Channeling skills were changed again in this build. The initial 30 AP cost was removed. However, the individual skills themselves now start off with lower damage (compared to live) and scale upwards so long as the channeling is uninterrupted.
The design philosophy I get; that you should do more damage the longer you cast. The implementation however as usual though is severely flawed because of the inherent game play design where you have various unavoidable damage mechanics that are built into the game as the key means of providing a challenge.
The current PTR iteration basically is still a nerf to channeling skills compared to what exists on the live server because your initial cast does far lower damage, and requires one to maintain the channel for several seconds to even reach the damage levels on live. I tested both Disintegrate and Arcane Torrent (again at Torment V) and I run out of AP doing this “standing around” sort of game play (mind you, I have more than most wizards do with around 151 or 131 if using Prismatic Armor). But as note above, at higher Torment levels and higher tiered Greater Rifts, you aren’t going to be stationary for very long.
That lazy design is now coming back to bite them in the ass because unless your gear passes the math check, the player is going to have to move their character out of the way of various effects which amounts to an interruption of ones channeling. Other effects will forcibly move the player/interrupt channeling (knockback, vortex, nightmarish). Furthermore, certain skills do not synergize well with channeling because it too, results in an interruption when those other skills are cast (Mirror Images is a perfect example with its casting animation).
Also, their design of Greater Rifts is as mentioned in a prior posting (regarding its flawed design), is that players are going to want to be continually moving. Even if you aren’t playing competitively for leaderboard purposes, it’s still a race against the clock to complete that rift before the time expires. This standing stationary sort of game play is not going to cut it.
The current damage numbers in this build shows a fundamental disconnect with the designer (it’s as mentioned before where there is no real rationale except that it’s akin to flinging feces on to the ceiling and seeing what sticks). With lower initial damage numbers, channeling is doing less damage compared to the current live game. It doesn’t take a math expert to understand what that means when playing the exact same Torment difficulty.
Why would I want to continue using Disintegrate (in my case) if it generally means I need to be standing around a lot longer to eventually reach that breakeven point, and then eventually run out of AP long before I’m doing that greater amount of damage (if I haven’t been forced to move). What’s becoming clear is that the majority of the Diablo III designers are INCOMPETENT when it comes to class design (skills + synergy) and how that translates into both normal and end game play.
Not addressing the fixing the core issues with the design of the class (and this goes for the monk class as well which is also the primary responsibility of Don Vu), is why these two classes have their own specific problems.
As also noted before, KISS (keep it simple stupid). Since it is clear the actual underlying design flaws with the classes aren’t going to be properly addressed, the damage for channeling skills should be reverted back to their live baselines at minimum. Then from their, that baseline needs to be tested not on Torment VI difficulty, but on Greater Rift tiers that have had their damage and monster health pools scaled to numbers higher than Torment VI. Only then can they even begin to dial in numbers (baseline as well as how damage scaling increases over channeling time) that make sense.
Subjecting channeling skills to immunity from CC effects is not the answer. It would be yet another bandaid fix that causes other balancing issues (which negates keeping the solution simple). The same goes for implementing some sort of channeling timer (where that buff does not immediately disappear when interrupted – that basically defeats the purpose of channeling). The fundamental tradeoff from channeling is that you have to stop to cast. That negative, should have a fundamental tradeoff where your decision to stop and channel, should yield some immediate results. And if it’s going to yield higher the damage the longer one continually channels, those numbers need to scale accordingly and also be balanced with the average resource pool (rather than trying to force players down the resource cost reduction path – which still doesn’t address the balance issues with those numbers). That is what keeping it simple is about. Basically, the damage needs to match the inherent decision to give up movement.
The current live design is fine. All it needs is its damage numbers re-balanced and scaled for higher tiered Greater Rifts (because as noted below, I don’t see this development team actually fixing all of the underlying root cause issues with the game, where they could actually design a more elegant/flexible system where character power scales accordingly for Greater Rift sort of scaling – basically a buff that only applies in Greater Rift type of content where the numbers keep scaling).
Again, this whole lazy difficulty design is why they are going to have trouble with scaling and balancing gear; legendary gems are meant as one part of that – but I see the same lazy design/implementation flaws that is synonymous with the Diablo III designers in those gems. To keep it really short, eventually, the only “challenge” players will have is to mindlessly do only Greater Rifts (forget about the rest of Adventure Mode except to farm the occasional Treasure Goblin portal) because challenge/difficulty as designed is purely about bigger numbers; not about introducing actual complex monster AI mechanics/abilities. Eventually as one powers up their gems, regular game difficulty will become non-existent for many players.
And this is all from the design team that wants to constantly balance classes and skills (because they want players to have choices), and to negate forms of game play that are degenerative and/or repetitive. Yet their ongoing designs results in that exact lack of choice/forcing players into a designed cycle of repetition. Watch what happens when they finally put Seasons on the PTR; all it will be is a microcosm of the non-Seasonal PTR stuff but with all the glaring balance related issues shoved to the forefront (because the designers have done a phenomenal job utilizing the wrong data/statistics when it came to balancing most everything in Reaper of Souls).
Their constant desire to force build diversity by doing these “moving target” sort of balancing acts only creates more distrust with the player base. And this is why I keep mentioning that not addressing the root cause issues with the core design (by continually doing these bandaid fixes above it), is only going to create more problems. Every attempt at trying to force some sort of longevity with Diablo III, is going to fail miserably, because the core game design, is clearly not designed to do that.
Furthermore and as I opined before about competition being a farce in this game (just need the ability to think a bit and have some eye/hand coordination when clicking stuff) given the lack of a level field that everyone is subjected to (far too much RNG involved), this crusade for balance needs to be put in check; egregious problems I can see but constantly changing numbers/re-working how certain skills work (where they don’t seem to work any better than before) gives that continued impression of a design team that has no idea of what they are really trying to accomplish.
With the way they are handling the wizard’s channeling skills (a really poor bandaid approach), this team does not have what it takes to fix all those self-created core problems (itemization, class design, skill synergies, challenging content not based on only scaling damage and health pools, making the rewards match the effort/time played, etc). Patch 2.1 is going to be as equally mediocre as everything this team has done to date.
