressed ASAP.

Another way to go would be a solution with charges similar to the monks dash.

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Can’t speak for all builds, but my LoD Arcane Twister build uses Illusionist and Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac to help mitigate Teleport cooldowns. It will never be as good as Vault, but it’s better than nothing.

I agree that we need some changes. Before working on cooldown mechanics, I’d like the horrible aiming and “stuck on a wall” problems addressed first. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a Teleport fail because I’m too close to a wall, or the corridor is too narrow for me to properly aim (playing on PS4). Not sure if it’s a huge issue on PC, but PS4 teleporting is a horror show.

At least give us an aiming line or something. The little arrow on the character ring is worth exactly nothing.

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4

Mobility,? Let’s not mince words, it’s our effing Teleport skill that should have been addressed YEARS ago. In fact, we’ve been asking for a fix years already.

  • It has the longest cooldown of ANY mobility skill (think it’s in fact the only one that has a cooldown);
  • the only way we have to boost it is using the Staff That Shall Not be Named which slaps on a hefty AP cost (which costs a whopping 3 times as much as Vault) AND cripples our dps to boot so really only an option in lower content. Think we’re actually the only class that an item to specifically help with a mobility skill and to think that it’s this bad;
  • it’s pathfinding is atrocious. I can’t count the number of times I’ve died because either it wouldn’t let me teleport at all or didn’t teleport to where I said I wanted to teleport to. Thank god, I don’t play HC.

So:

  • drop the cooldown and either have it spend a base 12 AP (it may cost more then Vault seeing the range is greater) or let us have a number of charged like Dashing Strike (with 0 AP cost ofcourse);
  • fix the pathfinding;
  • add the Wave of Force as standard attribute so you can assign different elemental damage types to the runes;
  • while you’re at it do something about the Rune Revearsel as no one EVER has used this (what about casting an unruned Black Hole where you land?);
  • and either delete the Staff That Shall Not be Named from the droptable or rework it to have a decent DPS stat and do something else, like doubling the size of Black Hole and giving all runes or prop op a skill we never use like WOF.
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I love the fact that you can’t teleport through walls if a door is closed anywhere between you and your teleport destination. Open the door and you can teleport through the wall. Brilliant.

I fully agree with the OP, teleport needs to be fixed and improved so that wizards have mobility comparable to other classes without sacrificing a ton of DPS.

1 Like
6

Spirit Walk? Steed Charge?

Furious Charge, Dash, and Blood Rush are all charge based, which is sort of like a cooldown, but definitely better (since you can stack up multiple charges).

Vault is the only one that really isn’t cooldown-based in some sense.

Teleport also isn’t even the longest cooldown mobility skill. Teleport is 11 seconds, Steed Charge is 16 seconds. Spirit Walk is slightly shorter, but it’s still 10 seconds. It’s not that much shorter. EDIT: Spirit Walk also doesn’t start the cooldown until after it expires, which effectively makes the cooldown 12 seconds baseline (2 second duration + 10 second cooldown), so effectively longer than the Teleport cooldown too.

Danetta’s set? Swiftmount? Steuart’s Greaves? Shukrani’s Triumph? Raiment 4p bonus? There’s some other examples too, but they are more damage-based rather than items that improve the mobility or change the resource/cooldown usage of the skill, so I guess that’s not as relevant here.

Not saying your points aren’t valid, but it’s a little inaccurate to say it’s the only cooldown-based mobility skill (there’s Steed Charge and Spirit Walk), that it has the longest cooldown (Steed Charge is significantly longer) or the only one that has an item to specifically help with a mobility skill (there’s a number of other examples of this). Again, not arguing that teleport doesn’t have it’s problems, but claiming things that simply aren’t true really doesn’t add to the argument.

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7

Aetherwalker has to go and the effect has to be the skill default, plus further changes (I could repost everything, but I guess I will just link an older post with my ideas on Teleport)…

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8

Valid points, yet there’s a huge need for change. As for the Witch Doctor I can’t say much since my experience with them are minimal, being an inteligence class they too would need an improvement there.
The Crusader class is not as squishy and could in theory tank in the in-between time.
That’s one point, the other is that although the cool down is worse using the “zodiac” makes it available sooner with the loss of damage to the same extent.
Last season I played Crusader fist / heaven’s fury and I was outrunning any wizard in team play.

The main reason teleport is important for the wizard besides mobility is positioning and damage avoidance. That’s some examples.

That is why I tend to lean toward a rework of the spell costing arcane power.

The missed casts, internal cd and so on. It’s just bad, other classes like the monk’s dash and barbarian rush feels much more fluid.

To sum it up it’s time for a change because it has too many issues, pointed out above. Keep to the problem at hand though without exaggerating like Time says. Hat of to you. :slight_smile:

9

I stand corrected.

When I played I almost exclusively played Wizard so I suppose my post is more how things felt then by just strictly looking at the skills and items.

It’s like how Stedia feels

And when I still played I feel I had this happen to me all the time. No matter what class, they all seem to be moving twice as fast as me and that’s with me using TP.

1 Like
10

It’s not only teleport/aether walker: it’s everything that has to do with mobility in general that’s severely lacking in wizard compared with other skills. Here are some examples:

Wizard

  1. teleport has 11 sec cooldown and you need a weapon slot to make it work with aether walker (which, in turn, requires passive and/or active skills for AP, like arcanot)
  2. Illusionist is a good passive but you need to get hit. Scramble gives speed bonus but you need to get hit (notice a pattern here?) and power of storm is a lot more useful for many builds. Sleek shell gives speed bonus but diamond skin really needs ingeom or very high cd to work.
  3. One set that improves mobility, Vyr (through archon)

Witch doctor

  1. Has the best lazy long-range speed combo of the game, angry chicken and manajuma
  2. Spirit walk makes you invulnerable and with Severance, extremely fast. Cooldown 10 sec that starts after spirit walk ends, but Grave injustice easily gives you infinite SW at speeds, the best CDR skill in the game.
  3. Many easy to use skills for added speed: fierce loyalty, big bad voodoo, stalker, soul to waste

Barbarian

  1. Raekor 2p gives you almost infinite charge, depending on map (for zbarb, charger)
  2. Easy to use +speed skills (some of them passively): marathon, bravado, pound of flesh, ferocity, Chilanik + war cry
  3. BK swords: huge speed bonus and take care of resource

Crusader

  1. Steed by itself is weak due to 16 sec cooldown, but updated norvald set is a game changer since not only does it double duration and decreases cooldown when killing, but now it gives a huge
    damage bonus as well.
  2. Other bonus to speed like flash or wings of angels typically have long cooldown and mostly require ORotZ

Monk

  1. Has infinite dash, the fastest build in the game
  2. Two sets (raiment, PoJ) have built-in mobility bonus
  3. Dash has 2-3 charges and 8 sec cooldown. Epiphany dashes to melee.
  4. Some easy to use speed bonus if you want to use them (like fleet footed, annihilation)

Necromancer

  1. Blood rush: 5 sec cooldown, can get charges, supported by an entire set and multiple passives
  2. Easy speed skills: fueled by death, harvest of anguish
  3. Non-weapon items that greatly improve speed with trivial requirements like steuart and lost time

Demon hunter

  1. Two sets with infinite mobility: GoD, Impale
  2. Vault costs resource by default. Cost can be greatly mitigated at standard play (RCR with CC, tumble) or nullified for speed scenarios (chain of shadows, danetta)
  3. Two speed passives (tactical advantage - great combo with vault, and hot pursuit)

I’m certainly missing skills here and there, but the comparison is not at all favorable for wizard. We need better +speed skills, not only better teleport.

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11

Oh it is. And even worse.

You have Barbs leaping over doors and walls, but Wiz can’t teleport over a blade of grass.

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