I had initially hoped to test my current build from Live, update it for the new skill and paragon changes, try adding the new seasonal powers, try swapping out some gear/stats to further optimize it, and maybe even try out some other builds I was interested in, like Ball Lightning.
However, a couple aspects of how the PTR works caused me to only accomplish the first two objectives:
- Seasonal characters become eternal characters when copied to the PTR. If we were able to able to use our current seasonal characters to test the new seasonal content, I would have had 300 paragon levels and very optimized gear to test with. As it was, I had to choose between testing with paragon levels and gear or testing with seasonal powers.
- Random gear is not sufficient for testing endgame builds. I already made another post about this, but suffice it to say that I spent most of my available testing time trying and failing to obtain the gear I needed to test my build. Ultimately, I fell back on testing on eternal because the gear was more impactful to testing than the seasonal powers.
This planner has both my current gear and build from Live, as well as the updated equipment, skill tree, and paragon setup I used on the PTR (the PTR changes to the skills, etc. are obviously not reflected, only the point allocation): https://maxroll.gg/d4/planner/r72x6021
Here is a summary of the changes I made to account for the elimination of burning effects as an option, as well as other skill and aspect changes:
- Moved Splintering Energy to offhand and Storm Swell to amulet since Splintering Energy no longer benefits from the 150% aspect value
- Swapped Burning Instinct and Enchantment Master paragon boards for Static Surge and Ceaseless Conduit
- Swapped Flamefeeder glyph for Invocation
- Removed 3 points from Devouring Blaze, 4 points from Teleport, and 4 points from Unstable Currents; Added 2 points to Inner Flames, 3 points to Icy Touch, 4 points to Lightning Spear, 1 point to Summoned Lightning Spear, and 1 point to Invoked Familiar
- Rerolled +3 Devouring Blaze to +3 Inner Flames on amulet
Observations
- Changes to Conjuration Mastery were not sufficiently offset by damage increases elsewhere. For damage, my build uses a combination of Lightning Spear, which still benefits from and requires Primordial Binding (formerly Conjuration Mastery); Chain Lightning with Axial Conduit, which no longer benefits from Primordial Binding; and Frostburn, which no longer benefits from Primordial Binding. With no changes to the build, I went from clearing a tier 99 Pit on Live to failing miserably to clear a tier 90 Pit on the PTR. After making the changes listed above, I was able to clear a tier 95 Pit.
It’s hard to tell exactly where the damage is missing, but two of my three damage sources lost a big multiplier and the overall result is that the build does less damage, even while still utilizing Primordial Binding and Lightning Spear. - Breaking the reliance on Conjuration Mastery for damage did not account for other losses from removing Conjuration Mastery from a build. One of the more glaring problems I ran into when attempting to test on a seasonal character rather than my existing character was that his mana regeneration was abysmal. Conjuration Mastery currently grants a huge amount of mana regeneration. In my case, I still need to take Primordial Binding because I’m using Lightning Spear, and even with 4 ranks in it, I was not able to continuously cast Chain Lightning without running out of mana.
This was the main reason I abandoned my seasonal character to test on my eternal character. With 11 ranks in Primordial Binding, he was able to keep 8 or more bolts of chain lightning going at once. My seasonal character constantly ran out of mana around 2. I think my eternal character might have also lost some mana regen, just not to such a glaring degree, but it’s hard to tell. (It would be nice if we could pin stats from our character sheet and have them show up on a sidebar so we could monitor them while we’re in combat. Seeing only the base values isn’t very useful, and you can’t effectively stay in combat with half the screen blocked by the character window. It could even snapshot the max recent value next to the current one if you wanted to get fancy.)
I was not able to test a pure Chain Lightning build (or any other builds for that matter), but this seems like it might be a severe issue for builds that drop this skill because they no longer benefit from the damage bonus. Most builds use Tal Rasha’s Iridescent Loop and Ring of Starless Skies. In order to include a resource aspect to (partially) make up for this loss, either one of those rings would need to be dropped, resulting in further damage loss, or a resource aspect would need to be imprinted on the amulet, resulting in further damage loss. Maybe this isn’t as much of an issue for builds that aren’t as mana-hungry as Chain Lightning.
You also lose a significant movement speed bonus. - The reduced stack limit and increased value per stack for Primordial Binding is a good change. It’s nice that it caps at 10 stacks now so it ramps faster and it’s easier to maintain the max bonus. It seems like the overall bonus values at max stacks are lower, however, not just for the damage which was ostensibly offset elsewhere, but also for the mana regeneration and movement speed which as far as I can tell no attempt was made to offset. I’m not sure how much of an effect this reduction actually had since it was a lot harder to keep this capped previously.
- There are no remaining Critical Strike Damage multipliers for Lightning. Devouring Blaze was the only CSD multiplier available, and now it’s gone too. Why are these effects restricted to Pyromancy when so much of the Shock skill tree is about critical strikes, and Splintering Energy is both triggered by critical strikes and scales on CSD?
- The rank 5 bonus for Unstable Currents is not worth the skill points. I previously had 5 points in Unstable Currents just because it lowered the cooldown and I didn’t really have anything else important to put them in. I actually took them out in my PTR build because I needed every point I could get to try to make up for losing Devouring Blaze. The 3-second stun every 10 seconds is not useful when there are already so many sources of stun available.
Maybe at rank 5, modifiers to Ultimate damage could instead apply to skills cast while Unstable Currents is active. That could at least make those damage modifiers that don’t do anything useful for something. I don’t know if there are enough of those to make that useful either, I just know it sucks seeing things with ultimate damage when your ultimate does no damage. This might be better as baseline functionality if practically nothing interacts with it anyway.
Maybe instead it could scale Critical Strike Damage for shock skills. It could give you a stacking CSD multiplier for each charge of crackling energy. That would make sense thematically, make up for losing Devouring Blaze, and give some incentive to take Supreme Unstable Currents to keep that buff maxed out. It could even be doubled at max crackling energy, to further incentivize keeping it full, although that might just be overcomplicating it since you’d already want to keep it full. This would give it a nice overload feel. - The passive skill changes were a shadow nerf to Shroud of False Death. Builds that were taking advantage of burning effects and Conjuration Mastery lost the benefits from the free rank of: Primordial Binding, Devouring Blaze (frost and lightning), Warmth, and Fiery Surge. In exchange we got: Icy Touch (fire and lightning) and Inner Flame (frost and lightning). We lost: stacking damage, stacking mana regen, stacking move speed, a CSD multiplier, stacking (per enemy) life regen, and more mana regen. We gained: a bit of damage and a bit of damage, and only lightning gained both since the others already benefited from one each.
- Swapping out the two paragon boards put me below the armor cap. I previously had enough armor to hit the cap on Torment 4 with just the three grand skulls in my jewelry and one armor affix on 12/12 masterworked boots. With the seasonal gems instead of skulls, I’ll lose even more armor. I didn’t have enough time or the proper resources to min-max this, but I imagine I’ll have to give up even more offensive stats and/or use Raheir or consumables to make up the difference unless I want to run around under the armor cap. (I don’t.)
- I’m feeling pretty starved for skill points. Having to put six points into hastily rebranded fire and frost passives feels worse than having to put three into Devouring Blaze, and it isn’t even a comparable replacement. I didn’t really want to take points out of Teleport or Unstable Currents, and that barely gave me enough to fill out the updated passives and Lightning Spear (which now needs 5 points because of the changes to Splintering Energy). I was hoping to try Convulsions and Shocking Impact, but I’d have to take those instead of the damage passives or else give up defenses, and I’m already feeling squishier than before.
All told, with the added powers of the witch, I might be as powerful as I was last season without the witch powers.
Edit to add a couple more thoughts:
- Besides being redundant, part of the reason an aoe stun for Unstable Currents doesn’t work well is that builds that include it have it up 100% of the time. This means you’re just pressing it as soon as it’s available every 10 seconds, regardless of where you are or what’s happening. An aoe stun is generally something you would want to use intentionally. At best you could try to control your location when you were going to press it anyway, but there’s basically no control on the timing after your initial engagement.
- Between all the extra skill points that are needed and the conversion of generic damage modifiers into specific damage modifiers, it feels like hybrid builds are just being made worse when they were already generally worse than just juicing a single skill as high as possible. This is a pity. Running Chain Lightning and Lightning Spear was more fun than either one by itself, and they went well together.
Maybe instead of just increasing conjuration damage, Primordial Binding could increase damage of an element based on the element of the conjuration. That way you couldn’t increase the damage of a fire build using Lightning Spear, but you could increase the damage of a lightning build. And you could still use it for the other elements, just not for as big of a bonus because there are fewer conjurations for fire and frost. (It might make sense to increase the max stacks to something like 15 in this case, as much as I like 10 for playability, so Lightning Spear could benefit more from having more active conjurations vs. Ice Blades or Hydra.)
Or you could just slap a “Chain Lightning gains the Conjuration tag.” onto Axial Conduit. That would kind of make sense since it does make Chain Lightning stick around and do its own thing. That might go a little past synergy and into required territory again, though.
Since the main issue being addressed is that people are using conjurations as a support skill just to trigger this bonus, maybe the damage bonus could scale off the rank of the conjuration skill somehow, so you’d only get a big benefit if you actually invested points into the conjurations as an actual part of your build. Like maybe the ranks in Primordial Binding scale the cap, but you only get 1% per rank of the conjuration up to that cap. That’s just an example; the numbers would probably need to be tweaked a bit to account for things like +all skills that could circumvent actually putting points into the skills. (Or it could just ignore bonus ranks, but I’m not sure how much I like that. That would definitely make it determinative, though.)
