Level 100 Sorcerer review:
I have played hundreds of hours of D4 and I’m a level 100 Sorcerer. I cannot get past Tier 50ish solo. Why? The sorcerer is too weak in terms of defenses and skill choices. I’m playing in parties with other players on tier 70-100 and everything 1 shots me. Meanwhile, my friends in the party who are rogues and barbs are standing in the middle of elite mob packs and resurrecting me and taking about 1-2% damage. Something is wrong here.
Upon further investigation there are some glaring issues:
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I’m forced to take almost every defensive skill on the sorcerer skill tree. That doesn’t leave a lot for interesting choices.
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Barriers are dependent on life and because sorcerer’s have so little life this forces you to use only Ruby’s in your armor and Skulls in your jewelry. This does not provoke interesting choices.
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The defensive paragon notes and glyphs: If you get everything single one of them you may be able to take 2-3 hits, but your damage will be too low to kill any mobs before their CC spells and affixes kill you. This also causes you to have to kite and run around constantly while your peers just steam role the content.
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I must use firebolt enchant slot with devouring blaze to do damage equal to my peers. Once again, this greatly limits my choices on skills and paragon boards.
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The all resist from INT points isn’t working. Anything that is poison or fire still 1 shots me while barbarians seem to handle that fine with STR because it also gives them armor which reduces all damage types.
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Resource generation is always a pain to mitigate with gear and reduces the number of spells you want to use. This forces players to have 1 or 2 spenders, with most players only taking 1 and the rest cooldowns. The resource generation skills are so low powered no one uses them at high levels. In many ways this limits what you can actually build for especially when you’re level 100.
Summary
Do I really want play Tier 100 tip toeing around the map with Flame shield enchant? No! I’d like to actually jump into the fray and enjoy my style my way. I was playing throughout the game a certain way, now I have to respect for almost 70% defensive capabilities? Blizz dev’s please pay attention to this, endgame sorc isn’t balanced with the other classes in terms of defenses and play style. If the game is about choices, make sure there are many viable ones, because at tier 70-100, its very limiting and not a fun class to play which is sad because I spent many hours trying to get to 100.
12 Likes
run def chest and boots, add healing gear, run heal from nearby burning, add more chill, a frozen enemy can’t kill you. add more DR nodes etc
run with a barb that uses heal aura/shout too, have someone use taunt skill etc.
at endgame your damage doesn’t matter anyway. most pro groups are running chill sorcs so you can add all the def gear you want. spread bliz and shard
our group is going to be two versions of ice sorcs, one off tank pbaoe sorc, and one at range, and probably a barb and a druid/necro.
Yeah I have to agree with everything said here. I’m level 98 and running with people around my level (necros, rogues, barbs) and everyone except me can run through tier 55+ and stomp everything out without dying. While I’m over here getting one shot by everything (ghosts, quill beasts, drifting shades, corpse bow) and it’s just down right not enjoyable at all. I feel bad because my teammates always have to double back to rez me and there is nothing I can do about it.
I have to completely change my build and not use Raiment (which is a staple for sorcs) and STILL I am dying ridiculously quickly. It’s just not fun and definitely not balanced. Blizzard devs PLEASE do something about this.
I’m currently playing without Teleport and Frost Nova. Probably could also drop Ice Armor. I’m farming T60 and done T75 without any problems at 94 char level. So it definitely possible to play without all defensive skills at non-trivial NM dungeon tiers, at least for some builds.
Rubies and +life on items do not increase your Ice Armor barrier amount (for that only base life value matters). They are beneficial only for things like Protection passive and Icefall legendary node.
You can get sizeable amounts of various dynamic defenses from paragon and still have good damage.
You can apply burn by other means, it’s just less convenient. It’s your choice between skill slot and enchant slot+comfort.
It’s working, it’s just that resistances are pretty weak at wt4.
But most “oh sh*t” sorc oneshots are from ranged physical units, probably.
Stacking reduction from distant works wonders. I have about 58% (14.5k hp and 5700 armor without bonus from Disobedience) and all those scary corpse bows do not oneshot me at T60.
And you still can do that. Just play at NM tier that you find most fun.
1 Like
Play your way is a D4 illusion and it’s personified by the Sorc class.
2 Likes
I don’t agree with everything stated (Ex. Barriers & Rubies) because I don’t think they work that way, however, the Sorc does seem to lack the opportunity for survivability+Decent DPS. If you want to build DPS you can but you will likely get one shot over 50 Nightmares. If you want to build with crowd control you can but you’ll take an extreme nerf to DPS and yeah…Be required to play on the edges of the map.
Not everyone has a Barb to run around with and we should be able to stand on our own. I play with a group of Sorc’s (on a variety of builds) and even leveled to 100 it’s a bit of a disheartening mess. I hate to complain because I love this game but…End Game Content? With a Sorc? It’s gunna be painful for most people/getting toward the impossible. And yeah. You can say “get good” but that’s the perspective of a troll. Here for help and to enjoy a hobby, not toxicity.
I can do up to 60ish Nightmares (depending on the modifiers) and that’s being hella careful. And yeah…I notice a lot of other classes just breezing through the content like it’s nothing. Sucks, when you’ve played hundreds and hundreds of hours. You’ve got the gear, you’ve got the aspects, you’ve got the game play loop down…
But still ineffective and at higher levels and it starts to be “unfun” because you feel like a burden to your friends and or leveling a new class.
2 Likes
I’m only level 90 and am leveling new classes to help me decide which class I want to play in Season 1. There does not seem to be much point running Nightmare dungeons to level up glyphs for the Sorc.
However, I suspect that our niche in groups IS being a glass cannon and if that is true, we have no business being alone in high tier Nightmare dungeons.
In an MMO scenario, there are healers to heal us and tanks to grab aggro from the wizard types plus a fair amount of wisdom on the wizard’s part to hold back on using Ice Comet (Everquest reference) at times.
Of course, D4 isn’t an MMO. But I suspect that the D4 devs working on the sorcerer skills think that it is.
Edited Note: I suspect the only cure for that is the devs being forced to play the class they are working on.
I agree with you, I am level 61 and have a really good defence at the moment, however it’s still not a good balance among classes and I made my build for the crowd control. However, when I play with my friend who is a druid and his defence is relatively the same as mine, his DPS mostly twice better and has significantly less cool down then mine. This is even more pronounced in that the DPS of this class is highly dependents on the stun/immobilty of mobs. If you hit ordinary opponents, spells will really start to lose to all other classes. When I have tryied invistigate why is that, I found that most of good charms has significant reduction or less advantages then other classess, which have a double or multiply increase. Personally, I think something wrong with a sorcerer balance…
I think HP poison may actually be classified as a dot rather than poison damage, that, or they over powered it to be both. The only way to get it under control is with DoT damage reduction. That one cluster of Dot Reduction in the paragon tree takes hp poison from being a 3 pot fix to 1 pot fix. But it’s also a big detour I think for most builds.
Glass canon, we’re more brittle than glass, and our damage is nowhere near cannon like.
So our class is what ? The only thing we are good @ is applying CC.
1 Like
The thing about glass cannons, if you think about it, is that if you do not want the cannon to be destroyed the explosive oomph from the cannon would have to be far less than if the cannon were made out of iron or steel.
The problem for sorcerers is someone thought the above and adjusted sorcerers accordingly.
1 Like
Its a tough balance.
Im a lvl 100 sorc and i can do nm 60ish no problem solo. I just have to watch out for the wraith/archer red line of death, fire elite death explosions, and poison explosions. Everything else, even the giant corpse bow things, easy. My damage dealt is very good.
If my survivability was improved too much it wouldnt be fun. I wouldnt have to worry about anything.
My biggest issues are that ice shards is the only viable core skill, fire bolt and frost bolt enchants are absolutely necessary so its not really a choice, and our unique items all suck.
Yes, even Rainment. Dont use it. At no point should a sorc be jumping into the middle of large packs. Just because some streamer did it once doesnt mean you should. If they jumped off a bridge would you?
If they want sorc to play ranged we should be able to zoom out more, atm playing ranged is not encouraged @ all.
Also if we’re not raimenting in with the stuns, how can we abuse our aspect of control to the fullest to not hit like wet noodle ? The main reason not to use raiment is it tends to stun yourself half the time, and ice armor being insta-punctured.
We really need that third enchantment slot, atm this class is so gimped we’re in a lockbox wearing latex.
Thats just false. We are definitely supposed to be playing ranged. Frost bolt, fire bolt, with proper gear and paragon boards to tale advantage of damage buckets deals great damage, and aspect of shared misery makes everything outside of bosses melt.
And then because the frost bolt enchant makes it easy to stun bosses with frost bolt hit them a couple times, theyre stunned, now your aspect of controls melts them before they get up.
Stop thinking you have to be in melee range. Wake up.
Well I’m doing the permafreeze thing with shards, frostburn and shared misery, I do use frostbolt enchant for the stagger on bosses.
But I still feel ranged is not encouraged @ all, the game is just too zoomed in for that to properly work, corridors are tiny. Maybe if we had access to knockback like rogue but even then.
Also, if you play on controller you can run and gun with rogue, you can’t do that on keyboard and mouse, WASD would help a lot.
Think about what you just said though. “Corridors are tiny” Thats exactly why ranged is encouraged. You have these tiny corridors, youre shooting piercing ice shards with shared misery and killing things before you can even see them.
Vs what? Close range jumping into the middle of a pack in a small corridor with very little room to manuever on a squishy class.
Also, USE FROST BOLT. Not just the enchantment but the actual skill. With the mana regen bonus. It does soooo much for you.
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If you run somehow out of mana 1 frost bolt gets you enough to spam ice shards again, especially if you have just 1 piece of gear with mana regen on lucky hit. Just 1. No down time.
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Frost bolt enchant adds its chill effect on to frost bolt for massive chill. 1 to 3 hits at max freezes any normal/elite enemy.
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Stagger. So stagger is based of the strength of the cc AND the timing. So what you do is for bosses frost bolt, stop, frost bolt, stop, frost bolt, stop. Dont just jold the button down spamming it, give it like 1 second between casts. Run to a normal non nightmare boss and try it. Theyre staggered super fast. Then light them up with ice shards while theyre down. Also pro tip, take at least 1 piece of gear, in my case i use my helm, and have increased cc duration on it. I used to think it was useless but even a small amount adds a ton to the stregth of your cc when it comes to staggering.
I should’ve added I’m level 97, refined my ice shards build multiple times, I don’t need a basic skill on my bar, i can just machine gun shards. I still think the cost of that infinite mana was too high though. My stash is full with tons of items for different builds I’d like to try if the rerolling wasn’t such a hassle.
And yeah I can stand out a door shooting into a hallway to mobs I can’t see, but who wants to play like that ? Being able to zoom out more would be an easy W, they could even make max zoom out range a config thing so people can keep it the way it is now.
Also WASD, being able shoot and move is a must for ranged imo.
Yes, that all works. My build is setup that I can ice shard mobs to death or jump in an insta blow them up. However, what he is talking about is the zoom is such that playing range kinda sucks. If you play range then most of the stuff you are killing, you don’t even see on your screen. Maybe two mobs in a ten pack. Otherwise you are practically in melee range if you want to see what you are shooting at.
Do what you want dude…?!? I am not the fun police. lol jeez so many cringe toxic neckbeards here lol.