Spell using sorcerers feel so weak

[Thecla]

Perhaps I’m poorly spec’d or haven’t found the right, required uniques, but…

Back in the alpha, I tried out a lightning blast/meteor sorcerer. Lightning blast gave me something to do while running circles in the arena waiting for the meteor cooldown to expire, and meteor did decent damage (ok, not as good as a sentinel’s hammer throw or an acolyte’s hungering souls, but still ok). Then again, meteor has high mana cost and long cooldown to help balance it against the other sorcerer spells.

This time, I figured I try out some different spells, so I have a fire sorcerer with fireball and elemental nova, still low level (30ish or something), but it’s been painful. Essentially every passive has gone into +damage nodes (nothing in damage mitigation—which makes the play-style of rushing up to mobs and firing off nova’s while circling them even more exciting ) and it still feels weak.

Lobbing fireballs from a distance just passes the time, and it actually felt like my damage went down after I spec’d into the supposedly more damaging fire nova. Undoubtedly, my passive and skill pts are far from optimally distributed, but my nova is already at lvl 15, so it seems unlikely to improve much from here on out.

An elemental sorcerer should feel like a destructive master of the elements, as in the original Diablo (in part, it’s true, because fireball damage was bugged and chain lightning was ridiculously powerful), rather than someone with a box of matches – which is more like what I’m feeling at the moment.

[username]

It sounds like it’s a core issue with your build and perhaps even gear. Now there’s a few ways you can scale damage and survivability on the sorc. First of you want to prioritize intelligence, any and every note that gives you this you want to pick up. This will give you damage AND survivability in form of ward retention.

Second priority for stats kind of depends on what your going for, but for the simple version I would just go for spell damage on gear and in the tree. This includes nodes such as elemental damage.

Now you mentioned meteor, this spell is really super strong if you know how to spec it. Now there’s kind of two ways going about it. You either go for all the meteors with a super high mana cost or you can go with a few say 4 or 5 and spec into the mana reduction nodes. Either one is viable and will obliterate bosses.

If you are having mana issues with meteor(And you will!) just spec into focus and make sure you max out desperate meditation and mana flooded. This will basically fil your mana from -80 to 200 in about 2 seconds. You can pick whatever you like after picking up those two nodes, mess around with it and see what you like.

About elemental nova, now I’ve leveled a character with this skilll, and while it’s super fun and useful while leveling it’s damage really falls off after you’ve finished the campaign. But it’s fun for sure.

Fireballs is awesome, if you get the right spec. Now I wouldn’t use it for AOE clear personaly, but you can with the piercing and extra projectiles. But where it really shines is when you spec into the Embers node and make the fireballs shoot out in sequence. For damage you want to make sure you pick up all the “Base critical strike chance” nodes for it. I don’t know if your aware, but your base critical strike chance for spells is 5%, now if you pick up these it will bring your base critical strike chance up to 14%. If your specced into a node such as the Sorcerer’s Calculated Destruction it makes a huge difference DPS wise. With 120% critical strike chance from that one node the difference is 11% crit without and a whopping 31% with the base critical nodes. You can of course further augment this with critical strike chance and critical strike multi on your gear and on your skill tree nodes to make it even better.

Now I can’t stress enough how important intelligence is for the mage, you always always want to prioritize it over other stats. And always max out the nodes that give you intelligence.

For defensive builds you want to spec into dodge as much as possible after intelligence. Ward, dodge and a good block shield is basically your bread and butter when it comes to defense.
If you are unaware the easiest and most reliable way to generate ward at the moment is speccing into the bottom middle of the teleport spell tree. This will give you decent enough ward per cast for you to stay alive vs most things.

I hope this helps you out a bit

[Athenaise]

Hi @username !, great info indeed, some advice for SpellBlade would be nice too. Thanks!

[username]

For Spellblade it’s pretty much the same deal defensively. As high int as possible, as much dodge as possible and as good a shield as possible.

Offensively you can build it in a few ways, personally I’ve tried mana strike, flame reave as ignite and flame reave as crit.
Mana strike I don’t care for at all, slow and boring, doesn’t do much imo. But I hear people like it, so I’m sure there’s other more relevant information out there other then me.

Flame Reave with ignite stacking is really good, especially if you have two of the set rings called The Invoker’s Scorching Graps, slap those on and your good to go pretty much After that just stack as much ignite chance and damage as possible, and you should be good. For weapon crafting I would just focus on attack speed and ignite chance.

Now the real gem imo, is playing it as crit. It’s very easy to get insane crit chance for flame reave. Picking up Ember Infusion and maxing it, along with a weapon with Melee Crit Chance give you a 20% BASE crit chance. Now there isn’t much crit chance in mage or spellblade tree, actually the only one for melee is in the mage tree called Knowledge of Destruction, so make sure you max out that one. The lack of crit nodes means you have to get crit chance when crafting your rings, neck and relic.

After that it’s just a matter of picking up all those juicy nodes that gives you +damage to all 3 elements.

Now the reason why it’s important to get those nodes over say, flat flame damage is because once you put in one point in Flame Reaves “Rolling Thunder” your flame reave will be tagged as a lightning attack. Essentialy making you double dip on all the nodes that give you +to all 3 types of damage nodes.

Another trick is picking up and maxing out the node “Melting Strike” in flame reave and then putting 2 or 3 points into the spellblade node called Shiver Armor. With 3 points invested in it you have nearly a 100% to Chill one a wave that bounces. The more damage node from Melting Strike is HUGE dps increase btw

When it comes to crafting weapons there’s a few viable ways to go about it depending what your crit chance is. But a standard one with base crit chance, increased crit chance and then if you can get lucky with chance to shock would be the standard. You can add another chance to x if you’re going with the unique chest Exsanguinous. Personaly I went with a crafted chest and crafted melee leech as the 4th mod(And soooo many failed attempts!).

Btw, picking up Mind Slayer and Mind Flayer in the spellbreaker tree seems really good, but at the moment it’s bugged and isn’t worth the investment at all, so I would stay away from that and rely on teleport for Ward and life leech for the rest.

Hope you find it useful Athenaise, let me know if there’s any questions