Recently I had been pondering on the wizards survivability, and of course this lead me to take a bit more of a closer look at some of her survival tools. One particular brand of defensive abilities caught my eye, the armor buffs. At first I thought as everyone else, you will certainly want one of these for inferno. Luckily with the new patch came the necessity to throw out all the preconceived notions one has about the game and start over.
Of course the first thing you have to do when choosing any skills is to ask yourself one important question, "is this worth a slot"? Shockingly I am actually leaning towards no in PvM, and here is why.
How much armor can you really expect to get out of energy armor? Looking at the D3items page I guesstimated that a full set of lvl 60 armor would yield about 2000-2200 armor. Thus...
Energy armor yields +20% armor, which given the 2k armor would yield an additional 400 armor.
However, energy armor also lowers your AP by 20, a fairly steep price in itself.
However, there is an alternative way to increase ones armor, a shield. if you look at level 60 shield you will notice that they come with 1000 armor! That is roughly a 50% increase in your armor compared to energy armors 20%.
Now I know what you are thinking, without that offhand thing-a-ma-bob, an orb, I would lose out on some dmg. And that is likely true, the offhand orbs come with +dmg, a rare stat that is amazing at increasing dps. However, you also have to consider you gained two things.
#1 You now have +20 Arcane Power - This doesnt sound like a lot, but having more to unload with on the front end is fairly significant.
#2 A skill slot. This should defintely not be underestimated, as you can have give yourself yet another defensive or offensive ability. Seeing as you might be concerned that you lost some dps due to the swap to the orb, then you should probably check out obsidian magic weapon. A straight up 19.5% dmg increse! There is also a 10% chance to knockback, but I have doubts as to what spells if any actually perform this function.
I won't go into detail about each rune, but I will mention one, prismatic armor which increases your resistances by 120%. The problem, if you want to call it that with this rune is the new change to the intelligence, which now grants 0.1 resistances per point of intellect.
So there you have it...What good are you energy armor or really any of the armors for that matter!
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"Just google "diablo 3 gold guide" and magical rainbow covered demons will assault your eyes."
It all depends on kind of player you're, if you are really careful and playing with friends and ''hanging in back'' and spamming spells from there, then it would be waste to use energy shield, but if you're more like ''come in and blow everything up'' then it's useful for sure, it all depends on preferences and way of playing. But i think every skill is useful in certain build and for different playstyles, that's why this spell changing all time will really be refreshing/interesting, i mean can change your whole build all time and try different strategies till find the perfect one.
Did anyone even read his post? Most of you just said, lol runes... He already said he didnt consider runes, he considered the skill from a defensive stand point. And from that stand point it sucks compared to a shield.
Atm, all the runes for energy armor kinda suck.
Prismatic armor might be half descent depending on how it works exactly.
Energy tap is mediocre, and the rest suck balls.
So yah, the only thing one needs to consider when looking at energy armor is its defensive capability. Now with that said, the OP might not have considered using both, shield + Energy Armor for a net gain of 1600 armor. However, from my experience of playing a wizard /sorc it was rarely the melee I had to worry about, but the ranged. A purely defensive wizard is a useless dead, or better off being dead wizard.
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One is never hurt by being given additional choices, only by taking them away. A QUADRILLION MAGIC FIND is worthless if you can't kill shit!
If OP not planing to playing solo all the time then i think orbs for off-hand are really enough, and you probably don't need "armor" skill if you can keep yourself at distance.
And we also don't know what bonuses will be on caster off-hand stuff (like now - most of them have + arcane power or something like that)
If OP not planing to playing solo all the time then i think orbs for off-hand are really enough, and you probably don't need "armor" skill if you can keep yourself at distance.
And we also don't know what bonuses will be on caster off-hand stuff (like now - most of them have + arcane power or something like that)
I am personally planning to solo most of the time more than likely. My friends are hooked on a mixture of WoW and SWTOR atm. Hopefully they will come around and see the light.
Regardless, I did not make this post based on any type of play-style. Energy armor, from a defensive stand point is simply far inferior to a plain old shield. The only saving grace for this ability might be prismatic armor, but given the way intelligence will function I am questioning whether we will need more resistances or not.
True we don't know what bonuses they have.
On beta they have +AP and +Dmg. However, the +AP is likely to be eaten up by energy armor, and I really can't see the stats on the OH to measure up against a 20% multiplicative buff to our dmg.
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"Just google "diablo 3 gold guide" and magical rainbow covered demons will assault your eyes."
orbs have gain power on crit, which works fine with aoe. And about resistances - prismatic say it give 120% not 120 resistance - and 120% from zero (and i don't think that number that you will get as passive res. from Int will be that high) are still zero.. and hell\inferno will probably reduce your starting resistance under zero like in d2.
ps. and i'm unsure that even 1k armor shield give you more then 3-5% of damage reduction.
orbs have gain power on crit, which works fine with aoe. And about resistances - prismatic say it give 120% not 120 resistance - and 120% from zero (and i don't think that number that you will get as passive res. from Int will be that high) are still zero.. and hell\inferno will probably reduce your starting resistance under zero like in d2.
ps. and i'm unsure that even 1k armor shield give you more then 3-5% of damage reduction.
This is really hard to read, idk what you are talking about half the time.
OK, +AP on crit. Ok, well that still fits in the offensive category, so can that overcome 20% multiplicative dmg? I would bet money it wouldn't. Another thing to consider is that the orb has to sacrifice 1 stat to get those+AP and +AP on crit affixes, they arent simply free.
As far as the Int yielding sufficient resistances goes, well that is just a hunch on my part.
except that there's no more Int from Soul Harverst and feast is only potentially boost = you probably not see more then 1-2 globes at once on elite mobs\bosses on harder difficulty (or you just don't kill them fast enough to spam globes for desired effect) http://d3db.com/tool...or/witch-doctor and this is for WD, Wizards don't have such boosts.
ps. AP from crits/+AP on orbs are more like block chance on shields, and Int on orbs (resist and you bonus damage) will be a lot rare on shields and it present on orbs (again, its bases only on beta yet)
except that there's no more Int from Soul Harverst and feast is only potentially boost = you probably not see more then 1-2 globes at once on elite mobs\bosses on harder difficulty (or you just don't kill them fast enough to spam globes for desired effect) http://d3db.com/tool...or/witch-doctor and this is for WD, Wizards don't have such boosts.
ps. AP from crits/+AP on orbs are more like block chance on shields, and Int on orbs (resist and you bonus damage) will be a lot rare on shields and it present on orbs (again, its bases only on beta yet)
I am not saying these are wizard abilities obviously. But that spell soul harvest has to be balanced at 60, especially seeing as it can easily be maintained as a permanent buff. Blizzard certainly isnt going to have one spell that doubles your intellect or something ridiculous to that degree. This spell is a clear indication of the types of numbers we can expect to see on a fully geared wizard, in other words very high.
As far as I am aware, shields cannot have +Dmg, +AP, or +AP on crit.
However, they can have stam, int, resistances and other good things.
Edit: Lets say they let soul harvest increase your intellect by about 20%. That means that the standard WD/Wizard would have about 3000 intellect, which is of course 300 resistances. But we aren't done, there will also be random resistance stats thrown onto our gear, so lets say we call it 400 resistances.
Assuming prismatic armor increases resistances by 120%, that would grant us 880 resistances to all schools. Doesn't that seem a bit extreme? I have not looked in awhile, but do the other non-intellect classes even get a massive resistance buff this this? If they don't that tells me that they don't need, which in turn tells me that we don't need anything further than what our gear + intellect provides.
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Do you want to get scammed? Perhaps a nice keylogger?
"Just google "diablo 3 gold guide" and magical rainbow covered demons will assault your eyes."
2Mysticjbyrd Resistance scales with level, and checks lvl of target. ie 1 resistance on lvl 7 give ~4% reduction vs same lvl, and 2 res on lvl 11 give only 3% against its lvl. 9res on lvl 12 give 13% res against its lvl.
this means that around lvl 60 you probably need 50-70 (if not more) resistance to get one percent reduction, against your level opponents. But don't forget that Inferno mobs have higher lvl then players, ie your resistance will be even less effective against them. So i don't think that even numbers you mentioned are making its safe...
ps. what i mean is - they probably use same system as in wow, ie "secondary" stats are degrade when you gain levels, and are degrade further vs higher lvl targets.
2Mysticjbyrd Resistance scales with level, and checks lvl of target. ie 1 resistance on lvl 7 give ~4% reduction vs same lvl, and 2 res on lvl 11 give only 3% against its lvl. 9res on lvl 12 give 13% res against its lvl.
this means that around lvl 60 you probably need 50-70 (if not more) resistance to get one percent reduction, against your level opponents. But don't forget that Inferno mobs have higher lvl then players, ie your resistance will be even less effective against them. So i don't think that even numbers you mentioned are making its safe...
ps. what i mean is - they probably use same system as in wow, ie "secondary" stats are degrade when you gain levels, and are degrade further vs higher lvl targets.
1 res on lvl 7 yields 4% dmg reduction
1 res on lvl 11 yields 1.5% dmg reduction
1 res on lvl 12 yields 1.444% dmg reduction
If you had some more numbers we could plot this out.
However, as he said, if the other classes don't have any sort of resistance buffer like mages and WD's, what makes you think we will need additional resistances? We are even ranged, we can avoid a good chunk of it, and slow time will make it easy to avoid flying attacks.
Edit: Also your estimate seems way too high.
50-70 for 1% just seems way off considering 1 resistance yields 1.44% at lvl 12...
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One is never hurt by being given additional choices, only by taking them away. A QUADRILLION MAGIC FIND is worthless if you can't kill shit!
ok, correct numbers
lvl1 with 1(1)res - have 16.67% reduction against his lvl
lvl2 with 1(1.2)res - have 11.50% reduction
lvl3 with 2(1.6)res - have 9.64%
lvl4 with 2(1.9)res - have 8.67%
lvl7 with 1(1.4)res - have 3.84%
lvl11 with 2(1.8)res - have 3.17%
lvl12 with 9(9.2)res - have 13.29%
seems its not so plain degradation of stat \= need someone else to fill res for other levels.
As for other classes i'm pretty sure there will be +XXX resistance items and at least monk can raise all his resists to same lvl as most higher one (and that passive means that there will be +particular resist suffixes for sure)
Plugged it into excel and the best line that fit it was a power trend line.
Y is the %dmg reduction per point of resistance
X is the character level
y = 17.63(x)^(-0.97)
Plug in Level 60
y = 17.63*60^(-0.97) = 0.33% dmg reduction per point of resistance.
Whether this is right, who knows. They could have very well change the equation at different levels, sort of a huge boost in difficulty at levels. Resistances could also very likely have diminishing returns.
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One is never hurt by being given additional choices, only by taking them away. A QUADRILLION MAGIC FIND is worthless if you can't kill shit!
I'd say given the + resistance from intelligence the wizard gets, + other items such as shield or anything.... that the 120% to resistance will go along way in helping out in later difficulities when resistance punishments are faced.
I'd say given the + resistance from intelligence the wizard gets, + other items such as shield or anything.... that the 120% to resistance will go along way in helping out in later difficulities when resistance punishments are faced.
That is just an assumption based on the idea that lolz inferno is hard.
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One is never hurt by being given additional choices, only by taking them away. A QUADRILLION MAGIC FIND is worthless if you can't kill shit!
I'd say given the + resistance from intelligence the wizard gets, + other items such as shield or anything.... that the 120% to resistance will go along way in helping out in later difficulities when resistance punishments are faced.
That is just an assumption based on the idea that lolz inferno is hard.
That is true... I pretty much only play HD so when blizzard had an interview video titled "you will die"... I'm kinda hoping it will be hard
The reduce any damage to only 38% max hp looks very useful situationally, when receiving such a mass amount of damage in one strike it would seem invariably the best spell to have.
Something that one shots anyone around you leaves you standing with more then half health would be very funny.
The pin-point rune also seems a fairly interesting addition as well adding 6% crit.
The reduce any damage to only 38% max hp looks very useful situationally, when receiving such a mass amount of damage in one strike it would seem invariably the best spell to have.
Something that one shots anyone around you leaves you standing with more then half health would be very funny.
The pin-point rune also seems a fairly interesting addition as well adding 6% crit.
I kinda I agree those rune effects might be somewhat useful. Except that +6% is not interesting enough.. +6% critical chance is relative to +3% damage done if you have no item that improves your Critical Damage... 3% More damage is not the kind of stuff someone expect from a skill that drains 20% of your max AP bar =/
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"In time the hissing of her sanity
Faded out her voice and soiled her name
And like marked pages in a diary
Everything seemed clean that is unstained
The incoherent talk of ordinary days
Why would we really need to live?
Decide what is clear and what's within a haze
What you should take and what to give" - Opeth
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Of course the first thing you have to do when choosing any skills is to ask yourself one important question, "is this worth a slot"? Shockingly I am actually leaning towards no in PvM, and here is why.
How much armor can you really expect to get out of energy armor? Looking at the D3items page I guesstimated that a full set of lvl 60 armor would yield about 2000-2200 armor. Thus...
Energy armor yields +20% armor, which given the 2k armor would yield an additional 400 armor.
However, energy armor also lowers your AP by 20, a fairly steep price in itself.
However, there is an alternative way to increase ones armor, a shield. if you look at level 60 shield you will notice that they come with 1000 armor! That is roughly a 50% increase in your armor compared to energy armors 20%.
Now I know what you are thinking, without that offhand thing-a-ma-bob, an orb, I would lose out on some dmg. And that is likely true, the offhand orbs come with +dmg, a rare stat that is amazing at increasing dps. However, you also have to consider you gained two things.
#1 You now have +20 Arcane Power - This doesnt sound like a lot, but having more to unload with on the front end is fairly significant.
#2 A skill slot. This should defintely not be underestimated, as you can have give yourself yet another defensive or offensive ability. Seeing as you might be concerned that you lost some dps due to the swap to the orb, then you should probably check out obsidian magic weapon. A straight up 19.5% dmg increse! There is also a 10% chance to knockback, but I have doubts as to what spells if any actually perform this function.
I won't go into detail about each rune, but I will mention one, prismatic armor which increases your resistances by 120%. The problem, if you want to call it that with this rune is the new change to the intelligence, which now grants 0.1 resistances per point of intellect.
So there you have it...What good are you energy armor or really any of the armors for that matter!
"Just google "diablo 3 gold guide" and magical rainbow covered demons will assault your eyes."
Atm, all the runes for energy armor kinda suck.
Prismatic armor might be half descent depending on how it works exactly.
Energy tap is mediocre, and the rest suck balls.
So yah, the only thing one needs to consider when looking at energy armor is its defensive capability. Now with that said, the OP might not have considered using both, shield + Energy Armor for a net gain of 1600 armor. However, from my experience of playing a wizard /sorc it was rarely the melee I had to worry about, but the ranged. A purely defensive wizard is a useless dead, or better off being dead wizard.
A QUADRILLION MAGIC FIND is worthless if you can't kill shit!
And we also don't know what bonuses will be on caster off-hand stuff (like now - most of them have + arcane power or something like that)
I am personally planning to solo most of the time more than likely. My friends are hooked on a mixture of WoW and SWTOR atm. Hopefully they will come around and see the light.
Regardless, I did not make this post based on any type of play-style. Energy armor, from a defensive stand point is simply far inferior to a plain old shield. The only saving grace for this ability might be prismatic armor, but given the way intelligence will function I am questioning whether we will need more resistances or not.
True we don't know what bonuses they have.
On beta they have +AP and +Dmg. However, the +AP is likely to be eaten up by energy armor, and I really can't see the stats on the OH to measure up against a 20% multiplicative buff to our dmg.
"Just google "diablo 3 gold guide" and magical rainbow covered demons will assault your eyes."
ps. and i'm unsure that even 1k armor shield give you more then 3-5% of damage reduction.
This is really hard to read, idk what you are talking about half the time.
OK, +AP on crit. Ok, well that still fits in the offensive category, so can that overcome 20% multiplicative dmg? I would bet money it wouldn't. Another thing to consider is that the orb has to sacrifice 1 stat to get those+AP and +AP on crit affixes, they arent simply free.
As far as the Int yielding sufficient resistances goes, well that is just a hunch on my part.
Look at this,
http://us.battle.net...ch-doctor#g!c!Y
Soul harvest = 630 intellect
Gruesome feast = potentially +50% intellect.
Just those 2 abilities grant a WD UP TO 945 intellect = 94.5 Resistances
If soul harvest is any sign of what we can expect on gear, then I have to assume that we are going to have very high amounts of intellect at 60.
PS: I am pretty sure they said that resistances would not go into the negatives in Diablo 3.
"Just google "diablo 3 gold guide" and magical rainbow covered demons will assault your eyes."
http://d3db.com/tool...or/witch-doctor and this is for WD, Wizards don't have such boosts.
ps. AP from crits/+AP on orbs are more like block chance on shields, and Int on orbs (resist and you bonus damage) will be a lot rare on shields and it present on orbs (again, its bases only on beta yet)
I am not saying these are wizard abilities obviously. But that spell soul harvest has to be balanced at 60, especially seeing as it can easily be maintained as a permanent buff. Blizzard certainly isnt going to have one spell that doubles your intellect or something ridiculous to that degree. This spell is a clear indication of the types of numbers we can expect to see on a fully geared wizard, in other words very high.
As far as I am aware, shields cannot have +Dmg, +AP, or +AP on crit.
However, they can have stam, int, resistances and other good things.
Edit: Lets say they let soul harvest increase your intellect by about 20%. That means that the standard WD/Wizard would have about 3000 intellect, which is of course 300 resistances. But we aren't done, there will also be random resistance stats thrown onto our gear, so lets say we call it 400 resistances.
Assuming prismatic armor increases resistances by 120%, that would grant us 880 resistances to all schools. Doesn't that seem a bit extreme? I have not looked in awhile, but do the other non-intellect classes even get a massive resistance buff this this? If they don't that tells me that they don't need, which in turn tells me that we don't need anything further than what our gear + intellect provides.
"Just google "diablo 3 gold guide" and magical rainbow covered demons will assault your eyes."
this means that around lvl 60 you probably need 50-70 (if not more) resistance to get one percent reduction, against your level opponents. But don't forget that Inferno mobs have higher lvl then players, ie your resistance will be even less effective against them. So i don't think that even numbers you mentioned are making its safe...
ps. what i mean is - they probably use same system as in wow, ie "secondary" stats are degrade when you gain levels, and are degrade further vs higher lvl targets.
1 res on lvl 7 yields 4% dmg reduction
1 res on lvl 11 yields 1.5% dmg reduction
1 res on lvl 12 yields 1.444% dmg reduction
If you had some more numbers we could plot this out.
However, as he said, if the other classes don't have any sort of resistance buffer like mages and WD's, what makes you think we will need additional resistances? We are even ranged, we can avoid a good chunk of it, and slow time will make it easy to avoid flying attacks.
Edit: Also your estimate seems way too high.
50-70 for 1% just seems way off considering 1 resistance yields 1.44% at lvl 12...
A QUADRILLION MAGIC FIND is worthless if you can't kill shit!
lvl1 with 1(1)res - have 16.67% reduction against his lvl
lvl2 with 1(1.2)res - have 11.50% reduction
lvl3 with 2(1.6)res - have 9.64%
lvl4 with 2(1.9)res - have 8.67%
lvl7 with 1(1.4)res - have 3.84%
lvl11 with 2(1.8)res - have 3.17%
lvl12 with 9(9.2)res - have 13.29%
seems its not so plain degradation of stat \= need someone else to fill res for other levels.
As for other classes i'm pretty sure there will be +XXX resistance items and at least monk can raise all his resists to same lvl as most higher one (and that passive means that there will be +particular resist suffixes for sure)
Y is the %dmg reduction per point of resistance
X is the character level
y = 17.63(x)^(-0.97)
Plug in Level 60
y = 17.63*60^(-0.97) = 0.33% dmg reduction per point of resistance.
Whether this is right, who knows. They could have very well change the equation at different levels, sort of a huge boost in difficulty at levels. Resistances could also very likely have diminishing returns.
A QUADRILLION MAGIC FIND is worthless if you can't kill shit!
A QUADRILLION MAGIC FIND is worthless if you can't kill shit!
That is true... I pretty much only play HD so when blizzard had an interview video titled "you will die"... I'm kinda hoping it will be hard
Something that one shots anyone around you leaves you standing with more then half health would be very funny.
The pin-point rune also seems a fairly interesting addition as well adding 6% crit.
I kinda I agree those rune effects might be somewhat useful. Except that +6% is not interesting enough.. +6% critical chance is relative to +3% damage done if you have no item that improves your Critical Damage... 3% More damage is not the kind of stuff someone expect from a skill that drains 20% of your max AP bar =/