I'm prettty sure the original intention for Critical Mass was "Hey, if you have lots of crit gear, you'll have shorter cooldowns! (Better benefit than Evocation), not "Hey, if you have crit gear, you never have cooldowns. Ever."
They had best buff the effect of pretty much every skill in the defensive tree substantially then because they are all garbage other than teleport at actually defending you in high end content without using critical mass to spam them.
take diamond skin for instance how many use crystal shell because the amount absorbed completely outweighs the bonus' of the others... raise of hands....
take diamond skin for instance how many use crystal shell because the amount absorbed completely outweighs the bonus' of the others... raise of hands....
Diamond skin has some interesting runes other than crystal shell when you consider live and swapping when you hit the right EHP thresholds. Diamond Shards for damage, or Prism for meteor builds like the ones discussed here. If you can make the 10K absorb work, then the other runes are pretty solid benefits.
On the PTR, the lack of cooldown reductions mean you don't really hit these thresholds very quickly and more weight is put on the skill itself. With scaling monster damage for loot, every rune except crystal shell is essentially out the window. Similarly Energy Armor despite the nerf, is more important on 1.0.5 than on live, because you can always go up in monster power rather than swapping in a more interesting skill when you gear is good enough.
My point is more that Frost Nova is garbage unless you can CC lock people, its a short stun at a short range for a class that wants to use it to keep mobs at a distance. Slow time is never used as a defensive skill, the only runes that get used are Time Warp and Stretch Time, the niche offensive versions. Diamond Skin is 1500 life per second with both crystal shell and evocation when used on cooldown and it is in fact bugged and sometimes doesn't activate when you need it to. Blur is hands down the worst flat out damage reduction passive in the game (compare jungle fortitude, superstition, the 30% hidden passive DR of monks and barbs, which is before we get into One With Everything, Tough As Nails, Nerves of Steel or Blood Thirst) and the only one available, compared to say barbarians who get 4 effective defensive passives and 30% less damage taken to begin with.
The only thing making a tanking wizard viable was critical mass, if they just do away with it (or nerf everything that interacts with it into the ground) the character type of a melee wizard is basically gone.
My point is more that Frost Nova is garbage unless you can CC lock people, its a short stun at a short range for a class that wants to use it to keep mobs at a distance.
That's actually exactly the point of using Frost Nova in a CM build, to freeze lock mobs. You're confusing CM melee wizards with kiting wizards when you say the class wants to keep mobs at a distance. CM melee is all about having mobs around you so you can chain freeze them and aoe nuke them with various skills.
This isn't just about the CM nerf in general - this is completely opposite of the 'build diversity' advertised by blizzard. Right now every single wizard is FORCED to go archon, simple as that. If you wish to dispute that statement please go ahead and look at the diabloprogress.com and take whatever amount of higher ranked wizards you want. Every single one of them is archon.
There simply is nothing else that is even remotely effective in the wizard arsenal left. Coefficients being nerfed to the ground is not just the matter of CM builds - it's making the APoC gear rather... i'm sorry what is the point of APoC gear again? To give us back AP on crit... right, so getting 1-3 AP back from using a skill that costs 50AP makes complete sense?
This isn't just evident on these forums - look inside the wizard forum, there is no threads about builds, there's no discussions of some never seen builds. Look inside WD or Barb forums - there are dozens of threads about various builds with many responses and people validating them.
I guess the choice all the wizards have to face right now is very simple - sell all your crap, change class to something else and enjoy, or be bored to death with archon and having to forever more manage the stupid long cooldown and wait for some future patch to address the issue. Mind you - patch 1.1 is going to be PVP patch, they said they are not going to do much balancing there, which is aimed for next year, so we're going to be stuck with the current shit until may be April 2013? If they are really really fast.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
On the PTR, the lack of cooldown reductions mean you don't really hit these thresholds very quickly and more weight is put on the skill itself. With scaling monster damage for loot, every rune except crystal shell is essentially out the window. Similarly Energy Armor despite the nerf, is more important on 1.0.5 than on live, because you can always go up in monster power rather than swapping in a more interesting skill when you gear is good enough.
My point is more that Frost Nova is garbage unless you can CC lock people, its a short stun at a short range for a class that wants to use it to keep mobs at a distance. Slow time is never used as a defensive skill, the only runes that get used are Time Warp and Stretch Time, the niche offensive versions. Diamond Skin is 1500 life per second with both crystal shell and evocation when used on cooldown and it is in fact bugged and sometimes doesn't activate when you need it to. Blur is hands down the worst flat out damage reduction passive in the game (compare jungle fortitude, superstition, the 30% hidden passive DR of monks and barbs, which is before we get into One With Everything, Tough As Nails, Nerves of Steel or Blood Thirst) and the only one available, compared to say barbarians who get 4 effective defensive passives and 30% less damage taken to begin with.
The only thing making a tanking wizard viable was critical mass, if they just do away with it (or nerf everything that interacts with it into the ground) the character type of a melee wizard is basically gone.
That's actually exactly the point of using Frost Nova in a CM build, to freeze lock mobs. You're confusing CM melee wizards with kiting wizards when you say the class wants to keep mobs at a distance. CM melee is all about having mobs around you so you can chain freeze them and aoe nuke them with various skills.
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
Had a good laugh at that one!
There simply is nothing else that is even remotely effective in the wizard arsenal left. Coefficients being nerfed to the ground is not just the matter of CM builds - it's making the APoC gear rather... i'm sorry what is the point of APoC gear again? To give us back AP on crit... right, so getting 1-3 AP back from using a skill that costs 50AP makes complete sense?
This isn't just evident on these forums - look inside the wizard forum, there is no threads about builds, there's no discussions of some never seen builds. Look inside WD or Barb forums - there are dozens of threads about various builds with many responses and people validating them.
I guess the choice all the wizards have to face right now is very simple - sell all your crap, change class to something else and enjoy, or be bored to death with archon and having to forever more manage the stupid long cooldown and wait for some future patch to address the issue. Mind you - patch 1.1 is going to be PVP patch, they said they are not going to do much balancing there, which is aimed for next year, so we're going to be stuck with the current shit until may be April 2013? If they are really really fast.