The State of Sorcerers featuring Mekuna and Roxy - Diablo 4 Season 5 - GameRifts (2024)

Roxy

The nerfs to and the “immortal” playstyle were expected. However, the change to was more than surprising! Before, we were able to keep its Barrier effect running by dealing damage constantly. On PTR, this form of “life leech” effect has been removed from Ice Armor’s base effect, which is a huge hit to Sorc survivability because both uptime and total Barrier value are much lower than before. Obviously, the Teleport cooldown increase only adds insult to injury, making it much harder to get out of sticky situations in case of no active Barrier.

The change to looks promising! Unfortunately, we can’t say for sure if it’s much better than the old version because Pits are not working properly on the Season 5 PTR.

In terms of item changes, the decision to remove Cooldown Reduction from Focus off-hands as their inherent affix seemed like a creative way to make Sorcs use staves more often, but those will have Damage Over Time as their inherent affix, which doesn’t quite hit the mark looking at the current Sorc meta.

Mekuna

As Roxy said, nerfing has been a big hit to the class. It might have been healthier for the game as a whole – but Blizzard should offer something in return!

The nerf seems unnecessary. Our defenses were never great, and now they’re even worse.

Roxy

Over the last year, the defensive capabilities of Sorcerers have been quite hit or miss. At launch and during Season 1, Sorcs were incredibly squishy. In Season 2, the class had to rely on heavy “Damage Reduction while Injured” to just survive, while Seasons 3 and 4 saw heavy use and eventually abuse of ‘s invulnerable effect.

Season 5 appears to be the return to even fewer Sorc defenses. Even with a heavy focus on defensive abilities and affixes, we tend to just fall over.

In terms of offenses, Sorcs needed to rely on unintentional skill interactions, like in Season 2, to get on top of the tier lists. The class has a ton of really fun and creative builds, which look cool and showcase unique players – but they just don’t deal enough damage to tackle harder endgame content.

For me personally, the Sorcerer Enchantment system also needs a complete overhaul. Initially, it was planned for Sorcs to have three Enchantment slots – and while I’d love to see the third slot return, the system itself needs to be reworked to make lesser-used effects more viable or viable at all.

Mekuna

Compared to other classes, Sorcerers seem poorly balanced. Players might think we’re strong because in Season 2 was so much better compared to most other meta builds, but the build’s performance mostly relied on a bugged skill interaction. That didn’t feel great and also didn’t help with build diversity because all Sorcs needed to play to stay competitive.

In reality, Sorcerers always lacked both proper base damage and defenses. With being nerfed in Season 5, we have no damage and also no real defense left. In my opinion, even getting a third Enchantment slot wouldn’t even matter because, as Roxy said, a majority of Enchantment effects really need a rework first. If that happens, the Enchantment system could potentially solve some of the issues Sorcs have been facing since launch.

Talking about missing synergies, the new Axial Conduit Unique Pants are a good example of that. While the item says that it would bounce 3 times, it just bounces 2 times between the player and the boss instead of doing the full 3 bounces. This inability to “self-bounce” not only decreases the single-target potential of Chain Lightning while wearing the new item but also makes Aspect of the Unbroken Tether and the new Lightning Rod Aspect much weaker.

The whole “Mana Drain” interaction also seems to work counter-intuitively because Chain Lightning deals less damage the more you cast it, which is very weird. As of right now, the Mana Drain counter applies to all active instances of Chain Lightning instead of counting for each Chain Lightning, meaning that a single Chain Lightning doesn’t explode when it has drained 66 Mana – the value is applied to all active Chain Lightnings at the time, which causes them to explode at the same time, making more recently cast Chain Lightnings deal much less damage.

Roxy

Here’s what needs to change, in my opinion, to improve Sorc’s performance in Season 5:

• Revert the changes currently active on Season 5 PTR
• Buff individual spells, not just skill passives
• Rework spell-specific Unique items to increase build variety
• Add a third Enchantment slot to increase class utility
• Allow Sorcs to equip an extra item as a “stat stick” similar to how Barbarians are allowed to carry multiple weapons to even out class balance