S26 Proposal - Wizard LoD Magic Missile

General Discussion
1

4K Poster

https://i.ibb.co/YpfMRwb/magic-missile.jpg

Corruption

Legendary Shoulders
Magic Missile gains the effects of all its runes.
(Wizard Only)

Moonlight Ward

Legendary Amulet
You can have 3 armors active at the same time
and each of them increases the damage of Magic
Missile by 75%.
[50-100]% (Wizard Only)

Slorak’s Madness

Legendary Wand
Magic Missile deals 150% increased damage per
active Mirror Image.
[50-250]% (Wizard Only)

Mirror Ball

Legendary Source
Magic Missile has a cooldown of 20 seconds and
gains 1 additional projectile per 35 Levels, up to 40
additional projectiles. Projectiles are 80% smaller.
(Wizard Only)

The Tormentor

Legendary Staff
Magic Missile can store up to 3 charges and deals
600% increased damage per projectile stored.
[400-800]% (Wizard Only)

Mantle of the Rydraelm

Legendary Chest Armor
Damage taken is reduced by 10% per Arcane skill
equipped and each stored charge of Magic Missile
reduces damage taken by 40%.
[30-50]% (Wizard Only)

Deathseer’s Cowl

Legendary Helm
Magic Missile pierces through enemies, walls and
environment, is 90% slower during 3 seconds
after being cast, and evaporates over 60 yards.
[1-5] (Wizard Only)

Board Walkers

Legendary Boots
Magic Missile’s damage is increased by 450% for
every second it is active. Maximum 5 seconds.
[400-500]% (Wizard Only)

1 Like
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So, you basically want 3 shields and OP magic missiles? I will give you credit the mockup looked good.

3

Magic Missile doesn’t require Arcane Power to be cast.
Magic Missile is free to cast, as it is a Signature Spell

This is why there is now a 20 seconds cooldown on Mirror Ball which is required to get the extra power given by The Tormentor.

Numbers can be adjusted, it is a proposal.

Having 3 shields is kinda fun.

The real defense comes from Mantle of the Rydraelm.

:stuck_out_tongue:

4

I really like this one, right now it is a waste.

5

Yes, Moonlight Ward is quite useless currently.
It is a good candidate to have its legendary power redesigned.

Having 3 Armors, the best options would probably be:

Ice Armor / Crystallize: When you are struck by a melee attack, your Armor is increased by 20% for 30 seconds. This effect stacks up to 3 times.

Storm Armor / Force Armor: Incoming attacks that would deal more than 35% of your maximum Life are reduced to deal 35% of your maximum Life instead. The amount absorbed cannot exceed 100% of your maximum Life.

Energy Armor / Prismatic Armor: Energy Armor also increases your resistance to all damage types 25%.

or

Energy Armor / Power of the Storm: Reduce the Arcane Power cost of all skills by 3 while Storm Armor is active.

6

If you had time with nothing to do. I would really love to see a D4 Paladin mockup in its own thread. :pray:

  • It could give the developers something to think about.
7

The thing is we don’t know yet what skills D4 Paladin will have.
I suppose they will merge D2 and D3 ideas.

Paladins are basically Magic Fighters.

A good source of inspiration could be:

  • Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition https://www.dndbeyond.com/classes/paladin#ThePaladinTable
  • Divinity Original Sin 2 https://divinityoriginalsin2.wiki.fextralife.com/Skills
  • Baldur’s Gate 3 - Does not yet have paladin, but Eldritch Knight, Warlock and Barbarian are available (some feats still not yet implemented) - http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/fighter:eldritch-knight - http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/warlock

More specifically on Baldur’s Gate 3:
Solo Fighter gameplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsm1mDaj-64
Solo Berseker gameplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sodWqCUbs3c

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8

Per 35 levels on mirror ball, what does that mean? What levels?

One the charges on tormentor, do you mean that you deal more damage when all charges are up, so that you don’t want to spend all your charges?

Thoughts:

  • This seems like a very slow build. The dps is on 20 second cooldown, and it’s not a big aoe that can clear the screen. It’d probably only be for pushing. Both weapon slots are taken, so no space for in-geom or reaver to reset CDs. You’d just stack CDR on gear and cast MM once every 5 seconds at best, or more likely burst a couple casts in fire cycle (but if you cast too many you lose all damage without charges, so can’t cast all charges?)
  • No mobility, again very slow build. Both weapon slots are taken, so no aether walker.
  • no freedom in skills. Every build needs magic missile, mirror images and three armours. The last slot will always be teleport on wizard I think. This restriction makes it so that you can’t even proc ring of zodiac efficiently, unless you go flame ward or something instead of teleport, and you’d be a veeeeeery slow pushing build that’d be surrounded and stuck when you channel to reset MM.
  • you want to roll a 5s helm, and hit things far away from the boots, so you need to time it, and it’ll be easy to miss for no damage. With one cast per 5 seconds (or 16 with coe), I can see it being a very frustrating build to play.

So all in all, I don’t think wizards needs another finicky LoD build that only shines at pushing. We have LoD twisters for that. :stuck_out_tongue: If you want to fill a gap for wizards, make a fast build that is strong at fspeedrunning GR90, and 2-3min speed XP in GR120 range. So a build that does not have two mandatory weapons so that we can equip aether walker, or built in mobility like firebirds. AND it needs to be a build that (unlike firebirds) can quickly clear the screen with low or no cooldown, like typhon hydra (or GoD or water inna).

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9

Regular and Parangon ones

Level 35 : +1 projectile
Level 70 : +1 projectile
Paragon 35 : +1 projectile
Paragon 70 : +1 projectile
Paragon 105 : +1 projectile
…

Yes and no.
You choose how to play.

Keeping charges is interesting to maintain Mantle of the Rydraelm’s defensive buff at maximum.

Using the The Tormentor, when you release charges, the first one will have max power (2 charges remaining), the second a little bit less (1 charge remaining), and the third shot won’t have any advantage.

Yes.

Good point.
Maybe bracers in the build would be better.

Yes, good catch.
Freedom has to be improved.

https://eu.diablo3.blizzard.com/en-us/class/wizard/active/

Seeker
Missiles track the nearest enemy.

10

There is enough damage increase before 1k paragon, and LoD builds are hard to gear at low paragon already, especially as this would need ancient gear with CDR to really come online, don’t need to gate it even more imo. The high paragon players wouldn’t care, and low paragon players feel left out. Just give the full damage bonus.

And I didn’t even think about sustain or stricken. There is no spammable ability. It’d be played with two armours only problably, and barrier blades with squirts, equip coe and karini.

Either way, this is not the build wizards need imo.

11

Even with the tracking missiles, you’d make a pull, teleport out and launch the missiles to give them time to travel before they hit the pack. And then a goblin runs up to you, all the MMs redirect and hit the goblin after 1 second for unbuffed hits without AD. Well, try again 16 seconds later.

Maybe it’d be RGK similarly to that bone spirit build where you launched 7 screens away? :smiley:

Edit: Sorry for spamming the thread, and bashing your suggestion. This would make me like this a lot more:

  • get rid of one of the weapons.
  • get rid of the cooldown.
  • get rid of the slow missiles, actually speed up the missiles slightly compared to base.

Then we could play it with aether walker, and we could spam swarms of fast homing missiles, which would allow for fast T16 and GR90s, and hopefully scaling into 2 min XP runs.

12

So, you get +2 from being level 70, and if you can have a maximum of +40, and you gain them every 35 paragon, that means this caps out at (38 * 35) = 1330 paragon? Some players would reach that in the opening weekend of a season. Then what…

13

How is this supposed to work?
If magic missle gains all of it’s runes, that means it’d also get the seeker and conflagrate runes, one of which gives the skill a homing effect and the other that gives it a pierce effect (that doesn’t stop unless it hits an obstacle). So would that mean that the magic missle would just keep hitting an enemy? If so, that’d be rather crazy, especially when you throw in 10+ magic missles into the mix that does the same thing.

14

It’s like that etheral bow with more damage up to GR800. It was just a fix damage bonus for players that played beyond the season journey, with a penalty for low level players. Feels a bit uncalled for, power difference is big enough already without extra explicit multipliers.

15

How about Moonlight wards 4 spining orbs shoot MM when you do. And if a monster gets close they blow up just like now. So you’ll want to be in range always, but can save you if things get dicey

16

I don’t like Tormentor at all it just contradicts itself. Never can have maximum damage of this weapon and in only works in combination with another piece of gear. Also the Board Walkers. Nothing of it really synergizes that great. If you select three Armor skills you can’t utilize Mantle of Rydraelm and unequiping Moonlight Ward just makes a lot of work selecting all skills again.

The only item I could see beeing something is the Sloark’s Madness suggestion.

And a legendary power wich grows stronger with leveling isn’t bad at all. Because the power gained with further levels is everytime smaller.

17

Enemies can build strong Pull resistance, diminishing its effectiveness when the battle duration extends.

Knockback and Pull effects will stop functioning when a monster’s Hard CC resistance reaches 65% or greater. Each successful Knockback adds flat 40% Hard CC resistance (20% per tick for effects that continuously apply Knockback, such as Black Hole).

https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Crowd_Control

I added the same limitation as Bone Sipirit. Maximum 5 seconds. I hesitated to create a Necromancer build but found it would be more fun to do it with a Wizard, because Magic Missile fantasy.

Maybe bracers instead of a weapon.

I need to think about implications.

I’d say 80% of players never reached that level.
It is a good objective to get players at work.

Do you suggest more missiles or more power for pro gamers ?

Yes, same idea of power adapatating with level to feel progression and give an objective for the player to keep playing.

Ahah my original idea was the missile would seek the first enemy then lock its direction, and if more enemies are on the path they would be pierced.

But after reading your comment, it could actually be more fun if the missile was fast, had a lifetime (let’s say 5 seconds), and was dealing more damage per pierce, even on the same monster.

I simply need to ensure cooldowns are OK so they don’t stack indefinitively.

Generally a good programming behavior is to add jitter, which means not a fixed time like 5 seconds, but more a range like 1-5 seconds so there is possibility for missiles to be destroyed when you burst, avoiding the infinite stacking effect on screen.

The problem is the blow up effect.

You would destroy your main source of damage, which means your main your of survival, just because monster density. This is very punishing.

I played few games of Nova Drift using shields based builds (you attack with shields), but when shield is destroyed, you lose both shields and ability to attack. It is a double penalty.

DnD players would observe that characters in Baldur’s Gate 3 casting Magic Missiles always say:

“Tormentum !”

Which is the rally cry for Magic Missile :wink:

The first shoot has maximum power, then it is degressive.

If you use Matle of the Rydraelm, shooting more missiles will decrease your defense.

It is your call.

But I understand you don’t like the direction.

So what about reversing the logic ?

More missiles stored decrease your armor and attack.
So you need to evacuate them frequently ?

Of course the cooldown need to be adjusted.
A short cooldown would be, let’s say, 5 seconds, so you can spam Magic Missile using Messerchmidth or In-geom or good CDR.

Yes there are pairs of equipment : malus + bonus.
This is frequent in Diablo, like Stone Gauntlets + Ice Climbers.

Mantle of Rydraelm does not reference Magic Armors and is fully compatible with them.

This is new to the game.
I don’t know if this idea is good or bad.
But I find the idea of having 3 Magic Armors kinda fun.
Like you just did something that was not normally possible.
Gameplay Transgression. Yummy.

18

You really think 20% or less of players reach 1330 paragon in a season? In the past week I’ve joined some random, public Bounty groups. Obviously this is simply anecdotal due to the limited number of samples a single player can attain, but I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times anyone in the group had under 1K paragon. Conversely, I do recall on a number of occasions being the lowest paragon player in the group, with over 2K.

19

You don’t have this in your image of the gear wizard is wearing.

Instead you have an Andariel’s Visage on the wizard.
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Andariel%27s_Visage_(Diablo_III)

20

Deathseer’s Cowl is slotted in the Kanai Cube.

On 30 millions of copies sold, maybe.
That said I doubt 30 millions of people play every season.