Cast Times and Hell Pit

thomasisalone

Well if there was ever an example of why long, buggy, and interruptible cast times could be class-breaking, Hell Pit really reveals it. Turns out it's quite difficult to cast spells when you either have to dodge hits, or those hits will interrupt your spells. Compounding this is the low magnitude of those spells because they have control effects. Too bad the stronger demons/devils are immune to some of those (of course, it's not consistent). And you better hope that your powers don't bug and reset your cast times .

This post is a vent, but I'll put some class feedback in too:

1) Reduce some of the cast times (this is a universal annoyance to people in my alliance who are trying cw)
2) Shatter Strike should be a class feature for both paragons, and replace Orb of Imposition. Orb is quite a useless class feature, and making it possible to do more damage to control immune mobs would make the cw more competitive. I'd add that the Shatter Strike shouldn't be a separate hit, it should be directly modifying the magnitude of the power to make it easier to proc damage thresholds for gear.
3) A useful aoe at-will for the arcanist. Chilling strike isn't too bad on the thaum, but storm pillar is not a viable at-will for its charged+aoe magnitude. It's not like anyone's going to miss arcane bolt...

erevel09

There were already a lot of ideas in many separate posts. Reducing cooldowns, fixing existing bugs etc. In the past few "episodes" we only get one change that I would consider to be somewhat decent and that was replacement of shard of endless avalanche spell for arcane tempest. Most of the others were cosmetic or something most cw's couldn't care less about.

As for Hell Pit, it is actually quite doable for wizards. Why? We have a lot of control spells. I speak from my perspective, but icy terrain, steal time and arcane tempest deal with quite a lot of mobs there and to add to that using oppresive force daily works great. Thing is, wizards needs to move a lot, have some way of protection (barkshield for example) and healing (in my case it's just insignia buff that heals me when my hp drops to 50% and companion purple slot boost with heals). Using those extra buffs from the Pit itself helps sometimes, so it's not really all that hard. But again, it's my prospective.

I agree that we could use a lot of fixes but I know it's not going to happen anytime soon. I hope I'm wrong though.

rikitaki

For the solo play a really helpful change would as well be the return of some previously discarded things:
a) return the "come and get it" gathering effect to the Entangling force while in mastery slot
b) grant combat advantage over the mobs that are frozen solid or lifted into the air

Otherwise - yes. If a class has too long cast times and lacks a good AoE at-will... the solo content has additional difficulty.