I’ve spent ALLOT of time playing Diablo. since 1996. I’ve both loved and hated some of the decisions made with this franchise.
That being said and out of the way, lets come together as a community and fan fic some Unique’s for the class and maybe the devs will take notice and come back with some build changing Unique’s for the class…I’ll start.
How about a unique focus that changes firewall into a fire wave? Spreads out from the character and does multiplicative damage, and can still be used with Flame weaver
or a unique that works to change meteor to do both fire and cold damage, that could work with Starfall coronet, Frostburn and Azurath.
or one that could work with the Conjurer and Invocation glyphs to actually make conjurations a real build?
or anything to make Spark, Shards and arclash actually worth playing past leveling.
I would like some unique for changing incinerate to channel ice or lighting or changing chain lighting to apply massive burning DOT with changed animation (red lighting maybe? )
I want a unique that massively rewards single element focus (“Horadric Focusing Rod”).
It’s cool that they added the Elemental Dominance passive, but that caps out at an 18% base multiplier. This can in no way compete with Tal’Rasha’s, especially combined with Elementalist glyph (our single best glyph multiplier) and even the new key passive that hugely rewards rotating elements.
I want to see something like “Multiplies all damage by 50% if you only have two elements on your skill bar, or 100% if you only have one”. That puts it in the same multiplier range as the Tal’Rasha / Elementalist combination.
I like it. Should probably be a ring if it was ever introduced. Stone of Jordan, maybe? My only concern is the skills to build this are not there, particularly for Cold.
Frost bolt, Ice Shards, Ice Armor, Ice Blades, Blizzard, and Deep Freeze are the picks, but Deep Freeze and Frost Bolt are pretty dead skills. Ice Shards needs better Aspect support. Something I toy with is pretty radical revamp of changing all instances of “Ice Spike to Ice Shards”. Now, you could build Ice Shards. You would have the Legendary Support of “Blue Rose” triggering Ice Shards, and Ice Shards dealing damage twice. You would have the enchantment casting Ice Shards at frozen enemies, which would also explode twice.
Ice Armor, Deep Freeze, and Glacial Aspect would massively increase Ice SHARD damage. Possible issues identified are the lack of mobility (because, presumably, you would take Ice Shard and Firebolt enchantments) and the ice bolt primary being a dead skill you’d never use. The lack of burning would really hurt the build. Maybe Familiars in lieu of Ice Bolt would work, if they counted as a conjuration spell that contributed to Elemental Synergies, a la having the “Frost” “Pyromancy” and “Shock” tags built into the spell. It should already do this.
Another issue is, unfortunately, with both unique rings taken (Blue Rose and your proposed unique) and presumably a staff, you would only have three affix slots to play with, on Staff, Amulet, and gloves. You could not take Glacial Aspect, Frozen Wake, Frozen Tundra, Shredding Blades, and Piercing Cold. You would have to pick the three best, and that really hamstrings the build. Presumably, they would have to be Glacial, Shredding, and Tundra.
Some possible solution(s) is to just bake one of the aspects into the spell and remove that aspect entirely. Frozen Tundra is ripe for this, just increase the radius of the base spell and ixnay the aspect, which frees up the aspect slot, most probably for Piercing.
On retrospect, I would amend your proposed legendary aspect to
“Increases all damage by 100% by one element if you have at least four shared elemental abilities of that type equipped"
as the proposed unique aspect, just to add some flexibility for skill choice and prevent abuse of 3/3 elemental and 4/2 elemental divide shenanigans. Cause you know, someone will be 4/2 and increase one element by 100% and a second by 50%.
Yes I meant Elemental Synergies, not Elemental Dominance. Whoops.
I would really like something to make single element builds worthwhile. I’m running Ice Shards this season, and it’s fun, but… I was forced into using Tal’Rasha’s to be able to handle Torment 3, and I absolutely hate the new play style with the forced spell rotations. I pop Flame Shield when I don’t need it just for the buff (before the S6 changes you could get the fire element buff passively from Firebolt enchant). I think it’s unfortunate that this item is essentially mandatory for all Sorc builds. Before I switched to it I used my cooldowns tactically. Now I watch them almost more than what my character is actually doing in order to keep the stupid rotation going so the buff doesn’t fall off. On the plus side, between it and Shroud of False Death I can handily manage Torment 3 now, but it’s less fun than I was having before.
I desperately want an alternative that can scale our damage just as well so that I’m not forced into using Tal’s season after season after season just to be able to keep up with the other classes.
My idea for an amulet. It’s called Salvation:
3 ranks to Conjuration mastery
3 ranks to Devouring blaze
3 ranks to Glass cannon
100% Crit DMG (or 20% Intellect)
Effect: Casting Fire, Cold or Lightning skill gives you 70%[ x ] damage buff to the corresponding element only one type of elemental buff can exist at one time.
It’s called Salvation since it saves us for the horrible amulet RNG grind.
I am still here advocating that Starfall Coronet be changed to increased mana cost instead of cooldowns and charges. I want a meteor build so bad. It seams like we are getting close with the increase presence of Meteorites.
Maybe a Unique that has a chance to turn meteorites into meteors.
i liked your reply. my only concern is the already stacked rings that sorc has. making it a focus would free up the ring slot for blue rose to work properly maybe? or an amulet, since fractured winterglass seems to dominate that slot.
A revised post devouring blaze nerf amulet to enable elemental specialization builds
Amulet of Elemental Destruction
Implicit: 30% all resists
% Int
(+) ranks to glass cannon
(+) ranks to evocation
(+) ranks to elemental dominance
Legendary Power: When you have at least 4 skills of the same element on your active bar you deal 4%-8%(x) increased damage of that element type per active skill of that element Max 20%-40%(x)
hmm may have to tweak something to make it not work with Talrasha as one of the main points of this item would be to free specialization builds from Talrasha.
I kept it to 4 thinking you’d want to allow for ice armor, flame shield and Teleport but i wasn’t thinking about talrasha now working off a cast of an element type vs dmg.
This would clearly be way op if it was able to be used together with Talrasha.
Maybe:
When you have 4 active skills of one element casting a spell of that element increases your damage with that element type by 1%-2% per active skill up to 10% for 5 seconds. this effect can stack up to 5 times. Casting another skill of this type refreshes all stacks. casting a skill of another element type removes all stacks
Apocalyptic chaos off hand.
multiple unique off hand … one for each element (shown below).
Or one mythic to combine all.
…
(This could also just be a new ultimate that harnesses and masters each element… which seems more logical for me)
(If its a new ultimate) then the ult casts one the following below. (Ult branche choices could then select the different elements of skill to master)… also if its an ult then you could add a mythic that makes all happen at the same time):
Fire:
Upon cast:
Player gains a 6 sec flame shield.
A massive apocalypse of fire ignites spawning 3x ultimate flame dragon serpents that roam around the battlefield spewing a lingering trail of incenerate. Also, a giant meteor crashes and shatters into 3x normal sized meteors, …
Each normal sized meteor spawns 3x firebolts that seek out enemies, 1x hydra and 1x flame familiars, also 1x firewall as volcanic eruptions that each hurl 3x fireballs in the area.
(This lasts for 6 sec and all enemies burn on screen. After burning for 3 sec it sets ablaze everything making fire dmg and burning dmg do 50x over duration).
(Of course any synergies with abilities and aspects etc are applied as well).
Ice:
Upon cast:
Player gains a 6 sec ice armor.
Apocalypse of ice overtakes everything as a giant deep freeze iceberg ultimate takes over the entire screen chilling enemies. A massive blizzard takes over screen additionally raining frostbolts, ice shards, and frozen orbs over 6 sec. 3x ice blades spawn, 3x frost familars spawn.
At initial cast, and each sec afterwards… A Frost nova explodes around player flash freezing enemies for 0.5 sec which erupts for additional area dmg equal to dmg taken while frozen.
(Lasts for 6 sec. After 3 sec of chilling, frostbite overtakes all enemies freezing them for 3 sec making ice spikes appear all over the place. cold and frozen dmg increased by 50x over duration)
(Of course any synergies with abilities and aspects etc are applied as well).
Lightning:
Upon cast:
Player can teleport around when using evade.
Apocalypse of thunder appears spawning a massive thunderstorm of destruction shocking and dmg enemies over time. Unstable currents is unleashed as a giant shock tornadoes that swirls around tearing up the battlefield.
…
Each second it unleashes 3x charged bolts, 3x sparks, 3x arc lashes swirls, 3x chain lightnings, yhat seek out enemies. It also releases 3x lightning spears, 3x lightning familiars, 3x swirling ball lightnings for the entire duration.
(Lasts for 6 sec. After 3 sec of shocking over time an electeomagnetic field spawns around shocknado pulling in nearby enemies while stunning them. shock dmg increases by 50x over duration)
(Of course any synergies with abilities and aspects etc are applied as well).