Symbols of Hope - Divine Flare Feedback

[Scipo0419]

Quoting from another thread:

@Scipo0419

I want to say it’s intended, but it’s still really funny and way stronger than I expected it to be. It’s only 11 Divine Bolts per cast (5+3 from the direct +3 from the proc) if you take the Divine Bolts passives, but they hit surprisingly hard.

As for Echoes vs Symbols, Echoes (even with the attack speed + damage vs blinded buff) just does pitiful damage and the buff isn’t that helpful. Symbols is stupidly strong in terms of damage output with Divine Flare, it’s just super clunky and feels like a knock-off brand of Holy Aura. Where Holy Aura always buffs you (except on CD with a specific node) and activating it makes the buffs stronger. Symbols punishes you offensively and in Health Regen for activating it for the trade off of some ward and damage reduction (or ward and a damage burst with Divine Flare). I went into it at length in another topic, but basically Divine Flare’s design is counter intuitive to what Symbols is trying to do and it needs some work.

Symbols is designed as a passive buff that works as an “oh crap!” Button defensively in emergencies. Divine Flare should, in theory, turn it into a nuke skill. The cooldown goes from 18s to 3.6s when you take the node, but the Symbols still only come in every 1.73s (5.19s for 3 symbols) meaning you’ll get 2 symbols back before you can recast the skill. You can increase the acquisition rate to 1.37s per symbol (4.11s for 3 symbols) which means, depending on the timing (because symbols acquire on a timer that runs constantly) you can have 3 symbols when the skill is off CD, but you might still only have 2. And the damage/range/healing (and recast chance when hitting a boss/rare) all scale with max symbols if you went with the easy to reach 4th symbol for 3 spec points it lowers the cooldown even further to 1.8s but now it takes 5.48s to reach the 4 symbol cap! You can get a single symbol back on kill or hit against boss/rare, but that’s a 10% chance, alternatively/additionally you can spend 4 points to guarantee you regain a symbol, but that only guarantees 3 symbols at the base cooldown, and 1 with the further reduced cooldown. Not only that, but the mana cost remains at 30, which is super hefty for a 3.6s CD nuke, Judgement (as another high damage nuke) deals similar damage, has a slightly longer 4s CD and costs half the mana!

Divine Flare, in particular, is built to be similar to judgement as a high damage skill on a cooldown, but everything about how it works is directly antithetical to that playstyle. They either should have kept the cooldown the same and had it be a high cooldown nuke, made the CDR 50% instead of 80% (9s instead of 3.6s) or added a 50% reduction in mana cost to make it more in line with Judgement. If there are concerns with the passive buffs coming from such a high damage skill? They could always replace the symbol acquisition rate node that’s before Divine Flare with the old Sigils of Hope node “Soliloquy” which limited you to one Symbol but made the passive effects slightly stronger (I think it was comparable to having 2 sigils) and then adjust the “scaling per symbol” upgrade nodes to have chances to proc and damage/area equivalent to what it is now with 3 symbols.

This rant got longer than I expected, so I’ll stop here and quote it over to my Divine Flare thread