(skippable prologue in case you cared about where my sorcerer is coming from)
So my friend and i who have been playing together semi-daily since launch made our mages together about a week ago as our third characters, now while they were slightly neglected in favor of the minion classes we were having more fun on at the time (his falconer and Beastmaster, my necromancer and forge guard) we did finally get them up to snuff and into monoliths a couple days ago, hitting 70 last night. now he decided to roll a spellblade because it reminded him of the spectral blade build in D3’s wizard that he enjoyed playing, and i decided to go sorcerer on account of i played the beta a bit more than him and remembered the sorcerer fondly.
now my starter build was fireball all in, as I ran a lightning blast build in beta and wanted to mix things up a bit. but despite remixing it a couple of times to try out mass shotgun fireballs, machine gun, seeker swarm, and flamethrower builds, the fireball simply wasn’t doing it for me (and i have a hypothesis why) and it’s damage was always lacking. we noticed that some bosses were taking minutes to kill that would have been one shot or downed in a maximum of 3 seconds on our other characters, and so i began investigating other builds as i was the de-facto “DPS” of our duo as my friend had to focus on survival, being a melee class and all. following this i fell back on my tried and true lightning blast build, but i noticed that, while it brought the damage, it also had me spending 90% of my time out of mana. the channel cost is simply way too high, and the throughput doesn’t keep up with it.
as a last resort before abandoning the character outright, i did a full respec of my sorcerer into cold damage to match up with my friend so that we might share any cold shred or frostbite buffs and maybe, just maybe, we might be able to form one fully functioning character. to my surprise, it actually worked… a little too well… speccing into ice barrage i now get 6 times the damage for 1/12th the mana cost of my other builds, i remain mobile instead of animation locking or rooting myself to channel every two seconds, and i apply frostbite… really really fast… that being said, this is where i started forming my thoughts on the current state of the sorcerer, as well as identifying some possible bugs, which will begin my feedback section below.
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Feedback Section
Sorcerer mechanics: since being a sorcerer increases spell damage based on the mana cost of the spell, we have a natural inclination to stack mana and increase our spell costs, however we don’t get anywhere near enough options to boost our mana regen, and even running a 200% focus build i spend a lot of time standing still between packs getting my mana back. please include a “% of max mana regenerated per second” time affix either in the passive tree itself, or as a default part of the sorcerer mastery. i want to try out these high cost meteor builds and volcanic orb and such, but not when it takes my entire mana bar for two casts then i have to focus for 20 seconds, or god help me run from a boss while it regens passively…
The nature of elements: (this is mostly commentary on the passive skill node tree)
Fire: this always felt like the most succinct and straightforward element, you hurt the enemy, you light them on fire, they keep hurting, you move on, nothing special, but nothing bad.
Lightning: Shock is awful… plain and simple, it feels like it does nothing, it caps at 10 meaning all these sources of multiple hundreds of % chance to apply shock mean nothing, since even a 10% chance to apply it will have it stack capped permanently against anything that matters. the lack of default base crit options means that these 80% increased crit chance amounts to, what 4%? the feedback and impact of the lightning options is simply lackluster… it looks cool though. i suggest converting the shock chance nodes into shock EFFECT nodes so that we might actually notice when shock is applied, and likewise the crit rate multipliers into base crit nodes…
Cold: So i get that cold is generally focused on chill and freeze to differentiate it from fire, since frostbite is basically just cold ignite… but we need to talk about the philosophy here.
just like with shock, chill caps at an absurdly low number, and yet we’re given massive sources of chance to apply chill on hit… why? there isn’t a bazooka cold skill that only hits once every 4+ seconds, i don’t need to guarantee my chill will proc at 3 stacks when i hit all enemies on screen 6-20 times per second… it’s just wasted. meanwhile, there aren’t any frostbite passives at all on the sorcerer page, which is a crying shame because frostbite, for how rare it is, feels great to use. my suggestion is this: please less chill, and more frostbite.
Some skills
(if you read the large prologue above, then you’ll understand why i’m focusing on these skills, but TL;DR, i’ll be comparing Lightning blast, fireball, and ice barrage because that’s what i used the most up to the point i’m at.)
Fireball: feels floppy and weak, and i have a theory as to why. so while leveling a different character i got those liath’s gloves that convert fireball half into lightning and give the ward per second and so on, and that is what initially inspired me to focus on fireball as my main dps spell for the first 2/3 of the game… however i think the item might be bugged, because despite having 300+ lightning specific damage bonuses by the time i decided to switch away from fireball, the converted damage fireball hit for about 300-400 damage (at level 50, which is an absolute embarrassment) and as soon as i take of the gloves, converting it back into fire pure damage (with only a 200~% bonus thanks to the fireball wand) it’s damage goes up to 800-1000 per fireball. fireball either isn’t scaling with lightning damage with the gloves, or the gloves turns off it’s fire scaling, either way, something is breaking here. following that, even 800-1000 damage per fireball isn’t great for the absolutely monstrous investment i had put into it at that point, so here’s my recommendation: Plasma ball talent and the liath node now cause fireball to hit a second time, with the second time being electric damage instead of fire (as opposed to converting half of fireballs damage into electric). also fix the scaling please.
Lightning blast: less notes here, but basically it feels bad when it isn’t channeled, but costs WAY too much mana per second when it is. the condition that it can’t chain to lower the cost is absurd, and severely gimps the build options we would otherwise have for a spell that is on a basic level very cool, it’s freaking lightning bolts after all… suggestion is simple, please lower the mana cost to channel, and please make the animation for casting it a bit faster so my character isn’t stuttering every half second to cast the non channeled version.
Ice barrage: i won’t say it’s too powerful, on the basis that i have 2 other characters who could slaughter it in dps, but compared to fireball and lightning blast, it makes them look like absolute jokes that should be consigned to a tutorial period and not even be available in the real game for how bad they are. You’re telling me that for a 40 mana, one time cost spell, i can get 50-90 hits of high damage, infinitely piercing, DoT applying, Homing turbo death, and it doesn’t even animation lock me or root me to the ground? that sounds too good to be true! but wait, there’s more?! you’re saying that i can actually get use out of the spell damage and cast speed per second talents on arcane ascendance because my mana bar doesn’t bottom out in 1.5 seconds after i start casting? no way!
But jokes aside, this spell made me realize just how much room y’all have to pump ludicrous amounts of power into the above skills without breaking anything. it’s actually embarrassing that i even bothered with anything that wasn’t ice barrage now that i’ve begun building around it. it really is just that good.
Honorable mentions
Glacier: the talent that turns it into a traversal skill lets you teleport over walls and across gaps that other traversal skills don’t. it has seemingly infinite pathfinding range, and honestly i like it, please don’t nerf and instead make other traversal skills use the same logic.
Focus: the lightning nova part of the skill tree does more damage than any other lightning skill available in the game right now. again, please don’t nerf it, but you have a LOT of room to raise the power budget of other lightning skills.
Frostwall: (a weird place for this comment i understand, but i wanted the ward per second passive and so accidentally unlocked it on my sorcerer and have been enjoying using it) the hitbox it super buggy and placing it is a bit awkward, please investigate.
Frostbite: for reasons unknown to me, my frostbite deals 10x the damage of my spellblade friends for no obvious reason (like literally, his does 124 damage over 3 seconds and mine does 1122 damage over 3 seconds) i do have about 180% more damage over time stat than him, but that doesn’t account for the absurd difference… very strange.
This concludes my current thoughts on the state of the Sorcerer.