I take the opportunity to suggest a buff in myken’s hate ball, velvet camaral and odyn son. Would be wonderful to do a LOD/LON build with electrocute, chain lightning, paralysis and manald heal. I tried several combinations with different equipment but none did significant damage.
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Yeah, and I’d like weapon throw, firebats, and sweeping wind to be useful skills and do something worthwhile… so, get in line. The queue is only about 10 years long.
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Lightning damage (except storm armor) is so neglected on the wizard with so many missed gameplay opportunities if devs did some tuning.
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Unfortunately the case, the state of affairs is so incredibly sad regarding Lightning builds…
Especially since they suffer from that horrible must-use Manald Heal mechanic where it’s not actually buffing your damage but making you dependant on a bad proc…
I support the author’s idea, but I’d also like a Manald Heal rework into something that more naturally buffs the Wiz’s direct damage huge damage instead RNG procs and 0 damage outside of them…
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Electrocute, huh?
First of all I would say that the item support for that skill is as outdated as can be. The two dedicated legendaries we have are insta-salvage because they lack extra damage and the effects are mediocre at best. Nothing that would work in the current state of the game. When it comes to further supportive items, there’s Fragment of Destiny, Depth Diggers, Sham(e) of Delsere and Manald Heal… plus Simplicity for legendary gem. So a whole bunch but the damage is still meh.
If I had to rework the two legendaries, they would likely look like this:
Myken’s Ball of Hate:
Electrocute gains the Chain Lightning rune, attacks 50% faster and can chain back to enemies that have already been hit. The arc deals 400-500% increased damage. Failing to chain to a new enemy causes the arc to detonate, dealing up to half the damage of all remaining jumps in a burst of lightning.
Velvet Camaral:
Doubles the number of targets Electrocute can jump to and quadruples the damage dealt. Electrocute now charges over 5 seconds. Starting to channel Electrocute on full charge releases a Supermassiv Black Hole on the first target you hit with the arc, pulling in enemies from over 50 yards.
Something around that.
As for Manald Heal… screw that proc. To make that thing viable you’d need way more damage. Basically around Firebird’s level. Otherwise the proc is useless on higher GR. That’s why I would scrap that mechanic and rework the whole thing:
Manald Heal - that thing is way too random!!):
• lightning skills deal +15-20% increased damage
• four random affixes (3 primary, 1 secondary)
as for its legendary power, it could be like this:
Hitting an enemy with any other lightning skill releases Electrocute from the target. Electrocuted enemies take 75-100% increased lightning damage from you for five seconds.
or as simple as this:
Enemies hit by Paralysis take 75-100% increased lightning damage from you for five seconds and your chance to inflict Paralysis is now 66%
And Shame of Delsere needs a “deal triple damage” added.
That’s about it. But we have to wait another decade for such to happen.
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I’d love to see this in general, not just for electrocute. I always loved the idea of LoD and LoN but sadly time after time sets get buffed and nerfed while legendary items get left alone.
So many items so close to being really neat ideas and others that could help get the fun skills the power they need to complete. Shame they didn’t put more focus into balancing them out so we could have tons of LoD and LoN builds to pick from based on the skills and item effects we found for our play styles.
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Well, it depends. When you look at wizards, there is a big issue with LoN/LoD based builds. And that’s mobility. Wizards have little options, we mostly rely on Teleport for that. What the devs did in regards to Firebird, Delsere and Tal Rasha was baking a Teleport mechanic into the set. Now, when it comes to damage we need two weapons and a source for most of our best working builds (or 2 two handers for Meteor)… and that’s where the things get ugly.
The only reliable mobility option for LoN/LoD builds is and always had been Aetherwalker - which is a weapon. So wizards have to trade damage for mobility. Not only that, certain builds need both available weapons to make the build work. That alone is a problem in itself, and on top of that the sets offer better damage. The exception is Typhon’s Veil - for the time being, I suspect they will add a weird Teleport mechanic or something similar to that set as well.
The next pressing issue for wizards is that we have a problem with available legendary items on set gear slots, especially chest, pants and shoulders, but also helm, hands and boots offer very little. I mean items with powers that work together well enough to rival set mechanics. That’s a problem for all classes, basically, but some do better than others.
Now, for wizards, I would offer a heratical approach to fix this - how about we swap Aetherwalker and the Illusionist passive (both a little adjusted):
Aetherwalker:
Gain the Illusionist passive. Casting Teleport, Mirror Images or Slow Time each increases your damage dealt by 125-150% for 5 seconds.
Illusionist: [Passive]
Teleport, Mirror Image and Slow Time have no cooldown but consume 25 Arcane Power per cast.
And now think about what that would mean for wizard builds…
These teleport suggestions as well as your electrocute changes would be incredible. I’d also like to add Crown of the Primus-casted slow time proccing the Delsere Teleport reset on top.
Additionally, currently I think Aetherwalker teleport arcane power cost isn’t reduced by arcane power reducing skills such as Shock Armor’s Power of the Storm or by resource cost reduction stats or items such as Pride’s Fall, that should also be fixed.
As for Manald Heal, I’d just like for it to be a powerful lightning damage buff independently of any skill used and especially independently of Paralysis, so we could make interesting builds with whatever skill we can think of, and without having to stack attack speed to proc Paralysis as much as possible, allowing us to choose more appropriate damage stats based on the build. One of the frustrating aspects of Paralysis is how it doesn’t allow enemies chained by Electrocute to properly stack for area damage a lot of the times due to them being stunned and I’d like to not use it if at all possible.
For Electrocute I’d love it if they just baked the Surge of Power rune effect into baseline and changed the rune into an interesting Arcane damage rune so we could also have a cool arcane lightning build. Additionally, I think they need to baseline increase the range of its jumps, it’s currently a bit too small.
As for updating Myken’s Ball of Hate, I’d want something like this:
Electrocute gains the effect of Chain Lightning, Forked Lightning and the (new) Surge of Power rune [(if it they change it to give an interesting effect aside from the element change)], doubles the number of jumps + your arc idea as well.
We can buff Shame of Delsere to give 100% attack speed and +500% damage on all primaries instead of Myken/Velvet.
This would make it apply to Arc Lightning and Lightning Blast in some capacity as well so the lightning arcs can proc from them, on top of the Surge of Power and Forked Lightning.
Arc Lightning rune itself should also do “each enemy hit by Electrocute Arc Lightning also blasts all enemies inside the Arc Lightning area of effect for x% damage”. Additionally they should increase it’s area of effect a bit more.
I have no idea what they could do with Lightning Blast itself, probably change to be more of a Disintegrate type skill, that would be neat. Like an actual big continuous blast of lightning.
As for Velvet Camaral, I’d honestly turn it into a Black Hole item since Myken’s would have all current effects baked into it.
Velvet Camaral
Black Hole gains the effect of every rune, deals +XXX% increased damage, costs no arcane power, increases the range of its pull to 40 yards and ignores enemy CC resistance. Every 10 seconds, hitting an enemy with a damage dealing skill casts a Black Hole on their location (that benefits from all rune effects, damage increase and doesn’t put your black hole on your bars on cooldown).
Baseline Black Hole’s damage and pull effect should be 20 yards. Lightning rune’s increase to both radiuses should be to 30. I’d change the Absolute Zero rune to instead read “Enemies hit by Black Hole take 50% increased critical damage” or something similar for 10 seconds and up both Spellsteal rune’s effects from 5 seconds to 10 seconds. Event Horizon’s enemy spell vacuum should also be upped to 30 yards.