I leveled a pure fire sorc up to 53. I had double rank 8 hydras, rank 8 firewall, comet aspects, +fire damage stats, +burning stats, +pyro stats, etc. I respec’d to blizzard + ice shards despite not having any ice gear on and immediately had at least double if not triple clear speed/boss kill speed. I just went back to town and crafted some ice enchants and found some frozen/chilled damage stat gear, and am now totally obliterating packs I used to have to coral and run around waiting for them to burn down.
I played fire because I like fire. I want to play fire. But clearly fire is not at all balanced at this point, and I don’t want to play fire so bad that I want to level up 4x slower…
As a gamedev myself… In my head I think Blizzard should be able to fully gear 3 level 70 sorcs, one ice, one fire, one lightning, and then pit them against the same pre-rolled elite groups, measure the damage output, measure the clear speed… Fire feels like it has been severely under looked.
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Ice is not balanced either. Between Frost Novas it’s still corralling.
The one way to kill mini-boss is to kite them into trash packs, then nova/shard/fireball the entire screen. This, or you’ll be wanding.
pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew
FROST NOVA BUME ALL DEAD
2 Likes
I’ve been doing blizzard, whole pack gets frozen in ~3s, then ice shards wipes the screen with all the ricochet/explosion. Dungeons bosses (currently in world tier 3) I just spam blizzard and frost bolt till it staggers, then ice shards deletes it. I have yet to not completely melt a dungeon boss from like 80% down to zero in less than 3-4 seconds. There were no chain/stack mechanics like that at all in fire.
im a 64 fire/burn mage and i have not once played with my key passive. we already so weak and then cant even hotfix that in a week? key passive is such a huge skill too.
it would give me 20% more dmg, but even then I’m still far behind other classes dmg output
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Good, now do from Sorc → Rogue for another easy 4xdamage again + immortality 
.
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Yeah i got tired of waiting for nova cd so im now experimenting with ice hydras.
Start saving gear for Fireball and reroll once you have a Great to perfect gear, you`ll do 4x damage of ice build.
How? What build? I got a nearly perfectly rolled Staff of Endless Rage, fully upgraded and everything else aspect wise and it’s still crap. There are literally zero viable Fire builds that aren’t Fire Wall based which you can use past tier 1, and that builds is miles behind the two Shock builds and in an entirely different universe from the Ice Shards build.
Fire is horrible, but the best sorc build is still really bad. Sorc is just really undertuned and I can’t understand why it wasn’t caught before launch
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Well I keep hearing from folks who played in the Beta (I did not) and they say the class was completely gutted before the game went live. Chances are they created this whole mess just before the game launched, were caught off guard by the massive backlash and don’t know how to go about fixing it because they taught they already had… lol. Probably lots of bruised egos at work right now refusing to acknowledge they screwed up.
Mana cost and the way it regenerates needs to be completely overhauled as does the reliance on cooldowns. Having to run around like a chicken with its head cut off until your cooldown comes back because you can’t do any real damage outside of it does not feel good.
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I really just don’t get why you can’t just run the numbers… The credits had like 300 people in it, surely at least one of them is in charge of number crunching/skill balance? Make a flow chart, run the numbers, consider the possible legendary/unique rolls, tune accordingly.
I’ve got my damage to frozen so cranked up now I can pretty much one shot everything with a single blizzard besides bosses. Fire damage was like 4 decimals behind.
I feel ya. I am currently lvl 68 tier 3 Arc Lash. I love the build, but after the nerf, I know I won’t be able to progress much further without switching to Ice. Sucks because I love lightning builds.
1 Like