Thoughts on casters?

[Frostfeather]

My group has Fire, Lightning, Cold, Light, Shadow, and Druid casters and now that I've unlocked some highest level abilities and got to test them for a while, I'm noticing that a couple skill trees are considerably less useful. In particular, Lightning and Druid.

Lightning feels too situational. It can pump out area damage if enemies happen to be rather close, but since that only happens occasionally, Lightning usually falls behind Fire/Cold for AoE and behind Fire, Shadow, and Druid for single target. If you go Fire instead, you get great buffs and more consistent damage. If you go Cold instead, you get more control and more consistent damage.

I repecced my Lightning to Cold and am *much* happier with the group since Cold gets stronger as battles go on even without external buffs. And Cold is great for efficiency in trash fights and damage/limited control in boss fights.

Then there's Druid. Such an odd skill tree. There's not much synergy and there's too much incentive to hyper-specialize vs trying to be versatile. The summons are really hit-and-miss, with some being too squishy while others teleport away (even if I cast them *right* next to an enemy).

Rainstorm is fantastic for my caster group, but I simply respecced my Light caster to pick it up to free up the Druid to respec to Shadow. Much happier with that change, too.

I feel like Fire/Cold/Light/Shadow are all pretty solid, though I'd like to see more offensive options for Light. What are your thoughts on any of the casters?

[Syger]

It would be nice to see the shocked status increase both crit rate and damage on the target instead of just crit damage. Might lead to a bit more consistency on the lightning tree. Looking forward to a balance pass on a few skills but I am mostly happy with the state of the game overall.

[Frostfeather]

Originally posted by Syger:

It would be nice to see the shocked status increase both crit rate and damage on the target instead of just crit damage. Might lead to a bit more consistency on the lightning tree. Looking forward to a balance pass on a few skills but I am mostly happy with the state of the game overall.

Definitely agree, and I'd thought the exact same thing. As it is, Shocked is too niche compared to other debuffs other casters can apply.

Would love a way to make Lightning more useful against bosses, especially.

[Ilsalay]

Lightning is one of the better trees. Mixed with Fire it has the highest damage output. Energy Cannon, thunder wrath, thunderstruck- all great skills.

There's multiple skills that allow you to move enemies. Clump them together, burn them down.

Shadow and light are more support oriented, but both can be good damage dealers if built accordingly.

[Frostfeather]

I dunno. For one, you can't always just easily move enemies together. In other situations, there's only one left.

And if you take into account attributed damage from Fire buffs... or prevented damage or efficiency from reliable Cold control, suddenly occasional Lightning burst damage simply isn't as useful in comparison. Even Shadow/Druid summons are probably more desirable due to soaked incoming damage and overall outgoing damage efficiency. I suppose it'll depend on group setup & strategy somewhat though.

[Ilsalay]

Lightning burst can delete most enemies, if not almost kill most beefy bosses. Cold can't. Fire can't.

Energy Cannon and Thunder Wrath are high damage single target and group skills.

Sure, Cold has high CC. It used to be not as good for damage, but changes were made to Chill/Freeze not that long ago, which really brought Cold in to the damage conversation.

Fire is my least favorite tree. None of the T5 skills are good, IMO. With maybe mass haste being an exception, and Avatar of Flame if you are specifically building around it. Mass Haste I've never had a need for in any party composition. But otherwise it's just to supply heat stacks. The Fire skills aren't the focus. It's always supporting the other trees.

[Frostfeather]

Not sure what you're doing with Fire where it's not deleting enemies, but I guess we'll have to disagree.

[Ilsalay]

Originally posted by night4:

Not sure what you're doing with Fire where it's not deleting enemies, but I guess we'll have to disagree.

Not sure what you're doing where Lightning isn't.

Never said Fire didn't - lightning is much better at it/has better skills for it.

[Frostfeather]

I didn't say Lightning couldn't. I said it's too situational vs the consistent value of other trees.

And you literally just said "fire can't". Verbatim. I think we're done here.

[Ilsalay]

They're all good 1-30. In "endgame" Cold stays relevant with its CC, but damage (as a pure caster) gets trickier. Fire and Lightning hold up much better damage wise. Actual Fire spells don't impress me, though. The passives are good. Burning Ground and Rune of Exploding are the only spells I ever pick up. Avatar of Flame is a good high end build - but too passive of a play style for my liking.

Lightning is still your best damage option of the element trees - Fire, Cold, Lightning.

Your highest damage builds will always be weapon builds, though.

[Frostfeather]

Approaching 30 with Cold, Cold, Fire, Fire, Shadow/Nature hybrid, and Light casters and it's *extremely* effective. Of all the caster trees, to me, Cold feels the most consistently useful and consistently overpowered. Having 2 trivializes almost every fight, especially bosses.

We'll see what happens as I get into the "late game" though.

[Frostfeather]

Some final thoughts now that I'm about "done" with the game in the higher Endless levels...

Summons are especially poor as the game progresses because they cannot be controlled. If the player could summon them, then buff them that first round, that would make them *much* more viable. Maybe there's a Fortune or something I never found that would help, but summons were very useful early on and nearly useless in the late late game.

Healing follows a similar usefulness curve. I now have zero points in Vitality across my entire group, and no healing spells (besides the mana regen shrooms which also happen to regen hp). If a fight cannot be ended in 1 round, everything is controlled or all party members go invincible. No healing is ever needed.

Light is already poor later on, but to make it even worse: even though it can be specced to do *some* damage, it pales in comparison to most other trees (even when you take buffs into account). Perhaps a new Fortune could change Light healing abilities into entirely different abilities that actually do something good, offensively speaking. Make the player sacrifice Light healing entirely in exchange for more damage.

Lightning takes a while to become useful unless you've got some guaranteed crit abilities to make use of Shock stacks. In the late game, I *finally* found Lightning to be good enough to respec to... it definitely could use something more in the early/mid game to make it more competitive/useful.

Fire could use something that consumes the all the burning DoTs to do their damage immediately. There's too much incentive to do as much damage as possible the first round, so an ability like this would help make Fire quite a bit.

And Cold is still the MVP tree when considering the entire game. It barely starts to lag a bit in damage after Endless 50+, but it's still extremely useful for reducing boss health by 25% (via Deep Freeze and Frozen Core), and for control too of course.

[Mayten]

Hi there, I'm from the Stolen Realm discord :D
Glad to meet you all, and let's get to everything that was said above.

Summons aren't bad. Like at all. A golemancer can solo endless 400, and altough necronomicon and mark of the alpha definitely can't match it, they're good contenders that can solo 160 without any problem.

Healing is pretty useless when it's not lifesteal, that's for sure, but excalibur alone gives you a reason to spec all the way until ascendancy, and the light's passives are, with perfected soul, in the top broken skills, being only t3 at that makes them so much more valuable. Additionally, the wrath of the rigtheous turns the white dragon as well as holy ground, seal of salvation and mass cure into nuking zone skills. It can't hold a candle against the absurd monk skills with a double excalibur, but it outdamages a lot of other casters easily thanks to how broken the weapon is atm.

Lightning and Cold are pretty equal, thanks to the energy cannon that can stack enchants, or thunderstruck, or the thunder and ice storm and stuff. They both have huge zones, and since the chill changes, the Cold tree is really as strong as the lightning one.

Fire is in the worst state in the elemental trees, and even if firestorm and haste are strong in themselves, the passives and the heat are what it's invested in, mostly.

I'm an endless campaign player, so I'm talking about my point of view using 160 as a basis (t3 gear) and above. And even then, "weaker" trees like fire can solo 160 with a good avatar of flame and some stealth shenanigans. I don't think any tree is lacking that much that it's not useful at that level, but difference start showing pretty rapidly after that.

[Frostfeather]

I'm sure a Summoner can handle that, but in my group, I stopped using one for a few reasons. Uncontrollable summons and summons teleporting away or moving enemies (ugh) was just terrible. To work in my group, I'd need to be able to control them to help alpha-strike enemies in a coordinated effort. Solo might actually be better as it would eliminate many issues.

I *just* got the white dragon form. Good to know there's some potential there, but I wish there were a couple more purely offensive skills in the tree.

[K1773R]

I got the removed fortune "Wrath of the righteous" fortune (its a skill now), and can use from time to time heals as offensive spells from my mostly light skilled staff healer.

Lightning is meant to act as a burst, and can help in boss fights, especially when you can stunlock the boss continuously, but it's not a reliable strategy, unless you are willing to exit-scum. I have an Invoker type character that I mainly use for applying stacks of shock. That synergizes well with my range hunter who has high crit chance and can spam auto attack with the proc skill (in the ranger skill tree that allows 50% chance to auto attack twice).

It would be nice if shadow damage abilities from the druid tree would be split into a new nature damage type. I feel like shadow is a bit underwhelming atm, and perhaps splitting it into shadow and poison/nature would diversify it rather than just being a damage dump.

In my opinion, a really cool lightning build idea would be like a enchancement shaman type of deal. You would focus on all 3 elemental enchantments, and get all abilities that give you proc chance off auto attacks and weapon strikes, including weapon skills (Mjollnir hammer give 10% chance to cast level X thunder bolt which is a tier 3 ability). Then you would get mana shield and because you wouldn't really be casting many spells, you could avoid putting many points into vitality and just sustain off of mana. Add some mana restoring gear and you have an amazing offtank or just melee dps. There are so many options for the 1 handed items as well, because a lot of legendaries have proc on them.

Something like this:
https://ianlamb.github.io/stolen-realm-planner/skill-calculator/lightning?build=bj07bD0zMDtzPTExNTExMjEyMTEyNjEyNzEzNjEzNTEzMTAyMjAxNjAxMzAyNjAyNTAzNjAzNTIyMjIxMzIyNzIxMjIzNTIzMTUxNzUxNjUyODUyOTUzNjMxNTMxNDMyODMyNjMzOTExMQ==

[Second Batch]

Energy Canon + Magedraw Bow = Bonkers

If Light's Beckon weren't so busted, then Teleport Other would be the best 1-point CC.