so to preface my feedback posts, i usually wait until i’ve cleared what is avaialable of the story and do a few monoliths on a character before giving feedback, but this is not grand knowledge from a level 100 tryhard leaderboard runner, so grain of salt and all that.
of the non pet classes (which were the first things i played) the sorcerer has been by far the most entertaining to me. at first i was running a lightning blast channeled convergence build (which does unreasonably high damage for level 50 and below content, in my opinion) and i was have a… blast (badum tssss) but i quickly found that i had 2 very significant problems that ultimately made my progress to the end of the story stutter to a stop and start style of play for a large part of the past week.
problem 1: Channeling leaves little option for other active spells.
i found myself stacking 2 different shields, a mobility spell for general safety purposes, and focus just to get my mana back to channel some more, and while that was effective, feeling like i only had 1 button worth anything wasn’t tremendously engaging, despite the sheer unreasonable amount of damage that one button did. this was offset slightly when i finally got my focus damage nova build online, but even then i only used it to hurt thins when i was bored of one shotting the entire earth.
Problem 2: you get locked into an element pretty early on.
pasives aside, which can be respecced whenever, the ability trees are not very conducive to hybrid play, you have to decide pretty early on (probably by your second or third skill specialization unlock) what type of elemental damage you’re going for, and it ended up forcing me to make a second sorcerer (so i actually have 2) to test fire vs lightning builds without having to gimp my already uber powerful lightning guy to find out that fire doesn’t even compete (not that it doesn’t, but i’ll talk about that in a minute)
with those two major problems being the highlight of negative experiences that i had on the sorcerer, the other were pretty minor:
While many skills have options to change element type, not all do which is limiting to certain elements.
while i found dipping into lich and druid trees on my necro and beastmaster to be completely viable options, there is no synergy to be found between spellblade and sorcerer as SB only affects melee damage, of which sorcs deal very little if any.
probably related to the crashing bugs with lightning blast, or perhaps just general instability, but i found often that my character would become unresponsive after teleporting, especially if i teleported near to a wall or other obstacle.
channeling (lightning blast) eats mana very quickly, and while it’s damage certainly makes it worth it still, i spend probably 2/3’s of my time using focus and running around while my mana regens just to find the right moment to stand still and murder everything with my sith lightning.
in addition to the above point, the current state of the game does not allow you to stand still near enemies without being instantly killed, and so i’ve learned to just fire my lightning blast off screen and then walk slowly through the wasteland of death that would probably have been much more entertaining to see.
gear seems to be pretty lopsided towards fire support, then lightning, then frost, although i imagine this will balance out in future updates as more gear is added.
this class has no pets, which is admittedly a pretty petty gripe, since there are clearly other options for pet classes, but it’d be nice to have at least 1 optional minion, even if it’s only purpose was to support me instead of being the bulk of my damage, which is already notable. (and everyone loves a pocket tank)
Now for a brief part 2 of this review: my thoughts on lightning vs fire.
short version: neither has the tankiness to just facepull a bunch of enemies, but fire is better at running past big packs that will eventually die to the ignite effect, while lightning hits WAAAAAAAY harder up front but has to work it’s way through enemies more slowly due to the more active nature of it’s damage.
Slightly longer version: while i have stated in another post my dislike for the current state of debuffs, it seems pretty clear to me that a lightning sorcerer will have a place in any late game multiplayer group provided that shock applies to everyone’s damage and not just the person who applied it. as for fire, in it’s current form it’s fine for soloing and even speedrunning to an extent since it’s pretty effective at killing enemy packs with low commitment damage, but it’s still outclassed by anything poison. on an aside, the game seems to be tuned such that you don’t want more than half of your gear to be uniques, as they don’t usually offer a good stat spread, and are tuned more for tanking or damage (usually), but fire damage specifically seems to have a significant supporting item in almost every single slot, but taking them all leads to being made of actual glass and leads to me having to make a very anti fun descision to nerf my own damage to survive a hit. in it’s current form i’m not particularly interested in trying any sort of ice build, so i’ll save that for the future when there’s more support/ cohesion.
i’ve also decided to start including a class rating in these feedback posts on a scale from 0 to 10, 0 being unplayable trash that made me hate my life, and 10 being a definite main character that i could play for days on end without getting bored.
with that in mind i give the sorcerer a standing rating of: 6.7/10, fun once you figure out what you’re doing, but quickly brought back down by monotony, pacing, and squishiness. on the english grading scale it gets a solid D.