Is the wizard underpowered?

[NBarnes]

Yes but we need hydra because it's the only skill that can do damage while kiting. Without hydra it would be even worse i think.

If Hydra were just nerfed, yes, wizards would be completely boned. It's the only thing keeping wizards viable at the moment. But I think that, honestly, if Hydra were nerfed while at the same time other wizard skills were buffed to compensate, we'd end up with a better class. Hydra is boring. Disintegrate, Electrocute, Meteor, Blizzard, and many other skills are interesting.

[Deced]

So? That has nothing to do with the balance between classes. That just means the gear for ALL classes is more accessible. However, good crit gear is still very expensive.

It is simply not efficient to kite for 5-10 minutes to kill something when the Monk can beat it in 30 seconds and have higher survivability for the same amount of gold investment. That to me is a design problem.

There are two things to do in Inferno: Quest to completion if you care, and farm / level paragon. That means you're either arguing:

1. "Wizard is underpowered and has a harder time clearing the quests completions", to which I'm replying BS, cause if people could comfortably do it while using far inferior gear against monsters that were far more powerful two major patches ago, there's no reason Wizards today can't do it with or without Crit Mass. Or you're arguing:

2. "Wizard is underpowered in entry level gear situations", to which I'm replying it takes like... ten hours of farming even in CRAP gear in Act 1 before you could make your first million, and that's probably an inflated time. At which point you can afford to start upgrading gear. So a handful of hours farming in crap gear against the backdrop of hundreds of hours of farming / leveling paragon in not-crap gear, I'm contending is a silly argument and not worth anyone's time to complain about. Certainly not worth Blizzard's time to adjust in comparison to all the other actual content they could be working on. Also:

I cleared all of Inferno on Wizard on gear that today is worth less than 300k, with no Critical Mass, before patch 1.0.3 when I was running a tank Wizard at like <14000 DPS. And I maybe raged 1/8th of the packs on a bad day using Blizz/Hydra. If you're seriously taking 5-10 minutes per pack, two nerfs later, it's not the job that's underpowered, you're doing something very wrong. There's no way in hell Monk is 20x more powerful than Wizard at any phase of the game given comparable levels of gear. The idea you'd even suggest it is absurd.

And please stop with this "Crit gear is too expensive" nonsense. You can get low grade 80 Int, 80 Vit, Crit Rate gear for dirt cheap, and if you run Force Armor even with no resists, there's no way in hell you'll be LESS survivable then a comparative budget WD or DH. Stop comparing low grade gear Wizard's tankability to Barb and Monk. THAT is not bad game design,. It's simply an approach you personally dislike. The two aren't the same thing.

I love the fact that my Wizard can tank better than most barbs and monks. But that doesn't mean I actually believe they're conceptually supposed to.

You do probably need it to be comparable or better. Without it, the wizard is underpowered mathematically, especially compared to barbarian and monk. Just do a skill by skill... or passive by passive analysis... and you'll see it. Do a comparative analysis with effective health with similar cost in gear, and you'll see it too.

With Wrath of the Berserker, you can keep it up by doing critical hits

So. You're saying let's ignore Critical Mass on Wizard "cause crit gear is too expensive", but wanna compare it to a critical Thrive on Chaos Barbarian? Well, I can probably beat Federer at tennis if you didn't let him use his arms, I guess that means he sucks at it.

Every job past beginner stages will attempt to get Critical at some point, even ignoring other benefits simply because there are only a handful of avenues to increase DPS and thus character efficiency.

Effective HP analysis is irrelevant. EHP doesn't even begin to properly take into effect Life Restoration, which Wizard is very good in. And there's NOTHING in this game even remotely close in terms of effective HP compared to an infinitely regenerating Diamond Skin. Not to mention infinite Frost Nova.

Monk would be worse off without Serenity or One with Everything. But you're trying to compare them with these abilities to Wizard without their abilities.

The difference is that Demon Hunter has sharpshooter, which gives her first series of attacks 100% crit. Crit damage gear without crit chance is much cheaper than gear that has both, which means it's a fair point. Crit chance is also more expensive than crit damage too on pieces of gear other than a weapon. I wasn't trying to have my cake and eat it too. I guess you don't play a DH to know this?

With Wrath of the Berserker, you can keep it up by doing critical hits

It takes like approximately 30 seconds to charge a Sharpshooter to 100% crit from low end crit rates. When you're talking about low end gear spectrums, you need to fire many volleys per champ packs before they die because you do little damage. You're suggesting this ONE opening volley is SO POWERFUL that Demon Hunters will blow away Wizards. That's absolutely ridiculous. Sharpshooters actual value is up for debate, but trying to pretend it is overwhelmingly more powerful than something like Glass Cannon or Coldblooded for low end gear characters makes no sense.

And yes you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. Not only did you compare a critical geared DH to a non-crit geared Wizard, you tried to compare it to a critical Thrive on Chaos Barb as well.

have worse anti-CC abilities

You constantly have to have clutch teleports because of the dumb 16 second cool-down [...] That's 16 seconds of punishment for you!" I also don't find that illusionist works like the description says either.

I don't understand why the Wizard requires Critical Mass to make her anti-CC abilities like Teleport useful.

You do not need specialized gear to a barb make wrath of the berserker or leap effective.
You do not need specialized gear on a Witch doctor to make spirit walk effective.

You're going to lengths to complain that 16 second Teleport and 15 second Mirror Images are bad CC breaks cause of how long their recast is, yet you praise a 15 second Spirit Walk and a 120 second Wrath of Berserker as examples of good CC breaks. Does not compute. It doesn't even make sense BEFORE you factor in Illusionist or Crit Mass. Much less after.

Barring any new bugs I'm not of aware of, Illusionist works just fine. Hundreds if not thousands of people have used it in the past with no problems.

Mirror Image/Teleport is not enough. If they don't attack your mirror images, and your teleport is on cool down, then you're ****ed. Sometimes I don't know if people are playing the same game as I am. Sometimes you run into fast/teleporter/waller on the same pack, and what the hell do you do during the 16 second cool down period on your teleport? You think illusionist is going to help? LOL.

This is different than Witch Doctor without Spirit Walk up, or DH who's currently out of Discipline how now?

I wouldn't call the wizard resilient. If it can't turn invulnerable for a brief time like 3 other classes can, how resilient can it really be?

she's second worse when it comes to defense.

The thing that really gets me though is that it's impossible for the wizard to "out gear" this, unlike the monk or barbarian. Yes, there are bad affixes for the monk for example, but once you out-gear the content, no champion/elite pack matters anymore. This is not so with the wizard.

You know what? You're right about something. You and I are clearly not playing the same game, since it's obvious you've NEVER encountered a high end Wizard before.

Wizard can stand in the middle of Desecrator stacks, with Plague, Molten and Arcane lasers, while a pack of phasebeasts are hitting you, and not even bother spec'ing a CC break at all, because WHILE FROZEN, you can still recast a self overwriting Diamond Skin that is constantly having it's cooldown reset to zero from the Storm Chasers that have already been cast on screen.

Do NOT tell anyone that "Wizard is bad defensively" or that "no matter their gear things are too hard". Content is laughable for ANY job once your gear is good enough.

There is NO other job in the game that can literally walk up to three packs of Phasebeasts, Melanchors and Harpies at the SAME time, sit in front of their faces, and melt them down without taking a SINGLE point of damage in the process in Inferno. You have no idea what you're talking about.

--

Diablo 3 has Witch Doctor, the only job in the game that has no full time sustainable defensive self buff, and DH, a job whose success in meta game survivability is more heavily tied to one specific set of gear than any other job, and yet you think Wizard's the most underpowered? Wizard has:

- Energy Armor, a spell which has TWO runes that are among the best defensive buffs in the game
- Multiple CC breaks
- Multiple CC spells
- The most spammable and simple to target Snare in the entire game
- Damage spells of all types ranging from direct to fire and forget
- A mobility spell
- And arguably the most powerful passive in the game

and you're arguing "Wizard is underpowered" because "I wanna ignore the last point cause it's convenient for me to do so".

[Karth]

Deced you are my hero.

[RazeBarb]

I main Wizard since a month after release and I never had the feeling that I was underpowered by design. Sure, I want better gear to steamroll everything, but that's why I'm one of these people who'll play the game for years.

What I'd really like tho, is not getting penalized by Glass Cannon. Or if the want to penalize you, they should increase the damage from 15 to 20 or 25 %

[mysticc]

2. "Wizard is underpowered in entry level gear situations", to which I'm replying it takes like... ten hours of farming even in CRAP gear in Act 1 before you could make your first million, and that's probably an inflated time. At which point you can afford to start upgrading gear. So a handful of hours farming in crap gear against the backdrop of hundreds of hours of farming / leveling paragon in not-crap gear, I'm contending is a silly argument and not worth anyone's time to complain about. Certainly not worth Blizzard's time to adjust in comparison to all the other actual content they could be working on.

The 1 million gold gear set, or the 5 million gold gear set is better on a barb or monk than a wizard. You cannot build a CM wizard for this price. It is doubtful you can do it for 10. Thus, farming on wizard until you get CM gear is painfully slow. It doesn't matter if it's "possible" to do it - I'm not arguing that (which was your first point). I get the impression you didn't actually read my post.

I cleared all of Inferno on Wizard on gear that today is worth less than 300k, with no Critical Mass, before patch 1.0.3 when I was running a tank Wizard at like <14000 DPS.

Good for you? I bet it was not efficient. The point I am making is that you have 36k dps on a wizard and still be worse than any other class that has far less DPS. I don't care about your personal accomplishments - I care about the mathematical balance between the classes. Whether you can do it or not is totally irrelevant.

Basically, your argument is, "I can complete the game with a wizard fine, so the class is fine." That's not a very objective standard to judge class balance, as it completely ignores the other 4 classes.

And I maybe raged 1/8th of the packs on a bad day using Blizz/Hydra. If you're seriously taking 5-10 minutes per pack, two nerfs later, it's not the job that's underpowered, you're doing something very wrong.

I am exaggerating. It is still much longer than barb or monk, which is the point.

There's no way in hell Monk is 20x more powerful than Wizard at any phase of the game given comparable levels of gear. The idea you'd even suggest it is absurd.

I didn't say 20x more powerful, and I didn't say a monk. I said the barb's survivability was 25x that of a wizard. Please learn to read.

I also said monk's and barb's basic attacks do more damage, but I did not say 20x.

And please stop with this "Crit gear is too expensive" nonsense. You can get low grade 80 Int, 80 Vit, Crit Rate gear for dirt cheap, and if you run Force Armor even with no resists, there's no way in hell you'll be LESS survivable then a comparative budget WD or DH.

We are not comparing WD/DH for survivability. I already admitted that Wizard was more survivable compared to demon hunter - it's true. I can't comment on the Witch Doctor. Unlike some people, I don't comment on classes I never played in Inferno.

And your gear doesn't include resists, which means you're going to get one shot. Why bother with this kind of gear when you get str/vit/@res for cheap and take dozens of hits on a barb or monk and STILL do similar or even better damage? That's the point.

Stop comparing low grade gear Wizard's tankability to Barb and Monk. THAT is not bad game design,. It's simply an approach you personally dislike. The two aren't the same thing.

It is correct to compare. If one class is significantly less resilient than another, and is also doing less damage, that is definitely noteworthy.

I love the fact that my Wizard can tank better than most barbs and monks. But that doesn't mean I actually believe they're conceptually supposed to.

I'm not talking about CM wizards with items costing 10 million per slot.

So. You're saying let's ignore Critical Mass on Wizard "cause crit gear is too expensive", but wanna compare it to a critical Thrive on Chaos Barbarian? Well, I can probably beat Federer at tennis if you didn't let him use his arms, I guess that means he sucks at it.

I am NOT just saying to ignore crit gear for CM wizards - I also saying to ignore crit gear in general. I am saying that a non-crit barb and non-crit monk are much better than a non-crit wizard. Crit gear shouldn't have to be mandatory to be relatively efficient between classes, although I suspect entirely different class balance issues even when you factor crit gear with crit builds.

Every job past beginner stages will attempt to get Critical at some point, even ignoring other benefits simply because there are only a handful of avenues to increase DPS and thus character efficiency.

I am not ignoring them. I am saying to look at low-to-medium inferno gear class balance. I am narrowing the topic to class efficiency and balance for characters who can only spend 1-5 million, as opposed to 10 million per slot. Unlike you, this is where the majority of players are likely at.

There is a reason to compare classes without crit gear too - it really highlights the general usefulness of the majority of the class's passives and skills, and it points out design problems with them. When you use Critical Mass, you are basically ignorant of the class's design problems because you side-step them completely.

Effective HP analysis is irrelevant. EHP doesn't even begin to properly take into effect Life Restoration, which Wizard is very good in. And there's NOTHING in this game even remotely close in terms of effective HP compared to an infinitely regenerating Diamond Skin. Not to mention infinite Frost Nova.

Did you not read my post? That's an imbalance on the other spectrum. I am talking about the wizard being underpowered in the general sense, which is very noticeable when you use low-to-medium gear sets. Critical Mass and crit gear is an exception to the wizard because it gets around all of the class's issues. It does that so well in fact that you aren't even aware that there is fundamental problems with the class's design.

Monk would be worse off without Serenity or One with Everything. But you're trying to compare them with these abilities to Wizard without their abilities.

The difference is that Serenity is good regardless of the gear you use, and one with everything is not an "equip all or nothing" kind of skill. You can slowly add more chosen resists as you find and/or buy gear. Since you only need 600 @ res in act 2, it is not critical to get it up to 1000 right away as you're farming. There is a natural progression that the player can take with One With Everything.

On top of this, it's possible to out-gear One With Everything too.

With the Wizard, as an entry fee, you need 35-40% crit hit chance and tons of arcane power on crit gear. Good luck getting all of that with just 5 million, yet that's the only way to get the wizard out of being terribly inefficient to one of the better builds in the game.

It takes like approximately 30 seconds to charge a Sharpshooter to 100% crit from low end crit rates. When you're talking about low end gear spectrums, you need to fire many volleys per champ packs before they die because you do little damage. You're suggesting this ONE opening volley is SO POWERFUL that Demon Hunters will blow away Wizards. That's absolutely ridiculous. Sharpshooters actual value is up for debate, but trying to pretend it is overwhelmingly more powerful than something like Glass Cannon or Coldblooded for low end gear characters makes no sense.

I didn't say that - you're inferring it. The demon hunter, even without sharpshooter, can still nuke elite packs much more quickly with cluster arrow in any event. The wizard doesn't have quick-killing single-target abilities like the demon hunter, which means that even 30k dps on a demon hunter is going to get her much further - i.e. better than a wizard. This is true. Try it.

And yes you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. Not only did you compare a critical geared DH to a non-crit geared Wizard, you tried to compare it to a critical Thrive on Chaos Barb as well.

I didn't mention critical Thrive on Chaos at all.

You're going to lengths to complain that 16 second Teleport and 15 second Mirror Images are bad CC breaks cause of how long their recast is, yet you praise a 15 second Spirit Walk and a 120 second Wrath of Berserker as examples of good CC breaks. Does not compute. It doesn't even make sense BEFORE you factor in Illusionist or Crit Mass. Much less after.

You are cherry picking a small example out of all of the ones I listed. You are also dropping the fact that Smoke Screen, Serenity and Spirit Walk make you invulnerable. You are also ignoring Leap, which is entirely comparable skill and it gives you a massive armor bonus and is much easier to use. It is right to judge and compare.

This is different than Witch Doctor without Spirit Walk up, or DH who's currently out of Discipline how now?

With DH, you can cast smoke screen at least 4 times. Again, I don't play a WD on Inferno - I already said that and I have avoided using WD as a means of comparison. Regardless, there are already enough class imbalances that exist between the Wizard and the other 3 classes as I've pointed out.

You know what? You're right about something. You and I are clearly not playing the same game, since it's obvious you've NEVER encountered a high end Wizard before.

I've encountered them just fine. You just can't read that I said I wasn't talking about high-end wizards throughout my entire post.

Anyway, it's my day off. Have fun.

[mysticc]

I main Wizard since a month after release and I never had the feeling that I was underpowered by design. Sure, I want better gear to steamroll everything, but that's why I'm one of these people who'll play the game for years.

What I'd really like tho, is not getting penalized by Glass Cannon. Or if the want to penalize you, they should increase the damage from 15 to 20 or 25 %

It's not about the "feeling" of it - it's the math. If the wizard did not have CM, it would be mathematically inferior to other classes - namely the Monk and Barb. And when I say this, the DH and WD could also have the same under-powered issues too, but I really notice problems with the Wizard.

I agree that they need to increase damage on Glass Cannon. I suggest 15% damage, 3% crit chance and 30% crit damage. That'll make a big difference and will justify the loss in resists/armor. It also goes along with the theme of the "cannon" part, as 15% more damage is hardly exciting from a stylistic point of view.

[Delvin]

The point I am making is that you have 36k dps on a wizard and still be worse than any other class that has far less DPS.

That doesn't make any sense. If you have far more DPS, then you're better at farming, long as you don't die all the time. And you don't die all the time if you know how to use your abilities and don't gear 20k hp with no resists.

You're still comparing the defensive cooldowns between ranged and melee characters and continue to miss that melee needs more damage reduction because they take far more damage. When you play a ranged class and you're not geared for some gimmicky CM/Melee build, you're supposed to shoot enemies. Outside their melee range. And you cycle your defensive abilities (evocation is great too), so you can stay at range and take less damage against jailers and teleporters and whatever else might be unavoidable by just running around. If you see this concept and still need as much defense as barbs, then it's indeed an L2P issue.

As for comparison between ranged... smoke screen has far shorter duration than any other cooldown. Also witch doctors might have the single best defensive ability in the game, but they're more vulnerable than wizards when it's on cooldown. That passive armor+resistance buff sure is a luxury in this category.

[mysticc]

That doesn't make any sense. If you have far more DPS, then you're better at farming, long as you don't die all the time. And you don't die all the time if you know how to use your abilities and don't gear 20k hp with no resists.

Not all classes do the same damage in the game based on their character screen. For example, a monk with 20k dps kills extremely fast compared to many characters with a lot more dps on screen. This has to do with the character's skills. It is a valid comparison from this perspective, and is no different than people saying Witch Doctors with 100k dps are doing less damage than Barbs with 80k dps (such as they said on the last podcast on this site).

You're still comparing the defensive cooldowns between ranged and melee characters and continue to miss that melee needs more damage reduction because they take far more damage.

Read my post above where I already addressed this issue. Barbs get so much healing in addition to the damage reduction that their overall defensive capability is massively better than the wizard. If the wizard could avoid damage, then I would agree with your analysis, but it can't. There are simply too many affixes that do lots of damage and affect both melee and ranged classes in the same way. The only difference is that melee characters contend with it much better.

I think the decision to make monk's and barbs have the 30% damage reduction made them overpowered (or the ranged classes underpowered... depends on how you want to look at it). They already have massive healing or dodge or other damage mitigation skills/passives to contend with damage - they didn't need 30% more damage reduction on top of it.

Contrast this with a wizard - and she gets inferior damage reduction/mitigation (not just to barb, but to monks too, and even when compared to demon hunter discipline abilities). In fact, one of her damage passives actually makes the situation even worse.

Mathematically when you factor in all of the healing, the barbarian is at least 25 times harder to kill. This truth basically forced the CM wizard builds to be what they are. I'm sorry, but beyond CM, the wizard doesn't bring anything to the table to justify her usage - it's not like she's so much more flexible or does so much more damage compared to the Barbarian that taking this much of a defensive hit is worth the cost. It isn't worth it. And this is why lots of people are playing barbs, and why barbs farming the game are generally wealthier players. It's not an accident that this happened.

I would argue that if you take away the CM passive, everyone would see what I'm talking about - all of the class problems would surface and everyone would see them clearly.

As for comparison between ranged... smoke screen has far shorter duration than any other cooldown. Also witch doctors might have the single best defensive ability in the game, but they're more vulnerable than wizards when it's on cooldown. That passive armor+resistance buff sure is a luxury in this category.

It has a shorter duration, but it has no cool-down. None. And this requires no gear investment at all for it to work. In fact, the poorer you are, the better this skill is.

After the pet buff - and I could be wrong - I don't think WD will be more vulnerable now. I will get a WD to 60 and try it out. This is why I suspect that applying the same changes to mirror images as they did to pets would probably improve things greatly.

[Delvin]

Not all classes do the same damage in the game based on their character screen. For example, a monk with 20k dps kills extremely fast compared to many characters with a lot more dps on screen. This has to do with the character's skills. It is a valid comparison from this perspective, and is no different than people saying Witch Doctors with 100k dps are doing less damage than Barbs with 80k dps (such as they said on the last podcast on this site).

True, but I don't think wizards are particularly worse than other classes about this. You can cast'n'forget hydra+blizzard and do damage with a third skill of your choice simultaneously. They also updated the cold damage passive to boost all damage by +20% rather than just cold damage. This isn't shown on the character sheet either. Now I've not done any theorycrafting to figure out which class does the best effective dps but surely the comparison can't be *that* bad for wizards.

It has a shorter duration, but it has no cooldown. None. And this requires no gear investment at all for it to work. In fact, the poorer you are, the better this skill is.

Fair enough, I've not played a DH yet. You still can't keep it up for very long at a time though, no? So the same enemies that are the biggest danger for wizards (mostly Fast, Jailer I think) would be a problem for DH as well because they keep catching up to you.

After the pet buff - and I could be wrong - I don't think WD will be more vulnerable now. I will get a WD to 60 and try it out. This is why I suspect that applying the same changes to mirror images as they did to pets would probably improve things greatly.

Might be true about the pets, can't really test since my only WD died on hardcore a long time ago (interestingly if I was a wizard I would've lived, since spirit walk doesn't help against waller+desecrator but teleport does, I might be a bit biased against WD survivability :P)

[mysticc]

True, but I don't think wizards are particularly worse than other classes about this. You can cast'n'forget hydra+blizzard and do damage with a third skill of your choice simultaneously. They also updated the cold damage passive to boost all damage by +20% rather than just cold damage. This isn't shown on the character sheet either. Now I've not done any theorycrafting to figure out which class does the best effective dps but surely the comparison can't be *that* bad for wizards.

It is that bad. The wizard has better AoE potential, but all of the challenges are with elites, which primarily focus on 1-4 big threats. When you look at the game this way, you start to see that the wizard has less ways to deal big damage compared to other classes. She is an AoE-focused character by design in a game where single-target damage is king. This is why her damage in reality is less compared to demon hunter or monk... and for the lack of defensive abilities that she has, this doesn't seem like it's balanced.

Fair enough, I've not played a DH yet. You still can't keep it up for very long at a time though, no? So the same enemies that are the biggest danger for wizards (mostly Fast, Jailer I think) would be a problem for DH as well because they keep catching up to you.

Correct, but demon hunter at least can cast smoke screen multiple times before it's gone. It's still a problem, but it's not as much of a problem. She also has caltrops. Let's not forget she has better burst damage, so the situation is at least resolvable much more quickly. It still sucks, but it sucks a lot less because she can kill much faster.

Might be true about the pets, can't really test since my only WD died on hardcore a long time ago (interestingly if I was a wizard I would've lived, since spirit walk doesn't help against waller+desecrator but teleport does, I might be a bit biased against WD survivability :P)

Don't get me wrong, I think all of the range classes need buffing. I think the barbarian/monk heals, damage reduction/mitigation abilities and passives more than compensate for the fact that they are melee range already. Everyone should get this 30% to damage reduction buff... or they need to remove the 30% damage reduction buff entirely from the game, and then reduce damage acrossed the board by 30%. Either way works.