There are some good points with regards to Sorc damage being too tied up in CCs.
Damage mitigation will be fixed at Season 2. People may not like that, but it’s better than a cheap hotfix for the SOLE purpose of keeping up with the Joneses.
The actual design of the skills is good and the build variety is rather massive, IF the damage scaling issues are fixed. People focused solely on pushing nightmare dungeons are missing the forest for the trees.
Honestly, if you guys stop obsessing over what other classes are doing, your choices for build variety explodes. Try having fun instead of stressing over how that one build on the other class is so much better.
ice spikes are not overtuned.
Devouring blaze is. and if you disagree you are delusional. that passive talent is so broken op that it forces every crit based caster into using it, regardless of element type.
also the uber lilith clear with that aspect was highly optimized around it AND heavy gearswaps during stagger to maximize dps.
A bonespear necro can do all of that dps easily without gearswap.
Let me rephase myself around blizzard and its aspect. If the skill points you put into a skill doesn’t noticeably affect the damage of the base skill + the aspect, then the aspect is more important than the base skill. I don’t think an aspect should outshine its base skill. Things like Corpse Tendril’s aspect is okay, because its giving you a buff that scales your skills. But the blizzard aspect is giving you a new source of damage that scales better than the base skill it is attached to. To me, thats just backwards.
I don’t mind blizzard + the aspect being as good as it is, I just would like for the bulk of the damage to be in blizzard and for the Ice spikes to be supplementary, not the other way around.
Do you mind posting what build you run and what level of content you clear? Have you played any other classes or even grouped with others in WT4 and higher NM dungeons? If you have tried grouping or playing other classes it becomes plainly clear that even a well geared sorc with full paragon boards can’t even compete with other classes with 40 less paragon points.
This post really nails it- anyone whose tried to take a sorc in anything beyond base III content will experience everything in the OP, following “meta” build or going off into the wild on their own- the class just doesn’t stack up to any of the other options. Anyone claiming otherwise either hasn’t tried a sorc at 70+, or hasn’t played the ezmode that all the other classes provide at 70+.
Can a sorc do a T40 NM relatively safely? Sure, all it takes is optimized gear, optimized build, and significant kiting/waiting for CDs! Can they do it 20 levels under the content like literally everyone else can? Not in my personal experience as a terrible noob whose only played diablo since 2001.
man I’ve got every char at 70+ except necro, and you often find the exact same things for each class. like, what do you think barb does? they run around waiting for shouts to come off cooldown. I find sorcerer to be easier at taking higher content because of all the CC they offer. Yeah I lean a lot on ice shards enchant, but I don’t really care because I think freezing stuff and watching them ricocheting off killing everything to be pretty fun.
there is little to add after the first bullet point, we are squishy since the very start, and at the end this is unbearable.
I think I played all classes, Sorcerer is by far the hardest and by far the weakest in almost every single aspect… and while I’m fine with it, what I’m not fine is not being able to pass NM 80+ with all possible defensives because anything and everything will one shot you because no matter what, we cannot reach the Armor number that is required.
PS: I’ve completed NM 97 switching to Flame Shield and cheesing my way with Blink Stun + Nova + Shards… as so I’m clear, I do not consider this a valid method of playing.
My main gripe (aside from the armor problem), and you describe it in your post but don’t really explicitly say it, is that Sorc is basically divided into 3 classes that don’t work well with each other and each have 1/3rd of a skill tree and 1/3rd of a paragon board.
The fire stuff only works with fire, the ice stuff only works with ice, the lightning stuff only works with lightning, and none of them really benefit much from the other. This is especially true with the paragon legendary nodes.
Other classes have skills and paragons that benefit them regardless of what build they play, and they can mix-and-match whatever they want to assist whatever skills they want to build around. Not Sorc.
And unfortunately, I think the problem may be too ingrained at this point to fix it without a complete 100% overhaul of all Sorc skills and paragons, which I don’t necessarily see Blizzard doing.
As someone who decided to make a pure pyro focus sorcerer to begin with, still using teleport because how not to do so, this is a great post beyond what I understand of the game.
I stopped leveling my sorcerer when reaching level 80 after seeing other characters doing stupid amount of damage and clear content it took me 5 times the same amount of time to clear with a fire build.
And no, I do not see the machine gun ice thingie as anything interesting to play (but that goes beyond that, so many builds are just boring, eh bone spirit).
I leveled 1 necromancer to 60 something and 1 rogue to 50 now.
The difference is just night and day in the damage output, my twisting blade rogue makes a mockery of sorcerer on both single and multi target damage.
Corpse explosion spam is a stronger dot than firewall with no resource cost beside corpses which there is no lack thereof.
The game was just released in an “unfinished but polished enough state” to escape the wrath of players bored with that … .
But balance simply does not exist within the game as it is.
I use Fire Bolt, Firewall, Hydra, Fireball, Snake Ult, and Ice Armor
Enchants - Fireball and Firewall
Rest is pretty much same as any other fire build, the 5 boards that make sense and the only 5 glyphs that make sense for fire, don’t even have the last one for more burn damage online yet.
Get as much armor as you can and crit D for the paragon ult. Rest is pretty straight forward, firewall, hydra, run around, fireball as a finisher or during ult for free fireballs. Bonus - if you have enough lucky hit and regen resource on lucky hit you can go nearly infinite with fireballs.
I’m not trying to say sorc is better than other classes, I’ve done enough group content and public legion events to know some classes have some broken stuff going on.
My argument is this idea that sorc is stuck into the one streamer spec that uses all 3 schools and 4 defensives. It’s actually insane. The metoo copy build meta that seems to have spread from classic wow is a cancer in gaming culture.
People should figure out how all the stuff works like paragon/glyphs/etc before they complain. Sure, maybe sorc struggles with 80+NM content, pretty sure all classes that aren’t cheesing do, that content is meant for Torment V most likely.
You’re crazy. I don’t play any “streamer spec,” and I haven’t looked at any builds online because I enjoy figuring out my own. I’m definitely playing non-meta builds.
Taking a minimum of 3 out of 4 defensive skills is a must. The survivability and damage is low compared to every other class. It’s a mess.
