Sorceress / Monk Elemental Skills and Builds Feedback: Issues And Possible Solutions

Some additional feedback:
- Passive tree is very lacking of fire damage / Ignite boosting branches in upper parts of tree compared to cold and lightning damage ones, even in the Strength / Intelligence part where Templar and Druid (who both have fire abilities) would be located. More fire damage / Ignite boosting branches should be added, especially if Druid would be the next released class.
- Fire damage builds also could use access to additional ailment that would mitigate their lack of protection, synergize with their features and bring them on par with cold / lightning that have access to 2 ailments each. Such ailment could be Conflagration (set on fire panic effect that would make enemy uncontrollably move and synergize with Ignite spreading effects) or Immobilize (to force enemies stay within fire damage over time areas like Flame Wall and Solar Orb). If needed for balance this ailment could have similar to Electrocute treatment and be enabled only by specific skills / passives / items too.

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Johny_Snow#4778 wrote:

A big patch which will buff the class is coming

What? Where did you see this?

Idk, but it's pretty obvious that LS is going to get nerfed and that a lot of mid-tier skills will be buffed in the upcoming patches.

Update for this thread in anticipation of 0.3. Most issues posted here are still present.

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Volsal#8024 wrote:

Update for this thread in anticipation of 0.3. Most issues posted here are still present.

I have some feedback as well.

0.1 I was completely new to PoE and went in blind. Rolled an invoker and instinctively went stats. The stat cluster at the bottom of the tree just seemed logical. It wasn't until late in the league that I learned that stat stacking was "OP" so I just kind of fell into. I know I had fun with the heralds and Elemental expression/conflux. A friend gave me pillar and although I didn't really know what I was doing, had a great time.

0.2
Rolled acolyte and thought a chaos melee/poison build sounded fun.
Only to find out chaos doesn't scale poison. That comes from the tree and first phys hit. Doesn't make sense to have poison (chaos dmg) not scale with chaos nodes. When I discovered this I switched to flicker which is underwhelming. Now there are good flicker builds out there but I don't want to use zombies to do it.
The other option is to go back to elemental dmg but without the ascendency, its just "invoker lite".
The mana leech "could" be nice but once your mana is full, you cannot regen shield.
The class has a terrible identity problem and it got to the point that I felt as if I rolled a pointless ascend.

Discouraged, I rolled a sorceress/Chronomancer.
(stormweaver light...just my luck)
Decided a fire build would be fun.
And it kind of was....when I had mana.
Tried just about everything I could think of.
Archmage is useless. I can get 2 (maybe 3) casts off before being completely out of mana.
So I tried EB which was absolutely useless. What good is the extra mana pool if the mana I gained is consumed just as fast if not faster? The offset isn't there. Fun is in 5 second incremental intervals.

Being out of mana is the baseline. Having mana is the outlier.
Investing in either:
Mana
Dmg
Defenses
Comes at a significant cost to the others. That cost isn't negligible, it's build breaking.
I like the fire build A LOT but the damage output is just too low. It's when I found out that I can't use herald of ash that kind of broke the desire to use fire.

So I got the new Whispering Ice staff and switched everything to cold.
Same problems as before only I could live a little longer but....still the same issues.
Maybe it's because I'm still fairly new to the franchise and I'm not building correctly but the line between mana/dmg/defense is way, WAY too thin.
It seems like every time I dip into the tree to make some changes so I can just play effectively, I make another thing worse.

The problem is base dmg. In order to do any real dmg you have to +skills. That should be a bonus if you can afford it, not a requirement.
If I didn't have +skills, none of the skills would do any dmg.
Like, none. They do very little dmg now at +5.
I can say that I DO NOT like having to use more than 2 skills on a pack of white mobs if I want any sort of time effectiveness.

It seems like in order for any significant increase in the class effectiveness, base stuff needs to change.
*Every fire skill needs a dmg boost buy a huge amount. Ignite just doesn't cut it.
Sure you can set the screen on fire but then you're running from a bunch of flaming mobs.
--OR--
*Let spell builds use herald of ash and herald of plague in their builds. There is NO REASON for those to require a martial weapon.
*The passive tree needs some reworking. Move the dumb minion clusters that are all over the top. Add at least 5 more spell dmg clusters. Add more mana increase clusters. Using intel travel nodes isn't enough for the mana demand.

I also think a the staff could use a major buff. Main hand/off hand is superior to staff and I believe it should be the opposite.
As I'm sitting here typing this I'm trying to be specific but it honestly boils down to everything.
Everything needs a buff.
Mana pool
mana regen
defensive options (how about at least 1 evasion cluster at the top?)
Base damage.
Elemental differences. Each elemental option should have pros and cons.
Fire needs more damage AND come CC.
Yeah so basically everything needs buffed.

Some additional focused feedback in anticipation of 0.3. It is mostly related to Monk and Sorceress, but these issues can also easily extend to Druid since Druid would also potentially have both spell builds and hybrid attack / spell builds, so should be addressed in general:

Invoker:
- Elemental Expression is both undertuned and too mana cost hungry and as a result is not played much. It could use both damage boost and trigger cost reduction.
- While having effects that benefit from using all 3 elements like Unbound Avatar, Elemental Invocation and Sunder My Enemies lacks access to Ignite and fire based attacks making value of these effects diminished.
- While having effects that promote hybrid attack + spell builds like Elemental Expression and Soul Springs Eternal lacks ways to meaningfully scale them together since most item modifiers are either mutually exclusive (like + X to attacks and + X to spells), overspecialized (like X damage added to attacks only, cast speed that affects spells only etc) or lacking (Crown of Eyes was supposed to cover this niche but since there are not much spell scaling modifiers on items to begin with it does not do much for hybrid builds either). This issue would likely also be present for Druid hybrid builds (some of which in previous showcases had gameplay of casting lasting spells like Volcano and Lightning Storm first and then switching to attacks in shapeshifted form and used synergies like slams triggering additional projectiles from Volcano etc) and should be addressed in general via adding more general item modifiers (elemental damage increase / skill speed increase / + X to all elemental skills etc) and if needed for balance these modifiers can have slightly lower values than specialized modifiers to compensate for increased versatility.

Sorceress:
- Base damage of most spells is very low and lacks ways of scaling via Spirit gems (for example there is currently no dedicated Spirit gem to scale cold spells). Existing ways to scale it are also either very niche (like pet based Raging Spirits) or come with excessive drawbacks (like 0.2 Archmage). As such many spells need base damage buffs and there should be more ways to scale them via Spirit gems.
- Existing ways for spell scaling also for some reason almost all have major downsides (tethered to small area like Sigil of Power / Orb of Storms, mana starving like Archmage or both like Mana Tempest) and often force limited mobility when attack builds don't have such issues and can just run and dodge around freely while dealing similar or higher damage. These ways either should be more rewarding (to compensate for increased risks in endgame) or there should be less reliance on such effects / alternative ways to scale spells.
- Spell builds also lack item modifiers to scale them (unlike X damage added to attacks and smilar modifiers there is much lower pool of spell scaling modiers) and have to rely on + X to skills modifiers that are both too mandatory (items without them are often not competitive and considered not even worth further crafting) and simultaneously heavily increase their cost and lead to other issues.
- Related to previous issues mana costs of spell builds quickly get excessive and require additional heavy investments to solve that are much higher than investments required for attack builds to solve accuracy issues. As such mana costs of some spells / effects or their cost scaling past level 20 gems should be lowered.

"

Volsal#8024 wrote:

Some additional focused feedback in anticipation of 0.3. It is mostly related to Monk and Sorceress, but these issues can also easily extend to Druid since Druid would also potentially have both spell builds and hybrid attack / spell builds, so should be addressed in general:

Invoker:
- Elemental Expression is both undertuned and too mana cost hungry and as a result is not played much. It could use both damage boost and trigger cost reduction.
- While having effects that benefit from using all 3 elements like Unbound Avatar, Elemental Invocation and Sunder My Enemies lacks access to Ignite and fire based attacks making value of these effects diminished.
- While having effects that promote hybrid attack + spell builds like Elemental Expression and Soul Springs Eternal lacks ways to meaningfully scale them together since most item modifiers are either mutually exclusive (like + X to attacks and + X to spells), overspecialized (like X damage added to attacks only, cast speed that affects spells only etc) or lacking (Crown of Eyes was supposed to cover this niche but since there are not much spell scaling modifiers on items to begin with it does not do much for hybrid builds either). This issue would likely also be present for Druid hybrid builds (some of which in previous showcases had gameplay of casting lasting spells like Volcano and Lightning Storm first and then switching to attacks in shapeshifted form and used synergies like slams triggering additional projectiles from Volcano etc) and should be addressed in general via adding more general item modifiers (elemental damage increase / skill speed increase / + X to all elemental skills etc) and if needed for balance these modifiers can have slightly lower values than specialized modifiers to compensate for increased versatility.

Sorceress:
- Base damage of most spells is very low and lacks ways of scaling via Spirit gems (for example there is currently no dedicated Spirit gem to scale cold spells). Existing ways to scale it are also either very niche (like pet based Raging Spirits) or come with excessive drawbacks (like 0.2 Archmage). As such many spells need base damage buffs and there should be more ways to scale them via Spirit gems.
- Existing ways for spell scaling also for some reason almost all have major downsides (tethered to small area like Sigil of Power / Orb of Storms, mana starving like Archmage or both like Mana Tempest) and often force limited mobility when attack builds don't have such issues and can just run and dodge around freely while dealing similar or higher damage. These ways either should be more rewarding (to compensate for increased risks in endgame) or there should be less reliance on such effects / alternative ways to scale spells.
- Spell builds also lack item modifiers to scale them (unlike X damage added to attacks and smilar modifiers there is much lower pool of spell scaling modiers) and have to rely on + X to skills modifiers that are both too mandatory (items without them are often not competitive and considered not even worth further crafting) and simultaneously heavily increase their cost and lead to other issues.
- Related to previous issues mana costs of spell builds quickly get excessive and require additional heavy investments to solve that are much higher than investments required for attack builds to solve accuracy issues. As such mana costs of some spells / effects or their cost scaling past level 20 gems should be lowered.

Im glad you posted this because I've experimented a little. Respecced chronomancer back to fire to try a different passive build I thought of.
The difference is tremendous.
Fire does such little damage compared to cold.
I just re-allocated my nodes from cold/chill/freeze to fire/ignite/magnitude.
I kept the same neutral elemental nodes and went a little heavier into crit.
It's insane that there is such a gap.
I swapped out the +cold on gear for +fire. I had the same amount of +fire spells as I do cold in my back so I didn't spend much at all.
Its not even the same game.

Put my acolyte back into straight poison. Gave up on the elemental stuff with him because I already have an invoker. Works almost as well as LS but its slower and bossing isn't that great.
Map clear is amazing though.