The two biggest issues with Sorc were left unaddressed

Sorcerer
1

TLDR Fix mana and barrier generation via defensive spells. If this isn’t done the class will lack diversity and if you decide to come back and fix it later you are going to have double the work to fix all the balance changes that you are making now.

There are 2 big issues that cause massive issue with sorc and the recent chat and the proposed changes do little to nothing to fix it.

Mana: Most sorc builds struggle massively with mana. This is largely because other than a legendary aspect there aren’t good ways to restore mana and we’re force to wait on regen (which is very very low) to cast very high cost spells. Some builds at a high enough gear level can get sufficient mana cost reduction and mana generation to drop the legendary aspect but most cannot. The lack of mana also means we can’t really effectively use attack speed in most builds to scale damage. And the biggest problem here is that legendary aspect is one of 2 critical reasons that lead into the second problem…

4 Defensive spells are a must: Oddly enough survivability isn’t really the reason we use 4 defensive spells. Necro’s are super squishy and they usually run 1-2… sometimes no defensive spells at all. The first reason we use 4 is because of the Prodigy’s aspect which gives us sufficient mana to actually play the game. The second reason is the passive “Protection” which gives barrier on defensive spell use. Having barrier is a key scaling method for damage.

These 2 major issues have to be addressed or the class is always going to feel bad to play and lack diversity.

So how do we fix this?

Mana: This could be tackled in a few different ways but the easiest would probably global reduction in spell cost and a bit of a boost to base regen. When you compare to the other similar spell caster in Necro lets look at some numbers:

Fireball: 35 mana cost, 84% damage, 25% crit damage

Bone Spear: 25 mana cost, 244% damage, 5% crit chance, pierces, +vuln (this is before the legendary aspects and passives that push it too the moon).

Now you’re probably thinking bone spear is just broken… well yea so here’s another

Sever: 20 mana cost, 158% damage, pierces, +vuln (and shadowblight damage)

Out of the sorc skills probably ice shards (there is also a case to be made for glacial aspect but we’re dealing with base skills not rare aspects I still haven’t bloody found one of >_<)

Shards: 30 mana cost, 219% damage vs frozen(requires barrier vs bosses)

At the very least with reduced cost and better regen we could use attack speed as another avenue of scaling.

Defensive spell usage: This one is pretty easy provided you solve the mana issues. Take the protection passive and change it to just convert a % of damage into barrier. You already have the tech in Ice Armor and plenty of other classes leech damage as life so just having as leech damage as barrier solves the barrier issue well enough. Provided mana is solved this would probably drop people down to 2-3. Teleport which is hard to get rid of since it’s mobility and triggers raiment. Frost nova because of vuln; giving vuln to other skills could have people drop it (or just continuing nerfing vuln so much it’s not worth). Flame shield because unstoppable is a must at higher levels although even this could be dropped when playing lower tier content and if they changed the ridiculous amounts of CC it could be dropped in high tier stuff too.

3 Likes
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Mana is a solvable problem with gear affixes. I personally just run resource generation and mana cost reduction on my off-hand, and that has solved all my mana issues as a Chain Lightning Sorc.

This is actually false. Umbral Aspect and Incendiary aspect actually give you more mana overall than Prodigy does. The problem is Umbral doesn’t work on bosses at all, and Incendiary’s effectiveness goes down with lower number of enemies. So people have settled for an aspect that generates a lower amount of mana, but at a much more consistent rate.

You can free yourself of 4 defenses (I still run 2) by using Incendiary over Prodigy. Your boss clear speed will be slower and clunkier, but if you care about not having 4 defensive skills more than you care about your boss fight experience, than this is a decent trade. With enough lucky hit and mana affixes, you might not actually suffer at all.

Also, Protection works off of all cooldowns, not just defensive cooldowns. So you can replace some of your defensive cooldowns with offensive cooldowns like Ice Blades or Lightning Spear.

So, you can make these problems go away right now if you choose to, if you don’t, that is okay too.

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Chain lightning won’t have any mana issues after the patch. 3 mana per bounce is just silly as you will be getting at least 4 bounces and 7 bounces 40% of the time. So that is directly at least 12 mana and on average 15.6 mana and on top of that you have your reductions and generation. You will be chain casting forever now without ever even thinking to have more than 1 mana affix.

Other builds though, ye have to resort to pulling all of the stops to maintain mana still. But at least Ball Lightning - Orbit got a 38% buff. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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Yeah, sorc could use more barrier generation. Especially ice since some of their skills require a barrier to be up and some of their defensive options just don’t work vs. bosses. Too bad the barrier generation from the icefall node is rather useless and even Temerity doesn’t help all that much as its own “life on lucky hit” doesn’t seem to count for its barrier.

5

you’re joking, right?

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I might be leaving out that I have a good amount of crit, but no. I’m at like a 1 CE orb : 1.5~ chain lightings, and thanks to high crit and destructive Chain Lightning, I spawn enough CE orbs to spam Chain Lightning non-stop.

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there is no man problem, being prodigy aspect and umbral I never run into mana issue. and the new patch they even tune up fire skill to proc mana. sorc core problem was it has no real build diversity outside the 4 defense skill, and lock in with frost nova because of vulnerable damage mechanic on sorc. but since the dev already aware of the issue we’ll what happen when they finally address it in the future patch

8

Now its just gibberish. Running around collecting CE is not “spamming CL non stop”

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Gibberish is a strong word, but if you want to completely discount everything I’ve said because I didn’t include the time it takes to teleport or sidestep, be my guest.

10

Have you ever considered that there is more than chain lightning spell in the game and other spells don’t refund most of their mana on use?

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Have you ever considered not crying because other people have tools you don’t, and just using what you have available to you to solve your problems?

1 Like
12

No 3rd enchantment slot talk either

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thats coming expansion, u know it

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I hope so. But what i want from the DLC is a Arcane skills added to the tree as a 4th element.
Black hole, disintegrate, familiar, time bubble, arcane torrent, etc.

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The crux of mana issue is actually lack of dmg. Necro has mana gen issues as well but you don’t hear it because their dmg is so high that mana usage is economical. 1 shot and it’s possible to clear entire room. Sorc doesn’t have this kind of dmg so gotta spam a lot of spells that eat mana.

Necro isn’t that squishy, there are a few nodes that +100 armour and u can probably survive 1 hit and quickly pop off mist or bone storm. Or necro can equip shield. Sorc is literally tofu, can still get 1-shotted even with ice armour.

Whatever balancing dev does have to be in consideration of other classes, it’s an multiplayer game after all. Sorcs are like visual fx effects in legions - they make dazzling colors on screen but it’s the bears and necros that are doing the work.

3 Likes
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Is the total # of possible bounces going to be 9 (up to 5 bounces from the talent plus the 40% chance to get 4 more bounces from the buffed, Unbroken Tether?) Maybe I’m missing something.

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Is not the whole point of the balance is that the tools available do not solve the current issues? Having said that, I do not think mana is the biggest issue for sorc.

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100% agreed.

The problem I’m pointing out is that people are experiencing the problem, choosing not to even try the tools available, then complaining about the problem.

Like the OP doesn’t even mention mana cost reduction and resource generation affixes. It would be a different story if they said they tried it, and it wasn’t enough, but they didn’t even mention them at all.

19

I don’t think that is ever going to happen specially due to lore reasons. Arcane is basically just raw pure unadulterated magic, and the reason as to why the Wizzard in d3 could use it was because Li-Ming is basically a crazy @ss maniac who was so powerful she could basically bend reality to her will and even make her own spells.

While I absolutely loved blackhole in d3 and was by far one of my favorite spells I think that thematically our sorceress is more of a schooled master rather than a loose cannon prodigy, thus why I doubt we will get the crazy spells like mirror image we had in d3.

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The only bit I disagree with is having 4 defensive skills, we ran NM 100s pre-monster-nerf and some mid level NMs pre-monster-nerf. I can’t understand why anyone would run Ice Shield, it gives you nothing, has questionable downtime and reduces the chance of resetting the cooldown of better defensive skills. Sure, it’s nice in the early game but later on it’s not worth the slot.

Keep in might lightning sorc will have infinite mana after the patch an fire sorc gets a questionable Umbral replacement, which might be awesome or might not work at all. Wait and see.