So I’ve been testing avalanche in a silly little contest. My sorc has picked it up and what I do is go out and earn 20 million gold in hell tides (want a lot of density) so I can turn around and log in my rogue and do 4 rolls trying to get Dark Shroud to roll on it’s chest piece in the vault.
So far I’ve run through 40 million with no results for either. Logically the sorc should win and I’ll see avalanche proc first, but you never know. There’s not some hidden issue where avalanche is broken right?
It would be much more efficient to actually earn the gold on the rogue where a GA armor chest might drop with the skill already on it. I just want to see it proc for frost orb like it used to for shards many seasons ago.
Edit-
Ha! It must be broken, the rogue won finally rolled +3 darkshroud on chest.
After sorc earning another 20 million with zero avalanche procs.
If anyone does their own testing and similarly finds avalanche not working, please drop a response. I’m just running lucky hit on gloves and Tal Rasha but still that is crazy non functional even if it turns out it is not completely broken.
I mean FO is what, 3% base LHC? Maybe youve gotten it to 4%, we’ll round up.
Since avalanche is only 10% of the time on a lucky hit, that means you’ll proc it 0.4% of the time, or one in 250 times approximately.
Now if you truly never procced it in Helltides I’d be a bit surprised, but those procs will be so rare it isn’t hard to believe you might have just missed them, too.
Try testing it with something that actually has a reasonable lucky hit chance. In other words, Ice Shards. I bet you start seeing procs then.
I can confirm Avalanche does proc, even the special legendary power associate with it.
Problem: The more you proc avalanche the harder is to keep Mana Shield active all the time, as casts by Avalanche don’t count for it.
Ive found that my favorite way of usuing Avalanche:
No frozen memories aspect
High ish attack speed, .5-1.
2-3 resource regen affixes
3 points in frigid breeze
This balances out mana use with return, gives a dps boost, and still spends alot of mana for passives like mana shield. Requires on demand vulnerability, orb should cover this perhaps? This balance was evaluated for shards so your mileage may vary.
Hopefully they consider adjusting it, it’s pretty sad. I had used it before playing shards, that’s why I thought it was broken. With neither Tal Rash nor Fractured Winterglass having crit which would help trigger Esu and not being able to benefit from the passive itself, just it’s aspect. Surly they don’t intend for us to use it. Neither combustion nor overflowing energy make much sense for a frost build.
That leaves shatter but that’s worthless for most bosses where we need the most help and on console the orbs stop on top of your target instead of just past meaning I’m looking at 9% chill, not 34% and then 9%. Cooldown is quickly becoming extinct so frost nova is worse than ever and forget about using the enchant with the abysmal lucky hit chance of our conjurations.
I dunno maybe, just, maybe they intend for us to spread ourselves super thin and pick up both blizzard and shards (for the enchant) and blizzards soon to be chilling ice spikes aspect along with shatters aspect and…you know I don’t what the heck they are thinking. With fairly obvious pressure for us to get into Frost Orb this season you’d think the core spell would have at least one clearly useful key passive designed for it. Don’t take the power of key passives lightly, just look at Gushing Wounds, Victimize, heck even Shadow Blight. I think Frost Orb sitting out there like an orphan is a very bad thing.
As a fun side note while wrapping up my test of avalanche a hell spawn champion spawned on the cliff above me just waiting for a teleport ambush. I believe i’m around 28k life with armor and resists capped, running shako 20% DR, concentration 25% DR, 20.8% elite damage reduction, 15.1% DR from Vulnerable, 25.9% DR from burning (with firebolt enchant), and of course the Protection passive. I pop my ice blades on the guy and teleport on top of him to be one shot. Forget tele tap, fireshield get to blasting, nope flat one shot. Now I joke around about sorc being fragile, but this is just hell tides and usually I view the champs like little mini treasure goblins that hit back if you let them. I’m hoping he was just an overturned fluke, perhaps raised by the corpse bows of old. If not, I have no idea how this class is going to be able to push.
Yeah our Key Passives are really in need of updating.
I think they missed the mark with the new Vyr’s. I strongly suspect they’re trying to get away from giving us flat multipliers; if what they were trying to replace those with was working just as well I would actually approve of this, but I’m not convinced that’s the case.
Overflowing Energy is horribly out of date and doesn’t compete well with almost any other source of CDR, and of course it adds zero damage while requiring dedication of skill points to generate CE and is useless for non-shock builds.
Shatter is useless on bosses, which is our biggest problem; no Sorc has trouble blowing up trash mobs in job lots.
Combustion is… Better than nothing, but doesn’t even really make up for the fact that DoTs can’t crit, and the way the game defines “unique sources of burning” makes that part practically useless.
Avalanche messes up our Mana Shield and relies on a terrible Lucky Hit chance to proc, making it useless for 2/3 of primary Frost skills. In its current form it is only feasible to use it with Ice Shards, and at high level content you’ll probably prefer the attack speed from Ancient Flame.
Is it any wonder everyone just uses either the current version of Vyr’s, or Esu’s with Ancient Flame?
I was able to get it to finally work on the boss test dummy by just spamming him quite a bit and looking for it. It’s sad that it’s lack of effectiveness makes it hard to notice.
Everyone will just point at shatter and say sorc is doing ok, but you’re right, the key passives need an update. Nobody wants to require rainment stacks to matter, and it doesnt help sorcs traditional issue of single target damage, singular pit boss aside.
On Console it’s much harder to use Frozen Orb to freeze. I had details for why in an analysis of Lucky hit for the Sorc, but they hid the post and blocked me from it. I put in a lot of research, showed examples, and ran several calculations to make my point. It’s like they’ll let people scream and be critical, but don’t back your argument up with math and numerically show unfair treatment.
That said, any spec can throw 2-3 chance to freeze tempers if you arent using unique boots, chest and gloves; it works well without shatter too. Shards procs it particularly well, and chain lighting has a high lucky hit baseline, at least on tooltip.
Yeah, I tried posting with a different title. Watch them eventually release both if some humans look at it. Ha! I just realized the thing was 7 pages due to the formatting, throwing in jokes, etc. I didn’t want people falling asleep between the actual numbers. I could see where some AI could think I wrote up some crazy advertisement or pyramid scheme.
On console Frozen Orb parks the explosion on top of the target instead of just past it. Now 4% already really low, but who knows where they distributed that 4%. I know I loose 34% chill from passing through my target and having it explode just on the other side. If your on PC, using Orbs, and haven’t tried slightly off targeting like that the difference is pretty wild.
Sleight edit, as long as the temper selection/aspects works with it (crit/vuln/damage/damage close, and passives like dB/cm), the new vyr’s could be intersting if proc rates are high enough, remains to be seen for me, but with a skill like ice shards, could be a very nice single target burn, using spear as a bit of an actual buff skill. Idk, a thought i guess.
Maybe if I drop Ice Blades off my bar for Lightning Spear I can get “charged” and maybe the arcing works off of any spell and does a lot of damage. Maybe the extra lightning damage will offset what I’m loosing for my conjurations. Then again, if they continue with current trends it would give me an excuse to try out Baldur’s gate. I know several people enjoy playing a caster in that game.
I have Elden Ring that I still haven’t played but I keep holding on because I really want D4 to work out. I’ve always been a big fan of the series from the very start. Playing them daily for years with occasional very short breaks. I even loved D3 that many people put down. I don’t want to see it all end with what they are doing now.
I just got back here after the crazy 1.1 nerfs and, for a while, had a place to escape to from the real world. At this point I’d like them to fix the balance and fix the bugs or quit touching the game period. I keep making posts with real numbers and real comparisons to try to help them see where they can make improvements, but we never see blue posts, and I don’t think anyone is listening. It was nice to visit the forums to see that others also feel abandoned and cheated. They say misery likes company but I don’t want to be miserable and I sure don’t want to spread it. I just rarely saw any posts here with research or numbers and thought I might be able to help. My wife keeps telling me to quit crunching numbers and posting because the people that need to see it wont and if they do see it, they wont change. She’s probably right, I need to step away from the spreadsheets and the forums and just play. I’ve got some nice modifications to the boards that pulls in Elemental Summoner, 6 glyph damage multipliers, and several fairly health stacks of damage reductions . I just need to get in there and level several new glyphs and see how the adjustment plays. I’m not even sure how far I can push NM dungeons, the glyphs might level really fast.
I think for me, when testing, its important to do just play gaem in between said tests, if for no reason than money/mats/brickables, but also to experience whatever mechanic im testing or attempting to incorporate in my own gameplay, even if the rolls arent just right. Numbers are one thing, but what do you wanna do and why and how build that and where sources of, ect. That iteration between use/test is how some of the best specs are always built, and it helps to break it up with approaches from both angles. Keeps you lil more sane.
Ice shards has 4.5 times as much lucky hit as Frozen Orb. As the base number gets lower and lower it gets exponentially harder to gear out of the problem, while having a large base lucky hit number makes bonus lucky hit more and more valuable.
Back when I was Ice Shards I’d alternate between shatter and avalanche. Frozen Orb handles avalanche differently because of it’s extremely low value.
Still, I very much appreciate the help.
I was able to get avalanche to work eventually on a training dummy, it’s just very rare at mid 20s lucky hit bonus and takes a lot of patience casting orb over and over waiting for it to prc. I’d speculate that it had to have fired at least some in the field and I just didn’t notice it but I certainly felt considerably weaker than when I had the continuous 25% bonus from Vyr’s which also grants 25% mitigation without the aspect, and yet another 27% mitigation with it.