ggg needs to take steps to make spells more approachable

I apologize in advance for not reading the entire 20-something pages of this thread, rather I have read the OP and skimmed most other comments in here.

As I see it, there are several issues regarding spells that were not discussed here, or at least not fully discussed:

1) Items - The issue of caster items is several fold:

A) Uniques - Some uniques are simply too good, making or breaking not just builds, but entire spells/skills, the biggest example of this is of course Shavronne's Wrappings, negating to a very big extent the vulnerability of Low Life builds to chaos damage and thus allowing a big a very small investment (In terms of passives, and even other slots) become a very big gain

Now to be honest, I am not entirely certain this is much of an issue anymore, as it seems that Pain Attunement really doesn't add that much of an advantage anymore compared to the myriad DPS and survivability of melee/physical builds, what it does do is prevent Pain Attunement from being changed in any meaningful way to become more than just a slight DPS equalizer compared to said builds.

B) Mods - Every caster gear, namely daggers, wands, scepters and staves can roll an obscene amount of mods, ranging from attack dmg/speed to light radius and reduced stat requirements, this is making it extremely, painfully, woefully frustrating and downright impossible to get a decent item that can grant a significant enough boost to spells to compete with the weapon based builds.

Another issue with mods is the availability of attack enhancing mods compared to spell enhancing mods. Flat physical/elemental damage can be found in almost all item slots, with uniques some times alleviating that problem with extreme values (Magnate/Meginord's, for example) while the spell enhancing mods, that are by far inferior in terms of raw DPS addition, can be found only on jewelry and a specific shield type, in which they still compete for place against an insane number of modifiers, all the while modifiers like increased attack speed and similar can also roll on the same pieces of equipment.

2) Utility - The utility of spells, categorized by the various crit afflictions, this, in my opinion, further hampers the viability of spells as that even when they bring extra utility (aside from range/damage), the only way to capitalize on it is via a heavy investment in both passives and items, creating an even bigger disparity in survivability but without a COMPARABLE (To the investment needed) added benefit through more damage or crowd control, namely against the monsters that matter most, which are bosses and rares.

I'd like to see a Witch starting area rework sometime soon. Hopefully that's a dream that will come true!

I think you could address the tree's inefficiencies and in doing so give a very minor kick in the butt to casters.

And put some blocking/dodging mobs in the next act!

HEY!

Hey all,

I have read this thread and I think you guys got pretty much all important points covered. However I'd still like to make a couple of brief comments about Ethereal Knives (EK). While EK does not have the same high-res mob issue the elemental spells have, I still think it is not on par with what a melee char can do in terms of DPS and skill gem diversity by a mile.

Let me start by saying I have a level 84 witch whose main skill is EK, so I know a bit about this spell. That said, I'm still relatively new to the game so any constructive criticism to what I'm posting will be well taken.

1.- Support Gems: First of all, EK suffers from a horrendous stiffness in terms of support gem flexibility. Low cast speed and very short range means Faster Casting and Faster Projectiles are pretty much a necessity. That combined with the need for life-leech gem leaves only 1-2 (5L/6L) spots open for other supports. This could perhaps be palliated by having a more manageable pool of caster mods in caster items (projectile speed, cast speed more common in decent items), like many posters have written before.

2.- Damage: EK damage only shines if you stack critical chance. Without it DPS is really lacking, and since this spell cannot be shotgunned there's a real need to bring that DPS up. However, with a 5% base-crit, we need a boatload of critical strike chance nodes plus all power charges possible to bring the final critical chance to a decent level. Power charges that to build up we need yet another skillgem: Power Charge on Critical; leaving one free slot for the lucky people who have lots of ex to spend in a 6-Linked chest (or those who can do with Tabula Rasa, I guess).

Somebody in this thread mentioned EK being able to get up to an absurd amount of DPS (300K?). I have never seen that. With Added Fire Damage skillgem and Hatred aura, 12-13K AoE DPS is certainly doable (prepare your exalts for a 6L chest or give up life leech in a 5L, pick your poison). There are builds around that reach ~20K AoE damage, but that requires having Void Battery (and of course 20/20 gems), not exactly common in Dommination and a pretty expensive item in all leagues. It does also require having all 8 power charges up for spell damage, but I suppose that is more manageable (I won't know until I get one, using Divinarius at the moment).

*A note: critical chance stacking, in my opinion, is mandatory for pretty much all spells. Even if only for the status ailment effects that many keep (wrongly) bringing up as something spell-specific.

3.- Other problems the commonly mentioned for all spells: prohibitive mana cost requires mandatory-clarity plus a lot of mana regen items. No life/mana leech from items/nodes, even though it deals pure physical damage.


Even though I wrote these as problems, I think Ethereal Knives is mostly fine as it is (save for the no leech common to all spells... seriously how have they gotten away with this for so long?), and these problems are problems only due to lack of spell variety forcing us to have EK as a main DPS skill. EK is an AoE spell that cannot be shotgunned, which is the way I think AoE should be about: multiple-target damage, not cheesy-one-target-shotgun-tactic.

(This is also TL;DR) What we need in my opinion is good, high DPS single-target spells for all elements and physical damage. That plus addressing the issues repeated ad nauseum in this thread.

These were my 2c.

bbbbbump

B-B-B-B-B-B BUMPPPPPPPOBREAKER!

so....

"

shroudb wrote:

so....

just read your post in the level 20 gem thread...
your math is right and now i just want to stop playing ....(yes i will comeback after some time anyway)
kind got used to it how long it takes to get gems to level 20...
but when you really see those numbers and "realise" how much exp yo have to grind (up to level 97 with lowest exp penalty possible) its insane...
not to mention that you need atleast a 5link to do acceptable dmg (because of monster resi/cruse resitance/immunity and leech)...

ya i know those things where already said and you could create a build that doesnt need leech (with creazy passiv investment though) etc...
it still makes me sad....

taking a sip from my coffee

GGG please...