I did a quick change over to the Firebird’s set (socketed one of the chests) and re-rolled the lightning damage on my Thunderfury to fire damage as I just wanted to see how the 6 set bonus worked. Since I don’t have a RoRG, I had to equip 6 pieces and thus had to forgo a Cindercoat or Magefist. Thus my fire damage tapped out at just 52%. I also lost 9+% crit chance with the swap of a Moonlight Ward with a fire damage Countess Julia’s Cameo.
I didn’t do any rift runs; I just hit up places like the Dahlgur Oasis (to gauge eHP by being hit by snakes) and did several Core of Arreat (phase beasts)/Azmodan runs using Conflag/Mammoth Hydra/Force Weapon/Sparkflint/Prismatic Armor. I tried using Energy Twister/Gale Force but found that Mammoth Hydra had more bang for the resource buck (400% weapon damage/sec for a hydra that lasts 15 seconds and costs just 15 AP to set and forget). Torment V ended up being much easier to manage compared to my Charged Blast/Raging Storm/Mocking Demise arcane build I was using in the first PTR. Torment VI with that arcane build was manageable but not very efficient.
With this fire build, the 6 piece bonus actually makes Torment VI solo feel like the above arcane wizard on Torment V. And that is with mostly non-optimal items (less elemental damage, less crit chance, less attack speed compared to my arcane items) and not even using a significant resource spender. The change to life on hit also makes a big difference since it is no longer based on the proc rate of a skill, but based on attacks (* – more on this after).
Single target bosses like Azmodan was insanely easy; drop a hydra from a distance and let it do most of the work. Or throw in some magic missiles and get it done even quicker. The point is that the 6 piece bonus makes a huge difference with trivializing the games base difficulties. Thus I can see a well rolled Serpent’s Sparker being a strong weapon of choice.
To summarize a previous posting, my live character is Torment V at best, and just barely at that. With the first PTR iteration, I continued using an arcane build with a new resource spender (Raging Storm) and moved up a Torment level (with T6 being one or two items away from being actually farmable). With this current Firebird’s iteration (in terms of the 6 piece bonus) plus life on hit changes, T6 solo (using Unity) isn’t a problem.
With that said though, Torment VI is no longer the goal. With Greater Rifts, it’s essentially the new baseline. And that’s where the updated Firebird’s, is still going to be lackluster. The 6 piece bonus is still a significant/better improvement compared to the current on-kill mechanic. But it still lacks that needed oomph factor and probably won’t be compelling enough for most players that already have high end/well rolled items occupying their slots. The 4 piece bonus (the Phoenix theme as far as rebirth goes) is still underwhelming. Once proc’d, it has a 5 minute cool down.
The revived by a meteor upon death mechanic should be moved as an inherent property of Firebird items instead with the cool down time shortened as more pieces are equipped (this will free up the 4 piece bonus). Equipping one Firebird item will have the 300 second cool down; each additional Firebird item would reduce that time by 40 seconds. Thus having all 7 pieces equipped would bring the cool down to just 60 seconds.
The 4 piece bonus can now be utilized for something that adds actual value to all players where it will give us a reason to look at using even just 4 pieces of Firebird (right now, it’s a bonus that holds more interest to hardcore players). Since the main elemental theme of the set is fire damage, I have ideas in one of two areas; resource management/regen OR a defensive/healing mechanic (since the 6 piece bonus provides the damage component). It would follow this theme of taking incoming fire damage, and using it to your advantage.
For resource management, I would borrow the proc effect from Krede Flames ring with a slight change. Instead of restoring ones primary resource when taking fire damage (given that fire is the most common form of damage – fully restoring AP might be way too OP), it would increase AP regen to 4 AP/sec for 10 seconds; taking additional fire damage automatically refreshes this (and this regen stacks on top of other forms of increased AP regen such as Astral Presence and 3 pieces of Tal Rasha).
For a defensive/healing mechanic, since all forms of inherent sustain was removed for the class in patch 2.0 (all life regen passive/active skills were converted to shielding), incoming fire damage would increase the players current life on hit and life regen (from gear and Paragon) by 50% for 10 seconds; taking additional fire damage automatically refreshes this.
But here’s where further value can be added to this set; other forms of incoming elemental/physical damage are seen as fire damage (only for the purpose of the bonus effects – this does not have an impact on items like amulets that prevent specific forms of elemental damage) by the Firebird set and provide half of the above bonuses (thus 2 AP/sec OR increasing life on hit/life regen by 25%). Actual fire damage will always take precedent though in those cases where there are multiple forms of incoming damage occurring simultaneously.
Having something like this is the only way I would even considering equipping 4 Firebird items (if I didn’t have all the pieces). But I still need to test the current set through Greater Rifts to see just how good the damage component is (plan to do that this weekend).
* – Now as for the life on hit changes where they untied it from proc coefficients, that was a self-inflicted wound. The idea might have sounded good on paper (have a coefficient attached to skills to deal with scaling things like life on hit, resource on critical hits, synergies with other skills). Just one number in a spreadsheet that could be “easily” changed (that again was something that CM Bashiok wrote in a forum post about the ease of game balancing – and that was being a mouthpiece for the game designers – which provides insight on just how off this team is and why the game is/has been in the state that its been).
The problem with the wizard class though was that lot of these coefficients were intertwined heavily with the Critical Mass passive (since this one single passive could reduce the cooldown of any skill that had a cooldown, by 1 second on critical hits). This is the biggest difference compared to Grave Injustice where it’s a cooldown reduction based on a on-kill mechanic. Critical Mass didn’t need to actually be fully put to pasture (the other issue was Frost Nova when used in conjunction with CM); it could have been redesigned to utilize this sort of on-monster death mechanic to reduce cooldowns (thus it would do away with the kind of single target perma-freeze/stun sort of spam and would still require killing stuff en-masse).
The key problem was that once they removed Critical Mass, the proc coefficients were still balanced for that passive. Thus life on hit generally sucked in 2.0 forward. Furthermore, Arcane Power on Crit was reduced significantly (max of 4 APoC on items). And because each class has their own specific proc coefficient related issues when it comes to life on hit (and given that their Greater Rift design of infinitely scaling damage as opposed to increasing actual monster abilities/AI, forced their hand when it came to dealing with healing/sustain), the designers took the easy/lazy way out (again) by just moving life on hit to an “on attack” mechanic.
It’s the easiest because properly fixing the issue means going back in and re-balancing every single skills proc coefficient. It’s an issue they could have avoided to begin with if they had originally treated life on hit as it’s name implied (rather than having it work in the convoluted way with hidden coefficients that kept players guessing until that info was tested, datamined and then very few bits/pieces later released by the devs in the form of patch notes that actually listed some of those proc rate changes). I know I’m coming across like a broken record but it needs to be repeated; once again, lot of wasted time/resources that could have been spent elsewhere.
