Suggested unique changes for 5 useless sorc uniques

  1. Esadora’s:
  • attack speed
  • intelligence
  • cooldown reduction
  • static discharge OR lucky hit chance
  • crackling energy is picked up automatically once formed. upon collecting CE, there’s a 15% chance to release a nova (…)

Reason: current affixes have absolutely no synergy with the necklace itself. if you want to focus on making those nova explosions, and to build into them, attack speed and int are going to be your primary generators for the passive that has a chance to form CE on lucky hit. CDR is great because it’s very unique for an amulet and it should remain as it is. Forgot to add: no matter how much damage you give to the unique affix, nobody is walking around collecting CE. N-O-B-O-D-Y.

  1. Oculus:

Gain the teleport enchantment effect for free. Every enemy you evade through grants you a stacking buff of 1%[ x ] damage or 2%[ x ] on elite enemies, stacking up to 30%[ x ] for 6 seconds.

Reason: the item is auto-bricked by the random teleports. It is just NOT fun. Lack of tempers and aspects also means that its utterly bad normal affixes are like salt to the wound. It needs a baked in damage multiplier that fits with the theme of evading with teleport enchant.

  1. Staff of Lam Essen:

Your casts of charged bolts are attracted to enemies and last 300% longer. Your charged bolts deal 40-80%[ x ] increased damage while you have a barrier.

Reason: Again, lack of tempers AND losing aspect, as well as not having the implicit affixes of 1h weapons (lucky hit and cdr) means it needs to have a solid tradeoff for it to be usable. Give it a solid damage multiplier that fits with the sorc theme / isn’t permanently up if you mess up your barrier cycles.

  1. Staff of endless rage:
  • Core damage
  • Fire damage
  • +3-5 to fireball
  • +2-3 to devouring blaze

Reason: Fireball is innately a long-range skill. The close damage affix is just a waste of space. Inner Flames as a passive is also inherently underpowered and needs something stronger for the staff to even be considered usable. Considering it’s usually paired with fireball gloves, there would be great synergy from the glove’s crit chance with extra ranks to crit damage from devouring blaze. Once again, it’s a unique 2h weapon; we’re losing both tempers and a 100% inc power from an aspect. This needs to be a strong unique.

  1. Flamescar

Every 0.5 second you channel incinerate, gain a stacking buff to Soul Fire and Endless Pyre, up to 5 ranks. In addition, you shoot our embers (…)

(at 2.5 seconds of channeling: 10% mana cost reduction, 10%[x] damage + 25%[x] burning damage)

Reason: Currently the wand has absolutely no synergy with incinerate, which is a DOT skill. A risk-reward concept would be to add a stacking buff to 2 passives with multipliers to fire DOT damage, applied in a similar way that the conjuration aspect works (gaining ranks to skills). Soulfire synergizes well with reducing mana cost that’s already on the wand, as well as adding a tiny bit of damage, while Endless Pyre is a go-to for fire DOT skills.

This is generally unused as an incinerate unique since staves with their tempers and especially 100% inc. aspect value for incinerate are just too huge. It needs to be strong to even compete, but at the same time if you want to get the full value of it, you’d need to stand still for a while (high risk, high reward).

Its unclear what you want removed though, but i agree that it needs a damage multiplier. You cant use this item in Pits due to the lack of damage, and also since the removal of creating a barrier with Protection, it offers less protection through barrier.

I disagree with the distaste of random teleport. What makes the Occuculus the Occulus IS the random teleport. Its a defensive skill that can be used in NMD and PVP.

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He’s right though, it’s just useless as it is now. It was already a sacrifice of damage; now with tempering that sacrifice is even less justifiable than it was. Plus the steady removal of utility and power from the Teleport enchantment means it’s now almost all downside. It might have a niche use in PvP, sure, but I can’t see it ever being useful in PvE content going forward without either restoration of all the nerfs to Teleport (so we get both Protection procs and Unstoppable back) or some sort of massive boost to damage. As it is you can’t even use it with a Telestomp build since the destination is random.

I understand that the random teleport comes from its origins in D2. However the D2 item was also seriously powerful to justify that downside; it was even better than a Shako. This version of the Oculus is, well, not that. If they’re not going to give it the traditional power of the Oculus, there’s no reason to give it the traditional downside either.

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Make occulus great again. Relatively.

Occulus is decent with rainment, tho ive never opted for that chestpiece. Glass cannon is a great ambassador to all this classes’ design intent issues. You can also make the nova bigger now.

Yes, there is no other way to play it, that is quite obvious. The thing is, that outside the aforementioned pvp, random teleports are useless. And let’s be serious - pvp is such a minor thing in d4 that it might not even be spoken of (especially this season with all the stupid infinite immunity options available).

The fact is that there are some synergistic stats on the current oculus; evade cdr reduction and +15 to tp with GA. My idea for an item like this would be to build into teleport damage and play around evade for extra damage boosts, not pray that you actually hit something with your evade+RoF combo.

Oculus didn’t have a random teleport in Diablo 3.

I don’t see why they had to add that accursed effect here. In Diablo 2 it had an auto-save effect with a random teleport. Why not let it give us the Diablo 3 teleport for its enchant, and an additional power that randomly teleports you when struck?

Uniques need to be strong to compete with Legendary Aspect + Temper. A wand like this is trash except in meme builds, or possibly a telestomp build where the +10 to +15 to teleport can potentially deal big damage, but you would only be using normal teleport and not the evade teleports, because a gun you can’t aim is next to useless.