Sorcerer with Lightning damage is severely neglected. The Crackling Energy (CE) mechanic is completely useless.
Not to mention the DPS, which is a total disaster (the spell doesn’t scale properly, similar to the situation with Necromancer’s minions). What bothers me more is the collection range. You literally have to step on it to collect it. I thought, as it’s electricity, it would make more sense if it was picked up automatically or from a greater distance. It would even be nice if Lightning abilities “automatically” collected it for us (since that makes some sense). Instead of dealing DPS, it would be useful if the charges were consumed during skill casting and gave multiple DPS or an additional effect. A build around CE doesn’t even make sense—the chance for a Nova from the unique is so low, and the DPS of CE with 30,000% damage is only 80k xD! Nova deals somewhat reasonable DPS, but it doesn’t reflect the stats.
The passive ultimate skill from the tree for Lightning in Season 6 is useless. The passive for CE doesn’t make much sense because we simply don’t have the DPS, and the cooldown reduction might be useful for one build. But looking at the unique amulet for Frozen Orb, it makes much more sense and is more effective than the passive for CE from the tree. Vyr also doesn’t impress me—I feel like the damage reduction part doesn’t work, and the multiple DPS isn’t noticeable in boss fights (250% single target). Seriously, I don’t see a difference… The new passive skill gives a bigger boost than Vyr. I don’t know why, but I feel like Sorcerer is in a situation similar to Necromancer with minions. I hope Blizzard will introduce changes to Sorcerer during the PTR so we can test them. Because as it stands in Season 6, this class is so squishy and lacks DPS compared to others, not to mention the limited number of viable builds, that soon they might as well remove it because no one will be playing it.
Fire spells have burning, ice spells have chill/freeze. In my opinion, shock should be added to the pool, which would passively increase damage dealt from crits and % crit chance for lightning spells depending on how much % shock the enemy currently has (max 100%, with paragon, or uniques, or an aspect more than 100%). Additionally, shock could work like chill—when stacked to 100%, the enemy becomes paralized/stuned (stunned + Shock effect bonus at 100% + x% direct damage (as mentioned earlier, with aspects that allow for more than 100% shock, each additional 1% increases the effect by 1%)). I think there’s a lot of potential for this element, but they’ve chosen the laziest approach.