Why pure caster is unplayable on late game comparing to physical damage

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h3rp3s wrote:

Spells are seriously gimped and the reason is:

1. Totems
2. Cast on Crit
3. Traps/Mines

Yep. There need to be more advantages to direct casting 'typical' spells (not counting special cases like Discharge or Molten Shell) to make it balanced with the other approaches.

CoC especially makes a mockery of a lot of hard-cast builds. Why struggle to build up a decent casting speed, when you can just use a spam attack that lands dozens of 'hits' per second to do the casting for you?

Mines for casters aren't that much of a DPS boost by themselves when you take into account the awkwardness. They're mainly a trick to avoid reflected damage (the CoC build's Achilles heel) or to supplement an Ancestral Bond build. Traps simply cannot be spammed due to the stock issue, so actually you wouldn't want to put most spells in a trap.

Ancestral Bond looks balanced on paper - the problem is all the loopholes and exploits. For instance you can use mines to summon a totem, which is basically free damage for negligible additional effort, then you can use more mines to cast another copy of the spell for super damage on top of whatever the totems are doing.

Sorc Frozen Orb you say?
Ball Lightning. Soon tm.

I CANNOT wait! :3 Muhuhahaha~


But yeah, I've always said that Spell Damage is really below Melee, and one of the main reasons that GGG is afraid to scale it, is because of Crit. They did nerf Crit and buff Spell/Ele Damage in 1.1 because of this, but it still wasn't enough.

With the Life Leech nerf, all Spellcasters are now FORCED to use Vaal Pact. Yeah I realize GGG wants Leech to not trivialize hard content, but this really cripples the builds that had the hardest time.

But the biggest thing that is wrong with Spell Damage, in my opinion, is Weapon Mods.
The Spell Damage Affixes on a Weapon should be MORE Spell Damage. That way crafting a GG/Mirror-Tier Casting Weapon is not COMPLETELY useless, and it'd lessen the gap between how much Tyrannical can scale a Melee/Physical builds DPS over the Spell Damage equivalent.. <_<

If GGG did that, and then scaled the flat Damage on Spells down to compensate, I think that'd solve most of the problems. Possibly even dropping the base Critical Multiplier of Players down to 100%. (Wait a second... That'd.. Well, I don't see anything wrong with that, force players to need to spec into Crit Multi. :P)

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Wouldn't be such a problem if most popular 'melee' attacks weren't actually functioning ranged attacks. Then people would have a much simpler choice between melee, casting and archery.

Some trinities are holy for a reason.

Yeah the joke is, the melee attacks need to have so much wide and broad AoE to counter desync.

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Sheriff_K wrote:

Sorc Frozen Orb you say?
Ball Lightning. Soon tm.

I CANNOT wait! :3 Muhuhahaha~


But yeah, I've always said that Spell Damage is really below Melee, and one of the main reasons that GGG is afraid to scale it, is because of Crit. They did nerf Crit and buff Spell/Ele Damage in 1.1 because of this, but it still wasn't enough.

With the Life Leech nerf, all Spellcasters are now FORCED to use Vaal Pact. Yeah I realize GGG wants Leech to not trivialize hard content, but this really cripples the builds that had the hardest time.

But the biggest thing that is wrong with Spell Damage, in my opinion, is Weapon Mods.
The Spell Damage Affixes on a Weapon should be MORE Spell Damage. That way crafting a GG/Mirror-Tier Casting Weapon is not COMPLETELY useless, and it'd lessen the gap between how much Tyrannical can scale a Melee/Physical builds DPS over the Spell Damage equivalent.. <_<

If GGG did that, and then scaled the flat Damage on Spells down to compensate, I think that'd solve most of the problems. Possibly even dropping the base Critical Multiplier of Players down to 100%. (Wait a second... That'd.. Well, I don't see anything wrong with that, force players to need to spec into Crit Multi. :P)

won't give the satisfaction of landing a perfectly spaced FO explosion shotgun

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testinglk wrote:

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Sheriff_K wrote:

Sorc Frozen Orb you say?
Ball Lightning. Soon tm.

I CANNOT wait! :3 Muhuhahaha~

won't give the satisfaction of landing a perfectly spaced FO explosion shotgun

GGG doesn't like op shotgun mechanics like that, hence why they nerfed Vaal Fireball to no longer work when done INSIDE a mob, thus hitting all of the Projectiles..

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Sheriff_K wrote:

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testinglk wrote:

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Sheriff_K wrote:

Sorc Frozen Orb you say?
Ball Lightning. Soon tm.

I CANNOT wait! :3 Muhuhahaha~

won't give the satisfaction of landing a perfectly spaced FO explosion shotgun

GGG doesn't like op shotgun mechanics like that, hence why they nerfed Vaal Fireball to no longer work when done INSIDE a mob, thus hitting all of the Projectiles..

well fireball actually does a lot of damage per hit. FO hit for barely 200 per shard, and was pretty much balanced to only do great damage on a perfect shotgun, and only ok damage on a slightly off shot...and is considerably harder to get that shotgun than just slapping a trap gem on it and chucking it in a mob's face

blizz, on the otherhand, hit for upwards of 10k+ per rock (and was obscenely op). I'm sure vaal ice spear could be balanced in the same way

I play some with this guy http://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Grahnja and his crit fireball/flameblast witch clears 77/78s far faster than my ST cyclone could ever dream of.

Casters are dead in 1.1.0, maybe the fireball caster still lives, but in very restrictive mode, we speak about high levels.

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Plastic_Cup wrote:

You can manipulate most of the spells to do a lot more damage than you actually need.

What 90% of people don't realize is that your tooltip dps is only accurate in terms of hitting a mob with 0 resist of any kind.

Multi strike on a physical damage skill for example will LIST more damage but likely makes you do less damage in the process to an actual mob; Sure you attack faster but what do you gain from it?

Spells need links like Penetration which for some reason people overlook because it doesnt list dps in your tooltip.

I do more damage than anyone I have ever grouped with in maps by a far margin as a self caster.

Multipliers like Melee Damage are available for almost every spell in the game.

I guess i'm missing something.

Agreed. To op's second point. I run a face tank life based spell caster in invasion. I don't use life leech. I think the only point OP effectively makes is that most people don't know how to build.

i remember when self-cast was king, I even have a L89 Freezing Pulse templar.

But in end game, I was either mocked or scorned, depending on how much other DPS was in the group, lol.

I thought 1.10 would give self-cast some love, it did, but not enough. What's it matter though? I switched to melee. Big deal. Instead of freezing things coming out i shoot little twirly knives.