Does Chain Lightning need a rework?

Sorcerer
1

I’m level 62, and I’m still using the Chain Lightning build, mostly because it’s too much of a hassle to try other things. I just think there is something not quite right with Chain Lightning, and it’s not just how the skill is balanced but how it performs up to expectations.

When I think of Chain Lightning, I envision a spell that creates a bolt of lightning, hitting a bunch of weak enemies and destroying them. That’s what it did in Diablo 2. Chain Lightning was the skill you used to clear out packs of weak enemies, and whenever you needed to kill an elite, champion, or boss, you used something like “Lightning,” which was a single-target spell that dealt bigger damage but was a lot less efficient against packs of enemies.

The design of Chain Lightning in Diablo 4 does not fulfill this fantasy at all. Firstly, you can only cast maybe three Chain Lightnings before running out of mana. Due to the speed of the bounces, the amount of damage it does per bounce, etc., you’re lucky to notice any difference in a group of enemies’ health bars whenever you cast it. This feels really bad because you expect a spell that actually costs mana to have a noticeable impact, but it doesn’t.

On the other hand, a spell like Arc Lash seems to hit for about the same amount of damage per hit, but it feels a lot better to use. Why is that? Firstly, it attacks faster. It’s easier to attack and then, if you decide to stop attacking, it’s easier to move out of the way compared to Chain Lightning. The other thing is that it has a big radius, so you can actually hit five or six enemies at the same time if they are bunched up. You don’t have to wait for the bounces or anything, and this is a major reason why Chain Lightning seems to perform so poorly. It’s being overshadowed by a free basic attack skill that attacks faster, costs no mana, and does more damage in AoE situations.

Realizing this, I basically use Arc Lash almost all the time. I may start a battle using Chain Lightning before I get closer to the enemies, but for the most part, it’s never actually efficient to use Chain Lightning in groups despite the fact that it should bounce off multiple enemies. In fact, even when I get the unlimited mana Shrine, it’s still more efficient to use Arc Lash than Chain Lightning. How does that even make sense???

So when is Chain Lightning actually good? Against single targets, which, for a Diablo 2 player, is not intuitive at all. Unlike the slow, random bounces off enemies, the bounces between you and a single target - assuming you can engineer this situation - are extremely fast. Add the skill that increases damage by 10% with every bounce between you and an enemy, as well as the Legendary Aspect that regenerates 4-6 mana per bounce off of you, and now we’re looking at a pretty effective boss clearer that rivals the Ultimate skill.

Before you jump up and down for joy, though, this game loves to spawn bone walls or new monsters near bosses all the time, so it’s actually not so common to use Chain Lightning this way. Even if one monster is spawned - regardless of how far away it is from you and the boss - the bonus damage and mana regeneration are completely lost. This, again, makes the skill feel bad.

Even if this was the intended design, I’m not sure why these values were assigned to a skill called “Chain Lightning.” If you asked me what skill I would have wanted for a single-target boss killer that was lightning-based, I would have told you “Lightning” from Diablo 2, not Chain Lightning. But beyond that, I really don’t enjoy my “boss killer” skill to be reliant on things I cannot control, like the Boss not spawning new monsters, walls, etc. that mess with its mechanics.

But even with its intended use as a single-target killer, the drawback of the bounces makes the skill feel awful to use most of the time. It’s bad against AoE packs. It’s even not worth using if 2-3 enemies are on the screen, as it simply costs too much mana and you are probably better off using Arc Lash anyway.

The worst thing about this whole situation is that I’m basically playing Diablo 4 using a Basic Attack almost the entire time, which feels like a slog and is a totally boring way to play a Sorc. If I wanted to play a melee character, I don’t think Sorc would have been anywhere near my top 3 choices in an ARPG. Waiting every 60 seconds for my Ultimate to come online to feel any sense of power is not exactly the gameplay fantasy I was looking for to all this time.

Does Chain Lightning need a rework? Is it fine? How would you make it better?

7 Likes
2

I can cast chain lightning well a good dozen times and still not run out of mana. I will be home in a little over a hour, I have something on my sorc that generates mana when chain lightning hits. Will share and or even twitch it.

3

I don’t think that would fix it really. I’ve actually got to experiment with the unlimited mana shrine several times, and I still think Chain Lightning stinks in most situations when that is enabled. It just doesn’t do enough damage, and I’m running a lot of +damage gear from a variety of sources.

1 Like
4

Focus on critical damage chance

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Mine is 20.9%, and that doesn’t factor in all the skill points that would increase it further…

And even if that was the problem (I don’t think it is), that extra critical hit chance will still make Arc Lash perform better anyway because the current balance is that Arc Lash is doing more damage than Chain Lighting. Anything we do on this front to make Chain Lightning better still makes Arc Lash even better.

6

Problem is the nerf bat from beta hit CL so much its now useless. I mean a core ability is out performed by a basic one (Arc Lash)? How? Why?

Then they nerfed the magic/rare glyphs to balance other classes which made sorc worse. My level 2 unleash would have buffed my cackling energy by 60% after nerf it dropped to like 25%.
Now a CDR nerf to combat barb shouts nerfed sorc even more.

The only viable build past 80+ is Ice Shards and even then the damage of Sorcs just isnt even comparable to any other class as you can watch any barb, rogue, druid use one ability and do 30k-600k plus. They scale a lot better than Sorc. And thats the problem. The damage is weak to start wtih and the scaling for Sorc falls off very fast from the early levels.

1 Like
7

Yeah, I haven’t tried the other classes, but if those nerfs to other classes really did affect Sorc, then I hope they go back and buff the Sorc asap because it really doesn’t feel good to play at all. Not having fun.

I’m at the point now where I’m at a crossroads - I either finish up my renown in the last 2 areas of the game and reroll another character, or just stop playing altogether and wait for a genuine balance update that fixes sorc.

I’m actually really upset that the balance is so bad, but not trying to vent in the forums. I attempted the capstone dungeon just to see where I was at, and I was not happy. I’ve actually made every attempt at optimizing this pile. I either reroll a new character, or waste all that gold/time respecing to a better sorc build (ice shards I guess).

1 Like
8

The problems with chain lightning are really noticeable when you pick up a channeling shrine and can just spam it. It does have damage, yes, but the problem is that it is so spread out hitting individual mobs that with higher hp, it just does nothing.

It is great at killing single mobs like bosses, but when i see a druid or rogue that can hit an entire pack with a high damage ability and wipe them all out, chain lightning bouncing around between a few mobs out of a pack of like 10+ is just dumb with the current implementation. Trying to focus down a shield mob? Good luck with that.

It’s very clear that Blizzard had a view of “this is how the class will be played” and you can’t deviate from that because you can’t setup your skills to do anything else.

1 Like
9

Yeah, something I didn’t point out before that I noticed a lot later is how those Damage Reduction Aura enemies really punish skills like Chain Lightning. The Sorc is always forced to run into the pack and kill that Aura Monster first. Chain Lightning from a distance does absolutely nothing to these enemies. And once you are in close after killing the Aura monster, there is no situation where using Chain Lightning is better than Arc Lash now that the enemies are all bunched up and aggroing you.

There are other things now coming out that also explain why Sorcs feel bad. Kripp looked at the damage reduction formulas and discovered that Resistance affixes on gear and the resistance you get from Intelligence is about 15x worse compared to Armor, Damage Reduction %, etc. It’s so bad, it almost seems like a design oversight because the game really does seem to think Resistances are on par with other forms of mitigation (like they were in Diablo 3).

On top of this, I think the nerfs to Glyphs to counteract Barb and Rogue’s extra weapon slots really affected Sorc pretty hard too. There’s not a lot of Critical Hit Damage sources on a Sorc. While this doesn’t explain why Chain Lightning is performing poorer than Arc Lash, it does explain why the Sorc - in general - feels so much like a slog to play. There’s just no way the Sorc can stack Critical Hit Damage the same way a Barb or Rogue can, and Glyphs were its most reliable source of it. Those were nerfed to counteract Barbs.

1 Like
10

It’s very telling that we have a rare electrocute glyph that is supposed to boost lightning damage and there are literally no glyph spots that are even in range of a lightning damage node. Like what that heck is that?

11

I agree with channeling shine chain lightning still doesn’t work. In my build it more of a utility skill to get CE. I feel like it needs some serious damage multiplier when it jumps between enemies or maybe make the damage start out insanely high then fall off when it gets towards the 5 jump.

1 Like
12

The entire class needs a rework and one hell of a buff, especially to Shock and Fire builds. All damaging Shock skills aside from Arc Lash are completely inconsequential and serve only to create Crackling Energy or as enchantment slots that can be proced. You raise great points, hopefully the devs do something soon to address this mess because the game feels terrible to play as a sorc and you most definitely can’t “play it your way” unless that way is called Ice Shards. /sigh

2 Likes
13

My crit is at 60 and when I let lose everything melts! My shields constantly refresh with my skills allowing me to spam constantly. I’ll be on around midnight eastern time add me I’ll show you some lighting mayhem!!

14

I have no idea how to get 60 crit chance from gear in WT3. Not a clue. Gear gives so little that the 20% chance I have on my gear seemed fairly decent for WT3.

Regardless, that wouldn’t fix the issue with Chain Lightning anyway as you could just use Arc Lash to make “everything melt” as you claim. Anything that improves Chain Lightning also does the same for Arc Lash.

I also don’t really believe “everything melts” with 3x more crit chance as 9 casts of my Chain Lightning instead of 3 wouldn’t fundamentally change my experience with this skill. I’ve used this skill with the infinite mana shrine and it’s still garbage. Not a win for chain lightning either way.

1 Like
15

lol this only works on 1v1 versus bosses bc of the mana return aspect when it bounces on you. when you’re mobbing and clearing dungeons/anything else other than single bosses it doesnt work anymore

16

Heh, if that’s what GeforceJoe meant by 12 times, then they obviously never even read my post.

I’ve been messing around with Frozen Orb - the only other archetype that really interested me - and while I also think it’s underpowered, it at least has a legitimate Sorc playstyle. The semi-permafreeze idea feels good, and actually casting spells from ranged also makes me feel like I am playing a sorc. Just casting the Frozen Orb feels a lot like Diablo 2, which is great.

I still think it needs a damage buff - around 50% at least. Perhaps more, but some of my gear unfortunately has Lightning % damage on it since I respeced, so I’m accounting for that. Considering you have almost permanent vulnerable, am using the vulnerable glyph, and the vulnerable paragon board, I feel like I should be doing more damage.

It’ll take me awhile to replace my rings though. They have lucky hit, dual crit and lightning % on them. I don’t want to scrap those.

17

With my build I can literally walk through the toughest group of mobs and even stand under most bosses for a good minute regen health/mana and stay steadily attacking. Do you have the crackle or whatever skills on your tree? It’s literally the key to a lot of it as well.

18

Ya don’t, don’t rings sound good, I literally only equip items that add to levels of my chain lighting/damage/ crits. I also have a imprint that allows chain lighting to generate mana I forget the terms on it tho.

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My skill tools are chain lighting, fire shield, ice shield, teleport,and the range basic attack for lightning I forget what it’s called. And any skill I can put points into that adds to crits and that crackle orb stuff oh and the lighting ultimate

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If you can’t even remember your build or the aspect that generates mana and under what conditions, you’re full of it. Just stop. You’ve been found out.

And do you really think you’re the only one to equip damage items? You’re full of it.

And after all of your rambling, you still fail to acknowledge that even if you had all of this bonkers gear in WT3, that it has absolutely nothing to do with Chain Lightning and you’d actually be doing better with Arc Lash.