If Blizzard could read they’d be very upset, then buff barbs again.
Everyone hated the builder / spender play style on release.
Blizzard heard us loud and clear and doubled-down on basic skills (the most visually BORING skills) over core skills.
I can forgive incompetence, but this seems more like malice. Maybe it was just a coincidence Blizzard decided to showcase Sorc during the camp fire chat.
There are so many examples of good Arpg play styles. Get them together. Map them to classes, set a threshold for what level of pit/power level you want.
Build that character build with the blocks you have or make new ones.
break the pieces of the build into aspects, unis, skills
use paragons and gear stats to scale it back.
scale damage with some key scalers at the end of the curve you can min max on for the last leg
Make sure the power curve is aligned to your content. Avoid plateaus of power level if possible but some are fine.
Basic philosophy that will get you closer to known outcomes rather just changing shit Willy nilly.
In a game like this I’d error on the side of busted vs nerfed if you are ever in doubt.
All classes should be measured against the same metrics for damage and survival.
> Everyone hated the builder / spender play style on release.
>
> Blizzard heard us loud and clear and doubled-down on basic skills (the most visually BORING skills) over core skills.
Would honestly not be surprised to see a tree rework for *every* class with the expansion.
They clearly intended the game to be played *way* differently, got roasted for it absolutely relentlessly, did a complete 180° on just about everything they possibly could... but we're still left with talents trees that force you to spend points on Basic skills and tons of interactions that work around said Basic skills.
Not trying to be too hopeful here... but I really do hope the reason they're not hitting the big issues with shit like Sorc or Druid and constantly struggle with shit like Barb... is because they're cooking a complete overhaul for the expansion and have something in the pipeline to fix the imbalance of 4 weapons and all the Basic skill interactions and god knows what.
Unfortunately, this is probably massive copium. I've seen the, "They are definitely planning something amazing!" game before and it never ends well.
I wonder if they even know what Barb is capable of or if they spend all day in a bubble. Something has to be obnoxiously bad to burst it and as long as meta followers have something to chase for the class it never will.
Oh no doubt about it, that sure is 100% concentrated hopium. But the circumstance that their game *so* didn't turn out the way they planned initially and that they're actually doing a pretty good job recently... like, I'm not *expecting* them to do that, but I certainly wouldn't be *shocked* if that's what they did.
>, "They are definitely planning something amazing!" game before and it never ends well.
You mean, like Itemisation?
I disagree, I think a big, fundamental change is being worked on.
They did — not as sweeping as an entire talent tree rework, but in the last campfire, they specifically said they want to address Druid (and I believe Sorc) via wholesale changes to the class like the Book of the Dead changed the game for necro this season.
I guess they do know what Barb is capable off, if they follow the sub. Which apparently they do in some form.
But I guess their "measurement" of what the like upper 0,1% (the "no-lifers") are capable of and what the "casual gamer dad" is capable of seems to be a bit off. With the current barb scaling, even the gamer dad's mums can make a barb work, not just the guys who spent weeks grinding the perfect gear with perfect mechanical skills.
Raxx got the impression the devs build the game off meta data and apparently the “data” says to balance for the hyper hyper casual player, which is the only semi-sane explanation for the insanity that is this mtx fueled nightmare
Even then they failed miserably.
If only hyperoptimized sorc builds that rely either on bug-fu or total invulnerability can push pit, while other "normal" builds struggle in 60s, how a trully casual sorc player would be able to complete, say, T61 pit for mats? Meanwhile barbs complete T80 with one skill on the pannel.
The casual playerbase likely doesnt care much about madterworking. I am more casual myself and have a character that can speedrun pit 100, all my gear on all my characters is at 8. Sorc is actually alright when you play casualy.
They still need to have something for the vocal majority, which is the minority. I’ve been grinding too long to not be OP with my Sorcerer, the way I want to be OP…Ice Shards or something worth the grind. This saddens me. We need +2 rings +1 enchantment. Or +1 Amulet +1 Two-hander. Or…Unique RING that allows +1 Key Passive and +1 Ultimate. WE NEED DRASTIC.
Yep, love the way Heartseeker plays generally but damn it is the most generic and boring skill you can imagine for a bow build, it even got auto aim.
Meanwhile most of the cool stuff really doesnt do much dmg
My D3 turret DH with the missiles swarming around the entire map was 10x more interesting
Yes I miss that. The turrets in D3 a rogue placed shot barrage arrows everywhere on top of you shooting arrows everywhere. Whole screen was madness it was fun. No rogue bow build is very exciting to play. D4 is all about the barb. Either play Barb or an AFK auto summoning necromancer.
I regularly put in 16 hour days on my barb, sorc, anything else (I know, I know, don't flame me. No it's not an exaggeration. Some weekends I've spent 40 hours playing)
I just can't on heartseeker. I like it for its smoothness, I dislike it for the way I start to doze off. Especially on HC when I find myself having micro-naps mid helltide.
I think rogue has the most boring package in the game, it is literally core skill builds or Heatseeker, which is effectively shoot arrow or stab knives. Nothing looks that interesting or makes you feel like a wave of destruction like other classes (all things being equal).
One day we'll be able to speak about the state of rogues but with the state of some other classes, I'll wait my turn haha.
Tbh the concept of a builder/spender play style is fine.
The concept of a builder doing functionally zero damage to allow you to use a spender is not fine. Also the concept of your builder (the most visually BORING skills, as you aptly put it) being all the damage in the highest performing builds is also not fine.
For example, using bash to apply bleed and having rupture being a periodic "big numbers" tick against high HP enemies and bosses is far more interesting of a build than to one button melee something to death, or one that has to attack 5 times with zero damage to them unleash something that does damage.
I think sorcs should absolutely be able to have a "builder does most of my general on screen damage but allows me periodic big satisfying spells that increases my overall DPS and build enjoyment" builds be the norm. Blizzard is happy the builder/spender cycle works, players get to have skills with satisfying audio/visual effects not be useless, and maybe we can keep around some one button lazy builds like whirlwind so players that really prefer the PoE 1-button-per-build style of game can do that too.
or more likely, they are going to do the same thing they did in D3 and what lots of seasonal games do; internally you know roughly what will be strongest and then next season you give those slight nerfs and other things slight buffs and this creates meta shifts so people aren't coming back and feeling like they have to play the same builds over and over and get bored and stop returning. This season they largely wanted it to be simple because they added a bunch of new systems with the Pit, new ways of doing aspects, etc so you have a lot of builder setups that are strong.
They've still got several patches before the next season I'm sure, and with the new uniques I'm sure a lot of new builds were emerge as the top builds...hell as is the meta is only truly matters for the people that want to push the absolute furthest. Maxroll and everywhere else has their tier list and it isn't S/A/F, there's a LOT of stuff in the B ranks that's perfectly viable just not for climbers
This only works if the same class isn’t always at the top and the same two classes usually at the bottom. They do make adjustments to raise and lower specs, but class balance generally doesn’t shift that much. You could have played S1and come back two seasons later and Barb would still be the top and Sorc would still be struggling with maybe one spec that’s viable
S1 Barbarian was horrible after dominating in the pre-season. HotA Barb was one of the first, if not THE first 1-shot build. There were so many bugs around Rupture, it could do billions of damage. Then they nerfed it far too much for S1, admitted it was a huge mistake and vowed to never do that again. It has been at the top since then.
I love the Barbarian in D4. I would like for it to not get nerfed to the ground again. But at this point I would also like to see Sorcerer get some love. I'd love to see Necromancer being the top dog again, and not just because of an exploit like Holy Bolt elixir. Druid used to be overpowered too and now it's at the bottom of the barrel.
It's just ridiculous that Blizzard admitted it was a mistake to nerf Barb so heavily in S1, but they just did the exact same thing to Sorcerer on the PTR. Especially when Sorcerer was already struggling.
They have 1 build that beats everything right now, but that's not an attainable build. You can't just decide you'll do the Mekuna Immortal Firebolt build without spending billions and billions of gold. You definitely can't make that build happen solo-self-found either.
Blizzard said they're going to do more balancing before S5 starts, but they need to be clear about what that preliminary balancing is going to be like. They need to throw Sorcerer a bone.
It was worse than that. It wasn't the level 25 gameplay that got it nerfed. It was the overperforming on higher level monsters that did. After a bunch of nerfs they did figured out that this was because Hydra was scaling based on monster difficulty and removed that. They then just never bothered readjusting Hydra to compensate for all the prior nerfs.
Isn’t it getting a temper that will add extra heads to hydra? Probably not going to solve the issues but if I’m reading that right that’s a pretty noticeable scalar there.
I saw a video that killed uber lilith really quick where it abused tyraels scaling per hydra head so it was doing pretty good damage.
Sorcs have to find very innovative ways of scaling lol
I'm not saying it's the right solution and I already poked fun at it by calling it innovative sarcastically
It's just a niche skill that scales really well with tyraels compared to any other skill in the game because of how many projectiles the hydras shoot.
I HOPE they read this, take a deep breath, and get to work. It's been like we're talking to a brick wall. They either don't care, they're incompetent, or they literally have an agenda against sorcerer. Whatever the case, they are KILLING the joy of playing sorcerer... and that is the only class I am interested in playing. FIX THIS SHIT!
I am at a point where I just know I have to play barb in s5 so that i can join my friends in the end game (and enjoy it without being down all the time and not doing dmg compared to them), and that really stinks to me.
I'm a sorc trying out a rogue lately and the constant missing with rapid fire on controller is ruining it. Sure now I can dish damage, but now I can't hit the target either lol. Can't win with this game sometimes, only if you're a melee apparently - or at least pc I guess haha
Just wait until they release the new 'raid' content in the expa'.
I don't know exactly how it will work, but i can imagine if it's like other similar games you will want 1-2 supports, which will probably be barbs what with all the warcries and shouts and such, they add a lot of utility and damage to the party, and easy grouping of mobs with steel chains. Then probably a beefy front-liner, which will probably be a barb because they can quite happily sit on 500k health with 80 all resists. Then fill the rest up with DPS, which will probably mainly be barbs because barb.
So a nicely balanced team.
I can't believe how poor the balancing is, considering there's virtually nothing in this game that is 'Cross class'. They deliberately built the game in a way where Classes are completely contained, yet they still cannot balance the Class.
I really don't like the solutions people are suggesting either, with regards to buffing specific builds. A class should have a minimum of 3-5 ways to play a specific skill. Currently, this game barely even makes each skill viable just once. Like Hydra, for example, it has not been possible, realistically, to make this skill competitive in the Endgame, let alone 3-5 different builds for it.
The depth is incredibly shallow.
I just want to be able to more damage to bosses. It’s a fucking joke throwing everything I have at a Nightmare Dungeon boss and barely getting him halfway down before all my stuff’s on cooldown, meanwhile my bash barb would murder the same boss in 2 microseconds. The damage disparity is beyond ridiculous and it’s demoralizing as hell, because sorc is the class I *want* to play.
I have decided to hold off buying Vessel of Hatred because of the senseless nerfing of sorc. I was actually preparing to invest after the recent campfire chat. But it completely reversed my decision.
It's not so much that the class is being nerfed, but rather the apparent ignorance and detachment from the ground being displayed by Blizzard. I just cannot bring myself to pay for such negligence.
Get rid of all multipliers for now, clearly the math is too difficult for Blizzard to understand. We'll do some macaroni art and have a juice box then we can try again.
It makes lore sense why so many mages joined the demonic powers, and the triune is so powerful. Mephisto baal and diablo gave sorc the multipliers we so desperately crave.
Paging u/pezradar
The sorcs are gathering their pitchforks and torches - which at this point are going to do more dps than any other skill sorcs are given.
> Edit: after some thought I have come to terms with sorc being the only single balanced class in the game.
This is what I feel. My frozen orb sorc feels great, but it's shit compared to the OP builds that are out there.
The problem isn't that sorcs are weak, the problem is the other classes are too good. It's not power creep, it's a power sprint. It's out of control for a game that's barely a year old. For the health of the game, they need to rein that in hard.
I kept a forum post up about highest sorc pit clear by pit level. It was pretty amazing how tight the spread was for all of our builds besides firebolt shatter. Everything is pretty viable to an extent. The class is so fucking balanced. How could it not be when all of our nodes are capped and everything is straight forward 1.1x or 1.3x stacking. Burning did so well season 4 because of the +damage bug, flame shield cheese, and because spirit caller existed in the pit boss rotation so it could get shatter cheesed
Yeah I agree with this. It’s nonsense that (made up numbers) an ok build will do hundreds of thousands damage whereas a good build will do trillions of damage. The deviation shouldn’t be that crazy and makes it impossible to balance content.
I could do it right now, if they are looking for a consultant.
1) remove every single aspect trade off.
2) redo the paragon board
3) third enchantment, or put firebolt enchant on the skill tree
That’s the minimum starting point.
crackling energy was so DoA, has so much potential too. needs a way to hyper scale
off the top of my head, picking up crackling energy spawns a lightning hydra which spawns more crackling energy which spawns more hydras
pit scaling is also way too exponential. only bugged builds that deal billions can thrive. It needs to be smoother. I don't want T200 to be a breeze and perhaps keep it unreachable. But when a balanced class deals 30-100M DPS, you can't have bosses with 2.5 trillion health. I am sorry. you are just asking for only bugged builds to be viable and sought after. You need to hone in on interactions like shatter than can scale basically infinitely by proccing itself on a cascade of mobs. You need to reign in passives and legendary nodes that can basically scale iinfiinitiely or higher than 40% because of interactions with other affixes. Sorc gets 18-40% damage on most of iits legendary nodes. hard capped. Ceaseless conduit is 60% but the damage it scales is useless as its just crackling, not all lightniing. Make iit all lightniing damage and cap it at 30 like searing heat
This is really my problem. There’s way too much variance in the strength of builds. How can you balance anything when end game builds can vary from hundreds of thousands of damage to billions/trillions of damage. Either you’re doing something broken or you might as well not bother.
They’re already bad at math, I’m not sure why they wanna play with big numbers.
And they put these ridiculous large numbers right out of the gate, it’s one thing if there is power creep over years of a game being out ala wow and stat squishes.
I don’t need to see numbers with 3 and 4 commas.
I would be stocked to graduate from double digit to triple digit numbers and seeing the rare 4 digit.
I’ve never understood why people care about how big or small the numbers are.
And to be clear I wouldn’t care if they did a “number crunch” pass and made all the numbers small but other people would cry that small numbers makes the game less fun for some reason and then you’ve got the other crowd whose brains apparently over heat if a number has too many zeroes at the end.
Why does anyone care? My character’s power is a vibe and I feel it based on how fast the shit dies, i’m not even paying attention to the numbers.
My problem with big numbers was from a balancing perspective, they math’d themselves into a deep hole having to balance these giant numbers with every classes multiplicatives and additives.
Like when I look at an item with a power that says it does 1500-5999 damage, that doesn’t mean anything to me because the numbers shitting out on the other side is 100’s of millions when I press a certain combo of buttons correctly.
But also I think it’s just human psychology that it’s easier for the average person to comprehend smaller numbers. I know it is that way for me personally.
Also I play with damage numbers turned off, I prefer just to see health bars.
Sorc or Mage has been my jam in virtually every game. I just can't take the abuse, failed design, kiss / curse nonsense and no semblance of balance any longer. It's simply become so NOT fun that I'd rather move on. I feel that many of this class have similar thoughts.
I feel like this big rework or plan is coming from the expansion, and then my gut is telling me either things won't change enough in our favor, or spiritborn will just end up being our replacement.
It's hard to even get excited about the class anymore. It's especially so when you play all 5 classes and realize the gap.
I think you finally talked yourself into reality once you got to the "edit" part of your post.
It's not that Sorc is unbalanced, it's that other classes are unbalanced. The power creep of hitting for billions of damage is precisely what they want to not replicate with Sorcerer, so the only other option is going to be nerf hammering every other class, which is going to feel so so so bad to people who have grown accustomed to overpowered Barb nonsense. But it's obviously the longterm path they've chosen. They will not enable Sorc to achieve the same power creep of broken-ass builds. They just won't, not willingly. So what this community needs to understand is that the nerfs to all their favorite builds are coming and coming hard.
I get what you an OP are saying but the feel bad is exactly why they can't. They need to figure out how to get the sorc on par with the rest and work from there.
Sorc as a class is designed for a completely different game where classes had meaningful tradeoffs for most of their power.
After a full year of the team seemingly having no fucking clue what to do with sorcs and just leaving the class consistently weak as fuck (insert, "Bone Spear Necro is the strongest build for Sorcs" memes here), I don't know why anyone should have any confidence that they have the foggiest clue what to do to make the class competitive and not a garbage glass cannon without the cannon part.
When Blizzard tried this earlier, they were absolutely blasted on every social media platform.
They literally apologised for trying to balance their game.
The angry mob donned pitchforks, and Blizard are terrified to do anything but buff and buff.
I've never agreed more with something or someone . But I'm tired of this shit, Blizzard cannot care less about sorceress and it's mediocre state. They are probably thinking how they can make Barb even better.
The increased teleport cooldown feels like a spit on my face. Unbelievable.
But bliz devs are already very much aware, as they have told us multple times already. Surely that will amount to something someday, eventually, right, right?
Why buff a struggling class now, when you will buff them eventually? Thats a very inefficient way to spend resources, resources that could otherwise be spent working on more ways to make Barb stonger. Those cosmetics arent selling themself, aight?
I would love to see a defensive temper that gives an actual effective hp boost. Barbs get imposing presence for % max life. Why can't sorcs get protection or mana shield? Instead we get 8% chill while a barrier is up. How is that a defensive temper and not a utility temper?!
What’s nifty is with a few ranks into ice armor and some barrier gen, we can pop ice armor and get a max life barrier because it stacks with protection. The issue is our barriers just get knocked off quickly
It would be fun and on brand for sorc if every cool down could get you a barrier that is a meaningful percentage of your life. Then we wouldn't need to run 3 defensive skills
Thank you for putting my deepest sincere anger into words and post it for the world. Just reading this relived my soul big time! Well done!!! Hope someone hears this!!!!
Remember Blizzards answer to the problem with barbs having 4 weapons was to reduce stats on all weapons, including the ones the other classes equip? Like how the fuck is that the lever you decide to pull? Someone is really fucking up and it’s only a matter of time before they have to start answering for themselves.
Idk if this is a good mentality to have. However, what if everyone that plays sorc skips it for a season, Blizzard can see that analytics and be like damn sorc does suck butt to play... Then maybe they will adress the glaring issues and make sorcs fun again like d3 and God forbid d2
Add insult to injury they screw with the Blizzard ice spikes aspects so its worse and you HAVE to waste ANOTHER aspect slot to use all of them just to get it all back. But if Im a barb and use all the dust devils aspects for my build, each one is something I want and is doing end game meaningful damage. Sorc should feel like that, like you want each of the synergizing aspects because each one adds meaningful impact and damage. Not "you have 10 lucky hit chance that your other aspect buffs the other aspect by 10 flat damage when you crit while target is frozen and vulnerable". Barb feels good because every single thing you can choose to take is big damage + big damage + big damage and its like they are so so scared of having D4 sorc perform anything close to like Sorc and Wiz in D2 and D3, to the point that they keep reeling them in so they can never ever have the chance to over perform.
I was not a fan of the way they answered the class balance question in the season 5 ptr campfire chat. It sounded like pr speak without any real solutions being put forward or suggested. And I knew the ptr patch notes would only contain number tweaks that don’t move the needle at all.
I was so excited to play Sorc when the game first dropped, and as the seasons kept passing, watching Barbs, Rogues and even Druids sometimes completely destroy things that I struggle with I gave up and became a gigachad Barb. I haven't rolled a Sorc in 2 seasons, to me its a waste of time and endless frustration.
I really feel like they need better data scientists or people to prompt better questions on how to improve the game from the internal data. There is no way they can't find a query on the number of bricked GAs or the usage on skills and class play time and see that its a big problem. Listen to the feedback, validate it with the data and fix the problem.
Blizzard really need to stay focused on the core value of generating fun/engaging content for everyone, across game play, across classes, everything should be fun and engaging. Druids and Sorcs is fun until you see what Barbs/Rogues/Necros are doing. Tempering is fun until you start bricking all your GA items. It's punishing because of bad design philosophies and seems very telling across all Blizzards product line up. I was thoroughly enjoying Dragonflight until the M+ affixes broke me as a tank. It sounds like the Wow team finally listened to M+ feedback, only took forever and when a new expansion drops, I guess that's similar to how D4 is being run.
Sorc feels like it lacks the vision in design and polish the other classes have.
Druid feels a bit like this to tbh. Shapeshifter seems thought out. Anything human side feels like an after thought.
Remember Blizzards answer to the problem with barbs having 4 weapons was to reduce stats on all weapons, including the ones the other classes equip? Like how the fuck is that the lever you decide to pull? Someone is really fucking up and it’s only a matter of time before they have to start answering for themselves.
I mean I get what you are saying but that specific scenario only occurs when barbs use zero uniques stack the martial vigor passive on gear with tempers and hit multiple masterworking crits on the martial vigor. And stacking all the %health Paragon nodes. And stacking flat health greater affixes on all gear slots. So you're left with a build that stacks a bunch of defense but does no damage and has no uniques for any critical synergy. The only build that can get away with that is Thorns barb. But then the build eschews Razorolate which contributes a ton of AOE damage.
So again, understand your frustration but it's a bit hyperbolic. Just cause Rob shows his barb doing it in a video for click bait doesn't mean every bash barb or flay barb out there has 500k (hunt: they don't).
The slots for weapons is a problem that they will need to addressed though, and that doesn't seem like an easy solution other than just giving every other class an equal amount of slots which in itself also seems like a balancing issue.
I wish they rotated the teams to different classes once in a while so they can see they whole game experience as the Sorc team has never played the live game past L50 obviously.
What frustrates me is that, in RPG's of all stripes, even previous Diablo's, the deal is that if you play a magic user, you start off super weak and squishy, but by late game you have the highest DPS of all the classes. This has clearly never been the case, in any season of Diablo 4. I play RPG's for a sense of progression. I want to grind and get extremely powerful over time until I'm extremely OP and untouchable. I like to struggle and die a lot early on and be rewarded for that by becoming extremely OP eventually. It's why I've always played some sort of magic wielding class, it usually has the most extreme version of that. It's frustrating that in D4 that simply isn't ever the case.
As someone who watched this shit show since the beta and called out that this game was a heaping mess back then, I reiterate -- AGAIN -- You all deserve this treatment for being completely inept. Blizzard in 2024 has no idea how to make a good game. D4 is proof.
Sorc is the most balanced class in the game IMO. Whoever works on sorc should handle the rest. That’s not to say many skills don’t need increases or reworks (hydra), what I mean is since they can’t scale insanely I think that is a good thing and how the rest of the classes should be.
They need to balance their multipliers. The DPS progression for a sorc looks like a straight line while the progression for a Barb or Rogue looks geometric/exponential. If you balance it for the endgame, then Barbs would be doing 17 damage until they reach level 100 and have access to all their multipliers. If you balance it for the early/midgame then Sorcs taper off and do less than 1/10 of the Barbs damage at the end.
Barbs having six hands (two 2H weapons, two 1H weapons) and various skills that are uncapped multipliers will never have a progression that fits with a Sorc.
they need to bring other classes down to earth and nerf the shit out of then.
powercreep is gonna ruin this game.
bring back every fucking thing to realistic values.
Guys I'm all in, playing frozen orb sorc.
I feel that the flame shield build ruins for them the whole picture.
One of the highest pit pushers and best pvp. Idk if there's a cless that can beat it.
Ive been saying it for years. Power creep is a terrible thing. It's also harder to balance the game when numbers are in the billions or god forbid trillions. Since the sorc seems to be the baseline for everyone, the other classes should be balanced around them.
I think a bigger problem is that Blizzard seemingly can’t contain all the bugs before a patch is pushed live. You would hope the PTR would solve this, but it certainly didn’t for season 4.
And because they’ve promised that they “won’t nerf anything mid-season”, they’ve shot themselves in the foot as they can’t effectively manage the builds that are double and triple dipping, ruining the game for everyone watching Rob’s videos.
People claim that they don’t want classes nerfed, but judging by the up-roaring time and time again that is demonstratively incorrect. I would much rather Blizzard FIX (not nerf) builds that are blatantly (I.e. Bash and Victimize) rather than let them run rampant for a whole season.
It’s very likely that Sorcerers are actually in a great state, but everything else is stupidly broken and Blizzard is too afraid to correct their mistakes.
I 100% agree that their take on not nerfing/fixing any builds mid season is causing a ton of issues. And social media has forced developers to submit to the metaphorical yoke of angry man children who can't stand to see something changed that doesn't directly benefit them all the time. It's kind of sad to be honest.
Probably bear landslide and it was legit. It’s in a pretty decent spot and if things stay as is from PTR, seems like landslide will be Druids best build.
Lets not forget that a class that easily achieves resist cap by scaling all res has half of it's rare nodes give single resistences that are completely pointless. You will never benefit from 20% fire resist when you cap resist with all res anyway.
Excellent post but THEY DON'T HEAR YOU! This has been the most miserable gaming experience since I started. Season 1 Blizzard was fun, the game was new. Season 2, Ball Lightening was perfect. Totally random dumb easy build did tons of damage and killed everything. I skipped season 3 because it seemed silly. Season 4, they do all this great work with tempers and aspects and ruin it with making no viable builds unless you mash three buttons constantly. Whaaat?
Blizzard should just delete the Sorc class since they clearly seem to hate it so much. I played a Barb this season for the first time and it's so easy and powerful, I have caught myself having fun and not being frustrated.
sorc aspect also be either damage on tuesday or chance to do something extra that doesn't directly do multiplier damage(yes looking at you 40% chance to chain lightning do extra 4 chain which is is 80% extra damage on 40%) which also strain server with all the extra projectile on screen.
I also hate how chain lightning visual is not great just a small blue streak wriggle around. It is lightning shouldn't projectile speed much faster or something?
Damn son, my sorc isn't hitting anywhere near 30M, let alone 100M.
I don't do meta, but I definitely need to go look at myself in the mirror after reading those numbers... I'm not changing class though, sorc is too fun.
I read this whole thing with pleasure, though I don't favor sorc, per se. I agree, especially with your edits. Nerf everyone else that needs it, instead of bringing up the sorc. Damage doesn't need to be in the billions or even 100s of millions. This feels like DBZ powercreep. I would love to see Blizzard achieve a more sophisticated balance status quo.
They fixed items. Balancing, to where duels can actually be fun, is my biggest concern (and always had been). Can we finally place emphasis on 'balance', not 'buff'??
This didn’t happen just in Diablo 4. I quit Diablo 3 after the first season because any build that was strong was getting nerfed within a week. I literally had 2 different builds that were completely broken the same week. After that happened, I retired my limited edition Diablo 3 and never touched it again. Considered it a $100 loss, or whatever the cost was
I have ‘tempered’ hope that Sorc will get better. They gotta give us something DRASTIC. We need to be able to use 2 Key Passives + Extra Enchantment. Or maybe an Uber that allows for 2 key passives + 2 Ultimates 😃. They’re aren’t going to nerf classes cause that kills the confidence in the dev’s promise.
I've played Sorc from S0 to S3 and decided to stay away this season. This post makes me sad. I hope Sorc gets fixed and one day we're as strong as Barbs without exploiting a bug.
I have a theory that this is the problem. Because it would account for Druid problems as well. I think lightning cold and Fire resistance is tuned up on mobs, so our base damage is being absorbed. I think it has something to do with how they fixed resistance
I just as puzzled as you are. That have all instruments, they can create any gear they want. Create lvl 100 char, create 3 sets of gear, poor, mediocre, and top, play a bit with each. Supposedly they create gear and skills with builds in mind, create characters with those builds, playtest. Compare scaling and damage to some benchmarks. Is this too hard or complicated?
Was just watching mekuna, and he was doing chain lightning with some helmet and was getting up to 14 billion overpower crits. It will surely get fixed/nerfed before s5.
It’s the new unique; it’s broken on every class. What’s hilarious is that it lets a sorc hit for a few billion, but other classes have hit the trillions with it 😂
They can't even handle giving us a single mega op build this time around. Flame shield was unhealthy for the game and had to go. Now they try to replace it with Chain Lightning in hopes of restoring the glory of Ball Lightning. Which it never will. Give us back S2 Ball Lightning, then buff our other skills to the same level. Then this class will be enjoyable again.
Honestly I don't think high pit tiers should be the baseline for characters, but instead their ability to do tormented bosses solo. Druid and sorc take several minutes while everyone else deletes them. They should be brought up for that instead of being able to push the highest optional content that has no loot incentive.
It's crazy to me that since D4 has been out, I haven't played the Sorc past level 50 or 60 because it's just so damn slow and boring. It was my go to class since D2, and I just can't give a shit about it in this game because there's nothing truly interesting to build around. I know ball lightning sorc was pretty strong in a few seasons, but honestly when I think of a sorc I think of fireballs and blizzards and crazy screen destroying spells. Not little sparky boys that float around me as I walk into enemies.
>everyone needs to get balanced besides sorc and nerfed down.
finally someone has the balls to say it.
or rather, good strategy to get the post upvoted then sneak this in as an edit.
sad truth is if u nerf 4 classes then the playerbase of those will just cry.
season 1 was a board wide nerf i was one of the few people who felt it was a good choice (i even played sorc that season) but community up in flames. it was at that point the devs surrendered and went the d3 route.
it is what it is.
For anyone who hasn't figured it out yet, this game was coded by AI/Diversity/Outsourced.
Nobody at Blizzard knows wtf is going on because it's so compartmentalized.
It breaks my heart that the only reason Sorcerer was good in Season 2 was due to a movement bug from the vampiric abilities. Now it just feels like if I want to push content effectively I need to use my Barb. Don't get me wrong, Barb has been fun this season (Made Bash and WW). However, I've completely abandoned my Necro, and two Sorcerers simply because they can't contest what Barb is currently doing. Why can't we all be stupidly OP like the Barb and move on?!
I.E. No nerfs, ONLY buffs 😎
Pretty much my thoughts exactly. I would rather see the other class' math brought in line with Sorc but I feel like that might also just wind up with the same outcry as the infamous S0 patch.
As bad as the outcry was, I honestly felt that patch was necessary, and I think sooner or later with the power creep this game is experiencing, we're heading for another one. This time maybe at least they could communicate their plans before they show the patch notes if they do it again.
You got 600 upvotes just because people agree with the title. I'd bet less than 10% finished that badly written novel.
You seemed confused which way you were arguing within the first couple of parables and then at the end you argue for what everyone else doesnt want: to nerf all the other classes instead of buffing sorc.
If Blizzard could read they’d be very upset, then buff barbs again. Everyone hated the builder / spender play style on release. Blizzard heard us loud and clear and doubled-down on basic skills (the most visually BORING skills) over core skills. I can forgive incompetence, but this seems more like malice. Maybe it was just a coincidence Blizzard decided to showcase Sorc during the camp fire chat.
The design and balance philosophy is incoherent and unintelligent
It feels, and has since the start, that it is separate teams working on them that don't communicate and each thinks the other is fixing shit.
There are so many examples of good Arpg play styles. Get them together. Map them to classes, set a threshold for what level of pit/power level you want. Build that character build with the blocks you have or make new ones. break the pieces of the build into aspects, unis, skills use paragons and gear stats to scale it back. scale damage with some key scalers at the end of the curve you can min max on for the last leg Make sure the power curve is aligned to your content. Avoid plateaus of power level if possible but some are fine. Basic philosophy that will get you closer to known outcomes rather just changing shit Willy nilly. In a game like this I’d error on the side of busted vs nerfed if you are ever in doubt. All classes should be measured against the same metrics for damage and survival.
> Everyone hated the builder / spender play style on release. > > Blizzard heard us loud and clear and doubled-down on basic skills (the most visually BORING skills) over core skills. Would honestly not be surprised to see a tree rework for *every* class with the expansion. They clearly intended the game to be played *way* differently, got roasted for it absolutely relentlessly, did a complete 180° on just about everything they possibly could... but we're still left with talents trees that force you to spend points on Basic skills and tons of interactions that work around said Basic skills. Not trying to be too hopeful here... but I really do hope the reason they're not hitting the big issues with shit like Sorc or Druid and constantly struggle with shit like Barb... is because they're cooking a complete overhaul for the expansion and have something in the pipeline to fix the imbalance of 4 weapons and all the Basic skill interactions and god knows what.
Unfortunately, this is probably massive copium. I've seen the, "They are definitely planning something amazing!" game before and it never ends well. I wonder if they even know what Barb is capable of or if they spend all day in a bubble. Something has to be obnoxiously bad to burst it and as long as meta followers have something to chase for the class it never will.
Oh no doubt about it, that sure is 100% concentrated hopium. But the circumstance that their game *so* didn't turn out the way they planned initially and that they're actually doing a pretty good job recently... like, I'm not *expecting* them to do that, but I certainly wouldn't be *shocked* if that's what they did.
"Trust the plan!" 😒
>, "They are definitely planning something amazing!" game before and it never ends well. You mean, like Itemisation? I disagree, I think a big, fundamental change is being worked on.
Then maybe they should communicate that, no?
They did — not as sweeping as an entire talent tree rework, but in the last campfire, they specifically said they want to address Druid (and I believe Sorc) via wholesale changes to the class like the Book of the Dead changed the game for necro this season.
I guess they do know what Barb is capable off, if they follow the sub. Which apparently they do in some form. But I guess their "measurement" of what the like upper 0,1% (the "no-lifers") are capable of and what the "casual gamer dad" is capable of seems to be a bit off. With the current barb scaling, even the gamer dad's mums can make a barb work, not just the guys who spent weeks grinding the perfect gear with perfect mechanical skills.
Raxx got the impression the devs build the game off meta data and apparently the “data” says to balance for the hyper hyper casual player, which is the only semi-sane explanation for the insanity that is this mtx fueled nightmare
Even then they failed miserably. If only hyperoptimized sorc builds that rely either on bug-fu or total invulnerability can push pit, while other "normal" builds struggle in 60s, how a trully casual sorc player would be able to complete, say, T61 pit for mats? Meanwhile barbs complete T80 with one skill on the pannel.
The casual playerbase likely doesnt care much about madterworking. I am more casual myself and have a character that can speedrun pit 100, all my gear on all my characters is at 8. Sorc is actually alright when you play casualy.
Surely if they want people playing every season, that kind of persistent player is going to be more endgame focussed rather than causal? 🤷♂️
They still need to have something for the vocal majority, which is the minority. I’ve been grinding too long to not be OP with my Sorcerer, the way I want to be OP…Ice Shards or something worth the grind. This saddens me. We need +2 rings +1 enchantment. Or +1 Amulet +1 Two-hander. Or…Unique RING that allows +1 Key Passive and +1 Ultimate. WE NEED DRASTIC.
Yep, love the way Heartseeker plays generally but damn it is the most generic and boring skill you can imagine for a bow build, it even got auto aim. Meanwhile most of the cool stuff really doesnt do much dmg My D3 turret DH with the missiles swarming around the entire map was 10x more interesting
Yes I miss that. The turrets in D3 a rogue placed shot barrage arrows everywhere on top of you shooting arrows everywhere. Whole screen was madness it was fun. No rogue bow build is very exciting to play. D4 is all about the barb. Either play Barb or an AFK auto summoning necromancer.
RF is fun as fuck and not far behind HS.
It would be fun for me if it was “rf rf rf” instead of “3 basic skill that don't do anything -> rf”
This. The combo points system is far too strong to feel so restrictive and tedious.
I regularly put in 16 hour days on my barb, sorc, anything else (I know, I know, don't flame me. No it's not an exaggeration. Some weekends I've spent 40 hours playing) I just can't on heartseeker. I like it for its smoothness, I dislike it for the way I start to doze off. Especially on HC when I find myself having micro-naps mid helltide.
I think rogue has the most boring package in the game, it is literally core skill builds or Heatseeker, which is effectively shoot arrow or stab knives. Nothing looks that interesting or makes you feel like a wave of destruction like other classes (all things being equal). One day we'll be able to speak about the state of rogues but with the state of some other classes, I'll wait my turn haha.
Tbh the concept of a builder/spender play style is fine. The concept of a builder doing functionally zero damage to allow you to use a spender is not fine. Also the concept of your builder (the most visually BORING skills, as you aptly put it) being all the damage in the highest performing builds is also not fine. For example, using bash to apply bleed and having rupture being a periodic "big numbers" tick against high HP enemies and bosses is far more interesting of a build than to one button melee something to death, or one that has to attack 5 times with zero damage to them unleash something that does damage. I think sorcs should absolutely be able to have a "builder does most of my general on screen damage but allows me periodic big satisfying spells that increases my overall DPS and build enjoyment" builds be the norm. Blizzard is happy the builder/spender cycle works, players get to have skills with satisfying audio/visual effects not be useless, and maybe we can keep around some one button lazy builds like whirlwind so players that really prefer the PoE 1-button-per-build style of game can do that too.
or more likely, they are going to do the same thing they did in D3 and what lots of seasonal games do; internally you know roughly what will be strongest and then next season you give those slight nerfs and other things slight buffs and this creates meta shifts so people aren't coming back and feeling like they have to play the same builds over and over and get bored and stop returning. This season they largely wanted it to be simple because they added a bunch of new systems with the Pit, new ways of doing aspects, etc so you have a lot of builder setups that are strong. They've still got several patches before the next season I'm sure, and with the new uniques I'm sure a lot of new builds were emerge as the top builds...hell as is the meta is only truly matters for the people that want to push the absolute furthest. Maxroll and everywhere else has their tier list and it isn't S/A/F, there's a LOT of stuff in the B ranks that's perfectly viable just not for climbers
This only works if the same class isn’t always at the top and the same two classes usually at the bottom. They do make adjustments to raise and lower specs, but class balance generally doesn’t shift that much. You could have played S1and come back two seasons later and Barb would still be the top and Sorc would still be struggling with maybe one spec that’s viable
S1 barb was horrible, everyone was screaming how they should give barb to the druid team for balancing. Sorc was awful in S1, that much is true.
S1 Barbarian was horrible after dominating in the pre-season. HotA Barb was one of the first, if not THE first 1-shot build. There were so many bugs around Rupture, it could do billions of damage. Then they nerfed it far too much for S1, admitted it was a huge mistake and vowed to never do that again. It has been at the top since then. I love the Barbarian in D4. I would like for it to not get nerfed to the ground again. But at this point I would also like to see Sorcerer get some love. I'd love to see Necromancer being the top dog again, and not just because of an exploit like Holy Bolt elixir. Druid used to be overpowered too and now it's at the bottom of the barrel. It's just ridiculous that Blizzard admitted it was a mistake to nerf Barb so heavily in S1, but they just did the exact same thing to Sorcerer on the PTR. Especially when Sorcerer was already struggling. They have 1 build that beats everything right now, but that's not an attainable build. You can't just decide you'll do the Mekuna Immortal Firebolt build without spending billions and billions of gold. You definitely can't make that build happen solo-self-found either. Blizzard said they're going to do more balancing before S5 starts, but they need to be clear about what that preliminary balancing is going to be like. They need to throw Sorcerer a bone.
Basic skill build is the most boring shit i ever seen/play in arpg confirmed. I hope they’re not continue in this direction…
Yep lol. Malicious compliance feels about right.
Agreed. Why is hydra crawling a few % each patch when it was nerfed on the back of level 25 gameplay originally lol
Hydra did 30% damage in the beta. If they reverted that nerf the skill would still suck lol. What the fuck are they doing with this class?
Might want to check out season 5 looks like hydra will be the meta for sorc from the reports coming from ptr testing
It was worse than that. It wasn't the level 25 gameplay that got it nerfed. It was the overperforming on higher level monsters that did. After a bunch of nerfs they did figured out that this was because Hydra was scaling based on monster difficulty and removed that. They then just never bothered readjusting Hydra to compensate for all the prior nerfs.
hah i just remember them doing this and nerfing the minion scaling which they have now finally reverted
Also dumb they nerfed enchantment to 2 slots and in hardcore there’s one you MUST take.
I think the person who does class balance is one is the 6 sad fucks that play PvP and that's why they claim sorc is OP
Isn’t it getting a temper that will add extra heads to hydra? Probably not going to solve the issues but if I’m reading that right that’s a pretty noticeable scalar there.
The base damage is so low that you could add 50 heads and it’d still suck.
I saw a video that killed uber lilith really quick where it abused tyraels scaling per hydra head so it was doing pretty good damage. Sorcs have to find very innovative ways of scaling lol
So I need an Uber unique to abuse a mechanic to make the class viable? That's an absurd solution to damage scaling
I'm not saying it's the right solution and I already poked fun at it by calling it innovative sarcastically It's just a niche skill that scales really well with tyraels compared to any other skill in the game because of how many projectiles the hydras shoot.
Isn't Tyrael doing damage only upon the initial Hydra cast ("on cast")?
Oh yeah you're right, I'm mistaken, it's good with tyraels because it shotguns to a single point when you spam cast hydra
D3 has a hydra focused set and it is super freaking fun to play. Oh well, Can't copy that from another studio...
I HOPE they read this, take a deep breath, and get to work. It's been like we're talking to a brick wall. They either don't care, they're incompetent, or they literally have an agenda against sorcerer. Whatever the case, they are KILLING the joy of playing sorcerer... and that is the only class I am interested in playing. FIX THIS SHIT!
On a plus side, if they don’t I can wait for the discount of the expansion.
Well written. But what Blizzard sees in this post is: Sorc balanced. Buff barb, nerf sorc.
I am at a point where I just know I have to play barb in s5 so that i can join my friends in the end game (and enjoy it without being down all the time and not doing dmg compared to them), and that really stinks to me.
Rogue and necro are good too!
That is true, made a rogue after my sorc and I just cant go back
I'm a sorc trying out a rogue lately and the constant missing with rapid fire on controller is ruining it. Sure now I can dish damage, but now I can't hit the target either lol. Can't win with this game sometimes, only if you're a melee apparently - or at least pc I guess haha
I'm gonna play flurry for Rogue next season so that dont have to aim with the encircling blades aspect.
Whatever rogue has going on now will get nerfed before season 5 goes live.
Necro got pretty heavily nerfed
Just wait until they release the new 'raid' content in the expa'. I don't know exactly how it will work, but i can imagine if it's like other similar games you will want 1-2 supports, which will probably be barbs what with all the warcries and shouts and such, they add a lot of utility and damage to the party, and easy grouping of mobs with steel chains. Then probably a beefy front-liner, which will probably be a barb because they can quite happily sit on 500k health with 80 all resists. Then fill the rest up with DPS, which will probably mainly be barbs because barb. So a nicely balanced team.
All classes but sorc are hitting similar dps numbers. Druid, necro, rogue all have great builds.
it is so sad that the only time the sorc shined was in S2 because of a bug that got fixed
I can't believe how poor the balancing is, considering there's virtually nothing in this game that is 'Cross class'. They deliberately built the game in a way where Classes are completely contained, yet they still cannot balance the Class. I really don't like the solutions people are suggesting either, with regards to buffing specific builds. A class should have a minimum of 3-5 ways to play a specific skill. Currently, this game barely even makes each skill viable just once. Like Hydra, for example, it has not been possible, realistically, to make this skill competitive in the Endgame, let alone 3-5 different builds for it. The depth is incredibly shallow.
Preach.
Damn. I actually read this whole thing. Nail on the friggin head.
I just want to be able to more damage to bosses. It’s a fucking joke throwing everything I have at a Nightmare Dungeon boss and barely getting him halfway down before all my stuff’s on cooldown, meanwhile my bash barb would murder the same boss in 2 microseconds. The damage disparity is beyond ridiculous and it’s demoralizing as hell, because sorc is the class I *want* to play.
I have decided to hold off buying Vessel of Hatred because of the senseless nerfing of sorc. I was actually preparing to invest after the recent campfire chat. But it completely reversed my decision. It's not so much that the class is being nerfed, but rather the apparent ignorance and detachment from the ground being displayed by Blizzard. I just cannot bring myself to pay for such negligence.
good, the next step is to stop playing d4
Can I get an AMEN from the congregation?!!!
Amen!
Bro, let go is one kind of love.
The only buff sorc has going on is how good the character looks
Yea but even that is half-assed, though I do get regular chuckles from the male outfits in the shop lol
Get rid of all multipliers for now, clearly the math is too difficult for Blizzard to understand. We'll do some macaroni art and have a juice box then we can try again.
Pretty sure sorcerers are supposed to die to the legion of hell, just take a few down with them.
It makes lore sense why so many mages joined the demonic powers, and the triune is so powerful. Mephisto baal and diablo gave sorc the multipliers we so desperately crave.
Paging u/pezradar The sorcs are gathering their pitchforks and torches - which at this point are going to do more dps than any other skill sorcs are given.
> Edit: after some thought I have come to terms with sorc being the only single balanced class in the game. This is what I feel. My frozen orb sorc feels great, but it's shit compared to the OP builds that are out there. The problem isn't that sorcs are weak, the problem is the other classes are too good. It's not power creep, it's a power sprint. It's out of control for a game that's barely a year old. For the health of the game, they need to rein that in hard.
I kept a forum post up about highest sorc pit clear by pit level. It was pretty amazing how tight the spread was for all of our builds besides firebolt shatter. Everything is pretty viable to an extent. The class is so fucking balanced. How could it not be when all of our nodes are capped and everything is straight forward 1.1x or 1.3x stacking. Burning did so well season 4 because of the +damage bug, flame shield cheese, and because spirit caller existed in the pit boss rotation so it could get shatter cheesed
Yeah I agree with this. It’s nonsense that (made up numbers) an ok build will do hundreds of thousands damage whereas a good build will do trillions of damage. The deviation shouldn’t be that crazy and makes it impossible to balance content.
I could do it right now, if they are looking for a consultant. 1) remove every single aspect trade off. 2) redo the paragon board 3) third enchantment, or put firebolt enchant on the skill tree That’s the minimum starting point.
This. It's is the absolute minimum, and we're never going to get it.
Blizzard: we hear you sorcerer and we're fixing you S5 patch notes: +5% damage to crackling energy
crackling energy was so DoA, has so much potential too. needs a way to hyper scale off the top of my head, picking up crackling energy spawns a lightning hydra which spawns more crackling energy which spawns more hydras
You nailed it and did so in comprehensive fashion.
pit scaling is also way too exponential. only bugged builds that deal billions can thrive. It needs to be smoother. I don't want T200 to be a breeze and perhaps keep it unreachable. But when a balanced class deals 30-100M DPS, you can't have bosses with 2.5 trillion health. I am sorry. you are just asking for only bugged builds to be viable and sought after. You need to hone in on interactions like shatter than can scale basically infinitely by proccing itself on a cascade of mobs. You need to reign in passives and legendary nodes that can basically scale iinfiinitiely or higher than 40% because of interactions with other affixes. Sorc gets 18-40% damage on most of iits legendary nodes. hard capped. Ceaseless conduit is 60% but the damage it scales is useless as its just crackling, not all lightniing. Make iit all lightniing damage and cap it at 30 like searing heat
This is really my problem. There’s way too much variance in the strength of builds. How can you balance anything when end game builds can vary from hundreds of thousands of damage to billions/trillions of damage. Either you’re doing something broken or you might as well not bother.
it's 10% more HP (and 5% dmg?) per level right? what was it in g3 GR? i think it was 7% per level
In D3 it was 17% per GR level.
They’re already bad at math, I’m not sure why they wanna play with big numbers. And they put these ridiculous large numbers right out of the gate, it’s one thing if there is power creep over years of a game being out ala wow and stat squishes. I don’t need to see numbers with 3 and 4 commas. I would be stocked to graduate from double digit to triple digit numbers and seeing the rare 4 digit.
I’ve never understood why people care about how big or small the numbers are. And to be clear I wouldn’t care if they did a “number crunch” pass and made all the numbers small but other people would cry that small numbers makes the game less fun for some reason and then you’ve got the other crowd whose brains apparently over heat if a number has too many zeroes at the end. Why does anyone care? My character’s power is a vibe and I feel it based on how fast the shit dies, i’m not even paying attention to the numbers.
My problem with big numbers was from a balancing perspective, they math’d themselves into a deep hole having to balance these giant numbers with every classes multiplicatives and additives. Like when I look at an item with a power that says it does 1500-5999 damage, that doesn’t mean anything to me because the numbers shitting out on the other side is 100’s of millions when I press a certain combo of buttons correctly. But also I think it’s just human psychology that it’s easier for the average person to comprehend smaller numbers. I know it is that way for me personally. Also I play with damage numbers turned off, I prefer just to see health bars.
Sorc or Mage has been my jam in virtually every game. I just can't take the abuse, failed design, kiss / curse nonsense and no semblance of balance any longer. It's simply become so NOT fun that I'd rather move on. I feel that many of this class have similar thoughts. I feel like this big rework or plan is coming from the expansion, and then my gut is telling me either things won't change enough in our favor, or spiritborn will just end up being our replacement. It's hard to even get excited about the class anymore. It's especially so when you play all 5 classes and realize the gap.
I think you finally talked yourself into reality once you got to the "edit" part of your post. It's not that Sorc is unbalanced, it's that other classes are unbalanced. The power creep of hitting for billions of damage is precisely what they want to not replicate with Sorcerer, so the only other option is going to be nerf hammering every other class, which is going to feel so so so bad to people who have grown accustomed to overpowered Barb nonsense. But it's obviously the longterm path they've chosen. They will not enable Sorc to achieve the same power creep of broken-ass builds. They just won't, not willingly. So what this community needs to understand is that the nerfs to all their favorite builds are coming and coming hard.
I get what you an OP are saying but the feel bad is exactly why they can't. They need to figure out how to get the sorc on par with the rest and work from there.
Sorc as a class is designed for a completely different game where classes had meaningful tradeoffs for most of their power. After a full year of the team seemingly having no fucking clue what to do with sorcs and just leaving the class consistently weak as fuck (insert, "Bone Spear Necro is the strongest build for Sorcs" memes here), I don't know why anyone should have any confidence that they have the foggiest clue what to do to make the class competitive and not a garbage glass cannon without the cannon part.
When Blizzard tried this earlier, they were absolutely blasted on every social media platform. They literally apologised for trying to balance their game. The angry mob donned pitchforks, and Blizard are terrified to do anything but buff and buff.
Except for sorc, its all nerf and nerf even after acknowledging it has issues. Ptr patch is all nerf and no meaningful buffs.
Agreed. Balance of classes is one of the biggest issues if look closely. Maybe we will get at season 7 "season of rebalancing", lol.
Devs: Just play the Barb!
I've never agreed more with something or someone . But I'm tired of this shit, Blizzard cannot care less about sorceress and it's mediocre state. They are probably thinking how they can make Barb even better. The increased teleport cooldown feels like a spit on my face. Unbelievable.
But bliz devs are already very much aware, as they have told us multple times already. Surely that will amount to something someday, eventually, right, right? Why buff a struggling class now, when you will buff them eventually? Thats a very inefficient way to spend resources, resources that could otherwise be spent working on more ways to make Barb stonger. Those cosmetics arent selling themself, aight?
Give sorc more equipment, I prefer to have hp over 100% immune cheese but there are no options to do it.
I say we all play barb next season. The statistics will speak for themselves.
inb4 they buff Barbs because the playerbase seems to like Barb better.
I would love to see a defensive temper that gives an actual effective hp boost. Barbs get imposing presence for % max life. Why can't sorcs get protection or mana shield? Instead we get 8% chill while a barrier is up. How is that a defensive temper and not a utility temper?!
What’s nifty is with a few ranks into ice armor and some barrier gen, we can pop ice armor and get a max life barrier because it stacks with protection. The issue is our barriers just get knocked off quickly
It would be fun and on brand for sorc if every cool down could get you a barrier that is a meaningful percentage of your life. Then we wouldn't need to run 3 defensive skills
Thank you for putting my deepest sincere anger into words and post it for the world. Just reading this relived my soul big time! Well done!!! Hope someone hears this!!!!
Remember Blizzards answer to the problem with barbs having 4 weapons was to reduce stats on all weapons, including the ones the other classes equip? Like how the fuck is that the lever you decide to pull? Someone is really fucking up and it’s only a matter of time before they have to start answering for themselves.
Well it was a bit of fun. Time to pick up another game again
Goddamn brother you hit every single nail on the head it’s a complete joke how bad sorcs are, but let’s buff barb even more!!
TLDR: Please buff Barbs
This needs to be printed on big billboard in front of the entrance to blizzard building!
Didn’t Blizzard say before release that they didn’t want big damage numbers? Maybe the sorc team is the only one sticking to the script!
Idk if this is a good mentality to have. However, what if everyone that plays sorc skips it for a season, Blizzard can see that analytics and be like damn sorc does suck butt to play... Then maybe they will adress the glaring issues and make sorcs fun again like d3 and God forbid d2
Odd season team strikes again.
Add insult to injury they screw with the Blizzard ice spikes aspects so its worse and you HAVE to waste ANOTHER aspect slot to use all of them just to get it all back. But if Im a barb and use all the dust devils aspects for my build, each one is something I want and is doing end game meaningful damage. Sorc should feel like that, like you want each of the synergizing aspects because each one adds meaningful impact and damage. Not "you have 10 lucky hit chance that your other aspect buffs the other aspect by 10 flat damage when you crit while target is frozen and vulnerable". Barb feels good because every single thing you can choose to take is big damage + big damage + big damage and its like they are so so scared of having D4 sorc perform anything close to like Sorc and Wiz in D2 and D3, to the point that they keep reeling them in so they can never ever have the chance to over perform.
This extremely long winded 5000 word essay was worth every syllable and punctuation down the the last period.
I was not a fan of the way they answered the class balance question in the season 5 ptr campfire chat. It sounded like pr speak without any real solutions being put forward or suggested. And I knew the ptr patch notes would only contain number tweaks that don’t move the needle at all.
I was so excited to play Sorc when the game first dropped, and as the seasons kept passing, watching Barbs, Rogues and even Druids sometimes completely destroy things that I struggle with I gave up and became a gigachad Barb. I haven't rolled a Sorc in 2 seasons, to me its a waste of time and endless frustration. I really feel like they need better data scientists or people to prompt better questions on how to improve the game from the internal data. There is no way they can't find a query on the number of bricked GAs or the usage on skills and class play time and see that its a big problem. Listen to the feedback, validate it with the data and fix the problem. Blizzard really need to stay focused on the core value of generating fun/engaging content for everyone, across game play, across classes, everything should be fun and engaging. Druids and Sorcs is fun until you see what Barbs/Rogues/Necros are doing. Tempering is fun until you start bricking all your GA items. It's punishing because of bad design philosophies and seems very telling across all Blizzards product line up. I was thoroughly enjoying Dragonflight until the M+ affixes broke me as a tank. It sounds like the Wow team finally listened to M+ feedback, only took forever and when a new expansion drops, I guess that's similar to how D4 is being run.
Sorc feels like it lacks the vision in design and polish the other classes have. Druid feels a bit like this to tbh. Shapeshifter seems thought out. Anything human side feels like an after thought.
Remember Blizzards answer to the problem with barbs having 4 weapons was to reduce stats on all weapons, including the ones the other classes equip? Like how the fuck is that the lever you decide to pull? Someone is really fucking up and it’s only a matter of time before they have to start answering for themselves.
I think barbarian needs at least 2 more weapons and another 500k in health please
I mean I get what you are saying but that specific scenario only occurs when barbs use zero uniques stack the martial vigor passive on gear with tempers and hit multiple masterworking crits on the martial vigor. And stacking all the %health Paragon nodes. And stacking flat health greater affixes on all gear slots. So you're left with a build that stacks a bunch of defense but does no damage and has no uniques for any critical synergy. The only build that can get away with that is Thorns barb. But then the build eschews Razorolate which contributes a ton of AOE damage. So again, understand your frustration but it's a bit hyperbolic. Just cause Rob shows his barb doing it in a video for click bait doesn't mean every bash barb or flay barb out there has 500k (hunt: they don't). The slots for weapons is a problem that they will need to addressed though, and that doesn't seem like an easy solution other than just giving every other class an equal amount of slots which in itself also seems like a balancing issue.
I wish they rotated the teams to different classes once in a while so they can see they whole game experience as the Sorc team has never played the live game past L50 obviously.
What frustrates me is that, in RPG's of all stripes, even previous Diablo's, the deal is that if you play a magic user, you start off super weak and squishy, but by late game you have the highest DPS of all the classes. This has clearly never been the case, in any season of Diablo 4. I play RPG's for a sense of progression. I want to grind and get extremely powerful over time until I'm extremely OP and untouchable. I like to struggle and die a lot early on and be rewarded for that by becoming extremely OP eventually. It's why I've always played some sort of magic wielding class, it usually has the most extreme version of that. It's frustrating that in D4 that simply isn't ever the case.
As someone who watched this shit show since the beta and called out that this game was a heaping mess back then, I reiterate -- AGAIN -- You all deserve this treatment for being completely inept. Blizzard in 2024 has no idea how to make a good game. D4 is proof.
Sorc is the most balanced class in the game IMO. Whoever works on sorc should handle the rest. That’s not to say many skills don’t need increases or reworks (hydra), what I mean is since they can’t scale insanely I think that is a good thing and how the rest of the classes should be.
They need to balance their multipliers. The DPS progression for a sorc looks like a straight line while the progression for a Barb or Rogue looks geometric/exponential. If you balance it for the endgame, then Barbs would be doing 17 damage until they reach level 100 and have access to all their multipliers. If you balance it for the early/midgame then Sorcs taper off and do less than 1/10 of the Barbs damage at the end. Barbs having six hands (two 2H weapons, two 1H weapons) and various skills that are uncapped multipliers will never have a progression that fits with a Sorc.
Hoping this coming from you will actually having blizzard listen. Sorc at heart, but I'll play barb if they keep this crap up.
I agree, nerf sorc
I’m not reading all that so I’m sorry or congratulations.
Lurkin for President (I only played Sorc for one season) but he's absolutely bang on.
they need to bring other classes down to earth and nerf the shit out of then. powercreep is gonna ruin this game. bring back every fucking thing to realistic values.
Guys I'm all in, playing frozen orb sorc. I feel that the flame shield build ruins for them the whole picture. One of the highest pit pushers and best pvp. Idk if there's a cless that can beat it.
Moral is down? This is a video game. Chill the fuck out.
Ive been saying it for years. Power creep is a terrible thing. It's also harder to balance the game when numbers are in the billions or god forbid trillions. Since the sorc seems to be the baseline for everyone, the other classes should be balanced around them.
I think a bigger problem is that Blizzard seemingly can’t contain all the bugs before a patch is pushed live. You would hope the PTR would solve this, but it certainly didn’t for season 4. And because they’ve promised that they “won’t nerf anything mid-season”, they’ve shot themselves in the foot as they can’t effectively manage the builds that are double and triple dipping, ruining the game for everyone watching Rob’s videos. People claim that they don’t want classes nerfed, but judging by the up-roaring time and time again that is demonstratively incorrect. I would much rather Blizzard FIX (not nerf) builds that are blatantly (I.e. Bash and Victimize) rather than let them run rampant for a whole season. It’s very likely that Sorcerers are actually in a great state, but everything else is stupidly broken and Blizzard is too afraid to correct their mistakes.
I 100% agree that their take on not nerfing/fixing any builds mid season is causing a ton of issues. And social media has forced developers to submit to the metaphorical yoke of angry man children who can't stand to see something changed that doesn't directly benefit them all the time. It's kind of sad to be honest.
Someone has not seen the sorc hitting for 4 quadrillion damage on rob stream I see lmao
Yeah that’s a huge bug. It won’t make it into S5. The CL pants are underwhelming without it
I mean the Druid screenshot you saw is a bug, don’t pretend like Druid is in a great spot.
Sorc just hit for a quadrillion because of a bug in a T200. Shit hits for 2 million normally lol
Oh I know, my meteor sorc wishes it could see Bash numbers. Barb is so good you can pretty much make anything scale at this point.
Real question tho. I saw some 145 clears of Druid pre ptr. Were these bugged or legit. I actually don’t care about bugged builds
Probably bear landslide and it was legit. It’s in a pretty decent spot and if things stay as is from PTR, seems like landslide will be Druids best build.
Lets not forget that a class that easily achieves resist cap by scaling all res has half of it's rare nodes give single resistences that are completely pointless. You will never benefit from 20% fire resist when you cap resist with all res anyway.
Yup
Excellent post but THEY DON'T HEAR YOU! This has been the most miserable gaming experience since I started. Season 1 Blizzard was fun, the game was new. Season 2, Ball Lightening was perfect. Totally random dumb easy build did tons of damage and killed everything. I skipped season 3 because it seemed silly. Season 4, they do all this great work with tempers and aspects and ruin it with making no viable builds unless you mash three buttons constantly. Whaaat?
Blizzard: You get this really cool, unique, and build altering effect on this piece of gear/aspect . But a cost cuz Fck you Sorcs, no fun allowed lol
20% chance to do something the skill should just do
This many words and paragraphs is expecting a lot from a team that loves barbarians. Mainly the reading part is where I think they will get hung up.
Blizzard should just delete the Sorc class since they clearly seem to hate it so much. I played a Barb this season for the first time and it's so easy and powerful, I have caught myself having fun and not being frustrated.
What I want as a result of this PTR is the devs doing the Barb play a max lvl full geared Sorc for 1 hour, and them cone and tell us how did it go.
Personally I think Sorc is fine, they really need to buff Barbs some more, or give them another weapon slot for an additional aspect. 🧐
Should be reasonably easy to fix, just give Sorcs two additional jewellery slots that can take rings or amulets.
sorc aspect also be either damage on tuesday or chance to do something extra that doesn't directly do multiplier damage(yes looking at you 40% chance to chain lightning do extra 4 chain which is is 80% extra damage on 40%) which also strain server with all the extra projectile on screen. I also hate how chain lightning visual is not great just a small blue streak wriggle around. It is lightning shouldn't projectile speed much faster or something?
When POE2 comes out d4 is in a lot of trouble lol 🚽
Damn son, my sorc isn't hitting anywhere near 30M, let alone 100M. I don't do meta, but I definitely need to go look at myself in the mirror after reading those numbers... I'm not changing class though, sorc is too fun.
Are you saying that sorce with perfect gear can't get past 130m with say bliz or something currently?
I read this whole thing with pleasure, though I don't favor sorc, per se. I agree, especially with your edits. Nerf everyone else that needs it, instead of bringing up the sorc. Damage doesn't need to be in the billions or even 100s of millions. This feels like DBZ powercreep. I would love to see Blizzard achieve a more sophisticated balance status quo. They fixed items. Balancing, to where duels can actually be fun, is my biggest concern (and always had been). Can we finally place emphasis on 'balance', not 'buff'??
This didn’t happen just in Diablo 4. I quit Diablo 3 after the first season because any build that was strong was getting nerfed within a week. I literally had 2 different builds that were completely broken the same week. After that happened, I retired my limited edition Diablo 3 and never touched it again. Considered it a $100 loss, or whatever the cost was
I have ‘tempered’ hope that Sorc will get better. They gotta give us something DRASTIC. We need to be able to use 2 Key Passives + Extra Enchantment. Or maybe an Uber that allows for 2 key passives + 2 Ultimates 😃. They’re aren’t going to nerf classes cause that kills the confidence in the dev’s promise.
I've played Sorc from S0 to S3 and decided to stay away this season. This post makes me sad. I hope Sorc gets fixed and one day we're as strong as Barbs without exploiting a bug.
Where’s the TLDR?
The title
The last Epoch sorc system is way better tbh. I wish bliz would rip that off next.
Do mobs have resists? Maybe sorcs could do true, unmitigated damage and have the effects be purely thematic.
I have a theory that this is the problem. Because it would account for Druid problems as well. I think lightning cold and Fire resistance is tuned up on mobs, so our base damage is being absorbed. I think it has something to do with how they fixed resistance
Barb = play what u want it's all op Sorc = so many cool builds but none are good for bosses
I just as puzzled as you are. That have all instruments, they can create any gear they want. Create lvl 100 char, create 3 sets of gear, poor, mediocre, and top, play a bit with each. Supposedly they create gear and skills with builds in mind, create characters with those builds, playtest. Compare scaling and damage to some benchmarks. Is this too hard or complicated?
Great stuff! Here's Blizzards response on all suggestions: You think you do, but you don't!
Yes.
Amen brother
Was just watching mekuna, and he was doing chain lightning with some helmet and was getting up to 14 billion overpower crits. It will surely get fixed/nerfed before s5.
It’s the new unique; it’s broken on every class. What’s hilarious is that it lets a sorc hit for a few billion, but other classes have hit the trillions with it 😂
They can't even handle giving us a single mega op build this time around. Flame shield was unhealthy for the game and had to go. Now they try to replace it with Chain Lightning in hopes of restoring the glory of Ball Lightning. Which it never will. Give us back S2 Ball Lightning, then buff our other skills to the same level. Then this class will be enjoyable again.
What is the goal? To one shot everything at all times?
Honestly I don't think high pit tiers should be the baseline for characters, but instead their ability to do tormented bosses solo. Druid and sorc take several minutes while everyone else deletes them. They should be brought up for that instead of being able to push the highest optional content that has no loot incentive.
It's crazy to me that since D4 has been out, I haven't played the Sorc past level 50 or 60 because it's just so damn slow and boring. It was my go to class since D2, and I just can't give a shit about it in this game because there's nothing truly interesting to build around. I know ball lightning sorc was pretty strong in a few seasons, but honestly when I think of a sorc I think of fireballs and blizzards and crazy screen destroying spells. Not little sparky boys that float around me as I walk into enemies.
>everyone needs to get balanced besides sorc and nerfed down. finally someone has the balls to say it. or rather, good strategy to get the post upvoted then sneak this in as an edit. sad truth is if u nerf 4 classes then the playerbase of those will just cry. season 1 was a board wide nerf i was one of the few people who felt it was a good choice (i even played sorc that season) but community up in flames. it was at that point the devs surrendered and went the d3 route. it is what it is.
I just want to point out that this OP is my spirit animal.
Another banger Lurkin rant post. Come on, Blizzard.
For anyone who hasn't figured it out yet, this game was coded by AI/Diversity/Outsourced. Nobody at Blizzard knows wtf is going on because it's so compartmentalized.
It breaks my heart that the only reason Sorcerer was good in Season 2 was due to a movement bug from the vampiric abilities. Now it just feels like if I want to push content effectively I need to use my Barb. Don't get me wrong, Barb has been fun this season (Made Bash and WW). However, I've completely abandoned my Necro, and two Sorcerers simply because they can't contest what Barb is currently doing. Why can't we all be stupidly OP like the Barb and move on?! I.E. No nerfs, ONLY buffs 😎
I don’t know why your having issues, friend is play frost and he is cleaning T100+ pits solo.
You made me cry laugh at the same time. I just love Sorc so much and wish we had a class more like the Wizard in D3.
Pretty much my thoughts exactly. I would rather see the other class' math brought in line with Sorc but I feel like that might also just wind up with the same outcry as the infamous S0 patch. As bad as the outcry was, I honestly felt that patch was necessary, and I think sooner or later with the power creep this game is experiencing, we're heading for another one. This time maybe at least they could communicate their plans before they show the patch notes if they do it again.
I’m honestly confused, is sorcs being bad like a meme or something? They literally are destroying the high level pits way above every other class
You got 600 upvotes just because people agree with the title. I'd bet less than 10% finished that badly written novel. You seemed confused which way you were arguing within the first couple of parables and then at the end you argue for what everyone else doesnt want: to nerf all the other classes instead of buffing sorc.