I crack up at all the people thinking FO and Electrocute is done for a a build. You won't even notice the change if you have decent crit and a tiny bit of APOC.
Frozen Orb does less damage overall and i feel like the base damage of it was reduced as well. Pre patch mine was critting for over 12m and now i don't see any numbers over ~8m.
FO is based on % of your weapon damage. that wasn't touched.
Maybe your changed your gear and forgot about arcane orb/ cold skills dmg modifiers.
i didnt change anything while the servers were offline. nice observation though. literally from when i logged out and logged back in, nothing changed but the patch. and my FO is hitting for less... dunno what to tell you
I tried Arcane Torrent but I didnt feel ok with that, seems I am being hit more, cant kill mobs faster enough, need more aim, I have some %arcane dmg items also and the dmg was higher than my FO ... dont know why but I feel FO still better, at least for my gameplay and control ... seems I dont know how to play arcane torrent atm, maybe later
Quote from Cazze
Bug Fix: Fixed an issue where the Frozen Orb bonus damage radius was hitting a larger area than intended
Sorry what?
Frozen orb still theoretically does the same amount of damage. You just can't use one orb to mow down a big pack spread over a wide area, you need two. Damage =/= radius, though - if 25 mobs are standing close enough you'll do the same damage as pre patch, if they're spread further apart you'll hit less of them an it will do less damage yes. The raw power of the spell is unchanged, though.
That said, overall, the change haven't really hit me. It might just be because I found a 15% cold dmg/30% elite dmg SoJ before I went to bed last night and am using it today, but my frost build is killing stuff even faster right now than before. Can't wait for a mirrorball to tear the elites up (6M crit per missile, with about 2.5 atks per second).
there's plenty of good builds its just im compleetly fucking broke right now and can't reroll my dmg on bracers (its up to 1 M per reroll ..). Got a sloraks for disintegrate, got an axe / davastator for fire etc... lightning is prolly weakest on wizz tho unfortunatly ... wich kinda fucks up the TF / SoH endgame.
Not really sure how, but i feel that my frozen orbs hit for so much less since the patch came out. Pre patch i could easily survive and blast through torment 3. That is not the case after the patch. I can still do it easily, but the time it takes to do it just got doubled. That coupled with the fact that we are now forced to specialise our characters (frost dmg arcane orb dmg and such) make theese kind of changes quite disheartening, as it is effecitvely a huge setback gearwise.
Now i am not saying frozen orb is dead, neither that i got perfect gear for it. But i am saying that i do not feel that the "fix" and thus nerf to frozen orb was as warranted as people make it out to. Most frozen orb builds function by sacrificing almost all ability slots to dmg enhancers. My own etc doesnt even have teleport in it, as i rely on black hole for offensive and defensive countermeassures against elites.
All in all, not really happy that it seems to actually affect the build a lot more than just a smaller hit radius. And heres hoping they hotfix it to do more dmg or something soon as it in its current incarnation just doesnt cut it anymore in comparison with arcane torrent and disintegrate.
This is with the EXACT same gear (firewalker boots changed to equal icebreakers but should not do that difference) that i used pre patch. So it is not because of regearing or anything.
With prismatic armor and force weapon im running 1.1 mill dmg 7.9 mill toughness, got 66% cold dmg 10% arcane orb, i used to be able to do torment 3 easily, now, not so much.
TLDR: Feels like the fix didnt just fix the area it hit but also hurt the dmg of the frozen orb, and not just by a little but by a lot.
I'm not sure where the assumptions of damage loss are coming from, nothing in their changes show anything related directly to initial damage. The RADIUS of the orb spread was reduced which might show LESS damage on the screen because its not hitting as many mobs. The only issue I'm having a times is not being able to freely spam FO as much as I used to. I now just have to make sure I land my hits accordingly as AP is bit more of challenge now.
Overall the build is still perfectly fine, and even more so if you've got APoC.
Vagrancy my assumption comes from trying it out for quite a while today, and it feels like it lost a very noticable ammount of dmg. And i am not talking about the spread (or the area it is hitting), im talking about the fact that if i want it to be even remotely good i have to practically hit the mobs with the point of impact where the orb explodes. And still when i do this (which wasnt required before) it hits for far less than pre patch.
As i also said in my post, it still works. but i do not believe it will work if i try to venture above torment 3 unless i get almost near perfect gear.
Also, it should be noted that there have been several sneak changes in this patch, so this may be a change that was snuck in along the others, or it may just be an unforseen consequence of the fix OR a new bug.
I'm not sure where the assumptions of damage loss are coming from,
The fact that I'm not seeing the 11m crits (tested on single target, mind you) I was doing 2 days ago , not even 9m... and my rift clearing time is significantly increased.
I've been using this build post-FO nerf, seems to be working well for me. They fixed the arcane dynamo on channel spells, so in the build I pretty much stack 5 charges and channel arcane torrent. I use shock pulse with power affinity for regen and at 4 stack, cast black hole to clump them and 5 stack arcane torrent channel and keep channeling. Dominance helps during channeling cause you'll end up face tanking something.
Also, why not come up with your own build and test it out yourself? T.T
Instead I play a tanky wizzard with arcane torrents + the 4set tals and 4 set asheare set and 3 set aughilds bonusses and the smoldering core..
This build wrecks anything on torment 4 and with some minor changes I can also do torment 5
But really there's so much more to wizzards than just mindless orb spamming.
Maybe your changed your gear and forgot about arcane orb/ cold skills dmg modifiers.
and ye I farm only t3so I cant say much
That said, overall, the change haven't really hit me. It might just be because I found a 15% cold dmg/30% elite dmg SoJ before I went to bed last night and am using it today, but my frost build is killing stuff even faster right now than before. Can't wait for a mirrorball to tear the elites up (6M crit per missile, with about 2.5 atks per second).
Now i am not saying frozen orb is dead, neither that i got perfect gear for it. But i am saying that i do not feel that the "fix" and thus nerf to frozen orb was as warranted as people make it out to. Most frozen orb builds function by sacrificing almost all ability slots to dmg enhancers. My own etc doesnt even have teleport in it, as i rely on black hole for offensive and defensive countermeassures against elites.
All in all, not really happy that it seems to actually affect the build a lot more than just a smaller hit radius. And heres hoping they hotfix it to do more dmg or something soon as it in its current incarnation just doesnt cut it anymore in comparison with arcane torrent and disintegrate.
This is with the EXACT same gear (firewalker boots changed to equal icebreakers but should not do that difference) that i used pre patch. So it is not because of regearing or anything.
With prismatic armor and force weapon im running 1.1 mill dmg 7.9 mill toughness, got 66% cold dmg 10% arcane orb, i used to be able to do torment 3 easily, now, not so much.
TLDR: Feels like the fix didnt just fix the area it hit but also hurt the dmg of the frozen orb, and not just by a little but by a lot.
Overall the build is still perfectly fine, and even more so if you've got APoC.
As i also said in my post, it still works. but i do not believe it will work if i try to venture above torment 3 unless i get almost near perfect gear.
Also, it should be noted that there have been several sneak changes in this patch, so this may be a change that was snuck in along the others, or it may just be an unforseen consequence of the fix OR a new bug.
I've been using this build post-FO nerf, seems to be working well for me. They fixed the arcane dynamo on channel spells, so in the build I pretty much stack 5 charges and channel arcane torrent. I use shock pulse with power affinity for regen and at 4 stack, cast black hole to clump them and 5 stack arcane torrent channel and keep channeling. Dominance helps during channeling cause you'll end up face tanking something.