Every competent high-end Sorc build currently utilizes Frost Nova with the “Mystical Frost Nova” modifier due to how reliant Sorc damage is on the Vulnerability effect.
While I understand Blizz dev’s logic shared in their last Campfire Chat (i.e, reasons why there is more of a focus on nerfing one outlier instead of buffing everything else), I do hope that a more nuanced approach is taken for this case of Sorcerers and the Vuln mechanic. Where instead of nerfing the effect, we see buffs elsewhere to make it more readily available to different builds.
Currently, the cooldown on Frost Nova and its Vuln effect is the one major bottleneck in Sorc’s damage rotation, where mobs take very little damage outside of this one cooldown. While I would love to see a world where the entirety of Sorc’s kit is rebalanced so that Vuln is not so essential to damage output, I imagine that endeavor would be a more long term goal we couldn’t hope to see anytime soon. Instead, I think it would be much more dev efficient and open up a lot more spells, talents, aspects, and paragon systems if Sorc’s talent tree involved more reliable Vuln applicators, particularly with having more sources for Vuln in the other elements outside of Frost.
Yes, Sorcs definitely need 1 or 2 more ways to apply Vuln.
It cripples sorc.
If I duo with a rogue, the sorc dmg is exponentially better because of the vuln they apply.
Since Vulnerability showed up, people forgot that crit is its own bucket, the same as vulnerability. The problem is that Ice Sorcs are based around vulnerability, but get access to high levels of crit with a single aspect.
As a lightning Sorc, I’d rather they keep my access to vulnerability to a minimum, but allow me to reach a respectable amount of damage by going all in on crit. As well as reduce Ice Sorcs ability to access crit, but allow them to reach a respectable amount of damage by going all in on vulnerability.
I don’t know how the math works but I am a Fire Sorc and I have access to a ton of crit % and crit damage and still can’t compete with builds that rely on vulnerable damage. There is definitely something about its scaling that is broken and much, much better than any other damage multiplier in the game right now.
At the end of the day I don’t really care. I am going to play the build I like and I will take it as far as I can and then just stop because forcing myself to play a build I don’t like saps my joy of playing the game and then what’s the point? I am hoping they will fix this at some point down the road but until then there is nothing I can do so I am just not going to stress about it.
The thing is, you can still do the high crit/dmg method but run frost nova and get another 20%+ multiplier. It’s part of the damage multiplier and almost all other classes can spam it/demand it on a whim.
Restricting access to vulnerability is literally the same as restricting access to crit or crit dmg. All classes can have it and gear it for a reason, it’s part of the damage formula, it’s a straight nerf to say, hey druids. You can only crit every 14 seconds, and only for 4 seconds. Think about it.
Vulnerability either needs to be removed or be more standardized across everything.
I’m fine with it being on-demand, it should be since it’s a duration debuff. And honestly the whole game would benefit from it not being spammable by some classes/builds. IE: frost nova itself giving vuln is just fine in the way that it does. The problem is, we only have frost nova outside of being frost spec. Since it’s so vital to damage, you are literally just nerfing yourself not running it.
I mean you’d have to add something to the effect of 100%+ CHD to ever outpace just hitting frost nova when it was up for timed attacks.
The crit and vulnerability problem is something that affects more than just sorcs, for sure.
The problem is, the situation you’ve described puts us 1 step closer to the point everyone’s gear looks the same, everyone uses the same glyphs, and everyone uses the same paragon boards.
What I’m proposing is people should be able to take two completely different paths, but do close to the same amount of damage at the end of the day. This is also what Blizzard is trying to promise with it’s “play the game your way” mentality, and that is what I want them to deliver as well.
Then Vulnerable has to be taken off the global list and put in the additive bucket. Which will kill it, so that’s no good.
The other option for what you’re saying, is to do some paragon/passive/aspect that reads something like “You no longer benefit from Vulnerable effects, but instead deal +50% Crit Hit Damage” or some other way to hard isolate it.
As long as you can ever benefit from both, you HAVE to spec both. You’re nerfing yourself not to. The extra multiplier is too good, the order of magnitude to overcome a simple 20% multiplier gets out of hand fast – and if you can ever trigger it or have a friend trigger it, it’ll be meta to do so.
Honestly, I think you may be on to something there. But rather than throwing vulnerability into the additive bucket, make it so that vulnerability and crit only multiply vs the additive bucket, and not each other. From what I hear, this is how overpower currently works.
Edit: Yeah, this would be the same as as making a crit, vulnerability, and overpower bucket. Which not only would solve the crit and vulnerability problem, but it would go a long way to making overpower useful too.
Uh, we’re pretty much already there. At least when it comes to Sorcerers, although I am sure it’s similar with other classes. There are certain builds and setups that deal damage on an order of magnitude higher than anything else. And it’s not even a question of nerfing individual builds or abilities because it’s the multipliers that are the problem. There is way too many of them to start with and some (like Vulnerable) are vastly superior to others.
Basically the whole system needs to be reworked from the ground up. Blizzard’s self fulfilling prophecy of “we expect the players to break the game” came true, except we didn’t break anything… it was already broken. Right now the only thing keeping everyone from bulldozing through the game with these broken builds are the players themselves who don’t want to play those builds for a variety of reasons. Personally, I just happen to dislike Frost visuals and only play the mage archetypes in video games, otherwise I’d be roflstomping everything on a Rogue or a Barbarian.
Vulnerability is an enemy debuff. You aren’t going to get an easy way out. It will always be calculated after all other damage multipliers.
I would make Vulnerability similar to Thorns. It does flat damage based on the skill that caused the debuff, or flat damage based on level of caster. Does X flat damage, each time the enemy takes damage, up to a total of Y damage.
Classes that use Vulnerability would have skills that “exploit” vulnerability for damage boosts similar to what we have now, if need be.
So Vulnerability stays decent in groups, but the class builds that need it for damage will continue to benefit.
If you have 3 buckets–C, V, E (Crit, Vulnerability, Everything Else) the problem you get into is that in order to keep up with classes/builds which can reasonable stack in each bucket, you have to get an increasing amount in the other buckets to compensate. The problem is even worse if you are only using one bucket to compensate.
Say C=5, V=5, and E=5. CVE=125.
You say you are fine with minimal values of V so long as you can get sufficient C.
Say V=2 and E=5 (because you are relying on C to make up the difference).
Solving for C you have: C=125/(V*E) = 125/10=12.5
Now, let someone who is able to work in each bucket push their values to C=6, V=6, E=6 for CVE=216. Your corresponding C value needs to be 216/(2*6)=18
You had to find a lot more C to keep up than the other person had to find in C, V, and E. And I doubt very much the developers are going to toss around the necessary high values for Lightning and Fire because it becomes problematic in terms of balancing solo versus group play and limiting in how future design plays out.
I’m all fire too. How far are you? I’m T31 or 32 and doing fine with no vuln. I mean do other people clear faster? Absolutely but I’m still doing great. I have a BS necro friend who just one shots everything to each their own but I don’t see how that’s fun.
The group play side of things has the potential to be insane. Previous Diablo titles have attempted to balance solo play by adding a merc and I can’t help but think about how amazing sorc would be to have a druid merc that just walks ahead and stormstrikes everything for vuln/immobilise uptime.
I understand how the math works, I’m just someone who puts vision before math because math can be manipulated to fit the vision.
I think the solution to the problem is to put Crit, Vulnerability, and Overpower into the same bucket. That gives people at least 3 paths to maximize damage, and doesn’t punish people for double dipping or not double dipping. At the same time, it will elevate Overpower which has been completely slept on since it already doesn’t multiply with crit.
I tried stack crit instead of buon to see how that would do. I was able to get nice numbers of non-elites, but smg against elites was way down. Crit dmg doesn’t seem to do much of anything to bosses or structures. I literally spammed ice shards at a tower in a dungeon for 3 min before I took it down. Sorcs need more reliable and longer durations of bulb from what I am seeing. Druids, rogues and barbs appear to have near 100% up time on vulnerability from the multi-game play I have experienced.
Same, mid 30s. I tired one 40 but it was too much. It irks me to know I could easily be doing 60s with another build but knowing I will be miserable playing it keeps me going, lol.
They need to do one of two things; either give every single class at least two different ways to reliably apply vulnerable with each spec (ie. in the sorc’s case two each for fire, ice, lightning). Make something mandatory and the only way not to bottleneck freedom is to make it extremely common, bordering on ubiquitous. The other option (the one I favour) is remove vulnerable as a mechanic altogether, then rebalance the game around its absence.
Blizzard are fond of adding layers of complexity where none are needed, probably mistaking complexity for depth.
Imo it just needs another passive node at the back of the barrier cluster along the lines of lucky hit: 5/10/15% for skills to apply vulnerable while you have a barrier. Plays into lucky hit and barrier which the whole class seems to be built around.
Because one of your multipliers is super low compared to the others. (I know Ebonbolt already explained it, but I know not everyone can follow it despite doing a great job. So I’ll give basic examples so you can understand).
Let’s suppose your skill did a base of 1000 dmg.
You have 500 int (50% dmg multiplier) zero vulnerable since you can’t apply it, 500% crit dmg and all your + dmg came out to 500% as well.
Your dmg would be 1000 x 1.5 x 1 x 6 x 6 = 54000 (the 1 is from not applying vuln)
Now let’s suppose you had the ability to do vuln and you changed your stats.
Now you enchant your gear replacing a total 100% crit dmg and 100% of your +dmg % stats and you put it in vulnerable % dmg
.
So your stats are 500 int, 220% vuln (they give you 20% baseline), 400% crit and 400% +dmg stats.
1000 x 1.5 x 3.2 x 5 x 5 = 120,000
So essentially, your dmg is a lot less because you are missing one of your dmg multipliers.
So basically, by not having a multiplier, you are missing out on a huge source of dmg.