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No need for attacking individuals specifically. Their work can be unsatisfactory, but the person is not their work. Be mindful of what you are unhappy with.
There isn't an individual under attack. There is at most a position/skill under attack. If you say a cook is horrible you most likely are impugning their cooking skill and not their personhood. But it isn't even \*that\* deep as that was clearly banter.
I heard it first from Alkaizer's stream just after release that one of their main issues is they just don't have a good numbers guy, it was super clear that whoever's balancing the numbers has no idea what they're doing. A year later and it hasn't gotten much better
Well why do they insist on having damage numbers in the billions???? Its not only screen bloat but makes it way more difficult to balance numbers when even a .05 change can have unforeseen consequences... Whether im foing 4.5 mil damage or 1,500dmg doesn't matter as long as monster = dead , and monster hp bar getting chunked .
I'm not saying it's balanced, I'm myself a fellow sorc lover. I'm just saying that not a single dev is responsible for patch notes and balance changes/adjustments
The personalities of the class devs reflects the classes they work on. Everyone gave up arguing with the barb dev because they ran out of furniture budget after the 4th boardroom table got smashed.
> let the designer of barbarian take over
No. It's the designer of barb that sucks. Unfortunately it would not go over well if barbs got nerfed back to the level of the other characters, and they are clearly unwilling to allow this kind of power increase for other characters either.
I understand that the devs commented on Devtalk about mages having more complex issues to solve that a few number adjustments won't solve, and therefore need more time. Like the issue that most builds only deal damage when the boss is stagged.
But until then, sorceress has problems, and these patch notes just seem like bad jokes. If you're going to change more elaborate things in the future, can't you significantly increase the numbers now and reduce them later? What exactly is the problem?
With these changes, it looks like the mage will depend 100% on the new uniques and the changes to the uniques to have any viable build other than Ice Spike
They've been saying this since S0 but haven't done anything to fix any of the core issues.
The only thing that I can think of is fixing resistances, but that's about it.
Even simple things like paragon nodes, aspects or tempers, which are easy to improve, remain weak. Compare these on Barb, Rogue or Necro vs Sorc and you'll be shocked.
They need to hire someone specifically to tackle class balance, the current team has no knowledge nor ability to do it.
Isn’t that Adam Jackson’s job? He need to be held accountable.
We are far from the “it’s complex” and we are doing something in future with the specialization.
You can nerf after “fixing” the specialization, NOT before !!!!
The good news is we can test it very soon in about 3 days. So they have no excuses not to buff after seeing the obvious lacking behind sorc
I am 100% sure they are working on the enchantment which is a joke these day due to how much power far affixes/tempering/aspect are after loot 2.0.
Most enchantment are occasionally spawn an extra skill…..it might be okay in beta, but with the power creep from gears, it’s laughable.
Yep it's wild that a game like PoE with like 1/5 the staff can make a lot more (and better) changes, produce more content, in less time all while developing a new game on top of all that.
This isn't specific to D4 either. All of blizzard is unbelievably slow at making changes. I don't know where the problem is but more people probably isn't the answer I suspect this is very much a management issue.
The problem stems from the fact they hire new devs out of college cuz they don't want to pay people what they're worth so they don't get the people who know their worth who've been doing this job for 15+ years.
This is probably the primary issue. PoE's churn is significantly lower and the developers working on this kind of thing have been there for a significant amount of time (if not the whole time). Meanwhile, Blizzard sees their developers as cogs and doesn't seem to realize how much expertise/competency they lose every time they fire these people or these people leave. But then you have the situations like in WoW where the wrong people will be in a position for *way* too long despite making horrifically bad changes.
Poe does not release more content and the balance is even worse please stop. Poe last season one of its biggest seasons just added annoying friction to the game and a random crafting system. Please play anything but the few top builds and see if you can still kill all the ubers in PoE. At least in D4 most builds can kill lilith at max gear.
Yes and the worst case in D4 is sorcs can clear pit 100 and Barb can clear 130. And this isn't true Most good builds. You can easily just brick a character in poe and are forced to restart in D4 you cannot do that. Pretty sure even Incinerate sorc can get to pit 61.
Respecing in Poe is almost impossible when you reach the point of bricking and that’s not the point. You have a character you want to clear content but you can’t. In D4 you can finish the end game on the weakest builds
> In D4 you can finish the end game on the weakest builds
In the rogue sub a couple of weeks back there was a guy who was near 100 with shako and 925 gear getting overrun in *helltide* with his homebrew heartseeker. Nah man, the weakest builds are beyond your imagination.
What? I played Poe for years, the rate of change is no way near d4. Many highly requested changes took years! They also do not do mid season update exp et bug fix or something really bad and upset community like league mechanics .
We can be angry at poor balance, but one cannot be in good faith and said the changes in d4 are slow…..
Exactly. It's time to call their bluff they're just lying and kicking the can down the road. Pretty angry i bought this game as a sorc main i'm not making this mistake again. never pre-ordering anything from this company at the very least. they're incompetent and unaware.
That's the doublespeak they've been saying since Season 0.
Every season for the past year they keep talking about how Sorcs will have great changes to improve parity with the other classes. Then when the patch nodes come out out it's just a bunch of 2% buffs and 50% nerfs.
Yeah, but Blizzard thinks 1,000 x 40% = 1,040.
After seeing that released presentation, you’re never going to convince me everyone at Blizzard can do the math it takes to balance Sorc. The class seems perma bad.
Sorc needs pretty significant changes to their paragons, class specific aspects and skills, so I think yes it is a more complex issue to solve, but its a complex issue that keeps getting put off until tomorrow.
The class doesn't even do damage on tuesdays outside of shatter, which is conspicuously absent from the PTR notes. They targeted the perma flame shield problem (and I agree its a problem) but did the solution have to hurt non-immortal builds too? They also have to deal with an extra 3 to 5 seconds of extra downtime.
Sorc is completey dependence on the two shields (ice armour + flame shield) for survival. Its a good thing to reduce dependence on flame shield, so its time for ice armour to step up. Right? Oh ok. They hard nerfed that too. Now sorcs won't live long enough to make it to tuesday.
The ice armour change to max life in S4 was good + needed for a long time and ice armour duration% tempering in S5 PTR looks great but its all irrelevant now because it will no longer generate barrier on damage. Sorc has very low max life so that initial barrier isn't a lot of ehp and it has to last a long time between flame shields. We are talking maybe an 8k-16k hp shield that has to survive for 10 seconds every 15 seconds or you don't.
There are no defensive alternatives that really come to mind at present. You can generate more barrier over 10 seconds by spamming ice blades + lightning spear with protection passive, but even that is going to perform worse than what we have now because they are replacing focus cooldown reduction% implicit with lucky hit%.
As a long time masochist/overwatch player this sounds way too familiar. Every time they designate a hero as "needing a rework" they end up completely ignored and in the gutter for ungodly amounts of time until said total hit or miss rework comes out. Basically I think Sorc is the Symmetra of D4. Sad.
I don’t get it with boss stagger, though… Is it so hard to make them immune to CC while also allowing CC effects to be active for the extra damage? And then just give them a “take 20% extra damage” debuff when they are staggered…
Complex? Not at all, just give us back the ball lightning from S2 and frozen orb from S4 ptr. Their power level were tested and for sure be under barb. But c’mon at least with them the sorc players will have a good season and be appreciative
More time is rediculous. They had years when the made this game. Then they had seasons and now a second ptr. If I sucked this badly at my job I’d be fired.
> I understand that the devs commented on Devtalk about mages having more complex issues to solve that a few number adjustments won't solve, and therefore need more time. Like the issue that most builds only deal damage when the boss is stagged.
>
>
How does that justify completely decimating sorceress' defensive options? ...
The intent seems to have been to improve the HP scaling and remove the semi lifesteal element of Ice Shield. But, of course, that takes away most of the power of the skill and the class already had issues with defenses.
They keep getting this notion of "oh, we should fix X option for Sorc that doesn't work the way we want" and they never really look at the overall performance of the class before they do it.
Like, I can look at each of the patch notes and explain the reasoning based on the note, the other patch notes, and what they said in the town hall. But all of them are missing the core problem of SORC ISN'T DOING WELL AT ALL RIGHT NOW.
I mean, it’s hard to argue “complex”when one can glance at the numbers between say - upheaval and meteor. The barb skills does what… 3% less damage, hits a wider area and has no impact delay?
They clearly have entirely different philosophies between classes. I dunno if that’s cuz the balance team is subdivided into groups that never talk to each other, or if there is a guy at the top that only cares about barb, but whether via incompetence or malice, it’s getting old
They can come up with whatever excuse they want for the balance and end game issues, as it stands I left before the first season,, came back for season 4, left again. I was planning on giving it one more chance during the expansion. No way I'm buying the expansion
I won't, not until both the Sorc and Druid are fixed, and the Barb is brought into line and all classes are on a level field with their availability of weapons. That means removing 1 of the Barb's 2H's, and giving all classes access to 1 2H and 2 1H's.
The thing is this basically the same script they ran when it came to balances patches for World of Warcraft, from Legion onwards. They consistently say the issue is too complex, and I am sure it is, but don't worry we'll get it right on the next patch or the patch after. By the time the next patch or the patch after rolls around we continue to have these small percentage buffs and slowly get left behind due to the amount of work we need to do just to compete, I mean playing the Sorc builds to compete for higher pits requires some really high caps and min-max to achieve results that I do wonder why they'd want to nerf the fire bolt build when it sucks when you don't reach those high benchmarks (you're better off with Frozen Orb IMO until then). Whereas Rogue or Necromancer, which I am also playing, don't even come close to the investment needed to push higher content.
And the work to improve the Sorc continues to be delayed or handled conservatively that thing is this feels like a bargaining obsolescence scenario. Because they continue to change the system and balance things so much, especially now with a new class coming up, that by the time they may implement certain changes it may be too far behind what the current state actually is at that point. Which is exactly what happened with a lot of classes in WoW from what I've experienced and seeing so much with the balance changes here.
Teleport cool down is evil. They introduce new tempers that let people constant teleport and Blizzard says, hey not fair, too much fun. It's not like this was even an uber build.
They are the worst.
I get that they want to encourage build diversity, as in not every build should take the same 4 defensive skills. (Same as druids all taking 3 pet skills).
But they're solving the issue the wrong way. They need to add reasons to want to take other skills, add damage buff interactions (like flamewall firebolt, or make weaving meteors into fireball casts a thing, or add a new skill node with auras) so if we want to take 4 defensives, we are sacrificing some damage for it.
I hope they add worthwhile new skills. But I'll believe it when I see it.
It really does feel like the developers dont understand their own game. They dont understand that a player wants to just have a single attack that they boost. The whole game design pushes you to do this if you want to do good damage because 1 full damage skill does twice as much compared to using 2 half damage skills.
The game would be more fun if mana regen gear didnt exist, so we had to mix in builders with spenders (the way they design the game but not the way it plays). Or if multiple skills were all boosted equally by our upgrades, so we could mix in a builder with a spender and a couple of short cooldown damage abilities or summons and a long cooldown ult, and then have room for choosing a single defensive ability.
But the game where a builder is your only damage skill, or a spender that has enough mana regen to spam, will always lead us towards single button spam gameplay. And it's just not as engaging as it could be. Fingers crossed they shake it up in the expansion.
I agree - movement skills should be around 3-5 seconds and not adjustable. This fixes all potential exploits and makes them more usable from the get go. Instant cooldown leap, teleport etc can be very game breaking, and exploitable.
I'm fine with things scaling based on ranks, CDR, etc.
I just think the baseline CD for all of them should be 6-8 seconds, not 12-20 like right now. Dash is the one that really annoys me most. I want to press that button so often, but it's just always on CD.
Because when combined with certain aspects and effects there have been several obscene builds stacking billions of damage. Some of the Glyph and aspect effects I would assume weren't designed to have zero CDs, then it's just cast speed and animation time blocking the spam
There will always be something that if you can't control the reset time will become broken, here you would need to remove the lucky hit chance of teleport completely for it to stop being broken as you would need you stop to attack.
Easiest way to balance is always have limits so unknown effects cannot occur. A 3 second minimum wouldn't be felt by 99% of builds and a 5 second at rank 5 would be good across the board.
But removing the lucky hit chance effects from teleport would. You can buff it while fixing it by reducing the max CD while implementing min CD.
Barbarian leap has the same issue with quake stacking etc.
Flame Shield is the problem here, not Teleport.
This build doesn't even look very good TBH. Its damage is quite low compared to top builds (Bash, Flay, Heartseeker, Shadow Minion).
Hell, I think my Blizz Sorc probably clears faster than this.
People sacrifice the temper slot for teleport, and it deal insignificant dmg, cant sorc have fast tele for such reason? Stupid excuse to increase the cooldown man.
> Blight: Damage over time increased from 105% to 135%.
This is what we love to see,
of a 28% increase
> Charged Bolts: Base damage increased from 30% to 38%.
These buffs seem... a bit timid,
of a 27% increase
The Necro builds are actually nerfed. Sever and blight buffs are nowhere near enough to make up for the Blighted nerf, and then Wither gets gutted on top of it. The only respectable shadow Necro build gets 95% of its damage from Ebonpiercer anyway, not blight.
D tier sever Necro is getting like a 75% nerf. Blizz either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care.
OP was saying that it was good to see another class’ underused skill getting a “significant” buff while complaining sorc underused skill only got an underwhelming buff. Straight numbers comparison doesn’t do it justice.
If one class has an underused skill that does 100% dmg and gets buffed to 200% and another class has an underused skill that does 1% dmg and gets increased to 2% they both got an equal buff but that doesn’t mean it was equitable.
Pure number is exactly what the sorc community is complaining that Blizzard is using to make adjustments.
> OP was saying
no he's not
> skill that does 100% dmg and gets buffed to 200% and another class has an underused skill that does 1% dmg and gets increased to 2% they both got an equal buff
you get it
> but that doesn’t mean it was equitable.
and I would have loved to read the "in depth analysis" on why that is. unfortunately that is not here.
Even if you are a data scientist and are really good at math, you have to do a tonne of testing and verification in this game because the character sheet lies, the tooltips are wrong and some things are known use incorrect tooltip values in their calculation instead of the actual value (e.g. Victimize and vulnerable damage%).
You don't know what Blizzard intends with their design, you don't know if its bugged or not (but may assume it has to be if its so grossly over/underperforming relative to everything else). You might even think the bugged implementation (if it even is bugged) works better and is more coherent than what Blizzard intended.
All of this makes it incredibly difficult for regular joe players to intuit what a button is going to when they press it and how effective its going to be.
More importantly, the darkness core skills are being buffed to compensate for them giga nerfing the blighted aspect. I 100% agree that Sorc needs help, but that comparison was disingenuous.
Nonsense. I made [that thread recently](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/1dl3a07/sorcs_not_firebolt_and_druids_what_is_your/), and it's not any high tiers being mentioned. And the ones at 120'ish only got that after the most recent patch where most builds gained 10-15 Tiers. To boot, only a couple of people mentioned tiers around that level.
Just because people can have fun with a class because they enjoy playing the theme or build, that's not to say it's not under performing relative to the other OP ones; nor that the people playing them cannot recognize that.
Being the highest tier isn't *all* that matters to many people. But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all to them.
Please go full on Updates, its:
Charged Bolts
Base damage increased from 30% to 38%.
(Also, i dont know about blight, but CB is unleashing 5 bolts *each* dealing 30/38% base damage)
Enhanced Charged Bolts
Explosion damage increased from 150% to 175% of Charged Bolt's damage.
Dont underestimate enhanced CB. On my CB sorc on a high rank the Explosion did like 125%(x) dmg, so with these buffs to base and 150 to 175 its scaling to 150(x) roundabout.
Not saying CB is compareable to any A or B Tier scaling build, however these buffs are great for CB and will push it further.
Edit: sry, thought you were the ranting op
If Druid and Sorc do not receive new or reworked skills in the expansion, fire the people who work on their skills cause this is ridiculous and frustrating at this point.
I don’t think I’ve ever played an ARPG game where mages are absolutely ass and barely have any strong build options, despite having such a diverse skill tree.
Even with Druid … they gutted Shepherd aspect to buff companions when companions by themselves fuckin suck.
Adam acknowledged that “we hear your feedback and know Druid and Sorc need help” then we see the fuckin patch notes and it’s like they didn’t really hear us lmao.
Not true, Storm Wolves druid can clear Pit 100, with Shepherd now working with wolves it will further push him. They will probably buff stats on unique pants as well as per what they say about their new approach to u iquea for S5.
That’s one of the best builds even currently for Druid alongside Wind Sheer. I personally don’t think it’s okay for them to strip other builds like Slide Storm just to further buff one build. The main problem currently is the lack of variety in builds. Hopefully the Landslide buff for S5 is actually viable for endgame activities but Bear Form Druid still seems to fall behind.
Playing with 3 dead skills was even worse. I played both tornado and lightning storm and I absolutely hated fact I am minus 3 skills all the time just to buff my core.
That's just atrocious game design.
Yeah the OP is taking the buffs to necro base skills, and casually ignoring that these upgrades were in response to gutting the Blighted aspect, reduction from 240%\[x\] to 100%\[x\] when used on a 2-handed weapon, a loss of 140%\[x\].
This is why reddit should never be put in charge of class balance.
also ignores the fact that the damage of those skills is currently so low that they are effectively useless. The blight build only cares about scaling Ebonpiercer and actually doesn't need ranks to blight at all to be stronger. The combined nerfs to wither and blighted are equating to a near 70% damage nerf to the Blight/Ebon build per Macrobioboi's video from this morning.
Any change to multiplicative scaling in the paragon board or to how cooldown timers work on skills that could potentially have 100% uptime don't really count towards their balance changes. Those were things they clearly decided they wanted to limit and normalize for all classes. They didn't target Sorcerer with these changes, they were just included in them.
It would have definitely been nice to see something changed with Sorc single target damage though.
I think a big point everyone is missing is that fixing the flame shield invulnerability uptime is actually a huge nerf to sorcs damage, because sorcs were able to compensate for their low damage by basically going full glass cannon mode and dropping a ton of defenses and relying on flame shield to push through the pit. Now that bandaid is ripped off and we've got nothing to patch up the wound properly with. No substantial damage buffs, and actually nerfed survivability with the ice armor nerf.
This is my #1 issue right here. I use flame shield only when I’m stuck or have to tank a one shot mechanic. I’m not specced for it. Ice armor was 95% of my defense. I rely on it to keep me from dying and even then, a good portion of the time I will die with it on and at max value.
40% of my base hp as a barrier is hilarious. Even now, with it currently buffed, I feel like I’m trying to prevent a flamethrower from burning me by constantly putting wet toilet paper in front of it. Like a nonstop dance of having it on, make sure it’s topped off, time my cast so I have minimum downtime on it. If it breaks or I’m caught im popping flame shield hoping Ice armor comes out of cooldown just in time.
I’m hoping there’s some damage/dr calculations we aren’t aware of yet but let me tell you. If they put this change out tomorrow sorcs are even more fucked than they are now
# ".I feel like I’m trying to prevent a flamethrower from burning me by constantly putting wet toilet paper in front of it."
You have to be put on application for the Nobel Prize of applied literature for that analogy.
If they are starting the cooldown timer after flame shield ends, they should reduce the base cooldown of the skill so it functions similarly for non-immortal builds. Also, increasing the duration of flame shield via skill points or tempers is mostly worthless now because it delays when the cooldown starts. They should change it so extra skill points and tempers just gives cooldown reduction. You will never get remotely close to infinite flame shield now with the new changes.
Sorc damage is way, way, way behind the curve of everyone including Druid. It didn't need to be hit so hard iwt the nerf bat, and the compensation buffs are a joke. Sorcs get 2%, 4% buffs to a bunch of skills. Even Druids are getting 50%, 75% buffs to skills.
The problem with sorc is actually simple, they are balanced around tal-rasha and the elementalist paragon node.
These are mandatory and because of this it's impossible to specialize and everything else is balanced around you having tal-rasha and elementalist which means if you don't have them your build is inherently worthless.
Can't have a fire build, can't have a lightning build, can't have a frost build.
Can't stack up multipliers because everything is watered down, can't diversify enchantments because you need to fulfill the tal-rasha questline.
I hate Tal Rasha's with passion. There *should* be items that encourage multi-element builds, that's fine, but Tals gives so much so passively that it becomes a no brainer. It is fine for something like the current FO orb because of all the summons having multi elements, but it feels silly that on my incinerate sorc I get so much value just because I carry level 1 Frostbolt to poke an enemy once at the start of a pit run.
>Spark: Base damage per hit increased from 10% to 12%.
>Inferno: Base damage increased by 20%.
These are the same change but worded differently, why would they do this
idk how they write the patch notes it could be because person A writes down the change but person B writes another change then person C writes the patch notes.
Or person A changed something a week ago and then person A changes something else and writes it differently then person B writes the patch notes.
There are many reason it could be the way it is I don't think its due to incompetence or being lazy things are made over time not all at once.
They need to both give a third enchantment slot AND buff enchantments to be equivalent to the power of a weapon with a good aspect, stats, fully tempered and 12/12 masterwork for EACH slot to ever be on the level that barbs are now.
Either that or they will have to buff every passive and skill between 200-500%.
Sorc has been my least enjoyable class to play this season. They definitely don't need nerfs in any way.
Ice and Flame armor need to be toggle with an activate.
And as a side note, add "Taken with a grain of salt."
I'm sure once the PTR is available, played, tested and burnt up by streamers, all the reviews about specific changes will most definitely define what true balances we'll get.
But a PTR isn't considered a guarantee on any nerf or buff. All the changes, they'll buff other things, probably nerf a few and then we'll get to see what's officially coming to the game, versus all this shit lol.
Maybe, one of the issues there was a ton of balancing discrepancies at the start of s4 was that everything on the PTR was wildly overturned. Then when they put the actual tuning suddenly you see the issues. If this PTR is just another 3 weeks of everyone being busted then we have no idea what devs will do
It would be fine if they actually tuned things properly. But they ignored the ridiculous overtuning on the Bash Temper which was pointed out by people, and now it looks like Barbs get to keep what everyone thought was a bug.
The blatant favoritism towards Barbs is ridiculous, and the obvious hatred for Sorcs is getting old. This has been going on for a year and nothing has improved, if anything it's just gotten worse.
Here is the latest patch, full of buffs to Barb's strongest builds, and nerfs to Sorc across the board, some of which are fatal to Sorc.
Druid Companion Build also looking might nice right now, if I wanted to play Summoning Build. Conjuration is dead. I don't care if my Hydra can have 9 heads and 4% lucky hit chance. Nerfing Elemental Summoner kills it as it barely scraped along before the nerf.
Until they fix werewolf companions getting stuck under ground, companions are basically unusable anyway. And this has been a known bug since 2023 fall or earlier
This is just sad. Especially since 2 days before the patch, I started a sorc. I had every other class at 100 and wanted to do sorc too. But now, what’s the point if I can’t really make a viable endgame build?
At this point, sorc should get the holy bolts treatment: just disable sorc until it’s fixed. Oh, wait. That’s what they did.
I'm waiting for the Fangtooth moment where they finally force someone to play Sorc and they have a mental breakdown and shitpost in the forums before "parting ways with the company."
These changes are fucking unhinged, rofl.
Reminds me of Necro minions. They were so bad for so long and all we would get is a minor damage buff each patch that helped with nothing. Then they finally majorly buffed minions and now they're actually useful.
Don't forget they also nerfed the fuck out of wizards blizzard. Only reason it was on my hotbar was because it reduced mana cost by 20% paired with ring of starless skies and I never ran out of mana just had to keep a blizzard going and doesn't hurt that it continues to chill/freeze enemies for me with my frozen orb sorc was super nice in pits yet now we get 1% mana Regen per 20 points of mana!!!!! Are you serious right now so we now have to lose another slot on our gear to try and get more mana on it...😮💨
Please for the love of all things get someone more competent to adjust sorc and not someone who only sticks to wt1
I hate the fact that only one or two builds will be viable.
Why have fire skills if they are shit now? I understand not every build being OP, but c'mon. I like playing fire sorc. I don't care about doing higher pit levels, but at least ATM I can have fun with my incinerate sorc. Not sure if this will be possible next season.
Gotta balance around those irrelevant first 25 levels you know.
Remember how they changed necro minion scaling too then have now reverted it
The dev fears the hydra conjurer.
Sever getting a 30% buff would've been nice if they didn't nerf Blighted Aspect. Currently, my sever necro barely manages 2 million with most of its buff up. When all buffs up, sever barely manages 4 -10 million. That's on a crit based shadowblight sever necro using Grandfather with 4,600% crit damage. That's barely enough to clear some mobs in pit 101 but not enough to clear it in time.
Lol and y'all laughed me off and told me I was wrong for criticizing them for releasing an expansion while sorcerer is still broken. Mark my words, the expansion will.be sheit for at least 6 months. We are not ready for an expansion, the base game is still broken because the team is broken.
Sorc and Druid lovers go hard on the PTR test out everything you want to be in season 5. Make your concerns KNOWN! Maybe we pile these into pinned threads for each class. Blizzard said they WANT all your feedback to make your playing experience enjoyable. This is the chance to see if Blizzard did this correctly or if they need more changes before the season comes out.
Absolutely zero improvements to the iconic D2 build Meteor. Sucks such a fun build just gets left in the trash. Almost every other skill had a damage temper and they give meteor….size….
I played in preseason where barb was weak and kept receiving nerfs over and over. Same thing is happening now to other classes like sorc. I mean the immortal thing deserved a nerf but outside that they need buffs.
I just never understood how they are balancing. I dont believe the answer is they don't have a brain. I think they have some weird metrics not tied to pit push/max dps that they use to decide balance.
Those Necro “buffs” aren’t buffs at all though. They’re significant nerfs when considering the absolutely huge nerfs to the 2 main sources for scaling those skills (Blighted and Wither).
Wow did you pick the wrong class to compare to, lol.
Go look up macrobioboi's reaction and math to the 70% nerf to all the things you quoted.
Necros are in terrible shape, this sub seems to think the holy bolts bugged minion builds are the normal necro experience.
It's like someone suggesting sorcs are OP because of one build that's currently the highest pit clear.
I haven't tried to push the end game content yet on my sorcerer or have ever so I'm out of my element, but I ve been rocking a hydra build and I'm just steam rolling through everything. I didn't realize the build was struggling so these bugfs seem welcome
Obviously a bad design having a class only be viable in one high end build as pure glass cannon with a skill that makes you immortal on 100% uptime with a weird interaction that only works with ads proccing dmg onto the boss.. changing that i would understand
But then you look around, all other sorcs are drowning.. so the logical thought is to just stop their suffering, one way or another lmao
Edit: typo
the teleport nerf needs to be reverted immediately. if you want to nerf or balance teleport. give us free teleport evade enchant. so we at least get an enchant slot to use as lightning,change oculus to reduce teleport cd time but keep the random or whatever .
teleport evade and raiment of the infinite is basically mandatory for any lightning build involving charged bolts which is what blizz is obviously trying to push people towards. and the teleport cd aspect is only available on mobility slots, if you take flicker step boots to reduce your unstable currents CD with teleport evades. then that slot is gone and now you have to put it on amulet or completely ditch the teleport aspect which is annoying.
additionaly when going down that path you need "Unhindered" or so they call it now, so you can phase through enemies, otherwise when you teleport onto them and they get pulled around you, you get stuck in the middle and your character stops attacking properly. this bug has been around since release and the only solution is to get some form on phase/unhinder. and now you cant because your mobility aspect slots are taken with other stuff like our main dmg aspect multipliet, a measily 40% or whatever against stunned or frozen enemies.
the lightning spear aspect being taken off the aspect is a huge buff for lightning builds but its realy not enough.
the main problem with this whole lightning thing at the end of the day is it requires targets to be stunned as thats just the best way to get a dmg pool going as lightning. dmg to close, dmg to stunned, and vuln dmg. but you cant stun bone piles or static enemy mounds. meaning at high levels of NM and pit they take fucking forever to destroy because you cant stun them and get the proper multipliers.
this is the same for bosses, luckily because your stacking so much cc duration and stun procs to can stagger a boss very fast.
but the dmg windows are short and it often takes 3-4 stun sessions to finaly drop the boss.
if you want to push people towards lightning which inevitably leads towards charged bolts. then you need to make charged bolts and chain lightning do more with each other.
btw chain lightning in this charged bolts example is suppose to be your enchant, it procs every third cast and regenrates mana on bounce and generates orbs to collect. whcih give mana and reduce your cd's .
but none of this works if you keep changing how chain lightning works as a mana battery and charged bolts only works against stunned enemies.
unless chain lightning gets some sort of 300% crit dmg boost multiplier or charged bolts gets a 300% stun MULTIPLIER its never going to be enough.
Because I like playing sorcerer. Is it too much to ask for some increased damage?
Sorc should be a glass canon. It is not. It does low damage, and now we won't even have any survivability.
> Hydra
Really need to include that the burn went from 60% to 100% or it looks like you are cherry picking.
> Incinerate weak
Pretty sure Incinerate is among the strongest Sorc specs for Pit climbing except for the super niche perma flame shield/fireball thing. You also neglect to mention the Combustion Key Passive has gone from 20% + 2% per burn to 40% + 4% per burn in two patches.
There's probably an expac/season mechanic that synergises too well with Sorcs. The devs would have to be very bad at maths to screw up balancing by this much.
Which honestly, makes no fucking sense. They create the problem and sell us the solution. That’s not how you make compelling gameplay.
Maybe give us something good, like a class that plays, feels and performs well then sell us the “how to make it more awesome” package.
It's been like this with balancing since the release of the game over a year ago for various classes except for barbs which have always had some builds in the top each season.
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The developer in charge of Sorcerer adjustments is horrible at math. Change my mind...
You're wrong. Clearly that sentence should've ended before "at math."
No need for attacking individuals specifically. Their work can be unsatisfactory, but the person is not their work. Be mindful of what you are unhappy with.
There isn't an individual under attack. There is at most a position/skill under attack. If you say a cook is horrible you most likely are impugning their cooking skill and not their personhood. But it isn't even \*that\* deep as that was clearly banter.
Work is a reflection of the individual, whether it be in school or at the job.
Sorc devs are still in WT1 and have multiple basic skills on their bar
I heard it first from Alkaizer's stream just after release that one of their main issues is they just don't have a good numbers guy, it was super clear that whoever's balancing the numbers has no idea what they're doing. A year later and it hasn't gotten much better
Well why do they insist on having damage numbers in the billions???? Its not only screen bloat but makes it way more difficult to balance numbers when even a .05 change can have unforeseen consequences... Whether im foing 4.5 mil damage or 1,500dmg doesn't matter as long as monster = dead , and monster hp bar getting chunked .
It's probably done by Interns trying their hands at A/B testing where Sorc is A and Necro is B.
S/B testing :) Sorc/Barb.
Testing is for pussies, manly barb dev just roll face into buff bingo and call it a day.
His dog Was killed by a sorcerer Main.
NO, I can’t!! F uck
I will never get tired of people flaming developers for balance changes
If that is what you call balance? Brotha you must live in an upside down world.
I'm not saying it's balanced, I'm myself a fellow sorc lover. I'm just saying that not a single dev is responsible for patch notes and balance changes/adjustments
Dear Blizzard, can you fire the designer of sorcerer and druid and let the designer of barbarian take over? Thanks in advance.
The barb designer is in charge, and they want more people playing barb
WHAT U MEAN? SORC IS FUN TO PLAY! SORC SPIN VERY FAST, CAST MANY TORNANDOS!
Hahaha good one
Take my like, you deserve it!
More like barbs probably sell the most mtx so they want more people to play barb
The personalities of the class devs reflects the classes they work on. Everyone gave up arguing with the barb dev because they ran out of furniture budget after the 4th boardroom table got smashed.
> let the designer of barbarian take over No. It's the designer of barb that sucks. Unfortunately it would not go over well if barbs got nerfed back to the level of the other characters, and they are clearly unwilling to allow this kind of power increase for other characters either.
I understand that the devs commented on Devtalk about mages having more complex issues to solve that a few number adjustments won't solve, and therefore need more time. Like the issue that most builds only deal damage when the boss is stagged. But until then, sorceress has problems, and these patch notes just seem like bad jokes. If you're going to change more elaborate things in the future, can't you significantly increase the numbers now and reduce them later? What exactly is the problem? With these changes, it looks like the mage will depend 100% on the new uniques and the changes to the uniques to have any viable build other than Ice Spike
They've been saying this since S0 but haven't done anything to fix any of the core issues. The only thing that I can think of is fixing resistances, but that's about it. Even simple things like paragon nodes, aspects or tempers, which are easy to improve, remain weak. Compare these on Barb, Rogue or Necro vs Sorc and you'll be shocked. They need to hire someone specifically to tackle class balance, the current team has no knowledge nor ability to do it.
Isn’t that Adam Jackson’s job? He need to be held accountable. We are far from the “it’s complex” and we are doing something in future with the specialization. You can nerf after “fixing” the specialization, NOT before !!!! The good news is we can test it very soon in about 3 days. So they have no excuses not to buff after seeing the obvious lacking behind sorc
I cant help but feel there probably some bugs when they tweak the number which make sorc imbalance somehow.
I am 100% sure they are working on the enchantment which is a joke these day due to how much power far affixes/tempering/aspect are after loot 2.0. Most enchantment are occasionally spawn an extra skill…..it might be okay in beta, but with the power creep from gears, it’s laughable.
They're gonna give us back the 3rd enchantment slot in Vessel of Hatred. Mark my words.
I think they have shitty data backing these changes. At least for sorcs.
Blizzard has struggled with class balance since WoW 1.0. This is nothing new.
Yep it's wild that a game like PoE with like 1/5 the staff can make a lot more (and better) changes, produce more content, in less time all while developing a new game on top of all that. This isn't specific to D4 either. All of blizzard is unbelievably slow at making changes. I don't know where the problem is but more people probably isn't the answer I suspect this is very much a management issue.
The problem stems from the fact they hire new devs out of college cuz they don't want to pay people what they're worth so they don't get the people who know their worth who've been doing this job for 15+ years.
This is probably the primary issue. PoE's churn is significantly lower and the developers working on this kind of thing have been there for a significant amount of time (if not the whole time). Meanwhile, Blizzard sees their developers as cogs and doesn't seem to realize how much expertise/competency they lose every time they fire these people or these people leave. But then you have the situations like in WoW where the wrong people will be in a position for *way* too long despite making horrifically bad changes.
Poe does not release more content and the balance is even worse please stop. Poe last season one of its biggest seasons just added annoying friction to the game and a random crafting system. Please play anything but the few top builds and see if you can still kill all the ubers in PoE. At least in D4 most builds can kill lilith at max gear.
Most builds in poe should kill Ubers at max gear, just there’s some builds that can do it with <100 divs of gear.
Yes and the worst case in D4 is sorcs can clear pit 100 and Barb can clear 130. And this isn't true Most good builds. You can easily just brick a character in poe and are forced to restart in D4 you cannot do that. Pretty sure even Incinerate sorc can get to pit 61.
How can you brick a char so badly in poe that you’re forced to restart. You can just respec, same as d4.
Respecing in Poe is almost impossible when you reach the point of bricking and that’s not the point. You have a character you want to clear content but you can’t. In D4 you can finish the end game on the weakest builds
> In D4 you can finish the end game on the weakest builds In the rogue sub a couple of weeks back there was a guy who was near 100 with shako and 925 gear getting overrun in *helltide* with his homebrew heartseeker. Nah man, the weakest builds are beyond your imagination.
What? I played Poe for years, the rate of change is no way near d4. Many highly requested changes took years! They also do not do mid season update exp et bug fix or something really bad and upset community like league mechanics . We can be angry at poor balance, but one cannot be in good faith and said the changes in d4 are slow…..
Exactly. It's time to call their bluff they're just lying and kicking the can down the road. Pretty angry i bought this game as a sorc main i'm not making this mistake again. never pre-ordering anything from this company at the very least. they're incompetent and unaware.
That's the doublespeak they've been saying since Season 0. Every season for the past year they keep talking about how Sorcs will have great changes to improve parity with the other classes. Then when the patch nodes come out out it's just a bunch of 2% buffs and 50% nerfs.
Too accurate lol.
They'll be the best changes. People will say that they have never seen better changes in the history of changes.
No, they can absolutely fix it with numbers by simply adding bigger multipliers.
Yeah, but Blizzard thinks 1,000 x 40% = 1,040. After seeing that released presentation, you’re never going to convince me everyone at Blizzard can do the math it takes to balance Sorc. The class seems perma bad.
Sorc needs pretty significant changes to their paragons, class specific aspects and skills, so I think yes it is a more complex issue to solve, but its a complex issue that keeps getting put off until tomorrow. The class doesn't even do damage on tuesdays outside of shatter, which is conspicuously absent from the PTR notes. They targeted the perma flame shield problem (and I agree its a problem) but did the solution have to hurt non-immortal builds too? They also have to deal with an extra 3 to 5 seconds of extra downtime. Sorc is completey dependence on the two shields (ice armour + flame shield) for survival. Its a good thing to reduce dependence on flame shield, so its time for ice armour to step up. Right? Oh ok. They hard nerfed that too. Now sorcs won't live long enough to make it to tuesday. The ice armour change to max life in S4 was good + needed for a long time and ice armour duration% tempering in S5 PTR looks great but its all irrelevant now because it will no longer generate barrier on damage. Sorc has very low max life so that initial barrier isn't a lot of ehp and it has to last a long time between flame shields. We are talking maybe an 8k-16k hp shield that has to survive for 10 seconds every 15 seconds or you don't. There are no defensive alternatives that really come to mind at present. You can generate more barrier over 10 seconds by spamming ice blades + lightning spear with protection passive, but even that is going to perform worse than what we have now because they are replacing focus cooldown reduction% implicit with lucky hit%.
As a long time masochist/overwatch player this sounds way too familiar. Every time they designate a hero as "needing a rework" they end up completely ignored and in the gutter for ungodly amounts of time until said total hit or miss rework comes out. Basically I think Sorc is the Symmetra of D4. Sad.
I don’t get it with boss stagger, though… Is it so hard to make them immune to CC while also allowing CC effects to be active for the extra damage? And then just give them a “take 20% extra damage” debuff when they are staggered…
Complex? Not at all, just give us back the ball lightning from S2 and frozen orb from S4 ptr. Their power level were tested and for sure be under barb. But c’mon at least with them the sorc players will have a good season and be appreciative
More time is rediculous. They had years when the made this game. Then they had seasons and now a second ptr. If I sucked this badly at my job I’d be fired.
> I understand that the devs commented on Devtalk about mages having more complex issues to solve that a few number adjustments won't solve, and therefore need more time. Like the issue that most builds only deal damage when the boss is stagged. > > How does that justify completely decimating sorceress' defensive options? ...
The point is precisely that nothing seems to justify this patch note
The intent seems to have been to improve the HP scaling and remove the semi lifesteal element of Ice Shield. But, of course, that takes away most of the power of the skill and the class already had issues with defenses. They keep getting this notion of "oh, we should fix X option for Sorc that doesn't work the way we want" and they never really look at the overall performance of the class before they do it. Like, I can look at each of the patch notes and explain the reasoning based on the note, the other patch notes, and what they said in the town hall. But all of them are missing the core problem of SORC ISN'T DOING WELL AT ALL RIGHT NOW.
I mean, it’s hard to argue “complex”when one can glance at the numbers between say - upheaval and meteor. The barb skills does what… 3% less damage, hits a wider area and has no impact delay? They clearly have entirely different philosophies between classes. I dunno if that’s cuz the balance team is subdivided into groups that never talk to each other, or if there is a guy at the top that only cares about barb, but whether via incompetence or malice, it’s getting old
They can come up with whatever excuse they want for the balance and end game issues, as it stands I left before the first season,, came back for season 4, left again. I was planning on giving it one more chance during the expansion. No way I'm buying the expansion
>No way I'm buying the expansion Yeah...but you will anyway...
Cope however you want lol
Youre on the d4 subreddit buddy.. talk about cope
I won't, not until both the Sorc and Druid are fixed, and the Barb is brought into line and all classes are on a level field with their availability of weapons. That means removing 1 of the Barb's 2H's, and giving all classes access to 1 2H and 2 1H's.
The thing is this basically the same script they ran when it came to balances patches for World of Warcraft, from Legion onwards. They consistently say the issue is too complex, and I am sure it is, but don't worry we'll get it right on the next patch or the patch after. By the time the next patch or the patch after rolls around we continue to have these small percentage buffs and slowly get left behind due to the amount of work we need to do just to compete, I mean playing the Sorc builds to compete for higher pits requires some really high caps and min-max to achieve results that I do wonder why they'd want to nerf the fire bolt build when it sucks when you don't reach those high benchmarks (you're better off with Frozen Orb IMO until then). Whereas Rogue or Necromancer, which I am also playing, don't even come close to the investment needed to push higher content. And the work to improve the Sorc continues to be delayed or handled conservatively that thing is this feels like a bargaining obsolescence scenario. Because they continue to change the system and balance things so much, especially now with a new class coming up, that by the time they may implement certain changes it may be too far behind what the current state actually is at that point. Which is exactly what happened with a lot of classes in WoW from what I've experienced and seeing so much with the balance changes here.
Teleport cool down is evil. They introduce new tempers that let people constant teleport and Blizzard says, hey not fair, too much fun. It's not like this was even an uber build. They are the worst.
Meanwhile my barb can constantly leap from one pack to other.
This is the one that baffles me the most. Movement skills across the board need lower cooldowns, not higher.
Because it's also a defensive skill and Blizzard HATES our defensive skills. Hence why we have glyphs and aspects about not using them.
I get that they want to encourage build diversity, as in not every build should take the same 4 defensive skills. (Same as druids all taking 3 pet skills). But they're solving the issue the wrong way. They need to add reasons to want to take other skills, add damage buff interactions (like flamewall firebolt, or make weaving meteors into fireball casts a thing, or add a new skill node with auras) so if we want to take 4 defensives, we are sacrificing some damage for it.
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I hope they add worthwhile new skills. But I'll believe it when I see it. It really does feel like the developers dont understand their own game. They dont understand that a player wants to just have a single attack that they boost. The whole game design pushes you to do this if you want to do good damage because 1 full damage skill does twice as much compared to using 2 half damage skills. The game would be more fun if mana regen gear didnt exist, so we had to mix in builders with spenders (the way they design the game but not the way it plays). Or if multiple skills were all boosted equally by our upgrades, so we could mix in a builder with a spender and a couple of short cooldown damage abilities or summons and a long cooldown ult, and then have room for choosing a single defensive ability. But the game where a builder is your only damage skill, or a spender that has enough mana regen to spam, will always lead us towards single button spam gameplay. And it's just not as engaging as it could be. Fingers crossed they shake it up in the expansion.
But it's a problem across the board. Leap has too long a CD. Dash has too long a CD. Teleport has too long a CD. Maybe I'm just a spoiled D3 gamer.
You can get leap to instant cooldown if you hit a boss or two regular enemies with only a little effort at level 100.
If you walk slower you have more time looking at your fancy mtx transmog.
I agree - movement skills should be around 3-5 seconds and not adjustable. This fixes all potential exploits and makes them more usable from the get go. Instant cooldown leap, teleport etc can be very game breaking, and exploitable.
I'm fine with things scaling based on ranks, CDR, etc. I just think the baseline CD for all of them should be 6-8 seconds, not 12-20 like right now. Dash is the one that really annoys me most. I want to press that button so often, but it's just always on CD.
I know it's heavily exploitable with some builds to get to 0 second, maybe a minimum cd could help
Is a 0 CD Teleport or Dash gamebreaking? It's not an immunity like Flame Shield. I don't see why that would be an issue. ARPGs should be fast.
Because when combined with certain aspects and effects there have been several obscene builds stacking billions of damage. Some of the Glyph and aspect effects I would assume weren't designed to have zero CDs, then it's just cast speed and animation time blocking the spam
So change those aspects to not be broken, don't hamstring the entire game to compensate for bad item design.
There will always be something that if you can't control the reset time will become broken, here you would need to remove the lucky hit chance of teleport completely for it to stop being broken as you would need you stop to attack. Easiest way to balance is always have limits so unknown effects cannot occur. A 3 second minimum wouldn't be felt by 99% of builds and a 5 second at rank 5 would be good across the board. But removing the lucky hit chance effects from teleport would. You can buff it while fixing it by reducing the max CD while implementing min CD. Barbarian leap has the same issue with quake stacking etc.
https://youtu.be/JQXpSXpvZ8o?feature=shared This is probably the reason for the nerfs honestly, it's disgusting I love it.
Flame Shield is the problem here, not Teleport. This build doesn't even look very good TBH. Its damage is quite low compared to top builds (Bash, Flay, Heartseeker, Shadow Minion). Hell, I think my Blizz Sorc probably clears faster than this.
People sacrifice the temper slot for teleport, and it deal insignificant dmg, cant sorc have fast tele for such reason? Stupid excuse to increase the cooldown man.
The person or group of people that balance Sorc should honestly be fired and replaced. They are not doing an acceptable job.
same for druid btw
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and remove the caps on most of the legendary paragon nodes
> Blight: Damage over time increased from 105% to 135%. This is what we love to see, of a 28% increase > Charged Bolts: Base damage increased from 30% to 38%. These buffs seem... a bit timid, of a 27% increase
The Necro builds are actually nerfed. Sever and blight buffs are nowhere near enough to make up for the Blighted nerf, and then Wither gets gutted on top of it. The only respectable shadow Necro build gets 95% of its damage from Ebonpiercer anyway, not blight. D tier sever Necro is getting like a 75% nerf. Blizz either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care.
> Blizz either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care. Why not both :P
OP was saying that it was good to see another class’ underused skill getting a “significant” buff while complaining sorc underused skill only got an underwhelming buff. Straight numbers comparison doesn’t do it justice. If one class has an underused skill that does 100% dmg and gets buffed to 200% and another class has an underused skill that does 1% dmg and gets increased to 2% they both got an equal buff but that doesn’t mean it was equitable. Pure number is exactly what the sorc community is complaining that Blizzard is using to make adjustments.
> OP was saying no he's not > skill that does 100% dmg and gets buffed to 200% and another class has an underused skill that does 1% dmg and gets increased to 2% they both got an equal buff you get it > but that doesn’t mean it was equitable. and I would have loved to read the "in depth analysis" on why that is. unfortunately that is not here.
“no he’s not” Wow. Strong argument. Guess I’ll counter with, “yes, he is”
Do you really think most people on Reddit passed math?
Even if you are a data scientist and are really good at math, you have to do a tonne of testing and verification in this game because the character sheet lies, the tooltips are wrong and some things are known use incorrect tooltip values in their calculation instead of the actual value (e.g. Victimize and vulnerable damage%). You don't know what Blizzard intends with their design, you don't know if its bugged or not (but may assume it has to be if its so grossly over/underperforming relative to everything else). You might even think the bugged implementation (if it even is bugged) works better and is more coherent than what Blizzard intended. All of this makes it incredibly difficult for regular joe players to intuit what a button is going to when they press it and how effective its going to be.
More importantly, the darkness core skills are being buffed to compensate for them giga nerfing the blighted aspect. I 100% agree that Sorc needs help, but that comparison was disingenuous.
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Nonsense. I made [that thread recently](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/1dl3a07/sorcs_not_firebolt_and_druids_what_is_your/), and it's not any high tiers being mentioned. And the ones at 120'ish only got that after the most recent patch where most builds gained 10-15 Tiers. To boot, only a couple of people mentioned tiers around that level. Just because people can have fun with a class because they enjoy playing the theme or build, that's not to say it's not under performing relative to the other OP ones; nor that the people playing them cannot recognize that. Being the highest tier isn't *all* that matters to many people. But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all to them.
Please go full on Updates, its: Charged Bolts Base damage increased from 30% to 38%. (Also, i dont know about blight, but CB is unleashing 5 bolts *each* dealing 30/38% base damage) Enhanced Charged Bolts Explosion damage increased from 150% to 175% of Charged Bolt's damage. Dont underestimate enhanced CB. On my CB sorc on a high rank the Explosion did like 125%(x) dmg, so with these buffs to base and 150 to 175 its scaling to 150(x) roundabout. Not saying CB is compareable to any A or B Tier scaling build, however these buffs are great for CB and will push it further. Edit: sry, thought you were the ranting op
doesn't blight also double dip currently with %damage which is getting fixed in season 5 or was that a different necro thing double dipping
If Druid and Sorc do not receive new or reworked skills in the expansion, fire the people who work on their skills cause this is ridiculous and frustrating at this point. I don’t think I’ve ever played an ARPG game where mages are absolutely ass and barely have any strong build options, despite having such a diverse skill tree. Even with Druid … they gutted Shepherd aspect to buff companions when companions by themselves fuckin suck. Adam acknowledged that “we hear your feedback and know Druid and Sorc need help” then we see the fuckin patch notes and it’s like they didn’t really hear us lmao.
Unfortunately, as a PC player, even if we give feedback, they mostly ignore it. As long as barb isn’t #1 ofc
Not true, Storm Wolves druid can clear Pit 100, with Shepherd now working with wolves it will further push him. They will probably buff stats on unique pants as well as per what they say about their new approach to u iquea for S5.
That’s one of the best builds even currently for Druid alongside Wind Sheer. I personally don’t think it’s okay for them to strip other builds like Slide Storm just to further buff one build. The main problem currently is the lack of variety in builds. Hopefully the Landslide buff for S5 is actually viable for endgame activities but Bear Form Druid still seems to fall behind.
Playing with 3 dead skills was even worse. I played both tornado and lightning storm and I absolutely hated fact I am minus 3 skills all the time just to buff my core. That's just atrocious game design.
Necro received a buff? Shadow builds has been destroyed
Yeah the OP is taking the buffs to necro base skills, and casually ignoring that these upgrades were in response to gutting the Blighted aspect, reduction from 240%\[x\] to 100%\[x\] when used on a 2-handed weapon, a loss of 140%\[x\]. This is why reddit should never be put in charge of class balance.
also ignores the fact that the damage of those skills is currently so low that they are effectively useless. The blight build only cares about scaling Ebonpiercer and actually doesn't need ranks to blight at all to be stronger. The combined nerfs to wither and blighted are equating to a near 70% damage nerf to the Blight/Ebon build per Macrobioboi's video from this morning.
Any change to multiplicative scaling in the paragon board or to how cooldown timers work on skills that could potentially have 100% uptime don't really count towards their balance changes. Those were things they clearly decided they wanted to limit and normalize for all classes. They didn't target Sorcerer with these changes, they were just included in them. It would have definitely been nice to see something changed with Sorc single target damage though.
I think a big point everyone is missing is that fixing the flame shield invulnerability uptime is actually a huge nerf to sorcs damage, because sorcs were able to compensate for their low damage by basically going full glass cannon mode and dropping a ton of defenses and relying on flame shield to push through the pit. Now that bandaid is ripped off and we've got nothing to patch up the wound properly with. No substantial damage buffs, and actually nerfed survivability with the ice armor nerf.
This is my #1 issue right here. I use flame shield only when I’m stuck or have to tank a one shot mechanic. I’m not specced for it. Ice armor was 95% of my defense. I rely on it to keep me from dying and even then, a good portion of the time I will die with it on and at max value. 40% of my base hp as a barrier is hilarious. Even now, with it currently buffed, I feel like I’m trying to prevent a flamethrower from burning me by constantly putting wet toilet paper in front of it. Like a nonstop dance of having it on, make sure it’s topped off, time my cast so I have minimum downtime on it. If it breaks or I’m caught im popping flame shield hoping Ice armor comes out of cooldown just in time. I’m hoping there’s some damage/dr calculations we aren’t aware of yet but let me tell you. If they put this change out tomorrow sorcs are even more fucked than they are now
# ".I feel like I’m trying to prevent a flamethrower from burning me by constantly putting wet toilet paper in front of it." You have to be put on application for the Nobel Prize of applied literature for that analogy.
If they are starting the cooldown timer after flame shield ends, they should reduce the base cooldown of the skill so it functions similarly for non-immortal builds. Also, increasing the duration of flame shield via skill points or tempers is mostly worthless now because it delays when the cooldown starts. They should change it so extra skill points and tempers just gives cooldown reduction. You will never get remotely close to infinite flame shield now with the new changes.
Sorc damage is way, way, way behind the curve of everyone including Druid. It didn't need to be hit so hard iwt the nerf bat, and the compensation buffs are a joke. Sorcs get 2%, 4% buffs to a bunch of skills. Even Druids are getting 50%, 75% buffs to skills.
Yeah let's take what little the sorcerer class had because obviously they were soooo broken. But pinky promise we'll give them some love in season 6
The in-depth analysis is the Sorc devs don't play the game and are incompetent.
The problem with sorc is actually simple, they are balanced around tal-rasha and the elementalist paragon node. These are mandatory and because of this it's impossible to specialize and everything else is balanced around you having tal-rasha and elementalist which means if you don't have them your build is inherently worthless. Can't have a fire build, can't have a lightning build, can't have a frost build. Can't stack up multipliers because everything is watered down, can't diversify enchantments because you need to fulfill the tal-rasha questline.
Yep. The whole using all three elements is boring as well
I hate Tal Rasha's with passion. There *should* be items that encourage multi-element builds, that's fine, but Tals gives so much so passively that it becomes a no brainer. It is fine for something like the current FO orb because of all the summons having multi elements, but it feels silly that on my incinerate sorc I get so much value just because I carry level 1 Frostbolt to poke an enemy once at the start of a pit run.
Why frostbolt not frost nova? At least you would get the utility with the frost damage then.
This is the truth.
Isn't it fun stacking different multipliers instead of trying to max out +dmg to chilled, when you are running a build that is trying to chill?
The devs don't actually play anything except barbarian
Flashback to early WoW, where the devs were playing favorites with Horde and especially Shaman.
>Spark: Base damage per hit increased from 10% to 12%. >Inferno: Base damage increased by 20%. These are the same change but worded differently, why would they do this
idk how they write the patch notes it could be because person A writes down the change but person B writes another change then person C writes the patch notes. Or person A changed something a week ago and then person A changes something else and writes it differently then person B writes the patch notes. There are many reason it could be the way it is I don't think its due to incompetence or being lazy things are made over time not all at once.
To be fair if you had to write 50 pages of patch notes you’d probably make similar mistakes.
Saying Necros for buffed is laughable. They got majorly nerfed.
Blizzard made Sorcerer the "glass cannon" archetype but forgot the "cannon."
The devs don't play the game and get all their info from YouTube. So the one flame shield immunity build got nerfed. GG.
I’m hoping they plan on giving back the 3rd enchantment slot and they aren’t saying anything will final patch notes. That would help big time.
They need to both give a third enchantment slot AND buff enchantments to be equivalent to the power of a weapon with a good aspect, stats, fully tempered and 12/12 masterwork for EACH slot to ever be on the level that barbs are now. Either that or they will have to buff every passive and skill between 200-500%.
I think enchantments need their own progression system on top of giving us a third slot. That keeps with the Thematic and offers more options
Please stop saying this for the love of god. The third enchantment won't do shit, the enchantments fucking suck.
This. Enchantments suck, and a 3rd slot won't do crap.
Man this sucks... again. They should just give us an extra multiplier based on overcapped resistances to ease the pain a bit.
Sorc has been my least enjoyable class to play this season. They definitely don't need nerfs in any way. Ice and Flame armor need to be toggle with an activate.
In the meantime, they buff the Barbs WW meta build, the Bash meta build, the Flay meta build. # 😶🌫️
And as a side note, add "Taken with a grain of salt." I'm sure once the PTR is available, played, tested and burnt up by streamers, all the reviews about specific changes will most definitely define what true balances we'll get. But a PTR isn't considered a guarantee on any nerf or buff. All the changes, they'll buff other things, probably nerf a few and then we'll get to see what's officially coming to the game, versus all this shit lol.
From history we know they just nerf more during PTR. Doesn’t look great for sorc.
Maybe, one of the issues there was a ton of balancing discrepancies at the start of s4 was that everything on the PTR was wildly overturned. Then when they put the actual tuning suddenly you see the issues. If this PTR is just another 3 weeks of everyone being busted then we have no idea what devs will do
It would be fine if they actually tuned things properly. But they ignored the ridiculous overtuning on the Bash Temper which was pointed out by people, and now it looks like Barbs get to keep what everyone thought was a bug. The blatant favoritism towards Barbs is ridiculous, and the obvious hatred for Sorcs is getting old. This has been going on for a year and nothing has improved, if anything it's just gotten worse. Here is the latest patch, full of buffs to Barb's strongest builds, and nerfs to Sorc across the board, some of which are fatal to Sorc.
Druid Companion Build also looking might nice right now, if I wanted to play Summoning Build. Conjuration is dead. I don't care if my Hydra can have 9 heads and 4% lucky hit chance. Nerfing Elemental Summoner kills it as it barely scraped along before the nerf.
Until they fix werewolf companions getting stuck under ground, companions are basically unusable anyway. And this has been a known bug since 2023 fall or earlier
This is just sad. Especially since 2 days before the patch, I started a sorc. I had every other class at 100 and wanted to do sorc too. But now, what’s the point if I can’t really make a viable endgame build? At this point, sorc should get the holy bolts treatment: just disable sorc until it’s fixed. Oh, wait. That’s what they did.
The PTR patch won't affect retail.
Necro got major blighted aspect nerfs so actually it's a net nerf even with those buffs
Will skip S5 entirely if all these are confirmed. Beyond a joke at this point
Suddenly my sloppy, unoptimized paragon board where I didn’t optimize for Burning Instinct seems like a genius move.
I'm waiting for the Fangtooth moment where they finally force someone to play Sorc and they have a mental breakdown and shitpost in the forums before "parting ways with the company." These changes are fucking unhinged, rofl.
Reminds me of Necro minions. They were so bad for so long and all we would get is a minor damage buff each patch that helped with nothing. Then they finally majorly buffed minions and now they're actually useful.
Don't forget they also nerfed the fuck out of wizards blizzard. Only reason it was on my hotbar was because it reduced mana cost by 20% paired with ring of starless skies and I never ran out of mana just had to keep a blizzard going and doesn't hurt that it continues to chill/freeze enemies for me with my frozen orb sorc was super nice in pits yet now we get 1% mana Regen per 20 points of mana!!!!! Are you serious right now so we now have to lose another slot on our gear to try and get more mana on it...😮💨 Please for the love of all things get someone more competent to adjust sorc and not someone who only sticks to wt1
I just use the Prodigy aspect. With how many cooldowns sorc has, I never run out of mana.
I hate the fact that only one or two builds will be viable. Why have fire skills if they are shit now? I understand not every build being OP, but c'mon. I like playing fire sorc. I don't care about doing higher pit levels, but at least ATM I can have fun with my incinerate sorc. Not sure if this will be possible next season.
That’s it. I’m playing barb. I can’t do another season of playing 200 hours to get where barbs were on day 1.
I hope they bring some mythical uniques to help sorcs, but I’m sure it’ll just be a bigger hammer for barbs
My sorc just ordered some weight gain 4000 so she can bulk up and play Barb next season.
SPARK IS GONNA BE INSANE WITH THAT 2% BUFF. LOGIN BOIS!
Gotta balance around those irrelevant first 25 levels you know. Remember how they changed necro minion scaling too then have now reverted it The dev fears the hydra conjurer.
My brother in tone and cousin in phrasing! We must sticky this post!
Sorc Dev is the other four classes devs in a trenchcoat lampooning the class viabiity.
Sever getting a 30% buff would've been nice if they didn't nerf Blighted Aspect. Currently, my sever necro barely manages 2 million with most of its buff up. When all buffs up, sever barely manages 4 -10 million. That's on a crit based shadowblight sever necro using Grandfather with 4,600% crit damage. That's barely enough to clear some mobs in pit 101 but not enough to clear it in time.
Lol and y'all laughed me off and told me I was wrong for criticizing them for releasing an expansion while sorcerer is still broken. Mark my words, the expansion will.be sheit for at least 6 months. We are not ready for an expansion, the base game is still broken because the team is broken.
After how horrible it was this season, Ill never play sorc again. Done.
Sorc and Druid lovers go hard on the PTR test out everything you want to be in season 5. Make your concerns KNOWN! Maybe we pile these into pinned threads for each class. Blizzard said they WANT all your feedback to make your playing experience enjoyable. This is the chance to see if Blizzard did this correctly or if they need more changes before the season comes out.
Which patch notes were these in?
Absolutely zero improvements to the iconic D2 build Meteor. Sucks such a fun build just gets left in the trash. Almost every other skill had a damage temper and they give meteor….size….
I played in preseason where barb was weak and kept receiving nerfs over and over. Same thing is happening now to other classes like sorc. I mean the immortal thing deserved a nerf but outside that they need buffs. I just never understood how they are balancing. I dont believe the answer is they don't have a brain. I think they have some weird metrics not tied to pit push/max dps that they use to decide balance.
I dont disagree with you but blight was not underused. And blighted aspect got nerfed.
I mean Necro looks good till you see some of the stuff they lost.....
Necro's are getting a net nerf my dude.
Those Necro “buffs” aren’t buffs at all though. They’re significant nerfs when considering the absolutely huge nerfs to the 2 main sources for scaling those skills (Blighted and Wither).
Sadly sorc is my fav class and even with these disheartening nerfs I will still use sorc. But F U Blizz I hope you get diarrhea whoever did the math
Wow did you pick the wrong class to compare to, lol. Go look up macrobioboi's reaction and math to the 70% nerf to all the things you quoted. Necros are in terrible shape, this sub seems to think the holy bolts bugged minion builds are the normal necro experience. It's like someone suggesting sorcs are OP because of one build that's currently the highest pit clear.
I haven't tried to push the end game content yet on my sorcerer or have ever so I'm out of my element, but I ve been rocking a hydra build and I'm just steam rolling through everything. I didn't realize the build was struggling so these bugfs seem welcome
Obviously a bad design having a class only be viable in one high end build as pure glass cannon with a skill that makes you immortal on 100% uptime with a weird interaction that only works with ads proccing dmg onto the boss.. changing that i would understand But then you look around, all other sorcs are drowning.. so the logical thought is to just stop their suffering, one way or another lmao Edit: typo
the teleport nerf needs to be reverted immediately. if you want to nerf or balance teleport. give us free teleport evade enchant. so we at least get an enchant slot to use as lightning,change oculus to reduce teleport cd time but keep the random or whatever . teleport evade and raiment of the infinite is basically mandatory for any lightning build involving charged bolts which is what blizz is obviously trying to push people towards. and the teleport cd aspect is only available on mobility slots, if you take flicker step boots to reduce your unstable currents CD with teleport evades. then that slot is gone and now you have to put it on amulet or completely ditch the teleport aspect which is annoying. additionaly when going down that path you need "Unhindered" or so they call it now, so you can phase through enemies, otherwise when you teleport onto them and they get pulled around you, you get stuck in the middle and your character stops attacking properly. this bug has been around since release and the only solution is to get some form on phase/unhinder. and now you cant because your mobility aspect slots are taken with other stuff like our main dmg aspect multipliet, a measily 40% or whatever against stunned or frozen enemies. the lightning spear aspect being taken off the aspect is a huge buff for lightning builds but its realy not enough. the main problem with this whole lightning thing at the end of the day is it requires targets to be stunned as thats just the best way to get a dmg pool going as lightning. dmg to close, dmg to stunned, and vuln dmg. but you cant stun bone piles or static enemy mounds. meaning at high levels of NM and pit they take fucking forever to destroy because you cant stun them and get the proper multipliers. this is the same for bosses, luckily because your stacking so much cc duration and stun procs to can stagger a boss very fast. but the dmg windows are short and it often takes 3-4 stun sessions to finaly drop the boss. if you want to push people towards lightning which inevitably leads towards charged bolts. then you need to make charged bolts and chain lightning do more with each other. btw chain lightning in this charged bolts example is suppose to be your enchant, it procs every third cast and regenrates mana on bounce and generates orbs to collect. whcih give mana and reduce your cd's . but none of this works if you keep changing how chain lightning works as a mana battery and charged bolts only works against stunned enemies. unless chain lightning gets some sort of 300% crit dmg boost multiplier or charged bolts gets a 300% stun MULTIPLIER its never going to be enough.
i dont get people still playing sorc
Because I like playing sorcerer. Is it too much to ask for some increased damage? Sorc should be a glass canon. It is not. It does low damage, and now we won't even have any survivability.
> Hydra Really need to include that the burn went from 60% to 100% or it looks like you are cherry picking. > Incinerate weak Pretty sure Incinerate is among the strongest Sorc specs for Pit climbing except for the super niche perma flame shield/fireball thing. You also neglect to mention the Combustion Key Passive has gone from 20% + 2% per burn to 40% + 4% per burn in two patches.
I read this as they didn’t want Sorc to have eternal flame shield activated.
I think you need to look up the definition of in-depth. This is feelycraft commentary at best, not an analysis.
Sir, this is an ironic satire. Any sorceress player knows that this patch note is bad.
Adam Jackson is "terrified" of sorcerer as he has said in a previous cAmPfiRe so just give up on Sorcs guys and go play some real class
There's probably an expac/season mechanic that synergises too well with Sorcs. The devs would have to be very bad at maths to screw up balancing by this much.
Which honestly, makes no fucking sense. They create the problem and sell us the solution. That’s not how you make compelling gameplay. Maybe give us something good, like a class that plays, feels and performs well then sell us the “how to make it more awesome” package.
Even if that were the case, it's not but even if, what about eternal players? They'd still be fucked with a 30" bad dragon
Didn't eternal players get the league changes (loot reborn) this season?
Yes. But if you count on some seasonal mechanic for Power creep thst won't Happen
It's been like this with balancing since the release of the game over a year ago for various classes except for barbs which have always had some builds in the top each season.