Deathwish/Etched Sigil combo definetely deserves a remake.
Now when any wiz skill is buffed:
Channeling is OK but channeling everything is not fun. After having channeling Meteors/Frozen Orb for many seasons we should get some non-channeling playstyles.
Seems this has now become a glaring problem.
They are too powerful, to not use.
They need to redistribute power away from those items, and put it directly on the skills… or something.
I agree, its baffling that every viable option for wizard is channeling
Problem is - channeling is now a tool, instead of the effective damage dealer.
This combo of items basically threw channeling’s actual damage under the bus to be used as a tool for other things
I see issue is deatwish, that has too big multiplier for item, that emproves damage of all spells
Channeling items has specific debuffs too. Frequency of casting spells with ES is lower than attack speed in profile and area damage doesnt work on its spells
Hydras is the best spell for chenneling items and most friendly to them. Other spells and runes are hard to get full es+dw benefit
Hydra is just a icon on your skill bar the gameplay are always the same : Channeling Torrent.
At least when you play Archon you chanel only during human form. Wizard is boring.
Tone the damage down for all I care, just don’t make it so my legendary abilities take a second or so to kick in. You’re typically moving again after a second or two, which means the affixes will do effectively nothing.
The channel build I use (non-meta) is the only build I’ve enjoyed that has survived some of the other stuff Blizzard has done, like neutering CC when I had a chain lightning stun build.
Just an FYI: arcane torrent is double dipping the benefit of the channeling bonuses on the PTR at current. This results in a:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/t/channeling-damage-bugs/12182
I will agree that these bonuses could be looked into adjusting, even after a fix to the above.
Etched sigil is fine the way it is on live.
Increase Deathwish damage bonus by a good margin but make the damage bonus only apply to channeled abilities.
Then buff various other support legendaries for other wiz builds.
I disagree with this. There are many really neat builds that exist because of channeling. Being able to interweave manual casts between channeling is a fairly interesting playstyle as well. The latter has the potential to be restricted by intended changes on the PTR.
I feel like the multipliers could be decreased for both Etched Sigil and Deathwish. After that selectively increase all skill item multipliers and other item multipliers (such as MH) to match.
If you want channeled abilities to do a more considerable amount of dps as compared to other spenders, the best means to safely achieve that is to increase the base skill damage of channeled abilities, or give them a separate (higher) multiplier within the channeling items.
EDIT: or even: separate the channeled vs spender multipliers within Deathwish and Etched Sigil. Allow for a boosted multiplier on secondary channeling skills when no spenders are on your bar. This would exclude some items for sure (OID comes to mind) but would allow the type of build you are hoping for to be more competitive.
This problem persists even after the bug is fixed. The game experience of channeling everything is basically the same.
This doesn’t work on the skills which needs only 1 weapon-slot power, aka meteors and hydra.
Hi FX9, how would it not work?
Woh, Vizier, etc. would make up the decrease in multiplier from DW+ES, and allow non-channeling variations to perform better in comparison.
I can see some minor difficulty rebalancing for LoD/LoN or Vyr reverse archon, but aside from this, there is little reason it would interfere.
Let’s take Hydra for an example. Do you have anything else to use for weapon/offhand, if you don’t use DW+ES? There seems nothing else to me, so even DW+ES becomes merely 1.25*1.25, it’s still better than others
The playstyle needs to go. How intriguing is it to channel a spell to maintain a buff only so that your other spells can deal actual dmg? It’s about as stupid as it sounds.
Let those that like channeling skills use those abilities to deal actual dmg but don’t pidgeonhold the rest of the builds into using them for the sheer multipliers.
DW+EW will be included in just about every build there is this upcoming season.
Correct. I don’t think the playstyle needs to go though, but it should be limited to maybe only one skill.
I don’t think limiting it to a specific skill is good as there are a few skills that channel. Personally I built my channel build because it’s flashy, fun and pretty simple to use when I don’t feel like thinking a lot, so putting a 1 sec timer on the legendary power of those items is a build killer for me.
Decreasing their damage, or how their own damage multipliers interact with other skills could possibly work for the intents here. This would keep the legendary affix intact for those that are using a channel build for the interactions instead of sheer damage output yet still give the overall tweak in damage that might be required.