Please don't unfix Starlight quite so hard (#SaveGarm)

Sorcerer
1

In Season 4, Starlight was fixed to work with overhealing, and not long after that, Garm was born.

Garm realised that Hydra and Life Per Hit were an excellent source of healing - and with the newly functional Starlight, an excellent source of mana.

So Garm patiently put together a new build, stacking life per hit everywhere she could, tempering for extra Hydra heads, and eschewing +Max Life, all to keep the mana flowing.

Then Garm saw the patch notes for Season 5, and realised that her time in Sanctuary was drawing to an end. She had been gamely struggling with T5 Hordes, but the incoming tenfold reduction in DPS would put an end to all that.

Why, she thought to herself, why was Blizzard doing this? The problem with overpowered builds wasn’t Starlight, it was the overpowered Life Per Hit on Andariel’s Visage.

Lacking Andariel, even stacking LPH on every piece of gear she could and +healing recieved on the rest, Garm could only reach about 170LPH while sacrificing numerous potential damage affixes. And she had to wear Endurant Faith for survivability, costing her an offensive aspect.

Andariel’s Visage is the broken item here. 430 life per hit means you can comfortably stack max life and still get constant procs of Starlight. It’s so much that you don’t need Serpentine Aspect, or tempers devoted to Hydra heads, or Hydra at all to achieve constant mana flow.

So please, for Garm’s sake, don’t choke off an entire category of high-mana-throughput builds by unfixing Starlight. Fix Andariel. Without that 430LPH in the mix, the tradeoffs needed to achieve high mana throughput are easily enough to bring builds down to earth.

2

try getting the mythic ring, it makes you have unlimited mana… nothing needed… just the ring and your in

3

They are using overpower/banished lords i believe, so that might still work but it slows the rate of proc by cost reduction.

4

that wont matter much in season 6, i saw a aspect or maybe it was a runeword that spends ALL your mana for 100 % multi on next attack, combo with banished lord…

and im confused about the explanation. so they want to heal a billion and cant now ??? im lost reading this original post.

what about the stacking “+warmth” and using starlight aspect. and also termanity to get barrier also ?

5

That could work; im not super familiar with op builds so someone with experience would have a better idea. I should go look at patch notes; are they up?

Would be my recommendation.

1 Like
6

notes are up, and its more “WHY did you do that?” stuff added to sorc…

sorc should just be “summoner” going forward…

1 Like
7

Its always ‘why’ for me lol ty.

8

and im confused about the explanation. so they want to heal a billion and cant now ??? im lost reading this original post.

No; that’s not it. I’ll try again :slight_smile:

In Seasons 1-3, Starlight aspect (which turns every 20% healing into 40 resource) didn’t proc at all if you were at full health (which is pretty much all the time if you have a barrier).

So it was pretty okay while levelling: you could charge into a pack, take a few hits, Life-Per-Hit would keep you alive, and you’d get some mana to spend. And it only worked if you didn’t stack +max life, because Life Per Hit isn’t a percentage.

But once you got to the later game, where charging into a pack with a small life pool and no barrier is suicide, Starlight Aspect became completely useless. It never procced.

Enter Season 4, where in the patch notes Blizzard announced a fix so that Starlight would proc off all healing received including overhealing.

This change made Starlight viable to construct a late-game build around. There were still a lot of tradeoffs (you had to devote a lot of affixes to life per hit, and Temerity and/or Endurant Faith was mandatory), but if you pushed it to the limit you could generate and burn maybe 250-300 mana per second, allowing you to spam Core spells at +100% attack speed even with Crown of Lucion equipped (100 mana per shot at max stacks)

In Season 5, they’re essentially un-fixing Starlight, nerfing it down to 40 mana for each 200% overhealing instead of 20%. A tenfold nerf. So once again, it’ll be a complete waste of an aspect slot in the lategame.

It won’t make any difference. Stacking warmth or life per hit - the problem is that, in S5, Starlight aspect will proc one tenth as often as it does now if you have a barrier or are at full health. So even with my build that’s fully optimised around generating %health as rapidly as possible, I’ll be getting 40 mana… about once every three seconds. Totally pointless.

It’s actually worse than a tenfold nerf, because the rest of the build is based around rapid mana consumption (hydra enchant) and Elementalist’s Aspect (40% Crit chance boost when casting at or above 100 mana). Since neither of those will be true any more, I’m looking at having maybe 5% of the DPS in S5 that I had in S4 - and it’s not like I was romping through T8 Hordes. T5 was about the limit.

So why nerf it so hard?

9

Fun detected, SHUT IT DOWN. More worthless aspects YAY!

1 Like
10

ok i get it… not every aspect is a hundred percent win.

S0 and S1 had the “use a cooldown to get mana” aspect and such and if you where a unstable currents with crack lightning reducing cooldowns to a second or two it worked well, theres like 8-9 mana generation aspects nowadays if you look at your codex.

just cause they “reduce” one aspect doesnt mean its still not obtainable.

the mythic mana ring does work with lucy helm i thought ?? and it is the ultimate in unlimited mana regen.

apsects of dark dance would be OP if it didnt have the 5 second internal cooldown

elemental acuity is super OP but has a mini ramp effect

aspect of umbral has a “soft limit” due to targets

voracious rage has a low % return and required kill so late game pits its obsolete

incendiary might work i havent tested this, but does it proc with burn ticks ??? that would be a unlimited mana loophole if burn ticks can proc it, you can get 100 % lucky hit with FoF triple MW’d

lucy helm at best is 75 % multi, very nice but conditional as heck, id rather use the godslayer and take a 60 % multi with easyer up time. or harlequin for all our armor for cap, and massive CD

11

But that’s exactly the point I’m trying to make!

If you take Andariel out of the equation, Starlight Aspect is something you have to lean the whole of your build into if you want to get the absolute most out of it. It’s not a free win button; you have to ditch max life, take Endurant Faith gloves (costing offensive affixes and aspects), stack Hydra tempers - it takes huge commitment.

And FOR that commitment, you get some benefits that Starless Skies doesn’t provide: you are ALWAYS casting at full mana, and you are BURNING through it, so enchantments and aspects that rely on full mana and mana consumption proc a lot. It’s a unique way to solve mana, and it’s not overpowered: I was just about coping with T5 hordes, and had hopes of pushing higher with masterworking and maybe a mythic.

The problem is Andariel’s Visage. The ludicrously high life-per-hit means that if you wear it, you get the full max benefit of Starlight with no effort or sacrifice.