This game’s version of Meteor feels… really lame to me.
Its windup is quite long for what it is, particularly before the upgrade that shortens it; so that upgrade feels more like it exists just to fix a problem than anything else.
Its impact site is really small; to the point where between that and the wind up, it’s quite hard to hit an enemy with it unless they themselves are large or they are already immobilized.
It costs a lot of mana for what it does and how finicky it is to actually strike with.
All of those might be fine… if the meteor did the sort of damage to warrant making that skill-shot… which it doesn’t. Fire Sorcerer is already under-powered and meteor isn’t even the spell to do damage for that: it’s firewall of all things.
It certainly doesn’t feel like I’m bringing down a flaming boulder form the heavens to smite my enemies… more like I’m lobbing a water-balloon after my arm’s fallen asleep and hoping it hits vaguely near my target. Anyone else?
I one shot all elites packs on key 30… BUT you are right, it feels clunky and if the mobs are moving all over the place, specially in dungeons where you have to clear a part of them, it feels awful.
Worst are the moving archers, whether skeletons or ghosts
Meteor is average, and is under powered as pretty much all the sorcerer flame toolkit is.
Try to use the 2 meteorite aspects and it does actually get very much better.
Aspects are the one having meteorites falling with meteor and meteorites falling with the ultimate making your meteorites immobilize targets (combined with slow after immobilization aspect, you get your cc this way for people like me refusing to use ice nova in a fire build).
The numbers are better than the aspects make you think they are somehow.
Also, you will need the glyph giving your spells 20% more area of effect as a bonus (mastery damage glyph).
But, yeah, when you see other characters having million damage hits … meteors are just as bad as the rest of the fire toolkit.
I agree that early game w/o aspects its useless, but as Rico posted you really need aspects to make a meteor build. Youtube clip from mid game NMs it looks almost like D3 Tal Rasha which looks fun to play.
I don’t understand how Devs play a fire sorc and come to the conclusion that Meteor is a spell that’s working fine. Doesn’t make any sense to me. Didn’t someone raise their hand and say how garbage it is? I ran it for a while but then went back to Blizzard which is 10x better.
I feel this is the problem with the entire class. Everything is pretty much crap unless you have a bunch of aspects supporting it - then it becomes kind of usable mostly.
I wanted to so badly do firewall but gave up and went frost just cause 80% of the legendries I had dropped were for frost or shock for some reason. Literally like 22 out of 24 of my lvl1 - 50 legendries were not for my build and the codex of power has pretty lame support for pyro sorc IMO. Definitely possible I’m missing something.
I decided to roll a barb alt and it’s like a very different experience. There’s aspects in all the dungeons even you can use everywhere and I don’t have to just run out of mana and juke stuff for 10 seconds while I recharge.
Is it possible to level like this? Like if I can get all the aspects on my Rogue main and put them on my Sorc? Or is it alot more to it than that, like lots of paragon, uniques, etc?
Yeah, it’s the achilles’ heel of sorcerers that pigeonhole all possible end game viable builds into feeling like the exact same. Blizzard made Vulnerability too good to pass up while at the same time only giving one spell a consistent way to apply it in AoE.
Here’s hoping for a small rework on sorc on the 13 pages patch.
I feel exactly the same - meteor is just slower/clunkier than other spells, deals less damage, has very small aoe while cost a lot of mana. It is really underpowered. Tried many other classes and so far it is one of the weakest options to level your character.
Also I don’t like that second meteor falls only if it hits 3+ targets which makes it useless on bosses
+1 vote that meteor feels really bad.
The wait for it to drop makes it seem like it’s gonna do massive damage but no its just kinda average - and that’s if the enemy didnt move 3 feet to the side and escape it entirely.
Then it burns the ground they are no longer on, uselessly, for irrelevant seconds.
It’s like they made it have a delay as compensation for a damage boost that never actually happened so it’s just weak for no reason.
It’s mostly utility due to it being one of the few ways Sorc can access immobilize. Just you’d rather have it as a lucky hit than actually on your bars. But with no skill having good lucky hit chance anymore since all the nerfs from beta phases till now, it’s mostly useless.
It is not like there are not control spells which slow/freeze/immobilize the target or an option to make the meteor fall immediately. Not saying Meteor is perfectly fine but it is not like other skills do not have their own issues which have to be played around (Frozen Orb can go past a target before exploding, Charged Bolts might not even make it to a target, Incinerate requires you to stand still and be a punching bag, etc.).
right but youre just describing all the other problems with other abilities. incinerate is WAY too expensive for the weak damage and i really dont want to mix my elements - i want to be a fire-mage and i feel that should absolutely be a viable option but it isnt right now cause all the fire skills (except the ultimate) are extremely weak compared the amount of mana they consume. My ice mage is waaaay stronger than my fire mage; The power difference is room-clearing superpowers vs careful tiptoe through dungeon.
I get the desire to be purely Fire. But as the game stands now, you NEED a way of applying Vulnerable and that means Frost, so you are already at impurity or not dealing damage. As goes Incinerate, you will be standing still, so Soulfire will drop your cost by 15% after 1.5 seconds to 21.25 mana per second. We start at 10 mana regenerated per second, so that is a deficit of 11.25 per second, or an ability to maintain Incinerate for 8.89 seconds. Buy one rank of Devastation and that puts you at 9 seconds. Obviously, the choice here is to invest in Mana Cost Reduction and Increased Mana Regeneration via nodes in the skill tree and gear.
The real problem with design is Blizzard seems to have taken the notion that you should only have a workable character somewhere around level 100 after plenty of investment in skill points, paragon points, and acquiring highly specific gear.
As goes your Frost (Ice Shards no doubt) Mage being stronger than your Fire mage, that is because of the (by comparison) utterly overpowered, silly stuffing of Frost with all the best abilities and overloading of Ice Shards with boosts other Core skills do not get. Or the comparison could be stated as every other skill getting crappy enhancements and perks in comparison to what Ice Shards gets. Either way you want to look at it, there is a serious disparity.
Meteor without the proper aspects and the Adept Glyph is going to feel terrible for sure. A fully tailored Meteor build works smoothly but is of course miles behind the meta builds.
There are two fundamental problems which destroy build diversity for Sorcerers: (1) the inability to apply the Vulnerable status effect without using Frost Nova or Ice Shards, and (2) the ridiculous squishiness of Sorcerers which mandates the use of ALL 4 defensive skills for survival.
This means that all but one of your skill slots are locked as are virtually all of your offensive aspect slots because of the various aspects focused on the interactions between spamming cooldowns and having a barrier up. The only choice you get is on what your main spammable ability will be and it’s not really a choice there either because if you don’t take Ice Shards or Arc Lash you’re already severely gimping yourself.
Of course this only matters if you’re pushing higher tier nightmare dungeons. As things are right now, if you don’t want to play a super restrictive meta build you have to resign yourself to not pushing NMDs. Personally, that doesn’t bother me because if I can’t play a build I enjoy I might as well not be playing the game at all and pushing super high NMDs is neither fun nor rewarding atm so it’s a no brainer.
Hopefully all of this will change once we move on from what is basically a glorified Beta test of the game but that will likely take a very long time. In the meantime it is what it is.
Meteor is one of those abilities that has never been properly balanced throughout all of the diablo games. D2 probably had the best iteration of it, and it was still too slow. D4’s meteor is pretty trash- the radius is far too small and the delay is too long (you shouldn’t have to choose over another skill because the baseline ability is badly designed.
Also, the art for meteor is absolutely terrible. Giant rock hits the ground and no explosive impact visual whatsoever. The crater is the exact size of the rock and is way too small, barely any effects on impact- it genuinely looks comical. It looks like someone dropped a bowling ball into wet cement and it just disappears on impact with no effect- really, really bad looking.