It took me exactly 5 minutes of looking at the skill tree to see this glaring inconsistency. Frost gets to apply Vulnerable while Shock and Fire get Stun and Immobilize respectively. At a first glance it looks fine, each element has its own status effect and gets lots of passives that boost damage to affected targets. However, bosses are immune to crowd control which means you can’t apply either Stun or Immobilize to them but you can still make them Vulnerable.
This means Frost gets constant uptime on a whole other 20% damage multiplier that the other two elements don’t have reliable access to. Until that’s resolved in some way, all Sorcerers are pretty much locked into RPing as Elsa with the stupid Ice Shards build if they want to push high end content. A build which btw also has an answer to the other crippling problems sorcs have: running out of mana and being cooldown reliant. Ice Shards is so OP right now you don’t even need to run an ultimate skill with it. Meanwhile all the other core skills are a joke except for Fire Ball with the Unique staff but good luck getting that, and even then it can’t compete with Ice Shards boosted by a single Aspect (Piercing Cold) that you can get from a dungeon!
It’s not OP. Look at what the other classes can do before you start saying ice shards is OP. But if people like you keep saying it’s OP, sorc will get nerfed again. Hope you’re happy.
OP only in terms of the other sorc builds. I am well aware other classes are performing much better but that is a whole other issue. These are the sorc forums, I am not concerned with how good or bad Rogues and Barbarians are. Also there is no need to get paranoid, the devs don’t give a damn about balance anyway so your precious icicles won’t get touched.
All I am saying is that Shock and Fire builds need a MASSIVE boost to compete.
There is a uniq which gives you a “freeze” chance in all of your attacks, on lucky hit, and a second legendary, which gives you 33% vulnerable chance on a frozen target.
So if you invest 2 gear slots, you can aim and build a vulnerable build with shock and fire.
Yes but you still can’t make bosses vulnerable easily unless you use ice shards or frost nova. Barb, rogue and druid all get free vulnerability from the exploit glyph bonus. But necro and sorcerer get a less useful bonus imo.
Bosses get staggered after sufficient crowd control is applied to them. Not sure why so many people cannot seem to grasp this fact. If you do not apply any control whatsoever to a boss then you must deal with an active boss the entire fight. If you apply sufficient control to them then periodically, based on the amount of control you pump out, you do not and get to just stand there beating on them while they are considered affected by ever crowd control in the game.
If you wanted to complain about Frost being OP then you should have pointed out it gets the most crowd control and ability to make things vulnerable.
Which is exactly what I did. I also pointed out, correctly, that the Vulnerable status effect can have a near constant uptime whereas the other status effects have no effect on bosses. Afaik the stagger mechanic is not tied to how much crowd control you apply on a boss but rather their health, that is to say they get staggered after a certain point regardless of what you do or don’t do.
First of all, they are perfectly well aware of the fact that the Ice Shard build is not only over performing but also really the only viable end game build for sorcs. So my post is not telling them anything they don’t already know.
Second, as I already said, this is only meant to raise awareness of why Frost builds are so powerful not advocating for nerfing them but if they do nerf it I honestly couldn’t care less because I would rather play a different class than spam icicles all day.
My only goal is to have Shock and Fire builds buffed so that they can compete. I have no interest in what happens to Frost one way or the other.
i think the concept was not to go 100 % one element type, as i use both lightning and ice, i get the vuln i need and the play style i want to use.
yeah some glyph boards are 1 elemental specific. but there is a few that is a general dmg augment, and one even a “a rip from tal rasha D3 set” to using all 3 elements ?? i think that would be BiS from being able to grab and pick one of each element skill and not focus on 1 type…
It doesn’t matter. Even if that’s true my point stands. Frost can apply its status effect far more easily than either Shock or Fire. And the benefits it gets for doing so are much better too. It’s an inherent flaw in the class design.
P.S. Is there a stagger bar visible on bosses? Because I haven’t noticed one yet.
The skill tree and paragon trees have extremely important nodes that require the target to be Burning.
Look – you need to mix it up a bit. You have to rely on multiple effects, most of which won’t come from casting your favorite spell over and over. Skills, enchantments and items are all part of the soup. That’s not immediately apparent to new players, but you’ll figure it out if you pay attention as you level.
Because that’s not considered crowd control. Not sure why that’s so hard to grasp. Not only that, stagger last about 10 seconds, 15 if you’re lucky, and takes at least 60 seconds, usually 120+ seconds, to build up enough to trigger it. It’s just poor design.
Stagger bar is right beneath their health bar, thing brown line which expands until it matches the length of the bar then turns blue and decays over about 10 seconds.
As for Frost doing it most easily, I probably would have agreed to that yesterday. Now I am not sure. I had been running Frost Bolt in an Enchantment slot to drive stagger. Then I removed it when I redid my build yesterday on my Shock sorcerer. I was somewhat surprised running her earlier today to see the bar growing on the boss I was fighting at dungeon end and I remembered my build does toss out stuns. I would have thought them too few to matter but I definitely got in a stagger. Then again, I was staggering dungeon bosses at least twice solo before, so maybe you are right.
Yes, it is crowd control. No matter what staggers the boss they boss is then considered to have EVERY FORM OF CROWD CONTROL ON IT for the duration of the stagger.
If you triple dip on damage boosts when a target is Frozen, Chilled, or Stunned, well they all apply at that point.