At the moment, Blizzard is testing the upcoming Season 5 on the PTR of Diablo 4. In addition to new content, there are changes for all classes – and almost exclusively buffs. However, during testing, players have noticed that sorceresses are even weaker than before. And they were already far from strong.
This is what is currently in Season 5:
- Since June 25, the PTR of Season 5 has been playable. The current changes and new features can be experienced there. You can find all the content of Season 5 at a glance.
- The focus is on the new activity “Infernal Hordes,” a roguelite mode where you fight waves of enemies and bosses for powerful loot.
- Blizzard is also adjusting the balance by increasing the damage of many skills and adjusting dozens of legendaries across all classes. You can find the full patch notes for the PTR of Season 5 here.
What is happening with the sorceress? Although the damage of many abilities is being increased, Blizzard has nerfed several skills for sorceresses in the current PTR patch. This primarily affects defensive spells:
- Teleport has a longer cooldown
- Ice Armor has a higher base barrier but is no longer increased by damage
- the cooldown of Flame Shield now only starts when the invulnerability has expired
All these skills are present in almost every top sorceress build because otherwise the class simply wouldn’t survive. Compared to other classes, sorceresses lack health points and defense.
Barbarians, for instance, are running around with almost 500,000 health points, while sorceresses struggle to reach 20,000 health points, rarely exceeding that. Additionally, there is another nerf to some of the sorceress’s passive glyphs:
- Burning Instinct grants less intelligence and is capped at +40%
- Elemental Summoner is capped at +30% damage
A user on Reddit directly compared the numbers for an Incinerate build between Live and PTR. His result: Sorceresses deal 40% less damage with this build in its new state.
“Sorceresses are the only balanced class”
In another thread on Reddit, the creator describes in detail the problems with the changes and the class itself. Sorceresses have been at the bottom of tier lists along with druids for a while now, and are hardly worth mentioning compared to the overpowering barbarians.
After his lengthy analysis and some contemplation, the user concludes: It is not the sorceresses that are the problem, but all the other classes. The way sorceresses scale is just right, that’s workable – with all others, it is not:
We scale in a reasonably predictable manner. All our builds (except Shatter) cluster closely together. A factor of 2 or 3 better than the others, at most. Honestly, that’s wonderful in a game with multipliers due to our scaling. The problem is: Because of this, we couldn’t keep up with the content, with our buffs. And we were unable to exploit other bugs like other classes.
The user argues: Either sorceresses need to “have their handcuffs removed” or all other classes need to be adjusted downwards. And that is exactly the right way, it is said. It is much easier to balance everything when everyone is only dealing millions and not billions of damage.
The comments and other threads on Reddit at least agree that sorceresses are currently far behind all other classes. Even druids have the potential to deal damage in the billions or more.
The criticism mainly is: Sorceresses are forced into certain builds and these are then nerfed because they are apparently “used too much.” Season 5 is still in the testing phase, and a lot can change by the release in August. The expert Raxxanterax agrees that the balancing is off but praises almost everything else about the PTR. Only the most important feature still needs help: Expert plays Diablo 4 Season 5 for 7 hours – explains what needs to be improved in the most important feature
