I watched various Diablo 4 partner vid’s about the PTR to see what Sorc was looking like for the next season. Here are my thoughts.
With the nerfs coming to Sorc on Deepfreeze and Ultimate’s I was already a little deflated. I’m getting really confused as to what Blizzard is trying to accomplish. They say they let players have OP builds and then put them in line except every season it seems there are builds that are completely out of line and they’re constantly nerfing everything. Using the player base as game testers to what seems like an unfinished game.
This said Lightning Spear has been dominating for a decent amount of seasons and its clear its due simply to the fact it has scaling dmg with crit dmg. Which Deepfreeze recently had with Vulnerable and burning has with Combustion.
I realized after a few seasons of playing diablo (Season 7, started in season 5) that the majority of skills in the game are red herrings. Basically building into them is going to leave you far under powered until you switch over to skills that can take advantage of scaling dmg. Which also makes the majority of gear useless and aspects also. Bogging a player down with a TON of reading useless aspects and skills combined with paragon until you find the sweet spot of scaling dmg.
Now this said from the footage I’ve seen of the PTR it doesn’t even seem like skills are a valid use of your time and its simply about getting boss skills and scaling them with gear and Paragon. Which from not even playing feels bad before the season even starts. I almost don’t even want to play next season based on how it currently looks and I’m seriously considering just finding a new game to dedicate my time to.
Its like every season is the same thing without being the same thing. They change everything and yet it seems like nothing is changing and they think just throwing a confusing steaming pile of numbers and abilities will keep someone distracted enough.
Also I don’t know what they think they’ll accomplish saying only 10% of players are meant to make Torment 4. Already there are build guides up for the next season and will be again almost as soon as the Season is up. I don’t imagine the majority of Diablo 4 players are incapable of using google and youtube to simply copy paste what will be available in lightning speed.
Then they have convulsions as a tempering choice on basically everything allowing it to get to 100% more dmg yet leave the frost and fire passive buffs to amulet slots.
This better be a good patch because Season 8 looks horrible.
My reason why it looks horrible is because of a lack of options to scale and play more builds other than Lightning Spear to scale crit Dmg, which is why I wanted to play Deepfreeze in Season 7.
Sorc sucks because weird skill options have scaling dmg. Like Crackling Energy scaling with Intelligence. Or blizzard scaling by casting a ton in one place (increase the temper for blizzard size so it can take up the entire screen and you’ll start to have a blizzard that can compare with Lightning Spear, which oddly enough is looking like a strong build this season). Or burn dmg with Combustion. Like they cap every other skill to a certain amount of dmg how have they not figured out how to balance this yet?
This applies to other Characters also as seen with Blood Wave Necro, and Druid Cataclysm. The game is clearly about scaling dmg. It shouldn’t require this much tweaking around constantly. One of the largest disappointments of the game is A) not being able to hit 300 Paragon or even come close unless you can reliably farm Pit 130 in under a minute and B) having a ton of useless gear that does nothing. Getting to level 300 should line up with the top boss clear being achievable around 280 because of Paragon scaling so the grind from 280 isn’t a chore and insurmountable task. I feel like the gear adjustment they made pinning us more as a player base to use yellows as we level needs to be adjusted to a completely new gear set above mythic, like Fabled or something.
They made World of Warcraft. I don’t understand why this is such a hard concept for them to achieve. What makes WoW fun was that there was another dungeon to attempt once you’ve farmed up enough gear at other bosses. Going from Onyxia and Molten Core to Blackwing Lair while also having side Dungeons for gear like Zul’Farrack. Even more having world dragon boss spawns that required entire raids and good gear to even be able to achieve.
There was a clear progression in Wow that tooks months. Which I don’t feel should be so hard to accomplish for a seasonal reset to experience that grind and gear leveling that WoW has in far less time in Diablo. Yet they can’t seem to ever balance skills well enough to have a coherent seasonal progression.
Anyways just my thoughts. Hopefully this helps improve the game.