Thunderzon in new patch

So I was excited to see that storm-zon skills got attention in new patch. I've never played one before but just re-speced my zon on SP to be storm-zon. I happened to have the whole storm-zon set already so I thought it would be a good demo for upcoming ladder. But some serious questions came up..

Gear: full storm-zon set, cowboy belt and boots (for boots just best I could find in stash) rings: der nebel and seal of n kings, ammy: lamen

Questions/Issues
-tried build with max magnetic field.. but didn't hurt enemies in desc cold plains on players 1 that much. it just didn't do much damage. char sheet says up to 59k, granted 1-59k, but still not significant damage output at all..
-thundercrack was okay and I can see how this skill could be powerful, but even with full set it wasn't that good. Seems like it would be great with barb where their wpn damage is much more significant.
-hammer of z - reminds me of hammerdin back in clod. same skill animation. but is not long range and takes a few secs to get the whirlwind going.
-asterism - really cool passive no complaints here
-storm call - this of all the other attack skills in this tree did by far the most damage to cold plains enemies. And could clear really fast.
-And then, what uber skill to use? I tried curare at first.. thinking poison would be good extra source of damage, but none of the skills do a good job at spreading it. magnetic field does 1% wpn damage - so that factors curare damage by 1% too right?
-at first I was thinking sov would be perfect for this build (b/c it lacks reanimates overall) but then noticed sov does not boost lightning damage..
-paragon seems only option.. it's good but I was hoping for more offensive option.
-oh and lastly, I previously was playing totem necro on sin war and was loving it, and saw the storm-zon set had stormcrow totem. it worked well.. but there is no easy amazon skill to teleport your minions to you right? my totems only had 20k life and without teleport moving were easy targets.

I could be missing something completely here, but has anyone else had success with storm-zon build in new patch so far?

I had success in the old version. It seems to me the Stormzon set is biased towards thundercrack, which, is wrong. Stormcall is your main damage dealer for the masses, and a good single target oskill as the stormzon guide suggests is Hailstorm which you can find on higher level ammys. As far as I can tell, stormzon is a build where you create most of your equipment mid-game using ornate shrines. You want to reach that 199% Light pierce break point.

Fallenruin wrote:It seems to me the Stormzon set is biased towards thundercrack, which, is wrong. Stormcall is your main damage dealer for the masses, and a good single target oskill as the stormzon guide suggests is Hailstorm which you can find on higher level ammys. As far as I can tell, stormzon is a build where you create most of your equipment mid-game using ornate shrines. You want to reach that 199% Light pierce break point.

I think what you fail to realize is that the Stormzon tree has two separate builds in it. One is a build that uses weapon damage (Thundercrack, Hammer of Zerae and Magnetic Field) and the other is a build that uses spell damage (Stormcall). They scale in very different ways, the former need a scepter with high weapon damage and items with attack speed on-striking procs for Magnetic Field to proc, the latter needs lightning spell damage, energy and cast speed. The only thing they have in common is that they both need -lightning pierce. It's as if holy/unholy melee and caster builds were placed in one tree.

The Stormzon set is for the first of these builds. Ideally the second one would have a set of its own (just like there are separate Paladin sets for melee and caster), but it's not a priority.

krex87 wrote:-tried build with max magnetic field.. but didn't hurt enemies in desc cold plains on players 1 that much. it just didn't do much damage. char sheet says up to 59k, granted 1-59k, but still not significant damage output at all.

The thing about Magnetic Field is that you REALLY need on-striking procs to use it well. That's kinda why I don't like this skill. It's almost entirely useless while you're leveling. But I need to try it in this patch, maybe it's better, who knows.

krex87 wrote:-hammer of z - reminds me of hammerdin back in clod. same skill animation. but is not long range and takes a few secs to get the whirlwind going.

I think Hammerdin-type skill really has no place in a fast-paced game like MXL. (Funnily Path of Exile also added a similar skill and it sucks there too).

krex87 wrote:-And then, what uber skill to use? I tried curare at first.. thinking poison would be good extra source of damage, but none of the skills do a good job at spreading it. magnetic field does 1% wpn damage - so that factors curare damage by 1% too right?

You can spread Curare with War Spirit.

Thanks for info! Do you think curare is best uber skill to pick with stormzon? For my personal play style, I feel like this build(s) lacks reanimates overall. I guess I need to try items outside set but I don't have all the ones I want to try :wall:

Probably Curare if you're going the weapon damage route, otherwise SoV? Not sure, I haven't played her in the late game enough.

I think the worst thing about the class is that it's horrible to play against lightning immunes. Makes leveling her feel absolutely terrible. If you look at the other zon trees none of them are focused entirely on a single element.

archon256 wrote:I think the worst thing about the class is that it's horrible to play against lightning immunes. Makes leveling her feel absolutely terrible. If you look at the other zon trees none of them are focused entirely on a single element.

Oh I wonder why it's called storm amazon. Maybe I should give it a pounce clone and I'm sure everyone will love the build. Long live median.

Anyways, saying the class is horrible to level up is definetly not true. Stormcall - just like apocalypse - is pretty much the "best you can ask for" in terms of a spell and its damage/aoe ratio. Also, there are infinite ways to deal with immunes: oskills, mercenaries, minions & even skills from the storm tree itself (since they contain physical damage). Yes if you spam lightning spells against lightning immunes that's definetly going to give you a bad time

what's another option besides set scepter for stormzon for wpn damage build? I guess I need to check runewords, but no su/ssu/sssu scepters have much wpn damage?

Marco wrote:
archon256 wrote:I think the worst thing about the class is that it's horrible to play against lightning immunes. Makes leveling her feel absolutely terrible. If you look at the other zon trees none of them are focused entirely on a single element.

Oh I wonder why it's called storm amazon. Maybe I should give it a pounce clone and I'm sure everyone will love the build. Long live median.

You could add cold damage and still stick to the Storm theme. Druid in cLoD has Hurricane which does cold damage, for example.
I don't know why you're bringing up Pounce, I didn't say I wanted press-one-button-to-spam skill.

Marco wrote:Anyways, saying the class is horrible to level up is definetly not true. Stormcall - just like apocalypse - is pretty much the "best you can ask for" in terms of a spell and its damage/aoe ratio. Also, there are infinite ways to deal with immunes: oskills, mercenaries, minions & even skills from the storm tree itself (since they contain physical damage). Yes if you spam lightning spells against lightning immunes that's definetly going to give you a bad time

I'm just saying how it felt when I was leveling. Physical part of Stormcall is less than half its damage. Imagine you're playing a build and killing things at some rate, and then suddenly your damage is debuffed by over 50%. It isn't enough to kill the build, but it feels bad. So you have to look for some other skill. And nothing else in the tree is good enough, so you have to rely on oskills or merc as you say. To me this is not fun.

Also just using Stormcall only applies to the caster build. If you're a weapon damage build you have to rely on the physical damage done by your scepter. Scepters have crap damage because Laz never designed them to be used for this purpose, and you never added any items for this other than set AFAIK. I ended up using a Honorific scepter and it didn't feel good for the investment I had to put in. But that was before the Thundercrack bugfix, maybe it's good enough now, I don't know.

Gonna test this build till endgame.

Last impression i got was her itemization is terrible despite than magnetic skill designed to be super proc-er.
But not even skill make up for it, at least to be like other caster or wdm ranger.

Im will just happy with more weapon choice alone than buff to skill mechanic

Good to hear. I probably won't have time to play anything other than Holy caster.

Also I'm kinda sick of trying to level a Stormzon in the last patch. The lack of itemization is really unappealing