Hey fellow Sorcs. I took a break right after mid of S3, the one with the spider pet lol. It’s mainly because I got bored of D4 and I had work to do.
I read the patch notes from 1.3.2+ to the latest and also read the notes for S4 and the upcoming S5. I had a chance to take a glimpse of the new expansion as well.
But what I’m interested here is an opinionated take on S5? Or should I just wait for the expansion? Has anything significant changed from S3? What did I miss besides what I have read from the patch notes.
For those who don’t know me, I’m nobody.
Edit Is Incinerate serious enough to be a contender against Blizzard-based builds or it’s still a joke. I think this is the crux of the question lol
Tomorrow is the camp fire chat, and probably after it they will release the full patch notes.
Keep in mind there are plenty of changes coming into season 5.
All the uniques are overhauled on top of general other changes that weren’t part of the PTR and changes base on the PTR feedback.
Just responded to you in another thread and then saw this so… to follow up:
A lot of sorc info was released outside of official notes/streams to content creators instead. I think this is the info you are missing.
They have shared that our legendary nodes in paragon are drastically changing and the caps are being taken off. A lot of our legendary aspects are being supercharged. Our unique items are being super-charged. Season 5 is the most hyped I have ever been in this game as a sorc player. It seems like they have FINALLY stopped treating us sorc players as garbage.
Burning Instinct cap is taken off? No longer at 80? The last update i saw was we went from 40 to 80, and that was last week from that barb unofficially page.
I believe the general consensus is that sorc class is still mediocre and still in last place. Just not as bad as the ptr notes.
My personal opinion is that we are the same, conisidering the defensive nerfs and little defensive upgrades
I SHOULD have said the ridiculous tiny caps were being improved. I don’t recall the details but I remember they are going to be much better than they were.
Yeah they made it sound like Sorcs were going to do way better because of unique changes and honestly most of them are lackluster, some worse than before, some barely touched. Some of them are better.
I think they’re almost all significantly improved, if not in ways quite as flashy as some of the items they leaked. And some, like the Staff of Endless Rage, are amazing now. Fireball is going to be a monster this season. They even buffed Tal’Rasha’s (which is definitely not what I expected, the stupid thing is even more mandatory now than it was).
lceheart Brais is honestly the only class unique that’s potentially a miss, but that was always kind of a niche item and still is. A few items that were bad before are better but probably still bad (looking at you Esadora’s). And a few more don’t really seem to be a whole lot better or worse, just different (Raiment, Flamescar).
I think Incinerate is probably A-tier but not S, though it’s hard to say for sure; they’re nerfing boss health so massively that I sort of suspect that every build that’s even a little bit thought out is going to romp all over everything. I’m actually not sure how I feel about that, TBH. I didn’t love feeling forced into a small handful of meta builds to be able to handle decently high pits and tormented bosses this season, but there ought to be at least a little challenge in the game; cutting boss health by 80% in WT4 seems likely to turn them into jokes unless you’re really far off the meta (like trying to make Crackling Energy work, or something).
They buffed Cackling energy all over the place, perhaps Esadora+Occulus will create a new build centers around tele stomp followed by picking cackling energy to erase the screen.
Combustion passive raised to +60% (from 20% or 40%) that is giant increase.
Meteor got use buff as well.
Charged bolts might be a playable build depends on how well the staff of Lam functions.
In general I think Blizzard got unique somewhat backward. First you need to have several builds, then add unique to further diversify the builds or create additional builds for the same skill base on a unique. Currently all builds that have a unique demands it.
Yeah I played around in my head with a Telestomp Crackling Energy build, but I don’t think it will be good (with the caveat that changes to boss health might make everything good, in the sense of being able to do all content). CE just doesn’t scale and I don’t think the new Esadora’s changes that - it’s just additive damage at the end of the day, and Ceaseless Conduit is now capped and wasn’t good even before that happened. But I could be wrong.
The Combustion buff looks good on paper but they capped Burning Instinct at 80%, so it’s basically a wash. Incinerate players were running BI up to 120%+ this season and Incinerate was still B-tier for end game. All buffing Combustion does is compensate a bit for the BI nerf. I expect Burn builds to continue to be sort of mediocre compared to everything else; Blizzard still hasn’t figured out how to make Burning damage scale reasonably. Incinerate is only (finally) playable
because they buffed it to silly levels, and it still can’t scale as well or as high as direct damage skills even though it’s now god tier for early and mid game.
Fireball will be very good, I think there’s a strong Hydra build out there, all the Shock skills should have good working builds, FO is better than ever, Blizzard is still strong (I think the Glacial nerf is more than made up for by changes to Blue Rose), Incinerate will be basically like it was this season but a bit stronger due to better base stat scaling. Firebolt will still be strong and Arc Lash is now also going to be ridiculous.
I agree Meteor is better than it was, but not enough better for me to be very excited about it. I think Meteor, Ice Shards and Firewall are going to be our weakest builds, and Frost Bolt still doesn’t have a viable build for itself. Firewall in particular is going to be bottom tier unless combined with Firebolt or Meteor. That said, even these three builds will be stronger than last season due to base stat scaling increases and the changes to our legendary paragon nodes. All our damage is up across the board, in some cases by a lot. We’re losing on the cooldowns and defensives, but remember that the S4 mid-season patch buffed all of our defensive passives so we should have more passive DR than we did going into S4; I suspect the new meta is going to see us move away from total dependence on barriers and related Aspects (Conceited, Storm Swell), see real damage increases despite that fact, and get us closer to being actual glass cannons instead of cooldown-dependent pseudo-tanks.
Reading the patch notes so far (ignoring the camp fire chats notes from today since I haven’t seen it), it seems it’s more of the same but the fact you are saying you are hyped, I feel I should try S5 then. I haven’t been following streamers since I stopped mid S3.
I’m really looking forward for Burn/Combustion builds to shine, but this comment kinda kills that excitement lol.
Thanks. I am back in the forums but not yet in game. Honestly I had more enjoyment interacting and reading forums
Our core skills alone are getting their damage buffed from 3 different sources, our legendary nodes are having their caps raised substantially, a lot of our legendary affixes have and are continuing to be buffed, our unique items are being overhauled for a lot more power, a lot of our skill passives have been and are continuing to be tweaked for more defense and power.
Since you didn’t play season 4, I should also add that some of the gear tempers do a LOT for certain builds and also enable entirely new builds. Before these new patch notes, they also raised some of our power a lil bit ago on top of all this new stuff.
If this isn’t all enough to hype you and you’re having fun playing other things, I understand. No game holds me forever. Season 5 is looking pretty good to me though, for sorc.
Yeah Burn is still just a bad mechanic at the end of the day. To be honest the best Burn build right now is probably Flameweaver gloves with Firebolt, and everything points to that still being true in S5 what with Shard of Verathiel getting thrown into the mix. Since you didn’t play S4 I’m guessing you haven’t tried that one out.
The only meaningful change thats a buff are those capped paragon getting their cap doubled, the minimal increase to skill literally does nothing for Sorc, also uniques are slightly better as many of them have INT now and Sorc scale 20% better with int.
New conjuration tempers might be interesting but both Hydra And Ice Blades have hard cap on number of summons so Lighting Spear is the only one you could scale well in thoery.
New unique pants were terrible in function on PTR dunno if they changed it.
Crackling Energy did no dmg before now they preemptivly capped the node as well so dbout it will do something now.
Frozen Orb will prolly do double the dmg, Meteor or Ice Spike build might do okay with the unique changes.
Andariels builds might also do very well as it got huge buffs and it was already doing solid in S4.
But most likely Basic Skills with the new unique Sword will be on top of Sorc builds
Pure Hydra will scale and be strong now because of the new extra head tempers. You can get up to 12 or 16 heads per hydra now, times three Hydras with Serpentine Aspect, doing basically double damage with the improved Summoned Hydra. Factor in the doubled caps on Searing Heat and Elemental Summoner and I think that build has serious potential.
Dont think so as number of Hydra heads doesnt give Conjuration Mastery stacks (atleast it didnt on PTR) which is the main multiplicative dmg of the build, so you get like 8-10 stacks at best 6 from Blades 2 from Hydras which are hard capped, while Lighting Spear was uncapped and with ulti you could get to 15-20 stacks quite easily
