Disclaimer: I play HC, so this might not have the same value in SC
When I first saw this item in the patch notes, my first thought was also trash. Like everyone else, I thoroughly enjoyed the Oculus will TP you right back to character select / PoE2 / BG3 memes lol. But in HC, you get to experiment a bit more since you need to think about survivability more, and so I decided to use Oculus for that purpose… and the result was MUCH better than I thought.
With 7 evade charges that constantly refresh in combat, 30% unconditional DR every time you evade, and a barrier every time you evade, plus another 10% (soon to be 15) DR from Reinforced Glyph, and Oculus ends up giving an insane amount of basically permanent toughness. Combine this with any build that doesn’t require precise aiming (eg Blizz, Hydra, CL, Firewall) and you can basically permanently evade + cast + evade + cast over and over in combat. The teleport animation also lets you dodge plenty of things, from boss swings to ground aoes. Is there a chance you’ll TP into another ground aoe? Yes… but in practice, I usually have more than enough time to evade again before it goes off, the animation is insanely fast.
So, in terms of combat utility, there is definitely something there for people who’d like to get a bit more toughness, PLUS it’s actually kind of a super fun playstyle lol. TPing around constantly spamming abilities watching enemies scatter to chase you or constantly be yoinked around with raiment has a certain pleasure to it.
Well, what’s the issue then you might ask? The main thing that I’ve found where this weapon is frustrating is QoL. Not being able to evade to speed up running presents numerous issues:
- For starters, being able to evade while running around is a simple pleasure that dates back to people who constantly jumped while running in WoW. It’s just almost a necessity to keep the ADHD at bay lol.
- Then there’s any kind of group play, whether its helltides, legion events, or dungeons. You’re constantly lagging behind because you cannot evade to speed up movement. Any kind of speed based content in the game (ie pretty much THE ENTIRE GAME outside of NM pushing) gets a severe QoL loss when using Occy.
So… what to do? IMHO, the item isn’t powerful enough to even warrant a “Kiss-Curse” condition (outside of maybe pvp but I don’t think Blizz balances around that). If it absolutely has to have one, maybe do something else, like it teleports you in the direction you pick but at a random location within a 30 degree arc in that direction. Or… maybe after evading you are slowed for 1 second or something. The point is, the item is already a TREMENDOUS dps loss compared to normal wands (speaking of which, I saw they’ve been replacing trash affixes on uniques for other classes, Oculus could certainly use Vuln Dmg or Crit Dmg instead of LH: Resource Blizz…), there’s no need to add another penalty.
As for my fellow HC sorcs (all 7 of us!), try it out! You’ll be surprised how nice it feels for toughness.