TLDR: Sorc class is designed around CC, and stagger mechanics combined with low %x damage vs CC mean sorc boss DPS is bad. Solution is eliminating diminishing returns on stagger bars AND increasing our available %x damage bonuses vs CC.
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Sorc as a class is designed around crowd control. Our frost skills apply chill which leads to freeze, lightning skills are geared towards stunning, fire skills generally immobilize, and a lot of our paragon tree and legendary affixes contribute either %+ damage or %x damage vs CC’d enemies.
I actually think this is a really neat class design because it’s different from the other classes which generally focus more on just doing damage. It makes the class feel unique. However, it’s making the class feel weak, too.
These mechanics work great against hordes of monsters as all of the CC applies quickly and because those monsters have reasonable HP. However, bosses are incredibly punishing. After the 3rd stagger, bosses may as well not be staggerable due to how much “hp” the stagger bar has. Stagger 4 requires something like 10x or more the amount that Stagger 3 required.
We can see that sorc is struggling hard in the pit. I haven’t followed druid, but barbs, necros, and even rogue have been clearing pit100+. Meanwhile, sorc is only reaching up to ~70s without uber uniques or 80s with uber uniques (data on sanctuary discord). This all comes down to sorc boss damage being very low in comparison.
I think the sorc class can be similarly capable to others with some minor tweaks.
- Eliminate diminishing returns on boss stagger. Maybe it can gradually become more difficult, but CC-oriented classes or builds need to be able to reliably stagger to do damage. The current stagger mechanic does nothing against classes that don’t need CC to do damage, and it’s extremely punishing for sorc which needs stagger to do damage.
- Increase values for %x damage vs CC’d monsters, or make them double/triple dip as they did in pre-season. Even with stagger, our boss damage is a bit low compared to other classes. Increasing these multipliers would go a long way for balancing our damage similarly to other classes.
In hindsight, sorc boss damage was actually pretty balanced in pre-season when Aspect of Control was triple dipping. We didn’t do any damage outside of stagger, but then stagger phase we would catch up. Maybe it was a bit too strong during stagger at that time, but the pendulum has swung the other direction now and it’s too little damage.
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If those dimwits at the dev team had two brain cells to rub together, they’d buff the sorcerer already.
Not buffing it just shows they’re a bunch of brainless 
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What kind of sadistic design choice is this sorc mess? It makes no damn sense.
Other classes breeze through with one-shot abilities, while us sorcerers have to spam skills 98789754645613 times to down a boss.
My fingers are about to fall off from this excessive button mashing torture.
The devs better get their heads out of their asses and fix this sorc dumpster fire, or they’ll have an entire class revolt on their hands.
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Listen up, you incompetent baboons! So you’re telling me there’s only one measly “buff team” while two whole teams get to run wild nerfing everything into the ground? Utterly ridiculous!
By the time that single braindead “buff team” gets around to the sorcerer in Season 7, we’ll all be grey-haired grandpas still spamming abilities into oblivion. My great-grandkids will be asking “Grandpa, why are your fingers bent intonaruto hand signs?”
This whole one buff team, two nerf teams setup is an insult. It’s like you’re deliberately making sorcerers suffer through multiple bloodline generations before addressing the issue.
Get your priorities straight and quadruple the size of the buff team, you donkeys! Redistribute some of those nerfers to give sorcerers the love they deserve. Otherwise, I’ll be leading a sorcerer union strike - we’ll all just stand in town spamming frozen orb until youfix this goddddddamn travesty.
Mark my words, if sorcerers don’t get massive buffs by next week, there will be chaos and anarchy! We’re talking Frost Nova spam levels of mayhem! You have been warned…
Rather than fixing the numbers, sorc actually has a fundamental problem / limitation with how their effects are designed to work (or not work) together.
I’ve brought it up many times and even made a video on it but the main reason why sorc builds suck is the word ‘cast’. It’s used everywhere from aspects, enchantments, paragon, unique, skills, passives, and dictates whether sorc has any synergy and yet blizzard can’t write consistent tooltips. Blizzard seems to have 3 groups of people working there, one that think self casting matters, one that doesn’t, and one that doesn’t know the difference (this is how we get fractured winter glass nerf at season launch, as well as the static surge nerf in season 3). if you read the patch notes / dev notes, they specifically called out the word ‘cast’. In season 4, now we have ‘cast twice’, but these are not casts either. Bug? Tooltip issue? or neither? Who knows. Blizzard doesn’t.
If blizzard fixed this, sorc would be way more interesting and creative revolving around proc chains and triggers and I’m sure strong builds would come out of it, e.g. 'cast twice 'working with unstable currents would be fun, but nope, doesn’t work.
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Ah thanks for bringing that up. Not much to add to what you’ve said; I agree with all of it. The proc chain stuff is what I was imagining we’d be doing based on reading tooltips back in beta, and it would make all of the low numbers seem a bit more reasonable if we were actually triggering large chains of spells.
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Im lvl 100 with good gear(not perfect) and level 21 max glyphs. I am struggling to clear 60+ while everyone else on my friends list can do 90+…
Im sitting here trying to figure out what I am doing diffrent/wrong. The problem happened when I made a sorc over literally any other class. Four season in and sorc is still trash over and over again. Blizzard what are you thinking?
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If I worked for blizzard I would
- Do an extensive cleanup of each skill, aspect, passive, enchantment, unique, and paragon and decide what is / what is not a ‘cast’, and fix their tooltips. This includes the new ‘cast twice’ affix, so that going forward, it’s clear what will or will not work together when theory crafting builds.
- Either significantly buff the underused stuff that requires self-casting, or remove the self casting restriction and lower their proc rate if necessary. For example, they could have done this for fractured winter glass. Instead they did both, making it proc less, and require self casting, completely gutting the fun part of the build.
- Fix all the other stupid sorc stuff I can think of
- cooldown reduction being bad for ice blades enchantment
- hydra burning upgrade not having any lucky hit
- fire bolt enchantment
- shocking impact passive
- buff the bad enchantments / proc rates, especially for DoTs which have effective stack limits for lucky hits. 10x DoT stacks does not mean 10x more lucky hit chance than 1 DoT.
- crackling energy needs rework
- it’s not fair that sorc legendary paragon nodes have damage limits e.g. 30% x, while the other classes do not.
dont forget that we dont get to use 4 weapons like barb can (TWO EXTRA TWO HANDER +100 % MOD WEAPONS)
and silly we cant use 3 enchantment slots when all other classes get 3-6 perks for class stuff
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