My reddit post below. Nerfing Terminus Facade could have been done in a manner that doesn’t completely kill its viability (removing the speed boost, in particular kills PvE builds along with PvP). Instead, the devs appear to just want the wiz class to die in popularity altogether. Probably to set up Warlock (that is the speculation, because the class is being called dead just about everywhere in the serious DI player community) . Update for the devs: If each orb gave a 60% speed boost for 6 seconds this essence would at least be viable in PvE, and possibly still useful in PvP preserving it’s current mechanics for speed while nerfing cooldowns a bit and reducing the need to mash skill buttons. If that was you’re intention, add something like that. Otherwise, you will have fundamentally broken the class for most wiz players. I just looked at my PvE stats for builds I would probably have to use to adapt to this change: 1) 60% lower DPS to retain the 70% speed for farming and 2) 40% lower DPS to run dungeons at 40% speed instead of 70%. Then invisibility AND 70% speed are gone in shadow war and tower war PvP. PLUS long range meteor is effectively gone with the Binding Forces changes (2 seconds of pause = death in PvP) . The class for many, many identity wiz players has just been fundamentally altered, so the devs basically just inspired them all to quit DI altogether with no alternative available.
Update #2:
Simple, workable examples of what could have been done:
Terminus Facade: “Slow time now causes you to enter a Temporal Flux for 9 seconds. Every 3 seconds, using a skill causes the cooldown of your other non-charged skills to be reduced by 2 seconds. Using a skill also increases movement speed by 20% for 3 seconds, stacking up to 60%. Slow Time’s cooldown cannot be reduced by this effect.”
Binding Forces (no charge up just the original essence): “When one of these meteors damage an enemy, the damage of the next meteor within 3 seconds is increased by 15% (old 20%) up to a maximum of 45% (old 60%). Overall meteor damage is reduced as range increases, up to a maximum of a 30% reduction at maximum range.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/DiabloImmortal/s/epW88cV2go
2 Likes
Clearly, their goal is to kill “Terminus Facade” because there is no way other helmet essences or builds can even come close to “Terminus Facade” performance.
The saddest thing is, they don’t buff other builds as compensation for nerfing “Terminus Facade” here.
Now that “Terminus Facade” is out of the picture, maybe in the future update, they can ACTUALLY design a powerful essence (e.g Immune to Damage or CC) that mattered for Wizard, for once.
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With the utter fail of the “spark shower” essences in i11 I have zero confidence any new i12 wiz essence will be useful in any game mode.
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Unfortunately, that’s how most nerfs are done. Instead of making small adjustments or nerfing a specific skill they think is too OP while buffing others to provide an alternative, they don’t, so they just ruin the class. And we’ve seen this story for so long.…
Honestly. It’s not simply nerfing the PvP content that may be the end for me. It is the devs being so disconnected they nerfed the PvE content making it not fun. Taking away the speed and DPS massively in dungeons means I can’t even contribute in a small way or keep up with other classes the way I could before. I don’t even want to run dungeons at all after tomorrow. And I’ve spent ~$20k. But’s it’s not $300k right? So to hell with my class. You don’t just throw class identifiers away, they are a key market segment. And they just whipped it out and started urinating.
3 Likes
100% this. I’m “only” around $7-8k deep with a good third of that coming in the last 6 months and I’m willing to give the update a try but if the speed and fast playstyle that can be improved with efficiency/skill is gone, I’m done.
Not going to bother switching classes because I put money and countless hours into fine-tuning this one (Specific leggo gems upgraded, Charms, Reforges, Enchants, specific Pets, etc). There’s no “Well just switch classes” for me. I get enough of other classes with other characters I play here and there and don’t have the investment they decided to take a dump on.
Played every main Blizz game since Warcraft 1, besides WoW having the sub and xpacs, DI is the only one I’ve put a good amount of money towards and this stuff just makes it easy to be the last.
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You can find the testing videos now. The Terminus Facade and Binding Forces mechanics are even worse than the descriptions make them sound. You have to chase the orb that randomly shows up on the ground and dissappears in 2 seconds for a cooldown. The Binding Forces meteor also no longer auto-targets past melee range. You have to drag it manually to the target every time. The Slow Time “Mask of Many” helm says it activates all “charged” skills, but “conveniently” for the devs doesn’t work with Binding Forces. This isn’t a “nerf”. It is an absolute bloodbath to eliminate a class from being at all relevant or fun to play. And completely comical that anyone on the dev team or in management would imagine this as a new “playstyle”.
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And very well done — you wanted to nerf other characters, so now you’ve got a nerf for mages too. In the end, everyone will get the same treatment 
VEEEERY WELL DONE, BLIZZARD, VERY WELL DONE!
The new Terminus Facade mechanic is so bad because your attention becomes focused on looking for the orb drops and waiting for it when you don’t see it, and in PvE you often have to backtrack to grab it… it’s so annoying I’d rather not use it.
3 Likes
It honestly seems like practical joke a gamer would dream up to murder a class-defining essence in the most obviously absurd way possible. I feel like they weren’t actually serious it was a fix and just wanted the essence unusable to set up Warlock.
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NGL, I think it’s somewhat entertaining for PvE but the orb doesn’t pickup half the time so I have to actually stop on it or backtrack. If the game wasn’t so bad with clipping/tunneling, it wouldn’t be a problem. Instead, half the time you pass through the damn orb and it just sits there. If I run in circles, as I often tend to do, it misses most of the time.
Picking up the orb aspect wouldn’t even be too bad if it worked properly.
I was trying a few things this morning and for movespeed I just put on The Siphon, sure it’s a lost essence but it fixes the aspect people were complaining that Wiz would just be slow. At least for PvE. I haven’t done anything for PvP yet.
Seems I’m doing about 20% less dmg but I think switching my sets for this would improve. I don’t have at least 4pc i2951 of Issatar to test it but the movespeed could help offset. Issatar + Nexus Runt + BSJ + BH + CE + any MS affixes would still keep you pretty mobile. That or possibly going the chest 40% MS from Slow Time and figuring out a replacement for Lightning Nova…the Main-Hand I like but much lower dmg and the knockback isn’t useful in PvE
The correct way to fix this essence should read like this:
“Slow time now causes you to enter a Temporal Flux for 9 seconds. Every 3 seconds, the cooldown of your other skills is reduced by X seconds. Slow Time’s cooldown cannot be reduced by this effect.”.
There, done. Super simple and balanced, not clunky to use, you can’t exploit it with spam builds, just pick a good value for X (like 2-3 seconds maybe).
3 Likes
Terrible nerf made by an incompetent dev team has killed the class. Gg Blizz…
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It seems all of my Wiz friend diehards switched to Druid and are destroying everyone in BGs. Guess that’s one way to show how OP Wiz was!
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Pretty much my thinking to. And you could just do the original 20% speed stack to 60% every time a skill is used. You could just limit the window of when and how much the other skills are cooled down by using a skill. Like a rolling 3 second window with some kind of timing indicator to show when hitting a skill will cause a 2-3s cooldown reduction effect. This orb nonsense doesn’t seem serious.
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They really don’t understand moderation. Did they really have to turn the Essence into garbage? If it was that strong, they could’ve just toned it down a bit.
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They mentioned the button mashing spam mechanic being “tiresome”. Then fix that mechanic and don’t eliminate the speed. I’ll take a 10-20% DPS nerf to make the class more playable, but 30-50%?! with half the speed that doesn’t keep up with other classes?! People are up in arms asking for refunds. Why alienate an entire player base because you can’t dream up new essences around one that happened to be well done and became foundational for the class? And the mere fact the DPS is 50% lower tells you they have been clueless at making new useful essences for the class to give it decent damage for a long time.
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I’d like to add a few more points.
For reference, I play all nine classes evenly.
When I play Wizard, in the case of the Terminus Facade build, controlling it on a smartphone is tiring and precise targeting is inconvenient in both PvP and PvE, so I haven’t used that. Instead, I use the Ice Crystal (Spectral Weave), Disintegrate (Searing Judgement) build.
So this Wizard nerf does not cause any loss for me.
I do not only play Wizard, and I do not use the Terminus build, so the criticism above is made from that much of an objective point of view.
This time, Dev you went too far.
I tried PC and hated it, main Wiz and play on iPad/iPhone/ZFold and have had no issues with the spam builds for 2yrs. Maybe I’m just better at playing mobile games
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The thing is, they had to be really careful with this nerf to avoid alienating spammers like us, and instead it’s a absolute wrecking ball. Not even a little bit subtle they wanted the essence unusable.
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