So done with this

Sorcerer
1

Made this thread recently, wasn’t aware of ‘us.’ division (and wondered why ‘eu.’ is dead) and that necros actually hit way harder than that.

Anyway. Aside from Sorcerer needing a HUGE buff all across the board, Meteor needs some hefty extra.
Regular, i.e. non-Starfall Coronet meteor has been a joke all the way up until I very luckily found a starfall shortly after I hit WT4 in a random NM dungeon.
For all of its drawbacks: small size, hit delay, huge mana cost, as well as for being a mastery skill, it deals so little damage. The only silver lining is that it can proc X’fal eruption, which you very likely won’t find until finishing campaign and even then will require decent lucky hit.

Masterworked my Starfall Coronet Meteor sorcerer to 8-9.
I am at 17,5k attack power, before all the multipliers from tal rasha, paragon glyphs and other situational multipliers are applied.
My meteor has 16 levels, 96% crit chance and 100% crit chance against bosses. I crit up to 1.5m and 2m with Meteor and Xfal, not sure which one is which.
I can clear 61 occasionally. Can’t do anything at 100 bar killing the trashiest of mob and fall behind the timer. I assume I’m not in the worst spot as sorcerers go, but far from best.
The real revelation to me was the cooldown reduction. The numbers didn’t seem to add up, but I only recently did I properly counting and turns out the cdr doesn’t simply stack, but work through a specific formula. I was thinking at masterwork level 8 with all first cdr crits secured, I’d hit ~60% cdr and close to 70% with fully upgraded. But no, it’s only 46% right now.

What I want to say is that I could possibly squeeze a little more and probably get virutally 100% flame shield active time (right now it’s 1-2 seconds offline against bosses), but the other CDR reliant skill - Meteor, would still have more than 3 seconds cooldown (right now it’s 3.3) and even with stacking ice blades it’s slower than you’d want from it and thus crippling the DPS.

Overall, Meteor is painstakingly difficult to make half-decent, especially with its ricidulous 6-12 cooldown range (the one I found was pre season 4, so I spent a month trying to get the non legacy 6s coronet and still couldn’t on my own, ended up trading mats for it with some guy), but even when you get it and after after spending SO MUCH extra effort on it, it’s still rather luckluster. Even the visuals, while great at first glace, look not as great when the gigantic meteor keep raining down but only chipping with small damage, not to mention they make it very hard to see what’s going on even with shaking turned off and reduced flash frequency. Increasing the size of the cursor and turning it green while giving yourself a blueish outline somewhat helps, but all in all, even the aesthetics can be a hindrance.

Now, turning meteor into a cooldown based skill gives you a slight playroom for stacking crit chance or filling the skill panel exclusively with cd skills, but in general, starfall Meteor has way too little synergy and interactions, let alone a regular one.
I can’t think/invent of good interactions to fix it right off the bat, but a base minumum fix could look something like that:

-Damage seriously increased (more compared to most other skills)
-The falling speed upgrade becomes innate, maybe even scales with level
-The 30% chance to drop another meteor when it hits 3+ targets now work against single bosses and elites as well
-Base size increased
-Meteorites from aspect of shattered stars become innate and scale with meteor levels. If used against bosses, all three will homing attack the boss.
-Cooldown range of Starfall Coronet changed to 3-6 seconds
-Lucky hit effect of Meteor enchantment buffed from 8% to 15-20%
I’m not saying Meteor is the only skill that needs extra buffs and interactions, e.g. firewall could use it too, but I’m simply speaking from my experience. What I mean is if we take good stuff like Frozen Orb or Blizzard, they could simply use basic, albeit huge, damage buff. While Meteor, firewall and possibly some other would need huge damage buff, then extra damage buff, then some additional stuff like mentioned above as well as new interactions and synergies.

And maybe make Ice Blades enchantment account for the basic cooldown of skills, not reduced ones.

3 Likes
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yeah i’v been running meteor with my sorc and i can confirm, Pit 61. I’v tried all kinds of swapping for different interactions but it does way to little damage for the compromises that must be made to even use it. It’s kinda likely a slightly stronger basic skill with costly requirements, and it has little to no real big synergies to push anything further than what it is.

Can confirm, 1-3M damage crits, Rotated a bunch of stuff around. Sacrifising CDR for slower meteor casts can manage 2-5m crits using a staff. But other than that. It’s pretty bad.

2 Likes
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Sounds about right. I did meteor last season and it was fun but I didn’t care for the season much so didn’t stick around long. THIS season (thinking about the Pit, in particular) I can’t imagine trying to do a meteor build. It just does not jive with the higher content of this season.

I really don’t like the trend of: new season–make a few builds viable(for sorc, anyway) and let the others fall dead along the way.

Chain lightning is horrific this season as well.

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I’ve never understood why base meteor damage is so low, plus there is the flame shield upgrade that guarantees a crit, what skill was this meant for? Sorc doesn’t even have a skill that hits hard where it makes sense. I’m using meteor purely as a cooldown for barriers and stagger for a pure fire sorc. Plus the enchantment at 8% is way too low for how small the damage is. Really like the playstyle of all fire skills but Warmth doesn’t heal enough, Inferno and Hydra do no damage other than apply a source of burn for 2% each…which leads me to the key passive being way undertuned.

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Either Meteor’s damage is bugged, or its tooltip is. Considering just how wet noodle-y it is, I lean towards it being the damage.

If you look at the tooltip, you’ll notice that there is a huge discrepancy between the direct damage and the DoT numbers, which mathematically makes no sense when you take into account the percentages each component is supposed to be. Then if you actually test the direct damage it turns out to be far lower than the tooltip says it is (the DoT component appears to be correct). X’Fal’s explosions actually outperform Meteor by a considerable margin.

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Tooltip numbers seem like a total mess to me, but X’fal has a base damage of 40k, while my meteor has 3064 (avg) * 200%=6128, so it makes sense meteor would do less. Even assumming intelligence doesn’t affect X’fal’s eruption damage, it would still be 6128*2,9=17771 for meteor and 40k for xfal.
The actual difference won’t be that big because of some passives applying to meteor and not applying to eruption, as well as having 343% mastery damage bonus, but I can see why eruption deals more damage.

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My own experience playing a meteor sorcerer has been exactly as you describe, almost word for word in fact. It simply isn’t a viable build for the Pit just like virtually all but a handful of builds. And it’s not just sorcerers who are in that boat either, it’s just that on top of everything else sorcerer single target boss damage is a joke. Most classes only have 2 or 3 builds that can consistently handle the Pit past 50. The Pit basically destroyed build diversity in the game and, frankly, killed the entire game for me.

Even if the game wasn’t currently riddled with bugs, performance problems and generally unstable because they can’t get a handle on the Nvidia frame generation issues that have been wreaking havoc on the game for weeks now, I still wouldn’t be playing it. And I sure as all hell won’t throw more good money after bad to preorder what will no doubt be a jank expansion just like everything else about D4 has been so far. They have given me absolutely no reason to expect anything better from them.

D4 has been an unmitigated disaster by any measure!

1 Like
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I think it does, ill test more later and come back with result

I also think main issue with meteor outside damage is that the helmet is amazing and terrible. Spammable meteor? Terrible. Debuff/preliminary dot meteor? Cooldown doesnt need anywhere that low.

Same with the extra meteors: falls around target, not right on top of.

If meteors damage is not to be touched, the helm needs to turbocharge the enchant. Somethink like:

Target is marked for destruction by the celestial will. 15% proc chance of enchant to fire (up from 8). Meteor enchant fires 5 times upon singular proc over 2.5 sec (same tic rate as burn). Multiple stacks can be on one enemy.

High lucky hit/fire rate ice shards as main spam, enchant meteor.

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It’s funny because it’s true and no idea why more content creators aren’t saying anything. Remove the S tier builds and all of a sudden sorc FO, dust devil, werenado are the strongest builds. Core skills are left behind in the dust due to bugged interactions and the Pit is balanced around having bugged damage. Rob was super excited about meteor sorc in PTR then they adjusted the Pit.

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Ok, actually, excluding Searing Heat that isn’t reflected in the tooltip and Elemental Dominance that isn’t relfected either, the tooltip is correct.
The calcs show 172677 and the tooltip shows 172699 as min damage from the meteor’s damage range.

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ok theres a lot to go over here, but ill start with the most important your cdr is weird im still leveling my gear after completly rebuilding and my cdr is at 55% with a straight shot to 60+%, so im not sure why your’s is lower. the only thing i can think of is i got very lucky and one of my buddies got a neckace with maxed cdr and gave it to me, at rank 8 its currently 18.5% all on its own and its only an 867 gs (it dropped while he was lvling. my crits are in the same range as yours and all of my armour is only rank 4 right now iv been very picky about were the rank 4 upgrade go’s and have spent millions resetting to get everything exactly were i want. the one thing in my opinion thats baddly hurting us is allot of are damage bonuses ie damage to burning, freeze and the like dos’nt count on bosses unless there stagered and with all the one shot kill movement mechanics its very easy to miss crucial dps iv been trying to work up a work around using the paragon board but it’s abit early to say how its going as iv still alot of upgrading todo. the only thing i can say is my damage numbers are in the same range as ops with only my jewelry at rank 8 everything else at rank 4-6. worth noting im am running a tweaked build i originally made back in season 1, that uses the frost bolt enchantment (adds chill damage to all skills) with + 3 ranks to horefrost on my neck giving me 6 ranks worth 38% extra damage to frozen / stagered. ps buffing lucky hit stats is only worth doing if your bonus lucky hit stat is low mines around 50% mark meaning i lucky hit all the time with no need to buff the enchantments. tho i do agrea on one point especially its very hard to see whats going on when meteors are droping almost every second, iv died a ton of times just cos some fire/poisen enchanted elite is in the middle of a pack and i have’nt seen it die and having it blow up in my face.

12

Does your gear have greater affixeson cdr? Are you on seasonal or eternal?

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Waste of time guys, my Forb sorc went to the shelve 2 weeks ago after I started farming 100pit speeds on my necro with no masterworks and no optimized gear.

Just let it go the sorc is trash at everything.

1 Like