Was thinking to try sorc in season 1 but heard a lot of things about sorc sucks because resistance is bugged.
Two questions:
- Why does Sorc suck??
- What is bugged about resistance? And what is your opinion a fix that can fix this issue??
Resistance isn’t bugged, just badly designed. And yes, sorc has fairly little access to Armor outside of gearing and jewelry gems, which means there simply isn’t enough DR when stuff starts to hurt.
But not only that, way sorc does damage is fully reliant on Frost Nova and Vulnerability. Outside of those windows you will do abysmal damage by comparison and outside of Ice Shards you will very likely do less damage during those windows than your average other class does at any time with similar gear level.
Also every build pretty much has 4 out of 6 slots locked and one enhancement locked. You simply cant be without them. And skill variance is non-existant, because only a few skills do actual damage.
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Resistance badly designed?? What do you mean by that?
So you are saying sorc has no access to increase DR or life steal from skills??
Are you sure only frost nova and vulnerability? that sounds like rogue to me with TB as well but it doesn’t stop others to use RF or flurry to push NMD.
Not sure what you mean by locked but what is the cost of locking?
From your description, it doesn’t sound too difference from rogue, skill damage variation wise that is.
He meant they dont work.’
He has access, but every other class has better access to that. Since his line of defense is useless (resistances)
Only reliable source. He has basically 4 must have skills in every build. Ice armor, teleport, frost nova, flame shield as a line of defense. Since vuln is its own multiplier, it makes builds playable or not playable.
Fireball enchantment. Everyone uses it. On HC everyone uses also flame shield one.
There is a build of each rogue class that finished NM100. Not to mention using 2.
There is 1 sorc that did NM100 and it took him over 2 hours. Its ice shard build.
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Mana regen issue. This is sorc primary source of dealing damage. Sorc damage is very poor, very poor, now add mana issues on top of that.
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Sorcs are meant to be resistance based, which, as you have heard, is broken due to DR. It gets worse though. Lit and Frost get the bulk of their damage increases, and damage reductions, from applying CC which cannot be applied to bosses or immunes. So any boss or immune turns off half your damage and damage reduction. Fire gets around that issue, but their skills are senseless given what the game throws at you.
I would not recommend rolling a sorc to 100 for season 1 unless they fix immunities to allow the basic label of being “CC’d”.
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Squishiness aside almost everything (meaning both your damage and your utility) requires you to either kill something or hitting a CCed enemy (sometimes even both at once) including things which apply the CC in the first place and ofc. bosses (which are immune to CC for most of the fight) are not helping either.
I got two chars, a rapid fire rogue and ice shard or ice spike sorc. When i run a 48 sigil with the rogue i take less dmg compared to my sorc running a 32
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Sorc defense is big damage. It always been this way. I am not married to this concept, but having poor defense and poor damage it’s really not much one can do. Ok, sorc can cc enemies, so what? You have to get rid of the enemies, not hold them in place.
Right now sorc is a glass cannon and the cannon doesn’t have ammunition and when it does get some ammunition, the projectiles are wet sponges.
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Pretty good explained here
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Sorc should be a glass cannon. I think this is fine. However, between skills available, paragon boards, and affects available you are shoehorned into several required skills needed to scale your damage to high level NMs leading to a significant lack of build diversity.
As a primary example, a huge amount of your top tier damage comes from “when enemies are burning” modifiers. So every build more or less requires one enchantment slot allotted to Fire bolt to apply burning, max points into devouring blaze, and heavy investment into the flamefeeder glyph and burning instinct boards.
Resistance has a very low impact to damage due to how the calculation works. There are some great articles on it but essentially your armor stat and DR have a bigger impact to elemental damage mitigation than elemental resistance. DR applies to the entirety of the damage stack. Armor applies to 100% of physical damage and 50% of elemental damage. ER only applies to that remaining 50% of the elemental damage that armor does not apply to and has further impacts that reduce its effectiveness at higher nightmare tiers. Additionally, ER is multiplicative from your base INT resistance (.05% per point) by source. So a point of diminishing returns happens very quickly. Combine this with an exponetially lower armor and access to DR than any other class and sorcerers feel really squishy. Above NM tier 50 one shots are very common, and above NM tier 65 or 70 any creature can one shot you, even a white weenie.
But Sorcerers have great access to barriers. This is where both problems merge. Look at build guides and you will see that every single build has all 4 defensives on it. It is pretty much a requirement for any Tier 4 play. So the squishyness of the sorc forces you to use all four defensive skills. You then need to apply vulnerable and burning in your build to take advantage of Sorc’s major damage buckets and affects. Almost all builds use firebolt for an enchant and frost nova as their vulnerable applier. So you really get 2 action slots and one enchantment slot that can impact your build. Then the end question in the meta at this point is do you want to go all in with ice shards and have an ultimate, or sacrifice your ultimate and go with a blizzard build, or maybe a half and half ice shards/blizzard. Even with all of this, while you are one of the best mob clearers in the game due to the stacking CC you push out, you have a terrible ability to do truly high NM levels (75+) due to getting one shot through even through your barriers, and awful single target damage compared to other classes.
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You do know that Rogue has the exploit glyph that also applies Vulnerability right?
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They don’t? No clue how so many people dislike the class, maybe you’re all noobs? lol
The only thing that they struggle with is super high level content solo, but as this is predominantly a group focused game, that is a moot point.
I really hope all you kids crying gets the class buffed, so that I will be unstoppable. If that happens nothing will stop me.
Get me back to the OP days from the alphas/betas 
This myth refuses to die. To be fair you said “pretty much”, but as someone with 100s of hours on sorc I can tell you this is not true for Tier 4 content. You can take ice armor and flame shield off your bar for equal-level content if you make an effort to gather gear with DR / Total Armor instead of trying to shove as much DPS as you can into your build.
The real problem is that there are very few skills you would want to swap in for those defensives that would actually be useful. I can think of 3 that are used purely for their utility: Blizzard to aoe chill/freeze, meteor to immobilize and lightning spear to stun. Glorified CC applicators.
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Insta Death early on in Nightmare Dungeons
Damage Numbers not in line with the universe of other classes
Complicated layup for survivability in context of other classes
Forced to take firebolt Enchant to compete leaving only 1 real flexible enchant to customize and play with
Force to take frost nova
Forced to take teleport
If options are not really options then it restricts the flexibility of the class.
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Her design in general is weird as F.
- Hydra is the worst skill outside of a NM. In a NM it scales weird and you can clear 100NM with Hydra.
- The usage of the 4 same skills (ice armor, flame shield, teleport, frost nova) for fast clears (you don’t use those in higher NM, but still use some of them).
You get one shot by everything. Why?, cos resistances are not working right now. Uh, and a reminder that in season 1 we will get a lot of armor less (750?), that’s funny thing. - Paragon boards?, we have like 300 armor. The second character with less armor, has 2000 armor in the paragon board.
- Vulnerability being so important makes some builds better than others.
- Do we need to talk about uniques?. We are the only class with a “but” in their desing. Gives X dmg, but cd higher. Gives X stat, but does X less.
- Some of the best uniques are also, bugged (flat armor for rainm).
The problem is that you can still play sorc. You can kill uber lilith and do a 100NM. The thing is when you swap to another character and see what the F you have been doing with your life, everything in this game is easier playing other chars.
I’m woried that sorc will not get any change, or that blizzard won’t fix some bugs before season 1. Tbh I don’t how a malignant gem can solve our issues (but we have not much information about them right now).
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Yeah, unless a malignant gem gives a lot of additional armor tied to our Intelligence stat, or unless Sorcerer gets a flat damage reduction (and at the very least, a reduced drawback from Glass Cannon), I don’t see how a Sorcerer will be able to get to very high NM content with 750 less armor… For most people, that’s probably an increase of over 10% in damage taken alone.
A lot of changes are needed to make Sorcerer less squishy. A squishy character that does less damage than your average joe is pretty much pointless.
I don’t mind the squishyness (well, maybe less one shot from random ranged attacks spawning from behind maybe), but Sorcerer should hit more, way more to make up for that.
We won’t know until July 18 patch notes, but my hopes are pretty low.
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Unpopular opinion but they should nerf the other characters to be in line with the sorc; rather than buff the sorc. Either that or buff the sorc and add another world tier. Just barely being able to clear NMD100 and Uber Lillith should be the balance goal. Smashing an NMD100 in 3 minutes means the game is too easy.
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Same. I think with the launch and QoL fixes needed, I have a hard time thinking they are going to give sorc the balance update it needs for S1 due to lack of development priority. However, we could be surprised. The S1 mechanic is really bad for sorc, which can’t afford to lose armor atm.
But we’ll see on the 18th.
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And pray them to give us back our third enchantment slot, so we could have more fun with builds.
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