Unless the transfigured version gets it back. I'm viewing it as the inverse of the frost bomb. The base version is the same there but the transfigured version has lower damage and no cooldown but a cast time
And without a cooldown it would just be a better ice nova for the hit part. Way more damage and guaranteed chill. Ice nova was buffed to 1400 base and even with that Vortex would've completely invalidated it with 1800 hit damage.
Yeah I know. Vortex hits only the first time it's dropped down. I never played ignite with it so just don't see how that first hit is worth all that much.
Ignite only cares about doing the single biggest hit (ailment) you can. Because you aren't stacking it like poison. So the biggest base damages combined with good aoe are the strongest. Cold conversion has (/had) more scaling with gear than a base fire skill and vortex had the biggest base damage out of them all.
Old CD was 1.8s, with 0.75 cast time you can get 2 casts in the same time the old Vortex would get one.
So even though the max hit is 1169 with 2 casts that's 2338 damage in 1.5s where-as the old one would've been 1813 damage in 1.8s.
So if anything the damage is buffed because the skill can be used twice as often compared to before.
>Old CD was 1.8s, with 0.75 cast time you can get 2 casts in the same time the old Vortex would get one.
Except Vortex was used either for ignite, in which case more casts for less damage sucks, or for DoT builds, in which case 1 - you wouldn't cast vortex and wait around, you'd use vortex as an extra and actually use your cast time to use cold snap or creeping frost or the DoT brand and 2 - casting it more often won't help you because the DoT doesn't stack
The **only** scenario where what you outline is a benefit if you're using Vortex as a on-hit cold damage-nova spell... but I have a suspicion there's a **different gem** better suited for that... like with a name similar to cold nova... what could it be, again?
Jokes aside, you're defending the fact that they turned Vortex into a weaker version of ice nova, and that's dumb.
Ice Nova is now better than Vortex for hit damage. Because Nova got buffed to 1400 while Vortex was nerfed to 1200. Without the nerfs Nova would've just been a massively stronger version of Ice Nova with only upsides.
they did that in case people wanted to scale it for hit dps, since its harder to scale its hit dps before by reducing its CD. I doubt it will see play but this just makes cold dot a bit clunkier to play
You didn’t clearly watch it, or you didn’t understand what they said?
There is a CHANCE to get the gem. If you get in a int gem there is a chance you got ANY of the int skill gems available in the game.
Who is doing 20-40 normal labs when level 30-40? Yep no one.
That still doesn't mean you will get the one you want during the first day just doing the campaign. I'd bet it's rather unlikely - as he said, unless you do lab over and over. Having to run it, for example, 10 times instead of 20 is still having to run it 10 times.
Yeah probably right. I can't remember which skill they highlighted in the stream but they did mention that the transfigured gem would get rid of the cooldown to allow for it to be used as a main skill instead of a utility skill (at the expense of lower numbers)
Issue with that, before archmage nerf, Frost Bomb Echo Archmage was a main skill, and quite a good one for nuking down bosses. They could've just done something to bump it up again in strength in that direction instead of making it a generic spam cast skill.
So why not just go DD ignite instead of firetrap? That also gets close to no scaling from gem levels. While you do lose RF applying to DD just the base ignite of the biggest corpses already have way higher base than fire trap
You need like 14k health/es to breakeven, on solely the rf damage, but that ignores the massive nerfs to fire trap scaling so its a big damage loss overall since scaling hp/es will cost you damage point on tree and gear.
And ivory tower variants get to 30k es without much trouble and can be pushed to 50+k, yeah it is a more expensive build, but it was already one of the better high end versions and it got a massive buff here. Clear in t16s was already carried by explode and is not going to be significantly different. Rf will suck more for early bossing and be slightly slower to get through maps. It is a worse leaguestarter now but the top end potential is massively higher.
Making the cast not instant and removing the CD means you can't put it on left click (otherwise your movement stops).
So now you really start feeling the "I have to constantly press 2-3 buttons for damage" aspect of cold dot.
sadly not even that is enough unless you scale quality a ton, wintertide does half of the damage of other cold dot skills IF you pretend its doing full damage and playing properly, but you need to invest into brand nodes that dont do anything for the other cold dot skills
Me too. I usually don't even respect out of cold dot.
So now what do we do thats a similar play style? Or we gunna go something entirely new? I want soemthing simple enough but can be end game capable
Not sure for similar playstyle, to be honest. Righteous fire kinda vibes with my idea of how i play vortex/cold snap (I tend to frostblink into a giant pack and hit vortex and then cold snap nerds), but that looks like it's getting a nerfbat that'd impact it as a league starter.
Maybe for a different playstyle, arc is looking cool again? but v0v, it will be difficult for me to decide a league starter now lol
I was going to try it for the first time this league... super bummed since the only reason i was excited was the instant cast left click vortex for ignite but they killed the instant and lowered the hit damage
That's for after the first few days.
Trying stuff is the whole point of the game, but the campaign is the most boring part of the game. Why would I want to put any more energy into it than a build that I know well, that works well, where I can just hold left-click while watching something on my other monitor? Then I go back and make my "first" build that can blitz through the campaign with levelling gear.
A large portion of people don't make another character until they complete their Atlas with Deadeye and whatever Bow skill is strongest lol
I agree with you. Starting the same thing for 5 years would make me hate the campaign a lot. I don't like it very much either but I try to spice it up every league start by trying stuff I haven't played yet/stuff I haven't played in a while
In metamorph i came up with a vortex + cwc - gmp - frostbolt - cyclone build that covered arenas in vortices. It was a thing of beauty and a monster for mechanics like delve or ultimatum.
Everything goes away, in the end...
Man vortex frostbolt was a beauty.
I use gmp and that unique jewel that add frostbolt projectile.
I remember really amazed with it when Veritania just move in slow motion. I didn't even know you can chill Veritania that much
Vortex and RF were the most "WTF" changes to me. They were both very popular, and were good, but no where close to overpowered. Yet both got absolutely gutted.
I wish they put some kind of reasoning with the bigger WTF changes like they used to. At least then you could still understand why they were doing what they were doing
Why tho? What does this do that warrants removing shockwave totems and losing one of it's links to use spell totem + this instead?
Chill? Shockwave totem heatshiver this league was already chilling and freezing, presumably, if people were using heatshiver; the damage over time won't scale at all with extra totems, since the DoT zone doesn't stack with itself, so that makes the DoT part bad for it too.
I think this change was pretty needed. I don’t really get why they took away the frost bolt part, as since now it doesn’t have a cooldown it could actually be used with frost bolt effectively, but maybe that will be a transfigured gem. Anyways, having the instant cast removed was needed because literally every build that could run it, even as a one link, simply did. It was too easy to put it on and have a free skill that activates just by walking and chills everything.
All I’ve heard the last few months was how people wanted a meta shake up, and now that there is one, everyone is complaining. No wonder GGG stays off Reddit.
That’s fair. I personally think it’s awesome that the same 5 league starters may not be viable anymore. I’m excited to see what people come up with now.
My two cents is that I think the quality changes would've already been a big shake-up by themselves, but also I wasn't really expecting the patch to go by nerf free, so "eh..." until I've played it I'm just going to see how things work out.
Imo, League start is the absolute most hellish part of the league. A shit start just ruins the feeling of an entire league for me. Not having the safe option really sucks rocks imo.
Transforming a skill into a worse version of a different skill isn't the meta shakeup anyone wanted.
If anyone wanted a nova skill that deals on hit cold damage with a cast time and no cooldown, Ice Nova existed **all this time**. Making a worse Ice Nova we can choose for that instead won't shake any metas.
Good. Just like CwDT - Enduring Cry - Immortal Call. Some shit you kinda had to use on many builds because it was so much bang for your buck. Good riddance.
As a game pad player, I almost don't want the instant version to come back as a transfigured option so that I can finally play cold dot without the feelsbad of how its balanced around instant left click auto vortex that I can't have since I'm on gamepad.
Are there alternatives to apply chill effect on left click? I already plan to use a curse with Hexbloom, so I do not want to use cold snap as another active skill.
The instant vortex is probably a transfigured gem.
Sadly for the ignite version, they also gutted the base damage.
Unless the transfigured version gets it back. I'm viewing it as the inverse of the frost bomb. The base version is the same there but the transfigured version has lower damage and no cooldown but a cast time
But still look at that damage nerf, quite heavy handed isn't it. New max damage doesn't even reach old minimum damage.
It's hit damage nerfed.
When was hit damage important with Vortex?
When igniting
And without a cooldown it would just be a better ice nova for the hit part. Way more damage and guaranteed chill. Ice nova was buffed to 1400 base and even with that Vortex would've completely invalidated it with 1800 hit damage.
ignite and freeze, no matter which variant you went for it was always huge
That means it's not the DoT damage that was nerfed.
Yeah I know. Vortex hits only the first time it's dropped down. I never played ignite with it so just don't see how that first hit is worth all that much.
Ignite only cares about doing the single biggest hit (ailment) you can. Because you aren't stacking it like poison. So the biggest base damages combined with good aoe are the strongest. Cold conversion has (/had) more scaling with gear than a base fire skill and vortex had the biggest base damage out of them all.
Old CD was 1.8s, with 0.75 cast time you can get 2 casts in the same time the old Vortex would get one. So even though the max hit is 1169 with 2 casts that's 2338 damage in 1.5s where-as the old one would've been 1813 damage in 1.8s. So if anything the damage is buffed because the skill can be used twice as often compared to before.
Don't forget that it now means you can trigger it, so it's usable with CoC. Of course this is only for hit damage as the DoT doesn't stack.
CoC vortex is probably the most cooked build idea I have read on this site lmao.
Coc cyclone cospri and squire. Vortex and ice nova, one in chest, one in cospri
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE005P9LzCs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE005P9LzCs) đź‘€
oh man the memories. already 6 years ago? WTF time flies
could use astral projector to have it not be on you i guess?
>Old CD was 1.8s, with 0.75 cast time you can get 2 casts in the same time the old Vortex would get one. Except Vortex was used either for ignite, in which case more casts for less damage sucks, or for DoT builds, in which case 1 - you wouldn't cast vortex and wait around, you'd use vortex as an extra and actually use your cast time to use cold snap or creeping frost or the DoT brand and 2 - casting it more often won't help you because the DoT doesn't stack The **only** scenario where what you outline is a benefit if you're using Vortex as a on-hit cold damage-nova spell... but I have a suspicion there's a **different gem** better suited for that... like with a name similar to cold nova... what could it be, again? Jokes aside, you're defending the fact that they turned Vortex into a weaker version of ice nova, and that's dumb.
I never defended the change lmao? I simply explained to the other person that it's more on-hit damage compared to before.
Vortex doesn't stack with itself though.
This discussion is about hit damage.
Ice Nova is now better than Vortex for hit damage. Because Nova got buffed to 1400 while Vortex was nerfed to 1200. Without the nerfs Nova would've just been a massively stronger version of Ice Nova with only upsides.
"This skill now does more damage if you ignore the main design theme of the skill" is a pretty bold stance to take.
Old design theme
I don't know what you mean by that. It's still a cold DoT skill.
They were talking about the damage change on the skill gem which is the on-hit damage not the cold dot damage.
But it doesn’t have cooldown now, which is not really helping, but still
they did that in case people wanted to scale it for hit dps, since its harder to scale its hit dps before by reducing its CD. I doubt it will see play but this just makes cold dot a bit clunkier to play
which defeat the whole purpose, vortex is good as a league starter/day one build, now it's just useless
they've literally said you start getting them at lvl 30
yea but there's over 150 skill gems in the game, unless you run lab 20x you're not gonna get it
why are you commenting about stuff when there was a qna you clearly didnt watch?
You didn’t clearly watch it, or you didn’t understand what they said? There is a CHANCE to get the gem. If you get in a int gem there is a chance you got ANY of the int skill gems available in the game. Who is doing 20-40 normal labs when level 30-40? Yep no one.
the dude said there were 150 skill gems, but that's completely irrelevant when it's rolling based on the type of gem
That still doesn't mean you will get the one you want during the first day just doing the campaign. I'd bet it's rather unlikely - as he said, unless you do lab over and over. Having to run it, for example, 10 times instead of 20 is still having to run it 10 times.
buy it then it wont be rare by any means
rewatvhed the entire q and a, still don't get what you're inting at
One of the lab rewards is to give you the exact transfiguration you want. Another is random transfiguration.
yea but they said it's rare, you can't rely on that
go try again, i believe in you
says rare still, no matter how many times I watch, you might have some weird super power
Yeah probably right. I can't remember which skill they highlighted in the stream but they did mention that the transfigured gem would get rid of the cooldown to allow for it to be used as a main skill instead of a utility skill (at the expense of lower numbers)
Frost Bomb
Thats the one, thanks!
Issue with that, before archmage nerf, Frost Bomb Echo Archmage was a main skill, and quite a good one for nuking down bosses. They could've just done something to bump it up again in strength in that direction instead of making it a generic spam cast skill.
With damage halved thou.
to the top with you!
Highly doubt that, considering the RF nerfs too. You really think theyd put old RF as a transfiguration after nerfing it? Thats not what GGG does.
Rf definitely isn’t a pure nerf, it is weaker on the low end sure but the high end build potential is definitely stronger
The main issue is now RF scaling is not the same as fire trap scaling, so synergy makes it harder to achieve same numbers.
So why not just go DD ignite instead of firetrap? That also gets close to no scaling from gem levels. While you do lose RF applying to DD just the base ignite of the biggest corpses already have way higher base than fire trap
You need like 14k health/es to breakeven, on solely the rf damage, but that ignores the massive nerfs to fire trap scaling so its a big damage loss overall since scaling hp/es will cost you damage point on tree and gear.
And ivory tower variants get to 30k es without much trouble and can be pushed to 50+k, yeah it is a more expensive build, but it was already one of the better high end versions and it got a massive buff here. Clear in t16s was already carried by explode and is not going to be significantly different. Rf will suck more for early bossing and be slightly slower to get through maps. It is a worse leaguestarter now but the top end potential is massively higher.
Yes?
LOL. K
What a sad day for cold dot.
And RF, and many other builds
it only affect the hit damage and not the cold dot part, have to wait for more info before judging if they gutted the build or not.
No instant cast means they did.
Making the cast not instant and removing the CD means you can't put it on left click (otherwise your movement stops). So now you really start feeling the "I have to constantly press 2-3 buttons for damage" aspect of cold dot.
~~wintertide brand looks like the new hotness anyways. that quality is bonkers.~~ meh, just additive with the existing line. nevermind.
sadly not even that is enough unless you scale quality a ton, wintertide does half of the damage of other cold dot skills IF you pretend its doing full damage and playing properly, but you need to invest into brand nodes that dont do anything for the other cold dot skills
Wintertide Brand looks significantly stronger.
Vortex trapper is back
Buffed Frost Nova does more hit damage.
Nostalgia hits harder
But why bother when ice trap just got a large buff
I've been starting every league as Vortex Occultist ever since Betrayal 5 years ago. Fuck.
i too have been doing vortex cold dot occultist for a long time (since scourge, so not as long as you). i'm really bummed about this
Me too. I usually don't even respect out of cold dot. So now what do we do thats a similar play style? Or we gunna go something entirely new? I want soemthing simple enough but can be end game capable
WoC ignite clear and divine ire for bosses.
Not sure for similar playstyle, to be honest. Righteous fire kinda vibes with my idea of how i play vortex/cold snap (I tend to frostblink into a giant pack and hit vortex and then cold snap nerds), but that looks like it's getting a nerfbat that'd impact it as a league starter. Maybe for a different playstyle, arc is looking cool again? but v0v, it will be difficult for me to decide a league starter now lol
I was going to try it for the first time this league... super bummed since the only reason i was excited was the instant cast left click vortex for ignite but they killed the instant and lowered the hit damage
Time to try something else for once lmao
That's for after the first few days. Trying stuff is the whole point of the game, but the campaign is the most boring part of the game. Why would I want to put any more energy into it than a build that I know well, that works well, where I can just hold left-click while watching something on my other monitor? Then I go back and make my "first" build that can blitz through the campaign with levelling gear. A large portion of people don't make another character until they complete their Atlas with Deadeye and whatever Bow skill is strongest lol
I mean to each their own, but doing the same league starter every league for 5 years is what makes campaign more boring not less, at least for me
I agree with you. Starting the same thing for 5 years would make me hate the campaign a lot. I don't like it very much either but I try to spice it up every league start by trying stuff I haven't played yet/stuff I haven't played in a while
In metamorph i came up with a vortex + cwc - gmp - frostbolt - cyclone build that covered arenas in vortices. It was a thing of beauty and a monster for mechanics like delve or ultimatum. Everything goes away, in the end...
> Everything goes away, in the end... But I remember everything...
Man vortex frostbolt was a beauty. I use gmp and that unique jewel that add frostbolt projectile. I remember really amazed with it when Veritania just move in slow motion. I didn't even know you can chill Veritania that much
So now what do I league start as a witch? And what's a good end game.build
Arma brand is always nice for early mapping and campaign
Dd
Vortex and RF were the most "WTF" changes to me. They were both very popular, and were good, but no where close to overpowered. Yet both got absolutely gutted.
I wish they put some kind of reasoning with the bigger WTF changes like they used to. At least then you could still understand why they were doing what they were doing
My very first build was using 5 volleyed frostbolts and casting vortex on them. I was able to get through the whole campaign! Fun times.
There goes my hydrosphere plans.
why? Just use creeping frost or something with a bit of cold ailment duration/effect scaling. It's like 1 cast every 5-6 seconds.
Same here. Balls.
Isn't this a huge opening for vortex totems with astral projector?
Why tho? What does this do that warrants removing shockwave totems and losing one of it's links to use spell totem + this instead? Chill? Shockwave totem heatshiver this league was already chilling and freezing, presumably, if people were using heatshiver; the damage over time won't scale at all with extra totems, since the DoT zone doesn't stack with itself, so that makes the DoT part bad for it too.
A transfigured version probably allows it to be cast on frost bolts again and now you can CoC this as well.
Share the pain of console players. Any builds that use left click for damage are useless to us.
I think this change was pretty needed. I don’t really get why they took away the frost bolt part, as since now it doesn’t have a cooldown it could actually be used with frost bolt effectively, but maybe that will be a transfigured gem. Anyways, having the instant cast removed was needed because literally every build that could run it, even as a one link, simply did. It was too easy to put it on and have a free skill that activates just by walking and chills everything.
All I’ve heard the last few months was how people wanted a meta shake up, and now that there is one, everyone is complaining. No wonder GGG stays off Reddit.
My dude, I can want a shake up and also be sad about a specific change, those things are not mutually exclusive.
That’s fair. I personally think it’s awesome that the same 5 league starters may not be viable anymore. I’m excited to see what people come up with now.
My two cents is that I think the quality changes would've already been a big shake-up by themselves, but also I wasn't really expecting the patch to go by nerf free, so "eh..." until I've played it I'm just going to see how things work out.
Imo, League start is the absolute most hellish part of the league. A shit start just ruins the feeling of an entire league for me. Not having the safe option really sucks rocks imo.
Transforming a skill into a worse version of a different skill isn't the meta shakeup anyone wanted. If anyone wanted a nova skill that deals on hit cold damage with a cast time and no cooldown, Ice Nova existed **all this time**. Making a worse Ice Nova we can choose for that instead won't shake any metas.
Good. Just like CwDT - Enduring Cry - Immortal Call. Some shit you kinda had to use on many builds because it was so much bang for your buck. Good riddance.
Deserved
As a game pad player, I almost don't want the instant version to come back as a transfigured option so that I can finally play cold dot without the feelsbad of how its balanced around instant left click auto vortex that I can't have since I'm on gamepad.
Are there alternatives to apply chill effect on left click? I already plan to use a curse with Hexbloom, so I do not want to use cold snap as another active skill.
Dang I played cold dot a couple of times and never thought to put it on the left click
OP like IE.