Winter Orb nerf.... is a buff? Wut?

I don't know what you've tried to do there GGG.... but it went wrong in so many ways which should be obvious to see.

So, the general changes are base-duration (nice, so starting out is more comfortable, that's ok) which is a buff.
20% less range... ok... who cares, now you actually have to go mid-range rather then stand nearly outside of the screen... decent balance finally.
Then we have the projectile occurence halved from 0,8 to 1,6 seconds, ok... and this is where the fun starts.
The new WO also scales with cast-speed, namely: have a lot of cast-speed you'll also have a lot of projectiles flying out and about.
Also with the 100% MORE cast-speed while channeling this becomes ridiculous.

So, as an example let's take a 100% cast-speed build, that's not all too hard to make after all, it has tons of damage in it without any issues:

So, we got our 1,6 base projectile occurence... with 100% cast-speed... back to 0,8. Welcome to common WO!
Now though we add the 100% while channeling to it, down to 0,4.... oh, this becomes a problem now, we got a buff actually!

Now, let's go for pure cast-speed, let's say we stack up to 300% with all means available:

1,6 becomes not 0,8... not 0,4... but 0,2 already! Down to 0,1 while channeling. This is MASSIVE.
With the ability to scale the skill through another pure multiplier it's even more broken.


So GGG... what should probably be done then to actually nerf the skill properly? What's the cause of the large amounts of people playing it?

Well, there's several. First of all it scales in many ridiculous ways. Multiplie projectiles, overlapping AoE, very convenient in the conversion-line, a very defensive skill as we can focus on evading stuff rather then being hit, the ability to build heavy defenses with very little investment into our offensive measures.

The most riggid way to nerf the skill actually would be to ONLY allow it to deal cold damage, this takes care immediately about the conversion-line (which is a broken mechanic, period). This way WO needs heavy investment into offense to be viable. Since it would actually kill it outright though... give it an inherent multiplier and raise the damage effectiveness high, allowing builds still to happen in a decent manner.

Another one is to... well... fixing conversion itself, this is harsh in a lot of builds definitely, something which is fairly important though as it's the main cause of many builds to literally spiral out of control.

Or as a third one.. why not giving the projectiles a cooldown on hitting mobs? 0,1 second before another projectile of Winter Orb can deal damage to the same mob, this would take care of the shotgun-effect it has at the moment where simply 3-4 of the 5 (commonly 5) projectiles overlap and deal damage to the same mob.


I know I know... nobody has ever thought about those changes before, they're such hidden stuff that no sane person would ever suggest them, right? (beware of sarcasm here).
But maybe... just maybe with a bit of thought the 'nerf' wouldn't actually have become an end-game buff... which we didn't need as it's the skill with the HIGHEST available damage in the game if build well.

Not the first not the last case of Public Relation stunt

They had to 'do' something with Winter Orb and at the same time they know they are doing things against 40 percent of their playerbase.

What company can afford to reduce their income by more than 1/3rd?

So they do some smoke and mirrors. Shuffle some numbers and here we are. Worb is still rather bonkers. Same with Bane and Soulrend. Storm.brand lost shotgun so thats bad. But the remaining 3 are just as strong. Melee patch.. yep

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sidtherat wrote:

So they do some smoke and mirrors. Shuffle some numbers and here we are. Worb is still rather bonkers. Same with Bane and Soulrend. Storm.brand lost shotgun so thats bad. But the remaining 3 are just as strong. Melee patch.. yep

Actually, if you look at Stormbrand-changes:

The single-target is actually higher then before, which was the only downside for brand. The clear-speed is a little bit lower... though since it did overkill heavily anyway without a lot of investing the clear-speed is still near the same.

Another one of the 'we did nothing at all' changes to a large degree.

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LowBudget780 wrote:

Yup, it's still OP and the Warlord's Mark thing isn't a problem either, just grab a shaper ring with +3 mana on spell hit and a bunch of mana regen and your good to go. Tested this out last night, it works perfectly and feels better than WM since you don't need to apply a curse.

Elementalist went with elder on-hit WM, this was VERY comfortable. A good thing this is gone at least, for all casters as it kept your life full all the time, very very defensive.

In contrary the shaped-ring option is also more then fine as you're saying... actually... it's what Trickster did anyway. Sure, Trickster doesn't have that much defense anymore... but really? Who cares? If you're killing each boss in the game in less then a second (bare phases with invulnerability) you don't give a shit about defense in SC anyway, running through content without ever stopping for more then a quarter of a second to re-cast (which also raises our projectile-count now from the cast-speed!) it wasn't important if you had 5k life or 20k ES, it felt close to the same.

OH LMAO! You're right! If anything, it got buffed pretty hard!

People forget you have to actually channel the skill now, or do they think their clear speed is going to be the same, lol.

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RPGlitch wrote:

People forget you have to actually channel the skill now, or do they think their clear speed is going to be the same, lol.

The common way to play WO was to rush from pack to pack anyway and re-channel shortly. This now simply increases the clear-speed further.

Also since we got a base-duration now we don't need to channel it as often, 25 more duration per stage is massive, it means you'll end up with a looooong time of running WO before the need to re-channel.

Oh, and since cast-speed is already buffing the base-speed beyond what was possible before the channeling-step is only another measure to dish out even MORE damage then was possible.

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Kulze wrote:

Also since we got a base-duration now we don't need to channel it as often, 25 more duration per stage is massive, it means you'll end up with a looooong time of running WO before the need to re-channel.

Edit: Well, correction.

Winter Orb Duration

For a duration comparison.

Also, doesn't increased 100% projectile frequency while channeling.

Mean if you aren't channeling. You are losing about 50% of your damage?

It should be significantly worse, unless you put a lot of investment into the build especially with the HP buffs.

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LowBudget780 wrote:

The normal way to play Worb is to channel the skills between packs, you and your buddies on reddit just think otherwise because you watched streamers/racers stack duration and never channel while they plowed through yellow maps. If anything this is a buff for that playstyle as well which is hilarious.

Maybe, lay off the hate threads before you get yourself on probation?

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RPGlitch wrote:

Edit: Well, correction.

Winter Orb Duration

For a duration comparison.

Also, doesn't increased 100% projectile frequency while channeling.

Mean if you aren't channeling. You are losing about 50% of your damage?

It should be significantly worse, unless you put a lot of investment into the build especially with the HP buffs.

Ah, you're right about the duration, I usually don't invest a single point into duration anyways as the same investment into damage or defense is more valuable, you can efficiently clear with a single stage anyway as 1 orb is enough to kill all rares usually, cast-speed to get to 10 stages immediately was always something I enjoyed more there compared to staying at high stages.

As for you saying it's less now in damage:

Now states that increases and reductions to cast speed now also apply to projectile frequency (actual behaviour is unchanged).

And

Now has 100% more projectile frequency while channelling.

Meaning It's a multiplier... and multipliers are bad for balance, also in this case.

So the actual state is: We got 1 projectile every 1,6 seconds, we got 1 projectile every 0,8 seconds with 100% cast-speed (should be in every Wo-build) and we get 100% bonus to out TOTAL cast-speed for projectile frequency when using the skill.

This means we can double our DPS during any evaded attack or when an enemy is charging a telegraphed attack and we're not in reach for it.

Who cares what the projectile speed is while channeling. You will NEVER want to channel near anything that needs to die.

Oh and I love how easy OP makes it seems to get 100-300% MORE cast speed just like that.

I'm still waiting on that Blade Orb.