And while I never use the “immortal build” (really too much work going into getting the absolute best cooldown reduction + fireshield duration buff + attack speed + ice blades spam…) I was paying attention to always have a shield, always cast a cooldown just before my last shield goes down…
And the sad thing was… sometimes the time it takes for my eyes to check my buff bar was all the time required to go from full health to dead if it turned out that my buff ran out at that time…
With that in mind, checking the patch notes… I see damage buff (cool) and overall nerf to all defensives… (except for a small buff to manashield value, but not duration, which is the main limiting factor AFAIK)
Which beg the question, did I miss something (I guess we shall soon find out, yeepee!) but… how can the sorcerer survive?!
Or… mmm… is it that we are supposed to kill all the mobs faster now, and dodge the bosses attack, I guess?
Stack DR - we get lots. Don’t forget that the midseason patch buffed basically every defensive passive skill we have, and then Mana Shield was buffed again.
Also don’t forget that they’re cutting Pit Boss damage by 66%, so there should be a lot less one shots provided you learn the fights and dodge the shadow boss mechanics, which now add extra damage debuffs to you just like Tormented bosses do.
If we stack enough DR I don’t think we’ll have problems surviving attacks from mobs through all regular game content (and of course we remain masters of crowd controlling stuff, and stuff that is CCd can’t attack you in the first place). Bosses will still be the real challenge but with the adjustment to Pit boss damage and the massive reduction to all boss HP I really don’t think survivability is going to be that much of a problem for us despite the nerfs to defensives and CDR; we will need to learn to avoid boss mechanics, but we all had to do that anyway last season unless you were running a perma immune build.
you can focus on the notes about damage reduction, and the Warmth healing buff.
in season 4 i am using the immortal build, so its straightaway conversion into permanent-ice-armor build in ptr 5. the result is not bad with the new snowveiled aspect, now even better.
permanent-ice-armor build is way easier than flameshield, as ice armor easily has its 6 seconds duration to start with.
Yeah that is like them saying the Shako will solve our CDR problems. Does that mean that the meta is now to make 4 characters to do the Infernal quest line and get 4 Resplendent Sparks to make a Shako?
I think you mean 8 characters. 4 sparks for shako, 4 sparks for doombringer.
Jokes aside, yeah, I’m nervous, especially because we can see even when you have an 80% barrier with temerity and invested in getting HP, it doesn’t actually mean much. Which means the ice armor buff itself before considering Snowveiled aspect to DR doesn’t mean much either.
Will master worked Tyreal DR + Snowveiled DR + Doombringer DR/Life + Shako be enough? Maybe? I know Barb defense and paragon is built around getting max life buff and the same combination.
I do think with Selig, ball lightning being near immortal could be a thing again.
I do not care about immortal builds. They are boring to play. I just do not want to be defenseless because all my skills are on cooldown. With the elimination of a lot of CDR and the increase to cooldowns, it appears that they do not want us to play defensive skills. They even have several items/affixes that give perks for not using defensive skills.
I just do not understand where they are trying to go with the class. They finally throw us a bone and give us more damage (not cannon level but better) but then they make the glass part of us even thinner.
Your second sentency is clearly true right? Because they even released a new legendary aspect with a huge damage boost if you abandon defensive skills.
My feeling is at least from the PTR glance, the total cool down after all the weird cool down math is not too difference. For example my teleport cool down was 3.8 seconds and then after all the changes with same gear was 4.2 or something. It would be horrible at start of a season, but is not too bad by end game. And of course as said earlier, the problem is getting to end game.
I am also more than half serious with this last part of the answer: the purpose of the class seems to be just R&D to decide how to make Spiritborn cool enough to drive purchases. This is likely why the evade unique boots on Spiritborn are everything we want with teleport enchantment and/or Occulus unique. The nerfs are bad enough to drive you to playing the class to have the ‘teleport’ you really want, gated behind the license purchase.
