Attack power is pretty unreliable as a benchmark because it excludes all your conditional and temporary damage modifiers, which we as Sorcs have tons of (bonus fire damage, for example, won’t be reflected there). Training dummies are better, and the NMD eye test is best. I know Ball Sorcs who can practically solo World Bosses in like 15 seconds that only have 6k attack power on paper.
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that does not apply for INCINERATE.
when I reached 19k attack power I started to see enemies melted in 2 secs, with 400k damage + flamescar 60k critical hit per sec. in addition to the DOt caused by firewall…
I dissagree with your comment.
I’m not sure why Incinerate specifically would matter… Attack Power on your stat sheet is agnostic to the skills you’re using. 19k is very impressive, but is that in town? Or is that a snapshot when you have all your temporary buffs up? I can do T100’s without too much trouble at 6k attack power in town with a CL build, and I don’t hold a candle to BL builds (many of which have about the same resting attack power on their stat sheet as I do).
Hardest part for me at the moment is grinding all the way to level 80 where I have godslayer, thibaults, flickerstep and starless skies all waiting. Have to pick up the sorcerer uniques along the way still. Progress hit a wall today trying to get gear with enough CDR and cost reduction to stay in the fight.
I have starting going through the NMDs using ESU’s Heirloom, Endless Rage, Illuminator Gloves, and Tibault’s Will and I have done well in the upper 50s and I’m having fun. My current issue is that I like two Hydra’s going and I put the Serpentine aspect on my gloves which means I lose that second Hydra with the Gloves of the Illuminator. And I do think the bouncing balls is a positive. So, here are my current aspects. What do you think and which could I do without? Thanks.
Aspect of the Protector (Shield) [Helm]
Aspect of Disobedience (Shield) [Chest]
Serpentine Aspect (Axe) [Gloves]
Aspect of the Crowded Sage (Shield) [Pants]
Aspect of Binding Embers (Trap) [Boots]
Elementalist’s Aspect (Axe) [Staff]
Aspect of Three Curses (Axe) [Amulet]
Prodigy’s Aspect (Flame) [Ring #2]
Ring #1 is Tal Rasha’s.
Here are the aspects I’m using. I have had to put a lot into defense at the expense of power to be able to survive high level nightmares.
Helm - Disobedience - should have high up time with hydras
Chest - Protector - mostly for groups of elites
Gloves - Illuminator (unique)
Pants - Temerity (unique) - for survivability
Boots - Binding Embers - fire shield is my get out of jail free ability
Staff - Three Curses - max fireball crit damage
Amulet - Elementalist’s - almost guaranteed crits with ult + fireball or meteor
Ring 1- Serpentine - basically required for hydra
Ring 2 - Conceited - extra damage with multiple barriers from skills and aspects
I find that pure fire sorcs are too wimpy to sacrifice damage for mana, cooldown, and other utility boosts. The ability balance in this game is very poorly designed. For instance, Meteor is a very slow and hard to hit ability. By standard gaming rules, its damage should be top tier. It obviously isn’t. Burning damage seems very weak compared to bleed or poison. BL sorcs are top tier right now, but every other build needs a lot of help.
I just passed level 80 tonight and equipped my unique gear that I had waiting (godslayer, Tibaults, flickerstep and starless skies) and jumped into a NM48 to see how things would go.
Lost a lot of DR to pick up a lot of damage and the squishiness was felt right away. First pack of 6 elites ripped me apart until I realized why I was dying (game really needs logs to take the guesswork out of this.) I cleared the rest of the way after using up 2 deaths at the start.
For me now it’s upgrading glyphs to 15 so I can activate their bonuses. Only one is above 10 at the moment and none of them are fully activated. I have 5 slotted at the moment and backfilling the rest of the board next.
My fireball sorc isn’t nearly as strong as my pulverize Druid or my jack of all trades barbarian at this same point, but I am building it out differently as well. Resists are already capped and with glyph leveling i think I can get my armor to a better place. I’m also still struggling with rss management a bit though once I figure out flickerstep and how to better time my inferno I think that problem will go away.
Need to farm staff and gloves also, that will boost DPS where it needs to be to make the build a little less spammy.
I too have learned that one needs to upgrade the glyphs as fast as possible. All the ones I am using are at least 15, one is at level 21 while two others are at 18. I still only have four boards and am still looking at what I will give up for what I can gain by expanding to a 5th board. For me, I had a reason for going where I went and though I have changed two glyphs my initial choices still seem sound to me.
Getting all the glyphs you are using to level 15 gives you a good power spike. It is faster now than it used to be. It seems better to try to have more glyphs rather than rare or legendary nodes. I am currently using 5 glyphs. I have a way to use 6, but I have not found one that would give me more power.
For sure more glyphs is the way to go now compared to how we played at launch where 4 paragon boards with the occasional 5th board was the norm. Now people run 5 or 6 boards and if they increase paragon in the expansions I could see possibly 7 boards on builds one day. That might seem extreme, but with WT5 on the horizon those kinds of extremes may be necessary.
I did the same thing in the beginning. I thought it was better to use all of the special nodes on the board. A lot of builds I am seeing skip most of the rare nodes, and many don’t use the legendary nodes at all. The BL build I am following for S2 uses 7 boards. I’m not convinced it is better to have 7 glyphs with the bare minimum versus 5 glyphs with max nodes. It’s too hard to do the math. Using 1 element type limits the usefulness of the boards for sorcs.
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