Melee - You don't have a lot of choices, really. As long as you're powerful enough (HP and damage) then you're good.
Ranged - You can always hit and run. And you also depend on your weapon damage.
Caster - Hit and run as well. Clump up enemies together, etc.
Summoner - ???
I'm thinking of rolling out a WD as my main character (which of course I want to be the most powerful) but I'm starting to think about the viability of the summons in the late game. Come to think about it, it's hard to think that zombie dogs, for example can just kill stuff on Inferno easily. I don't know about you but when I imagine how tough monsters can be on higher difficulties and the damage they put out, it feels like the summons would just melt away especially because they just charge into mobs of monsters without any micro/evasion or whatever. Now here's the thing:
Due to the lack of skill required to manage an army (you just summon those things and sit back lol), a balanced game would have to compensate and make them "weaker" if you know what I mean. Don't tell me you expect just getting an army and just walking through Inferno like no problem.
I don't think it's possible otherwise. Your summons must SURVIVE and it's just absurd if they are expected to die frequently and that's what would make things "harder", right? Besides, the cooldowns are long on those skills as far as I know. OR MAYBE Sacrifice would be your bread-and-butter spell late game?
Now I'm not talking about the late game WD per se, just the summoning aspect of the class. What do you guys think?
Well from what I had seen in the streams, it seems like even if the WD's summons don't do much damage, they lasted a long time. Health orbs heal them, so assuming they aren't getting picked off by every single pack of monsters you run into, that shouldn't be too much of an issue. Coupled with the two passives that both make them stronger, Fierce Loyalty by giving them a % of your gear stats, and Zombie Handler, increasing the health of both Zombie Dogs and Gargantuan by a %. I'd say at the very least, even if the damage they could put out wasn't outstanding, they would end up being a pretty good meat shield. Though hopefully that's not the case, as a WD will be my main as well.
Edit: Also, I forgot to include the rune effect that gives them life-stealing attacks.
I see your point. If they are meat shields, then don't you think that's a bit overpowered? Let me provide some examples. These are surely not the case, but I just want to explain my point further. Let's say that on Inferno:
Average HP for a character = 20k
Average damage an enemy inflicts = 2k
So maybe you die in 10 hits. Reasonable as a WD
But here comes your summons... and they march forward into a group of 15-20 monsters. How much HP would the WD's zombie dogs have then to become good meat shields? That group of monsters will be churning out around 30k damage/sec so what, 100k HP for each dog? 200k? They would die after 1-2 mobs that way. So to become good meat shields they should have like 300k-400k which I think is too much. See, you just have 20k HP and then each of your dogs has 300k? Looks weird. That's like 1 million HP per cast of Summon Zombie Dogs.
But then again, if the dogs do not have "meat shield" amounts of HP and you would have to Sacrifice them all the time, that's okay. I'm just thinking KEEPING your summons constantly alive will not be possible. Unless maybe your skill and item build is very, very specialized on summoning.
Btw this is not wow ffs where did u got those numbers lol.
I know, relax. Change those numbers to whatever suits you. I'm just trying to explain my point in the damage scaling on the late game and relate it to how much the zombie dogs can tank.
Expending skills and runes into massively tanked minions will clearly mean snail-pace personal dps. I don't see a problem there. It's the same tradeoff a zookeeper had in D2, where only a high level might aura merc and very high end gear put your damage on-par with a weak sorc, hammerdin, javazon, trapassin, etc.
While you can argue the other "caster," is squishy and has no such tanks to utilize her damage output and ability to avoid other damage (ranged/spells) looks superior. I would of-course hesitate to speculate about endgame given what we have seen so far, but nothing yet looks overpowered or problematic.
Well, i guess its ez. Dogs will suck ur dps, but u will need em till ur merc wearing crap and cant tank anythin' on inferno. Once u up ur merc to an immortal-equip-lvl ur dogs will gone for some dps abilities. Or dogs can be useful as side-dps ability if WD will only have 1-2 imba-main abilities (like blizzard or forb for sorc in d2).
I don't think the wd's pets are overpowered for late game. They may have high hp but I think they still can die from tough mobs in Inferno. You can resummon them at any time, unlike the necromancer needed a corpse, so I think they will die quiet often. So the wd will have to decide if he/she wants to cast dot's or save mana for more summons. I think they are balancing them by making the wd resummon them often in Inferno.
I don't think the wd's pets are overpowered for late game. They may have high hp but I think they still can die from tough mobs in Inferno. You can resummon them at any time, unlike the necromancer needed a corpse, so I think they will die quiet often. So the wd will have to decide if he/she wants to cast dot's or save mana for more summons. I think they are balancing them by making the wd resummon them often in Inferno.
That's what I'm saying. You would have to resummon them often in Inferno to keep it balanced because if they can "naturally" tank stuff at that stage then they would need to have so much HP, hence the OP point of view I was referring to.
I severely dislike how the zombie dogs skill has a (rather long) cooldown. Additionally, because it only summons max dogs, if you lose one and are running around with 2 and want your full capacity back, you need to blow the cooldown.
At this point, I'm not sure how viable the WD is going to be in Inferno. Before beta, I always thought the WD would be able to solo anything because he is the only summoner class, and also has AoE crowd control utility on top of that (confusion+fear). But if our summons are going to be dying fairly easily in Inferno and we can't just summon new ones constantly, then I see that as a problem. Without our summons, we're just crappy Wizards.
P.S. - Wizard looks cooler and cooler to me every day. I even love their books and floating energy ball offhands!
I'm thinking of rolling out a WD as my main character (which of course I want to be the most powerful) but I'm starting to think about the viability of the summons in the late game. Come to think about it, it's hard to think that zombie dogs, for example can just kill stuff on Inferno easily. I don't know about you but when I imagine how tough monsters can be on higher difficulties and the damage they put out, it feels like the summons would just melt away especially because they just charge into mobs of monsters without any micro/evasion or whatever. Now here's the thing:
Now I'm not talking about the late game WD per se, just the summoning aspect of the class. What do you guys think?
Edit: Also, I forgot to include the rune effect that gives them life-stealing attacks.
But here comes your summons... and they march forward into a group of 15-20 monsters. How much HP would the WD's zombie dogs have then to become good meat shields? That group of monsters will be churning out around 30k damage/sec so what, 100k HP for each dog? 200k? They would die after 1-2 mobs that way. So to become good meat shields they should have like 300k-400k which I think is too much. See, you just have 20k HP and then each of your dogs has 300k? Looks weird. That's like 1 million HP per cast of Summon Zombie Dogs.
But then again, if the dogs do not have "meat shield" amounts of HP and you would have to Sacrifice them all the time, that's okay. I'm just thinking KEEPING your summons constantly alive will not be possible. Unless maybe your skill and item build is very, very specialized on summoning.
While you can argue the other "caster," is squishy and has no such tanks to utilize her damage output and ability to avoid other damage (ranged/spells) looks superior. I would of-course hesitate to speculate about endgame given what we have seen so far, but nothing yet looks overpowered or problematic.
Softcore Inferno 4/4 [05/06/12]
At this point, I'm not sure how viable the WD is going to be in Inferno. Before beta, I always thought the WD would be able to solo anything because he is the only summoner class, and also has AoE crowd control utility on top of that (confusion+fear). But if our summons are going to be dying fairly easily in Inferno and we can't just summon new ones constantly, then I see that as a problem. Without our summons, we're just crappy Wizards.
P.S. - Wizard looks cooler and cooler to me every day. I even love their books and floating energy ball offhands!