Question about Etched sigil from PTR

Hi folks,

what do you think about Etched sigil change at PTR patch notes…?

I would say, so big change can happen only from 2 reasons - item is way oo strong OR item is way too weak.

When i see, that Wizards now have only 2 options what to bear in offhand (Etched sigil and/or Chantodo), i don’t really know, what was the reason toc hange exactly Etched sigil…?

Is it way too strong? Why? Because people using it? I would say, that people are using it more because there is no other possibility - other offhands are crap. That does not make Etched way too strong, it just says, that rest of offhands are useless.

Tha brings me to question, what’s reason of changing etched sigil and not to rework other offhand, to be usable finally?

From my point of view, it looks like devs have an idea, how to add more diversity to game, make people to think about new builds based on twister, but instead of that they decided to change one build to another and still have only one usable offhand/build and tons of useless ones…

What do you think guys?

I don’t personally play Wizard but most of the players that do don’t seem to like the changes, for the same reason you pointed out, i.e. etched sigil was being used due to lack of alternatives, not because it was super strong.

There’s lots of threads about the upcoming changes in the US Wizard forum.
Biggest thread seems to be…

We all hate it. ES was pretty balanced as it was. Now, it’s only good for Energy Twister, where it would no doubt see a lot of us.

The problem is the replacement, Winter Flurry, is terrible. Lots of suggestions on good ways to fix Winter Flurry, though.

 1. It casts Blizzard instead of Frost Nova on killing an enemy with Cold damage; and enemies caught in the blizzard take 150% more damage. (Works for Frozen Orb, Cold Vyr, and Hydra.
   3. It increases damage to enemies you chill by 33%, and Damage to Frozen enemies by 150%. (works for ALL cold-centric builds)
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I absolutely agree with those ideas are better than the one they are planning to change which kind of suck. Thank you Blizzard for the effort to be more variety and creative but you need to think twice before changing play style and current set and gears.

The new version of ES will be very difficult to fit in Typhoon and Tal Rasha set or even for DMO. What are they trying to focus on? Also no change on Firebird? Seem to me like replacing Death Wish and ES to Winter Fury + Fragment of Destiny for Hydra build.

In which case, what is the use of ES now then? Twister is only useful in DMO with the bracer. Maybe in Tal Rasha. But then you have Twisted Sword already for Twister. What about the off hand that go with Twisted Sword? They just don’t work if I wear Twisted sword and ES and Valthek’s Rebuke in the cube.

ES is channel build and you will need Death Wish as weapon. So you have to pick either Valthek’s Rebuke or Twisted Sword in the cube but cannot have both. This is so complicated and I can’t figure out how best to use all these, all because of changes in ES. Just please leave ES alone. Make changes in other gears which is acceptable.

Even so Fragment of Destiny max damage is 300% and Winter Fury is 150%. Which mean you must wear either Fragment of Destiny or Serpent Sparkler with Winter Fury and the other weapon in the cube. This set up will remove both ES and Death Wish.

Why not give us both option? Let us decide either channel build hydra (Current) or Signature spell set up. IF you combine with the belt (shame-of-delsere) and Fragment of Destiny, attack speed will be 100% which is a bit crazy. Maybe remove the attack speed 50%? I mean have you guys think it though properly?

They had to break it, because in this way, they have more space to introduce set and balance changes for the other builds. DW+ES was monopolizing almost all wiz builds, and this change will break most of them.

Unless they introduce more buffs to other wiz sets/items we’ll be in a bad place for a season.

How to deal with it: Play LOD hydra, Twister and perhaps Frozen orb builds and wait for season 23 to fix more of them.

The better solution in that case would’ve been changing Death Wish and Etched Sigil’s damage modifiers to affect only the channeling skills. If the channeling skills were actually powerful enough without both Death Wish and Etched Sigil, then converting Etched Sigil into an Energy Twister item would’ve made a bit more sense. However that isn’t the case and what we got instead was that our channeling builds got severely weakened (as well as just about any arcane spender that relied on the Death Wish and Etched Sigil combo, as the loss power wasn’t properly reallocated) in exchange for a few new Energy Twister and Hydra builds.

All in all, there were better ways of handling the Death Wish and Etched Sigil combo.

Etched Sigil was when Tal Rasha was playing up their abilities without it a little too much.