Wizard thoughts

[Skandranon]

I assume by "it" you mean Force Armor. I kind of agree that it's silly. From the descriptions I've read of Inferno, it sounds like you might as well make a glass cannon and use Force Armor even in hardcore, because everything will one-shot you no matter how much health you have without Force Armor. Force Armor's seeming requirement seems related to the incredible damage dealt in Inferno relative to the equipment that people have. I don't know yet what the drops in Inferno are like. It's possible that Force Armor could become unnecessary, if one can get good vitality and damage mitigation gear in Inferno that lets you survive without it. That really should be the thing that "replaces" it.

Drops in Act 1 Inferno are like Act 4 Hell drops, except with a tiny chance of being slightly better. Emphasis on tiny. I personally didn't manage to upgrade a single piece of gear from drops. I mostly bought upgrades off the auction house. We did slightly upgrade our witch doctor and other wizard, and got a fair few upgrades (pooling our drops) for our monk.

So far, no amount of farming Act 1 Inferno is going to make it survivable. All that really changes is that the base types of items are slightly better and the item mods are also slightly better, but it's not a gigantic leap and it isn't keeping up with the damage.

I think Blizzard made a mistake in allowing people to resurrect in during major event/encounters. It looks like people are just resurrection suiciding right now. If Blizzard's intention was to have people progress slowly in Inferno and gradually obtain gear act by act, then this mechanic should have been taken out. Taking it out would force people to spend some time in the earlier acts farming and crafting to enable them to progress through the rest of Inferno.

I'm not sure what you mean. Maybe you could in normal or nightmare, I don't remember, but at least in Hell and Inferno you cannot resurrect back into major storyline boss encounters by yourself. If you are alone, dying resets the encounter. If you aren't, pressing the revive button warns you that "releasing here will render you unable to rejoin your teammates!" If a team relies on resurrecting, they will likely never progress past the Butcher, and thus be unable to exit Act 1.

That is, unless you're talking about champion and elite packs, in which case yes, you can resurrect infinitely at them. I don't know anyone who doesn't die a lot killing those packs. The amount of sheer nonsense they can hand out with 4 modifiers on Inferno is insane.

Anyway, since I'm on the topic: today our team went to the end of Act 1 and defeated the Butcher to advance to Act 2 Inferno. I discovered something that is going to change a lot of my skill evaluations: notably, in Inferno, elite packs and at least some storyline bosses have berserk timers.

Taken straight from WoW heroic mode raiding, if you don't defeat an elite pack in time (I have unfortunately not been able to figure out exactly what that time is), the entire pack gains a buff which increases their damage and speed, to the point where you cannot run away and they will one-shot you. Not only that, but bosses and/or champions will begin to pulse a screenwide damage aura called Out of Time that tears through your health in seconds - judging from my health, it was doing at least 8k damage/second if not more. The only way to win after that was to let whoever was currently engaged die and to evacuate everyone else to town, which allowed the encounter to "reset".

Thankfully, that didn't happen very often, so the time is probably something forgiving like 10 or 15 minutes. I'm not sure if we'd have hit it more often if I wasn't still running my all-offense, zero active defenses build. The Butcher, however, justified my keeping Archon and all my passives: his berserk timer is a mere three minutes, after which he lights up every single grate simultaneously, rendering the room an inescapable firepit of death. We wiped to his berserk twice before we won.

I'll admit I was missing Ray of Frost. I've always known it was good for some kinds of single-target situations, and had habitually swapped to it for the Butcher, the Siegebreaker, and Azmodan. But swapping to it would have dropped all five of my stacks of Nephalem Valor, meaning that the Butcher, when defeated, would drop only two blues and a mass of whites, instead of 2-3 rares and 4-6 blues (as is typical when you kill a major storyline boss with 5 stacks of Valor). So I had to make do without, and it turned out to be good enough.

That said, if softcore players find they can't hit the requirement, they can just decide to lose Nephalem Valor and make the skill change. It seems to me that the real implication of the berserk timers is for hardcore players. It means you cannot just load up on defensive spells and play very safely, since if you do that for too long the mobs will simply berserk and kill you anyway. You need to do some serious damage. That might mean skill swapping, but the skill swap times are extended in Inferno, to something like five or more minutes. Probably you'd have to move very cautiously, activate a pack and then flee to a waypoint so you can set a custom build for that particular combination of modifiers in town, where you don't incur a cooldown.

I'm not a hardcore player, though, so I could be completely wrong about that. What are your thoughts?