I though that Blizzard would learn from D2 and D3 ( I mostly played D3), as far as caster skills that are well designed and fun to use.
But no here we are again with skills no one liked in previous Diablo games like “charged bolts”.
Charged Bolts: No one likes this skill. No ones liked it in D3, no one likes it in D4. No matter if they buff it to do 10x the damage it does now. RNG type projectiles, short ranged, etc.
Ice Blades: another badly designed skill. The “look” and animation of the skill is also ugly and non impressive. How did anyone think this skill looked good? When they could have had a cool ghost like familiar with a cool sword, we get a unimpressive , small thing on the screen that would fit into D2 type graphics.
Fireball: Not too bad but very small projectile for a core skill that looks like a basic skill. The only decent thing about this skill is the enchantment.
Meteor: Is again too small and too slow (to fall) to be useful in anything other than maybe the enhancement.
They could have brought back the familiar skill and improve it from D3, BLACK HOLE , Disinigrate, Arcane Torrent, from D3, etc. The better popular skills were left behind and charged bolts was brought in , when everyone ignored that skill in D3 and in D4 its still bad regardless of the damage it does.
Honestly, it’s not just the badly designed skills. The lack of interesting uniques that combine or amplify skills like the other classes has is seriously concerning for sorcs going forward. It is an easy opportunity for growth, but the class seriously lacks the creativity the other classes seem to have right now. I certainly will not be rolling a sorc again in season 1.
I agree. Besides a few skill that are bad and useless pretty much , this sums up what could have been:
Sorc was fun and good in the beta. Then streamers like Asmongold started crying about the sorc because he wanted the barb buffed.
Basing a characters powerlevel off of a level 25 is dumb.
In the beta every Sorc build was fun and viable. Fire, Lightning, and ice were all viable. Even a mix of all them was viable. That is a sign of good design and powerlevel.
Then it was all taken away because of a few streamers crying that the barb and druid weren’t viable at level 25 lol. Instead of just buffing those classes and leaving the “fun” classes alone.
Now we are left with the same boring nonsense like in D3 that 1 build is viable and the rest are trash. So everyone goes that 1 build and there is no originality of build diversity and you have a million ice shard Sorcs running around.
EDIT:
Even in the early alphas the Sorc had 3 enchantment slots and that was also taken away.
Here is proof…
h ttps://i.ibb.co/rk25MfN/1071449.jpg
Exactly my point. Someone at the Diablo dev team must love that skill that everyone else hates or just ignores completely.
The worst part is that they keep trying to force you to use it with continuous buffs and legendary items for it. Yet they dont understand the power level of the skill isnt the issue. Its the design and how it works that is bad.
Charged bolt was kinda cool in D2 because of how every point added more bolts. The small number of bolts is what sucks. It’s popular in POE as well because of how you can build it out to have a lot of projectiles and they zip around everywhere.
I’ve found the unique staff for charged bolts maybe 8-9 times and every time I am left thinking why would I waste 1/3 of my offensive aspect slots to do 30-40% less damage with a garbage skill?
The lack of runes on skills is killing it for me. Wheres the ice, arcan, lightning, blazing, and Mammoth hydras? No fire blizzard. OP is right about the skills looking underwhelming too, so many look lame as hell. Fire Emblem on the GBA had cooler looking spells. Only good one visually is the fire serpent.
It is enjoyable if you get the aspect which makes it last 300% longer and seek. Probably more fun if you add in piercing. Not sure if it has any real potential for climbing tiers though.
You can improve it to make it fall instantly, you can slow/freeze targets so they do not move away from where the meteor falls, and the Adept Glyph gives it 20% larger area of effect (nevermind the legendary aspects which add meteorites).
But yeah, it takes work you would not necessarily have to put into the meta skills.
I agree with this actually. The one thing I never understood is when you have NOVA… they bring back charged bolt… ? Charged bolt should probably be a flipping basic attack
Anyhow, it does cause a nova with the passive behind it, but why not just… have it fire bolts in all directions. The range is so short, no one would notice.
The Staff and Aspect for it are awful. Like most sorc uniques, the dmg loss for using a non-customizable 2 handed weapon is never worth it on any day of the week.
it’s a short range spell so the last thing I think is, “Hey I really wish this would pierce this row of guys and hit the nothingness behind it and disappear 0.5 seconds later”
But I will tell you this, the use of this skill is teleporting on top of something and making it eat all 5 bolts at once. +40% crit chance when 100+ mana combined with 30% dmg buff from the basic aspect = stronger crits than you’d think (50-75k times 5) I’m not even main spec for bolts but if I were I’m pretty confident these things could hit for 500k+ on a stunned mob
So the theme of D4 so far is, play the way we want you to… CB is a powerful example of that.
definitely not. the staff is terrible, unfortunately.
You’d be surprised how often piercing never applies. Even if you used the aspect with it to 1/4 of the time be attracted to enemies and last 4x as long… so it manages to just barely get off screen… yay
It’s a shame because the idea of piercing charged bolts has such potential. Spamming novas out of a pack, even more bolts shredding their way out of packs when you stun with the passive.
Or we could just run a staff with 4 useful stats and an aspect to give charged bolts 80% more crit chance so that they actually proc the stuns. Or a wand/focus for the lucky hit and cdr that every sorc build seems to need, as well as 2 useful aspects.
I’m actually unsure if i would use the unique staff if it were changed to 30-40% more damage.
If it gets you multiple Lightning Novas, perhaps. But that is only going to be meaningful on trash, and trash which is near other trash. Waitaminute…the Teleport, suck them together bit might work with that.
The 40% - 30% less Charged Bolt damage as you said.
Its affixes are +lightning damage, +damage to close, +damage to injured, lucky hit restore mana. Those 3 damage affixes all belong in the same additive damage bucket. Would it killed them to have crit damage on the element spec that has the most crit based passives?
It’s a Staff. My personal issue with weapon uniques is weapons are highest source of damage out of any single piece of equipment. So not only do you need to find a Unique weapon, you need to find it at Item Power 800+. Rocking an item power 740 staff is asking to get yourself killed at lvl 75+.
Nova? Nah, screw that. Thunderstorm? Nope. Neutered versions of Meteor, Blizzard, Frozen Orb, Chain Lightning, and even Charged Bolt though? Yeah lets gooo!
Even compared to D2, Charged Bolt is a massively nerfed spell. At least there they travel to the edge of the screen and you fire like 20 at once.
I don’t understand how they keep bringing back things like Inferno (Incinerate in D4, but please, it’s just Inferno) and Firewall either, on the subject of bad returning spells. Firewall performs but my God does it feel bad to use. It’s felt clunky and dated as early as D2, only really working in D1 because of how slow everything moves.
Agreed. The shape of it is also bad.
It could have been I large circle like the Necro curse skills. Would make it easier to place, use and for monsters to not easily walk out of it. Making it a long narrow rectangle is I limiting factor.
The only way to make it semi-useful is to spam like 10 of them in a row when you have max stats and the perfect gear and Paragon board skills to make it all happen.
From the cosmetics to the skillset design these devs are lost on what players want. I mean even the Barbs Wrath of the Berserker looks stupid. None of these capstone/ultimate abilities look cool at all.