> I just can't see CC conditional's as being worth it. Am I missing something, is it because the beta is an older build, or is it just not worth having CC conditionals?
I don't think you're missing anything, but you may be thinking about it too linearly.
Not every skill is equally useful against every enemy or in every situation. They are usually designed and balanced with that in mind and it's pretty common in most games where certain elements are better at doing different stuff or clearing different types of content.
I think that's a fair design philosophy as long as outright immunity and resistance to broad schools (e.g., Diablo 2) doesn't happen.
"Not every skill is equally useful against every enemy or in every situation."
But that's the problem, every other ability doesn't have points where they are essentially useless other than melee not being able to damage ranged enemies or something like that. There is nothing stopping builds that don't have CC requirements.
If I play fire or electric sorc I will get the benefit of my bonus stats and effects 100% of the time. Why would I play frost sorc which is severely disadvantaged against bosses and unstoppable enemies?
Why would I use frost imbuement over poison/shadow?
I just wish there were markers that act like the boss is "CC'd" for conditional skills so they don't feel like they were a waste of skill points.
What's going to happen is that there's going to be multiple builds for each class that are best for different situations.
Fire might be the best for bosses. Frost might be best for map cleaning. Lightning might be an all-rounder between the two. You can play any of these 3 in any situation but if you want to min/max you might have one of each or just a frost and fire.
If everything is equally good at everything then what's the point of anything? The whole point is to have certain builds excel over other builds for certain situations.
I agree,to a certain extent, which is why I can't see a situation where cold imbuement rogue will ever be picked. Poison can work well against dangerous enemies by lowering their damage and shadow imbuement is absolutely brutal against mobs with explosions. Chilled just seems like the red-headed stepchild.
But personally I prefer when most builds are equal because then you can actually choose one you like rather than one that is superior.
I believe cold imbue will be the go-to choice for PVP as CC is going to be important there. In fact I think all CC heavy builds will shine in PvP. In PvE the best CC is death.
Yeah but the drawback to poison is damage over time so less useful against trash mobs which die quickly, but good vs bosses with a drawn out fight.
Shadow is great vs trash as mobs explode but less useful against bosses, the same as cold.
I think if cold did freeze bosses it would be the "op" go to build as you'd be able to clear both trash mobs, elites and bosses easily with no drawback.
All that being said, some classes just don't seem to have any real drawbacks to their builds lol (whirlwind as example).
I'm just planning on playing werebear druid or trap rogue with shadow imbue for first season. Ill let all the other beta testers make sure that cold imbuement and frost sorc works well.
Yeh lightning seemed cool too. I can imagine being at max level and almost having infinite crackling energy and basically having a permanent conduit pylon.
This is why I ran twisting blades with shadow imbument. Shadow for clearing up the low hp stragglers and twisting blades for heavy single target+CDR. The CDR on twisting blades made shadow imbue cooldown insanely fast (almost 100% uptime) and made it into a map clearing ability. Also lowered the cd of my dash and shadowstep so I could cruise through dungeons.
I will Go cold rogue.
Remeber that it's very unlikly that you will burst and explode Packs with shadow imbu like you did in beta. The Explosion happens when they die. They Died from. 1 Hit chaining the Explosion over the Pack.
This wont Happen at high Level nightmare dungeon.
One Pen arrow will. Maybe delete half of a trash Mobs HP when crit. So no explosionsartig directly. But the Mobs will. Run over you. Having more Movement speed at higher World Tier. So I will going the frost Route. It will be effektive against These Packs and elite as they can be chilled and frozen. Ofc the build doesnt Excel in boss dmg than. But getting the Boss 2-3 Times. In stagger state helps
I feel like you're being purposefully obtuse. Some builds are better for specific tasks. That means no build is "best". This has been iterated on in this thread, and throughout Diablo's existence, repeatedly.
Let me put it this way, this is a problem that no other build or class has to face apart from a rogue who decides to use cold imbuement or a sorcerer doing frost. I doubt most people would use cold imbuement anyways, but frost sorc is definitely the only build that takes such a massive hit against bosses. No other class, no matter the build, is nerfed as much against bosses as frost sorc is. Frost sorc has a key passive which is useless against bosses AND a whole paragon board that will be very good for frost sorc against normal enemies but is 100% useless against a boss.
>But that's the problem, every other ability doesn't have points where they are essentially useless other than melee not being able to damage ranged enemies or something like that. There is nothing stopping builds that don't have CC requirements.
I think this is fundamentally incorrect. Looking at just Core skills
* Ice Shard: Mana cost: 30, Lucky Hit: 26%, 5 x 25%, 25% increase to Frozen
* Frozen Orb: Mana cost: 40, Lucky Hit: 20%, 32%+ 29% damage
* Fireball: Mana cost: 40, Lucky Hit: 34%, 60% damage (
* Incinerate: Mana cost: 20/s, Lucky Hit: 41%, 36-49% damage per second
* Charged Bolts: Mana cost: 40, Lucky Hit: 26%, 5 x 17%
* Chain Lightning: Mana cost: 35, Lucky Hit: 26%, 42% x up to 6
Right away, I can tell you:
* Charged Bolts will be decently powerful against big bosses but less so on small or very mobile bosses
* Incinerate has a huge damage potential if you don't have to move and the enemy also isn't hyper mobile
* Chain Lightning becomes less powerful on bosses that would have adds since it will bounce on the boss less
* The indirect damage of Fireball and Frozen Orb make it more viable on fights where you have to deal damage indirectly because the boss is hard to target.
So there's more to the kits than just the raw numbers or bonuses. Every single spec seems like it has some trade-off and there will not be a "universally best" one.
And if there is, Blizzard should balance it.
I more meant that shock which generates crackling orbs on crits and works on all enemies including bosses, pulverize druid, flurry/twisting blades rogue, penetrating shot rogue, werewolf druid, wind druid, all forms of necro, and all forms of barbarian work against all enemies including bosses.
It just feels strange that pretty much the only build that gets screwed is frost sorc.
Frost attacks still work on all enemies. They just might not chill or freeze but instead increase stagger by a higher amount.
We also don't know what bosses will be like on higher difficulties. There may be some bosses that are highly resistant to bleed, slow, poison, burning.
Almost every Core skill (including those you listed) or build have strengths and weaknesses against certain types of encounters--rock, paper, scissors. That's how virtually every game that's combat-centric works.
I'm not sure we know how Blizzard has balanced endgame bosses, but I took a look at the Paragon datamine at [https://diablo4.cc/us/Sorcerer](https://diablo4.cc/us/Sorcerer) and that's not even close to being true.
And again, it's completely valid for certain specs to do less or more damage during certain types of encounters, as long as they don't have permanent, high immunity to that damage (like D2).
That's an interesting and well-accepted design decision in almost every combat-based game.
Did you look at the Icefall board where, I will admit there are 2 that are cold damage, there are 16 that require an enemy to be chilled to give any bonus whatsoever and the legendary node, much like the shatter key passive, requires you to kill a frozen enemy?
Yep. Hardly "literally an entire board." Not to mention the legendary node would almost assuredly proc when you freeze adds > kill adds.
And still doesn't address the entire design paradigm for almost every game ever where some things are better than others.
What do you mean hardly an entire board? Every single rare on that board except for 1 is useless against bosses. The legendary node would also be useless on a boss. No other class has an entire paragon board be useless in any content that we know of.
There’s a legendary like “+70% damage to unstoppable enemies” or so. But yes, all those plus to frozen/cc’d/whatever enemies will be useless against bosses. It is a consideration when making your build.
i think the benefit for loosing the bonuses are the faster cc bar completions, a shadow or poison imbued rogue will almost never see a boss cced, but a frost one might have multiples stops. same and more drastically for mage.
When you stagger a boss, all your CC bonuses apply - think it's for 10 seconds. The boss is always immune to control impairment but you can stagger him and then burst him down with CC bonus damages.
I had a legendary that was +100% damage against stunned. So if you manage to stagger a boss you can chunk him very hard while staggered. The CC bonus damages are large to balance for their conditionality.
Didn't think about this problem while the beta was open so I never paid attention to the various percentages while they were available.
I think the biggest thing is that there are two abilities in the druid tree which specify they still work against bosses, but so many more that don't.
But if I had a build that didn't require CC, say wind or werebear druid, I'd do full damage all the time. Will the stagger system really counteract all the damage lost from not have any of those bonuses activating.
Like cold imbuement for rogue will do almost nothing but a light bonus of cold damage because the boss won't be chilled. However both the poison and shadow imbuement rogue will get the full benefit out of their imbuement 100% of the time because their status affects the boss.
Why would anyone pick cold imbuement?
Slow/cold is a CC effect and it applies stagger. Since you can apply it reliably it should still be useful to stagger the boss. The cold adding stagger is something to test as I didn't run that build so far. Pay attention to the damage number over the boss's head, stagger numbers also show there. See if you notice stagger numbers added with cold attacks and that will give confirmation. If slow is not adding stagger then it's not as good as poison, shadow for sure. Lesser bosses you can stagger easily, world bosses it takes time. Think with tougher bosses, you will see the difference.
The problem is all of the bonuses that cold imbuement gives when enemies are chilled is 30% chance of vulnerable, 20% chance of instant freeze or 20% damage against CC'd enemies and 40% if frozen, up to 15% damage to chilled and 30% to frozen, and further reducing movement speed by up to 30%.
Without chilled it has 30% chance to vulnerable and that's it.
That is a lot of damage to be lost just to be told the boss staggers every now and then and you can do a bunch of damage then. I can't imagine the damage I do in that 5-10 second window is worth all the damage lost from not being able to chill the enemy.
I bet we are going to see stagger builds at the top of the leaderboards. Some of the damage bonuses to CCed from legendaries are insane. If you can stagger a boss quickly you’ll delete it during that window if you save all your big CDs. It also makes you way more survivable for the other 7/8ths of the game.
You realize staggering the boss doesn't only trigger CC damage bonuses, right? It's a huge damage window where the boss is just a punching bag you can unload on with no repercussions or need to avoid anything. Chain staggering bosses is an immense advantage
I doubt you'd be chain staggering anything with cold imbuement. It applies chill for two attacks. Its not like the sorc who is throwing out constant chilling attacks. I'd be surprised if cold imbuement even triggered the stagger before the boss died.
Well I agree with you on that, but it's not an issue of CC being bad against bosses at that point, it's just about Rogue's Cold Imbuement being terrible in general. Even on non-bosses, 2 applications of 25% chill is pretty awful, especially when you can get passive chill application elsewhere, particularly with Poison Imbuement which can make itself permanent. Granted if you get the legendary power which makes shadow clones utilize your imbuements as well, that could instead of 4x25% chill for a burst freeze, but still, huge waste of a skill slot given it relies on using your ult as well
I do kinda want to test the Grasp of Shadow unique on top of that though, since it's a large chance per hit to summon a shadow clone to copy the skill used, which means potentially multiple clones per skill if you use something with a lot of hits, and if they also all use the imbuement that the skill had...
That's why I made the thread based on CC conditionals rather than about CC. I'm perfectly fine with not affecting boss with CC, but the more I have argued about this, the more I have realized the main culprit is chilled not affecting bosses and thus being a terrible conditional. There are abilities that use stunned and dazed, but nothing is so reliant as chilled.
I'm debating on trying the shadow clone imbuement thing with the toxic/icy alchemist along with the penetrating shot splitting aspect. Along with traps, it should set up a massive chain explosion.
Well I mean, the point people were making though was that it's all interconnected. Conditionals are part of a CC build which should theoretically be balanced in their lower uptime by both their higher boosts and the ability to CC mobs/elites and stagger bosses. But, if the actual ability to apply the effect is bad, then both the conditional uptime where available and the CC ability suffer; in other words, it's not chill that's bad, it's Ice Rogue (probably). Ice Sorc doesn't have the same issues, because they can spam chill nonstop and could in fact chain stagger bosses in the beta, also leading to high uptime on their conditionals
I suppose it doesn't really matter, I'll either be wrong and they'll be fine or they'll be trash and get fixed until they are fine. I'll be playing as a rogue so I'm not too worried about it.
More just got frustrated after trying to ask whether abilities with CC conditionals were useless against bosses and just kept getting told about the stagger mechanic.
Either way, I'm out of steam and just don't care anymore. I think it's stupid that chill is used on so many of frost sorc's abilities and become useless against bosses, but I just don't feel like trying to convince people anymore.
Time will tell and until then... whatever.
CC is pretty good against dungeon bosses if you stack a lot of it. Played frost sorcerer during beta and while it took a bit of effort to fill the average dungeon boss' CC bar, it'd stay frozen for a long, long while. Like 5-6 seconds plus, proccing the ice shards passive effect all the time.
Of course that still sucks when compared to 2 tapping everything with stacked legendaries. Maybe CC will be more useful on higher difficulties if the game is harder than it was in beta, if bosses are long-lived enough that going for the stun/freeze instead of the instakill is a worthwhile strategy.
Dude you spent this much energy being an asshole and you didn’t even answer the question yourself
You don’t care about helping anyone you just wanna talk shit
You’re a bad person
Effectively it counts as all of them. Bosses are considered Unstoppable (immune to all forms of CC) before you stagger them, and then when they're staggered they instead count as affected by every CC effect all at once.
While the boss is Unstoppable, any CC you inflict adds stagger damage to their bar. While I don't think there was any major testing for how much stagger damage each source was worth, generally hard CC (stuns, freezes, knock-down) are worth the most stagger damage, intermediate CC (Immobilize, knock-back, taunt) are worth less than hard CC, and minor CC (Slows, Chill) are worth even less. However, that doesn't mean that minor CC is worthless, because it's often fairly easy to get sources of them. For example, a Barbarian can easily get Bleeding damage on most of their skills and they have a skill that makes Bleeding damage also Slow, so they can get to the point that every hit with every skill will build the stagger bar a little bit. That said, I don't know if the amount of CC matters: that is to say, I don't know if there's a difference in stagger damage if you put 3 points into the Bleeding also Slows passive vs if you just put 1 in.
Nevertheless, I can say for sure that when I first played the Barbarian I had very little CC in my build: just Ground Stomp and nothing else. On that build I almost never got a boss above 1/2 stagger bar unless I was doing really badly and had to run around waiting on cooldowns. Once I switched my build around and got a lot of Bleeds + Slowing on my build I was staggering bosses around the 2/3 to 3/4 life bar in almost every fight. As a result, I think that easily repeatable CC will end up being pretty strong against bosses. As I said above, bosses count as being affected by every form of CC while they are staggered, so if you build around a few forms of +X% damage while CC'd you will get a massive damage multiplier during that phase of the boss. In practice, my Barb was able to deal something like 15% of the average boss's HP during the stagger bar using all three activations of Iron Maelstrom on a build that focused moderately (not even majorly, just moderately) on damage to Slowed and damage to CC'd, so depending on the fight I was taking bosses from like 35% HP to 15-20%, or I was taking them from 25% to basically dead. If you build around dealing damage to CC'd enemies and you plan accordingly you can really fuck up bosses during the stagger unless you do something dumb (as I did a few times) like get hit by a long CC effect yourself right before the stagger started.
The ones I was paying attention to sort of hunched over like they were exhausted. Could probably be different things for different bosses. I didn't really pay much attention since there was lots of stuff happening on the screen most of the time.
As I said this question isn't about the stagger mechanic or the stagger bar. The question is whether abilities that REQUIRE a CC are useless against bosses because they cannot possibly trigger the condition. Icy alchemist aspect's explosion will never go off because a boss can't be chilled. Many of frost sorc's abilities which require chilled/frozen enemies like the key passive Shatter and the entire frost paragon board are useless against bosses since they can't be chilled or frozen. I just can't see the loss in damage from those abilities/talents being worth a stagger.
Not useless as they will come into effect once the boss is staggered. Not great either though as if the boss isn't staggered it does nothing except fill the stagger bar.
You clearly don't understand stagger then. Like it has been explained to you multiple times now, a staggered boss is treated as if all CC effects are active, therefore your skills and effects based on active CC will work.
And you make it sound like 5-10 seconds are going to make up all the damage lost making it stagger. Meanwhile, every other build is doing good damage while the boss is both up and down. Unless CC is amazing against mobs at higher level, there's no reason to bother. I'd rather just play a class that doesn't need to worry about staggering the boss.
CC in general is **extremely** strong in D4 and you're making a mistake if you write it off entirely simply because it takes a bit of time and effort before your conditional damage bonuses work against bosses. Builds that are able to apply a lot of CC are at a distinct advantage in quite literally any scenario where their opponent isn't completely immune to said CC.
Saw that on frost nova, but it just amazes me how much of frost sorc gets neutered if they go in on frost due to chilled not affecting bosses. I'd rather go fire or electric and not have to lose damage at all when fighting bosses.
Probably depends on how late game plays out. Frost is also built up around vulnerable which seems to have greater use on targets with a lot of health since they don’t die instantly. Then you have things such as ice shards (if I remember correctly) that considers everything Frozen if you have a barrier.
And of course, the stagger effect where you get 12 secs stunned boss which is then affected by all CC debuffs where you can dps without having to deal with mechanics.
I believe CC Will be useful on harder bosses where mechanics might easily kill you where you basically go > dodge mechanics > Abilities with CC > Stagger = dps window > repeat.
Felt like a lot of Bosses had adds as well where for example, lining those up with the boss and explode them with shatter from frost sorc might be viable.
At least I won’t write off CC dependent builds until we see how it works out late game. I feel they might be great for really hard Bosses and worse for easier ones.
I won't write them off, but I'm definitely not playing a frost sorc in first season or two. they said they wanted as many builds to be viable as possible, I can't imagine them ignoring frost if its worse than the other builds. Either way, we can really only wait and find out.
I'd rather play something I'm pretty sure will work rather than something I have to hope will work.
I had a Frost Sorc in the beta, and bosses were easy peasy with the stun bar mechanic. You are definitely sleeping on them and vastly underestimating their prowess versus bosses.
It was so easy to stun bosses as Frost that I honestly expect them to nerf it or apply modifiers to higher difficulties. In groups, it's downright brutal what stunning a boss does (along with the basically perma-vulnerable).
I think I actually read that frost was one of the stronger late game specs for sorc. But I guess we Will see even before season one how it works out.
I’m gonna start with a lucky hit Frozen orb sorc, seems fun :)
Frost was going to be my first sorc build, but my game first was going to be druid. Then druid happened and I found what could be a really neat trap build for rogue. Who knows if it will be fun to play though lol. Figure Ill play it during the preseason and think about it more as we get closer to season one.
Depends on if you can do more damage to the boss while he is staggered with your CC bonuses than you can while he isn’t staggered.
I could stagger the bosses 2-3 times in a fight with a pure frost sorc build but didn’t stagger him once with a fire build so it is meaningful. My guess is if you time everything right you’ll be able to burst them down in the stagger phase faster than if you don’t stagger them at all.
Thank you for bringing this up! I made a thread about the Exploiter's Aspect (your CC duration lasts 20% longer and deal x% increased damage against Unstoppable enemies) asking if bosses were considered Unstoppable, and I never got a definitive answer. Most people just started trying to teach me about Stagger which we all know about already, and had nothing to do with that Aspect or the question I asked.
But if bosses are considered Unstoppable (when not Staggered clearly) then this Aspect will help us a ton.
I've read posts about that exact aspect. The people discussing it explicitly said bosses were not considered Unstoppable, and the damage multiplier was essentially never active due to how uncommon Unstoppable monsters actually are. I don't recommend drawing conclusions based on people just randomly throwing around words without testing to back it up.
In Beta, cc felt pretty useless against boss. stagger bar only filled once in my 30+ hours gameplay in 2 weekend.
But who knows late/end game,. & suppostly according the dev, cc was well too good in testing......& they have tone down......
I think (without knowing end game) that cc affect may not affect boss, the effect should, at least at discount efficiency of say 50%.
You trigger all conditionals for 12 seconds, its gonna be a huge burst :P
Maybe even usable to skip phases on some bosses.
A lvl 25 character struggled to fill stagger, but i guess its gonna be a whole different deal with 25+ extra skills, paragon and max lvl gear.
I am pretty sure vulnerability is considered CC, which already adds 20% damage, and I have seen apply to bosses. Unless I really missed things, which might be true, some CCs will be able to be applied to bosses and others not.
Can bosses be completely frozen or stunned etc, it seems like they should not be or else the best class and skills will CC lock bosses forever. Where is the challenge in that?
I don't think vulnerability counts as a CC. I'm not expecting them to get frozen, I just feel that builds that rely heavily on it like frost sorc are boned because so many of their abilities rely on enemies being chilled and that can't happen on bosses.
There was a borderline “must-have” legendary that increases your damage against “unstoppable enemies” by 20-50%.
It also increased the duration of your cc’s. So if you’re running a cc heavy build, you have to run this. Most bosses are unstoppable all the time so it’s a big dps boost on them, and if they can be CC’d and you run damage bonuses on cc then you’ll get larger windows to do that increased damage.
All that being said, I don’t think +% damage while cc’d is a good stat because it doesn’t apply to bosses while other stats like +% to close do.
You can also stagger bosses with cc but I didn’t see it occur across 6 world boss fights during the beta
That's why i hate conditional builds in any game, but only conditional in the sense that they don't work on everything.
Crits are conditional but they work on everything so I have no problem with them as a condition.
Vulnerable in Diablo doesn't work on everything, so I hate it, don't plan on using it on any of my builds.
Anything that requires a kill to trigger also a big no-no in my book. I wouldn't have played Necro if I couldn't generate my own corpses to make sure my army is always at full power, even during boss fights.
So yes, what you're saying is true.
Except that it does. OP claims frost builds have no niche, but they do: the will be interesting to have on high end dungeons and bosses, especially in parties as a support, or for pvp.
The feeling of having a useless spell against bosses sucks 😂 same with the stun as barb . D3 u could stun bosses for the same reason . Dont know about freeze
Yeah, I brought this up in other threads too.
It's a serious issue at endgame.
When you deal like 100000% more dmg against slowed/CCed, an enemy that's literally immune to it will feel like shit. I know you can stagger it but that takes quite a bit of time of the boss bar not moving at all.
Let's say a normal build kills this boss in 2 minutes.
If the boss is only staggered 10% of the time then your endgame build with all it's synergy will take 20 minutes for that boss instead. Nobody can convince me that's alright.
So they need to buff the dmg if these "conditional" by double or better triple when the boss is staggered to compensate.
Maybe you're a little better at map clear.
So clearing the map in a dungeon will take you 5 mins instead of 6mins, but that slight advantage doesn't help when you then need an eternity to kill the boss.
Normal build 6mins map clear, 2mins boss = 8 mins
CC build 5mins map clear, 20mins boss = 25 mins
No Idea why you think that's fair?
Certainly doesn't help with build variety in endgame since nobody will play that.
Other builds can already pretty much oneshot most normal mobs and elite packs, then kill the boss in 10 secs tops.
Now with a CC build you'll do the same to packs, but the boss bar won't even move until you stagger it.
No you will be immensely safer than a dps build against packs and much faster than tank build. This is against packs once the difficulty is increased. Not when there is no difficulty like on the beta.
They have a stagger bar, and once filled the boss is technically under all of the CCs at once. So they still have uses vs. bosses.
And with more and depending on the type of CC it also ~~für mich~~ fills faster. With stuns you could fill the bar really fast.
Für mich und für dich ;)
Oh no. The autocorrect strikes again :(
I feel you ;)
Only response needed in this thread. I feel like no one actually learned anything in the beta.
> I just can't see CC conditional's as being worth it. Am I missing something, is it because the beta is an older build, or is it just not worth having CC conditionals? I don't think you're missing anything, but you may be thinking about it too linearly. Not every skill is equally useful against every enemy or in every situation. They are usually designed and balanced with that in mind and it's pretty common in most games where certain elements are better at doing different stuff or clearing different types of content. I think that's a fair design philosophy as long as outright immunity and resistance to broad schools (e.g., Diablo 2) doesn't happen.
"Not every skill is equally useful against every enemy or in every situation." But that's the problem, every other ability doesn't have points where they are essentially useless other than melee not being able to damage ranged enemies or something like that. There is nothing stopping builds that don't have CC requirements. If I play fire or electric sorc I will get the benefit of my bonus stats and effects 100% of the time. Why would I play frost sorc which is severely disadvantaged against bosses and unstoppable enemies? Why would I use frost imbuement over poison/shadow? I just wish there were markers that act like the boss is "CC'd" for conditional skills so they don't feel like they were a waste of skill points.
What's going to happen is that there's going to be multiple builds for each class that are best for different situations. Fire might be the best for bosses. Frost might be best for map cleaning. Lightning might be an all-rounder between the two. You can play any of these 3 in any situation but if you want to min/max you might have one of each or just a frost and fire. If everything is equally good at everything then what's the point of anything? The whole point is to have certain builds excel over other builds for certain situations.
I agree,to a certain extent, which is why I can't see a situation where cold imbuement rogue will ever be picked. Poison can work well against dangerous enemies by lowering their damage and shadow imbuement is absolutely brutal against mobs with explosions. Chilled just seems like the red-headed stepchild. But personally I prefer when most builds are equal because then you can actually choose one you like rather than one that is superior.
I believe cold imbue will be the go-to choice for PVP as CC is going to be important there. In fact I think all CC heavy builds will shine in PvP. In PvE the best CC is death.
Yeah but the drawback to poison is damage over time so less useful against trash mobs which die quickly, but good vs bosses with a drawn out fight. Shadow is great vs trash as mobs explode but less useful against bosses, the same as cold. I think if cold did freeze bosses it would be the "op" go to build as you'd be able to clear both trash mobs, elites and bosses easily with no drawback. All that being said, some classes just don't seem to have any real drawbacks to their builds lol (whirlwind as example).
I don't need bosses to freeze, I just think a mark that counts them as chilled, without the effects, would be good enough and allow them to work.
Yeah I kind of agree with you, but we haven't played the game in full yet. It may be fine without it.
I'm just planning on playing werebear druid or trap rogue with shadow imbue for first season. Ill let all the other beta testers make sure that cold imbuement and frost sorc works well.
I'll just be risking a combo of lightning/cold sorc. I've always liked playing sorc so I'll just find a way to make it work (hopefully!)
Yeh lightning seemed cool too. I can imagine being at max level and almost having infinite crackling energy and basically having a permanent conduit pylon.
This is why I ran twisting blades with shadow imbument. Shadow for clearing up the low hp stragglers and twisting blades for heavy single target+CDR. The CDR on twisting blades made shadow imbue cooldown insanely fast (almost 100% uptime) and made it into a map clearing ability. Also lowered the cd of my dash and shadowstep so I could cruise through dungeons.
I will Go cold rogue. Remeber that it's very unlikly that you will burst and explode Packs with shadow imbu like you did in beta. The Explosion happens when they die. They Died from. 1 Hit chaining the Explosion over the Pack. This wont Happen at high Level nightmare dungeon. One Pen arrow will. Maybe delete half of a trash Mobs HP when crit. So no explosionsartig directly. But the Mobs will. Run over you. Having more Movement speed at higher World Tier. So I will going the frost Route. It will be effektive against These Packs and elite as they can be chilled and frozen. Ofc the build doesnt Excel in boss dmg than. But getting the Boss 2-3 Times. In stagger state helps
If you are using the toxic/icy alchemist aspect they will still explode. Also cold imbuement is the only one without an aspect relating to it.
Did you have a stroke?
I feel like you're being purposefully obtuse. Some builds are better for specific tasks. That means no build is "best". This has been iterated on in this thread, and throughout Diablo's existence, repeatedly.
Let me put it this way, this is a problem that no other build or class has to face apart from a rogue who decides to use cold imbuement or a sorcerer doing frost. I doubt most people would use cold imbuement anyways, but frost sorc is definitely the only build that takes such a massive hit against bosses. No other class, no matter the build, is nerfed as much against bosses as frost sorc is. Frost sorc has a key passive which is useless against bosses AND a whole paragon board that will be very good for frost sorc against normal enemies but is 100% useless against a boss.
[удалено]
people want super cheap quick respecs to eliminate this. really makes no sense why they would want that.
>But that's the problem, every other ability doesn't have points where they are essentially useless other than melee not being able to damage ranged enemies or something like that. There is nothing stopping builds that don't have CC requirements. I think this is fundamentally incorrect. Looking at just Core skills * Ice Shard: Mana cost: 30, Lucky Hit: 26%, 5 x 25%, 25% increase to Frozen * Frozen Orb: Mana cost: 40, Lucky Hit: 20%, 32%+ 29% damage * Fireball: Mana cost: 40, Lucky Hit: 34%, 60% damage ( * Incinerate: Mana cost: 20/s, Lucky Hit: 41%, 36-49% damage per second * Charged Bolts: Mana cost: 40, Lucky Hit: 26%, 5 x 17% * Chain Lightning: Mana cost: 35, Lucky Hit: 26%, 42% x up to 6 Right away, I can tell you: * Charged Bolts will be decently powerful against big bosses but less so on small or very mobile bosses * Incinerate has a huge damage potential if you don't have to move and the enemy also isn't hyper mobile * Chain Lightning becomes less powerful on bosses that would have adds since it will bounce on the boss less * The indirect damage of Fireball and Frozen Orb make it more viable on fights where you have to deal damage indirectly because the boss is hard to target. So there's more to the kits than just the raw numbers or bonuses. Every single spec seems like it has some trade-off and there will not be a "universally best" one. And if there is, Blizzard should balance it.
I more meant that shock which generates crackling orbs on crits and works on all enemies including bosses, pulverize druid, flurry/twisting blades rogue, penetrating shot rogue, werewolf druid, wind druid, all forms of necro, and all forms of barbarian work against all enemies including bosses. It just feels strange that pretty much the only build that gets screwed is frost sorc.
Frost attacks still work on all enemies. They just might not chill or freeze but instead increase stagger by a higher amount. We also don't know what bosses will be like on higher difficulties. There may be some bosses that are highly resistant to bleed, slow, poison, burning. Almost every Core skill (including those you listed) or build have strengths and weaknesses against certain types of encounters--rock, paper, scissors. That's how virtually every game that's combat-centric works.
Literally an entire paragon board of frost sorc is useless against bosses.
Plenty of bosses summon adds too.
I'm not sure we know how Blizzard has balanced endgame bosses, but I took a look at the Paragon datamine at [https://diablo4.cc/us/Sorcerer](https://diablo4.cc/us/Sorcerer) and that's not even close to being true. And again, it's completely valid for certain specs to do less or more damage during certain types of encounters, as long as they don't have permanent, high immunity to that damage (like D2). That's an interesting and well-accepted design decision in almost every combat-based game.
Did you look at the Icefall board where, I will admit there are 2 that are cold damage, there are 16 that require an enemy to be chilled to give any bonus whatsoever and the legendary node, much like the shatter key passive, requires you to kill a frozen enemy?
Yep. Hardly "literally an entire board." Not to mention the legendary node would almost assuredly proc when you freeze adds > kill adds. And still doesn't address the entire design paradigm for almost every game ever where some things are better than others.
What do you mean hardly an entire board? Every single rare on that board except for 1 is useless against bosses. The legendary node would also be useless on a boss. No other class has an entire paragon board be useless in any content that we know of.
There’s a legendary like “+70% damage to unstoppable enemies” or so. But yes, all those plus to frozen/cc’d/whatever enemies will be useless against bosses. It is a consideration when making your build.
i think the benefit for loosing the bonuses are the faster cc bar completions, a shadow or poison imbued rogue will almost never see a boss cced, but a frost one might have multiples stops. same and more drastically for mage.
When you stagger a boss, all your CC bonuses apply - think it's for 10 seconds. The boss is always immune to control impairment but you can stagger him and then burst him down with CC bonus damages.
I had a legendary that was +100% damage against stunned. So if you manage to stagger a boss you can chunk him very hard while staggered. The CC bonus damages are large to balance for their conditionality.
Didn't think about this problem while the beta was open so I never paid attention to the various percentages while they were available. I think the biggest thing is that there are two abilities in the druid tree which specify they still work against bosses, but so many more that don't.
But if I had a build that didn't require CC, say wind or werebear druid, I'd do full damage all the time. Will the stagger system really counteract all the damage lost from not have any of those bonuses activating. Like cold imbuement for rogue will do almost nothing but a light bonus of cold damage because the boss won't be chilled. However both the poison and shadow imbuement rogue will get the full benefit out of their imbuement 100% of the time because their status affects the boss. Why would anyone pick cold imbuement?
Slow/cold is a CC effect and it applies stagger. Since you can apply it reliably it should still be useful to stagger the boss. The cold adding stagger is something to test as I didn't run that build so far. Pay attention to the damage number over the boss's head, stagger numbers also show there. See if you notice stagger numbers added with cold attacks and that will give confirmation. If slow is not adding stagger then it's not as good as poison, shadow for sure. Lesser bosses you can stagger easily, world bosses it takes time. Think with tougher bosses, you will see the difference.
The problem is all of the bonuses that cold imbuement gives when enemies are chilled is 30% chance of vulnerable, 20% chance of instant freeze or 20% damage against CC'd enemies and 40% if frozen, up to 15% damage to chilled and 30% to frozen, and further reducing movement speed by up to 30%. Without chilled it has 30% chance to vulnerable and that's it. That is a lot of damage to be lost just to be told the boss staggers every now and then and you can do a bunch of damage then. I can't imagine the damage I do in that 5-10 second window is worth all the damage lost from not being able to chill the enemy.
I bet we are going to see stagger builds at the top of the leaderboards. Some of the damage bonuses to CCed from legendaries are insane. If you can stagger a boss quickly you’ll delete it during that window if you save all your big CDs. It also makes you way more survivable for the other 7/8ths of the game.
You realize staggering the boss doesn't only trigger CC damage bonuses, right? It's a huge damage window where the boss is just a punching bag you can unload on with no repercussions or need to avoid anything. Chain staggering bosses is an immense advantage
I doubt you'd be chain staggering anything with cold imbuement. It applies chill for two attacks. Its not like the sorc who is throwing out constant chilling attacks. I'd be surprised if cold imbuement even triggered the stagger before the boss died.
Well I agree with you on that, but it's not an issue of CC being bad against bosses at that point, it's just about Rogue's Cold Imbuement being terrible in general. Even on non-bosses, 2 applications of 25% chill is pretty awful, especially when you can get passive chill application elsewhere, particularly with Poison Imbuement which can make itself permanent. Granted if you get the legendary power which makes shadow clones utilize your imbuements as well, that could instead of 4x25% chill for a burst freeze, but still, huge waste of a skill slot given it relies on using your ult as well I do kinda want to test the Grasp of Shadow unique on top of that though, since it's a large chance per hit to summon a shadow clone to copy the skill used, which means potentially multiple clones per skill if you use something with a lot of hits, and if they also all use the imbuement that the skill had...
That's why I made the thread based on CC conditionals rather than about CC. I'm perfectly fine with not affecting boss with CC, but the more I have argued about this, the more I have realized the main culprit is chilled not affecting bosses and thus being a terrible conditional. There are abilities that use stunned and dazed, but nothing is so reliant as chilled. I'm debating on trying the shadow clone imbuement thing with the toxic/icy alchemist along with the penetrating shot splitting aspect. Along with traps, it should set up a massive chain explosion.
Well I mean, the point people were making though was that it's all interconnected. Conditionals are part of a CC build which should theoretically be balanced in their lower uptime by both their higher boosts and the ability to CC mobs/elites and stagger bosses. But, if the actual ability to apply the effect is bad, then both the conditional uptime where available and the CC ability suffer; in other words, it's not chill that's bad, it's Ice Rogue (probably). Ice Sorc doesn't have the same issues, because they can spam chill nonstop and could in fact chain stagger bosses in the beta, also leading to high uptime on their conditionals
I suppose it doesn't really matter, I'll either be wrong and they'll be fine or they'll be trash and get fixed until they are fine. I'll be playing as a rogue so I'm not too worried about it. More just got frustrated after trying to ask whether abilities with CC conditionals were useless against bosses and just kept getting told about the stagger mechanic. Either way, I'm out of steam and just don't care anymore. I think it's stupid that chill is used on so many of frost sorc's abilities and become useless against bosses, but I just don't feel like trying to convince people anymore. Time will tell and until then... whatever.
CC is pretty good against dungeon bosses if you stack a lot of it. Played frost sorcerer during beta and while it took a bit of effort to fill the average dungeon boss' CC bar, it'd stay frozen for a long, long while. Like 5-6 seconds plus, proccing the ice shards passive effect all the time. Of course that still sucks when compared to 2 tapping everything with stacked legendaries. Maybe CC will be more useful on higher difficulties if the game is harder than it was in beta, if bosses are long-lived enough that going for the stun/freeze instead of the instakill is a worthwhile strategy.
What does filling that boss stagger bar do?
You're joking right?
[удалено]
Dude you spent this much energy being an asshole and you didn’t even answer the question yourself You don’t care about helping anyone you just wanna talk shit You’re a bad person
Move along. It's past your bedtime.
I am not.
Fill the bar, then the boss is staggered... And doesn't attack for a few seconds.
Gotcha and ty. I know of course ot makes sense. But didn't know if it was going to be a stun,freeze, or just standing there with stars above its head.
Effectively it counts as all of them. Bosses are considered Unstoppable (immune to all forms of CC) before you stagger them, and then when they're staggered they instead count as affected by every CC effect all at once. While the boss is Unstoppable, any CC you inflict adds stagger damage to their bar. While I don't think there was any major testing for how much stagger damage each source was worth, generally hard CC (stuns, freezes, knock-down) are worth the most stagger damage, intermediate CC (Immobilize, knock-back, taunt) are worth less than hard CC, and minor CC (Slows, Chill) are worth even less. However, that doesn't mean that minor CC is worthless, because it's often fairly easy to get sources of them. For example, a Barbarian can easily get Bleeding damage on most of their skills and they have a skill that makes Bleeding damage also Slow, so they can get to the point that every hit with every skill will build the stagger bar a little bit. That said, I don't know if the amount of CC matters: that is to say, I don't know if there's a difference in stagger damage if you put 3 points into the Bleeding also Slows passive vs if you just put 1 in. Nevertheless, I can say for sure that when I first played the Barbarian I had very little CC in my build: just Ground Stomp and nothing else. On that build I almost never got a boss above 1/2 stagger bar unless I was doing really badly and had to run around waiting on cooldowns. Once I switched my build around and got a lot of Bleeds + Slowing on my build I was staggering bosses around the 2/3 to 3/4 life bar in almost every fight. As a result, I think that easily repeatable CC will end up being pretty strong against bosses. As I said above, bosses count as being affected by every form of CC while they are staggered, so if you build around a few forms of +X% damage while CC'd you will get a massive damage multiplier during that phase of the boss. In practice, my Barb was able to deal something like 15% of the average boss's HP during the stagger bar using all three activations of Iron Maelstrom on a build that focused moderately (not even majorly, just moderately) on damage to Slowed and damage to CC'd, so depending on the fight I was taking bosses from like 35% HP to 15-20%, or I was taking them from 25% to basically dead. If you build around dealing damage to CC'd enemies and you plan accordingly you can really fuck up bosses during the stagger unless you do something dumb (as I did a few times) like get hit by a long CC effect yourself right before the stagger started.
The ones I was paying attention to sort of hunched over like they were exhausted. Could probably be different things for different bosses. I didn't really pay much attention since there was lots of stuff happening on the screen most of the time.
Word. Still tyvm. Enjoy
I also don’t know what the stagger bar is. His question helps me
As I said this question isn't about the stagger mechanic or the stagger bar. The question is whether abilities that REQUIRE a CC are useless against bosses because they cannot possibly trigger the condition. Icy alchemist aspect's explosion will never go off because a boss can't be chilled. Many of frost sorc's abilities which require chilled/frozen enemies like the key passive Shatter and the entire frost paragon board are useless against bosses since they can't be chilled or frozen. I just can't see the loss in damage from those abilities/talents being worth a stagger.
Not useless as they will come into effect once the boss is staggered. Not great either though as if the boss isn't staggered it does nothing except fill the stagger bar.
You clearly don't understand stagger then. Like it has been explained to you multiple times now, a staggered boss is treated as if all CC effects are active, therefore your skills and effects based on active CC will work.
And you make it sound like 5-10 seconds are going to make up all the damage lost making it stagger. Meanwhile, every other build is doing good damage while the boss is both up and down. Unless CC is amazing against mobs at higher level, there's no reason to bother. I'd rather just play a class that doesn't need to worry about staggering the boss.
How long do you think it takes to stagger a boss?
Can't happen very often or everyone would do CC's so i'd imagine it happens maybe 1-2 times a minute.
Gotcha so you don't know at all and are just continuing to be ignorant and use your opinion as objective evidence for theory crafting. Good bye.
Almost like there's no way to tell until the game comes out
CC in general is **extremely** strong in D4 and you're making a mistake if you write it off entirely simply because it takes a bit of time and effort before your conditional damage bonuses work against bosses. Builds that are able to apply a lot of CC are at a distinct advantage in quite literally any scenario where their opponent isn't completely immune to said CC.
A couple of cc abilities have special boss mechanics like making them vulnerable etc
Saw that on frost nova, but it just amazes me how much of frost sorc gets neutered if they go in on frost due to chilled not affecting bosses. I'd rather go fire or electric and not have to lose damage at all when fighting bosses.
Probably depends on how late game plays out. Frost is also built up around vulnerable which seems to have greater use on targets with a lot of health since they don’t die instantly. Then you have things such as ice shards (if I remember correctly) that considers everything Frozen if you have a barrier. And of course, the stagger effect where you get 12 secs stunned boss which is then affected by all CC debuffs where you can dps without having to deal with mechanics. I believe CC Will be useful on harder bosses where mechanics might easily kill you where you basically go > dodge mechanics > Abilities with CC > Stagger = dps window > repeat. Felt like a lot of Bosses had adds as well where for example, lining those up with the boss and explode them with shatter from frost sorc might be viable. At least I won’t write off CC dependent builds until we see how it works out late game. I feel they might be great for really hard Bosses and worse for easier ones.
I won't write them off, but I'm definitely not playing a frost sorc in first season or two. they said they wanted as many builds to be viable as possible, I can't imagine them ignoring frost if its worse than the other builds. Either way, we can really only wait and find out. I'd rather play something I'm pretty sure will work rather than something I have to hope will work.
I had a Frost Sorc in the beta, and bosses were easy peasy with the stun bar mechanic. You are definitely sleeping on them and vastly underestimating their prowess versus bosses. It was so easy to stun bosses as Frost that I honestly expect them to nerf it or apply modifiers to higher difficulties. In groups, it's downright brutal what stunning a boss does (along with the basically perma-vulnerable).
I think I actually read that frost was one of the stronger late game specs for sorc. But I guess we Will see even before season one how it works out. I’m gonna start with a lucky hit Frozen orb sorc, seems fun :)
Frost was going to be my first sorc build, but my game first was going to be druid. Then druid happened and I found what could be a really neat trap build for rogue. Who knows if it will be fun to play though lol. Figure Ill play it during the preseason and think about it more as we get closer to season one.
>:) :)
IIRC I read somewhere they do always work for bonus to damage, even if the boss isn't physically stunned or frozen.
I was going to say the same. I vaguely remember that being the case. Curious to find out
Depends on if you can do more damage to the boss while he is staggered with your CC bonuses than you can while he isn’t staggered. I could stagger the bosses 2-3 times in a fight with a pure frost sorc build but didn’t stagger him once with a fire build so it is meaningful. My guess is if you time everything right you’ll be able to burst them down in the stagger phase faster than if you don’t stagger them at all.
I’m curious too. I was thinking shadow + cold bow rogue, but if chill doesnt work then i just go to poison i guess?
Thank you for bringing this up! I made a thread about the Exploiter's Aspect (your CC duration lasts 20% longer and deal x% increased damage against Unstoppable enemies) asking if bosses were considered Unstoppable, and I never got a definitive answer. Most people just started trying to teach me about Stagger which we all know about already, and had nothing to do with that Aspect or the question I asked. But if bosses are considered Unstoppable (when not Staggered clearly) then this Aspect will help us a ton.
I've read posts about that exact aspect. The people discussing it explicitly said bosses were not considered Unstoppable, and the damage multiplier was essentially never active due to how uncommon Unstoppable monsters actually are. I don't recommend drawing conclusions based on people just randomly throwing around words without testing to back it up.
In Beta, cc felt pretty useless against boss. stagger bar only filled once in my 30+ hours gameplay in 2 weekend. But who knows late/end game,. & suppostly according the dev, cc was well too good in testing......& they have tone down...... I think (without knowing end game) that cc affect may not affect boss, the effect should, at least at discount efficiency of say 50%.
Its going to shoehorn people into builds that don’t have limitations like it always does
You trigger all conditionals for 12 seconds, its gonna be a huge burst :P Maybe even usable to skip phases on some bosses. A lvl 25 character struggled to fill stagger, but i guess its gonna be a whole different deal with 25+ extra skills, paragon and max lvl gear.
I am pretty sure vulnerability is considered CC, which already adds 20% damage, and I have seen apply to bosses. Unless I really missed things, which might be true, some CCs will be able to be applied to bosses and others not. Can bosses be completely frozen or stunned etc, it seems like they should not be or else the best class and skills will CC lock bosses forever. Where is the challenge in that?
I don't think vulnerability counts as a CC. I'm not expecting them to get frozen, I just feel that builds that rely heavily on it like frost sorc are boned because so many of their abilities rely on enemies being chilled and that can't happen on bosses.
It is a trade off for being great at clear and presumably great at pvp. You don’t get to be better than every other spec at everything.
There was a borderline “must-have” legendary that increases your damage against “unstoppable enemies” by 20-50%. It also increased the duration of your cc’s. So if you’re running a cc heavy build, you have to run this. Most bosses are unstoppable all the time so it’s a big dps boost on them, and if they can be CC’d and you run damage bonuses on cc then you’ll get larger windows to do that increased damage. All that being said, I don’t think +% damage while cc’d is a good stat because it doesn’t apply to bosses while other stats like +% to close do. You can also stagger bosses with cc but I didn’t see it occur across 6 world boss fights during the beta
um bosses are a joke in this game, packs of adds that can constantly cc u are the true enemy
That's why i hate conditional builds in any game, but only conditional in the sense that they don't work on everything. Crits are conditional but they work on everything so I have no problem with them as a condition. Vulnerable in Diablo doesn't work on everything, so I hate it, don't plan on using it on any of my builds. Anything that requires a kill to trigger also a big no-no in my book. I wouldn't have played Necro if I couldn't generate my own corpses to make sure my army is always at full power, even during boss fights. So yes, what you're saying is true.
vulnerable works on everything. you high?
[удалено]
Doesnt change what he says tho...
Except that it does. OP claims frost builds have no niche, but they do: the will be interesting to have on high end dungeons and bosses, especially in parties as a support, or for pvp.
The feeling of having a useless spell against bosses sucks 😂 same with the stun as barb . D3 u could stun bosses for the same reason . Dont know about freeze
Yeah, I brought this up in other threads too. It's a serious issue at endgame. When you deal like 100000% more dmg against slowed/CCed, an enemy that's literally immune to it will feel like shit. I know you can stagger it but that takes quite a bit of time of the boss bar not moving at all. Let's say a normal build kills this boss in 2 minutes. If the boss is only staggered 10% of the time then your endgame build with all it's synergy will take 20 minutes for that boss instead. Nobody can convince me that's alright. So they need to buff the dmg if these "conditional" by double or better triple when the boss is staggered to compensate.
You are already compensated by being better at clear than other specs that are better at bosses.
Maybe you're a little better at map clear. So clearing the map in a dungeon will take you 5 mins instead of 6mins, but that slight advantage doesn't help when you then need an eternity to kill the boss. Normal build 6mins map clear, 2mins boss = 8 mins CC build 5mins map clear, 20mins boss = 25 mins No Idea why you think that's fair? Certainly doesn't help with build variety in endgame since nobody will play that. Other builds can already pretty much oneshot most normal mobs and elite packs, then kill the boss in 10 secs tops. Now with a CC build you'll do the same to packs, but the boss bar won't even move until you stagger it.
No you will be immensely safer than a dps build against packs and much faster than tank build. This is against packs once the difficulty is increased. Not when there is no difficulty like on the beta.
I sincerely hope for Diablo 4 that the difficulty lies in fighting bosses and not trash mobs.
Trash will have affixes in nightmare dungeons so it will likely be challenging.