Should Blaze be nerfed a bit?
I've got a lvl 80ish sorc with pretty nice gear ("Flickering Flame", Lavagout, Infernostride, etc) with level 41 Blaze. With synergies maxed, and lvl 30ish FMastery, Blaze does about 31k per second. She's got 89% Faster Run/Walk (30% boots, 50% "Stealth", 9% charms). She's got -46% enemey fire res (10% glove, 10% boot, 26% staff). My sorc is in A4 NM right now, so perhaps Hell characters are all doing as well as she is.
Blaze stacks on itself, so if you run over a spot once, you do 31k on that spot, run back over and you now do 62k on that spot. Given 30 seconds or so to dance on a patch, and you should easily get up to about 1M dps on that spot. This is getting close to the damage cap of (I think) 65k per element on each frame. With -46% enemy fire res, this kills NM Council members in about 2-3 seconds, depending on number of people in the game.
Arguments against nerfing Blaze: 1) It's a fairly hard skill to use, since you need to herd critters over your patch. 2) It's only really effective when you're solo (no distractions to monsters chasing you), or have a team willing to cooperate. Teams usually do only when bosses are involved. 3) The skill promotes teamwork, since to be so overpowered you need someone to distract while you dance up a patch. 4) Despite it's high damage, killing trash is still relatively slow, since you need to run up, run back, wrangle stuff into the fire, rince and repeat. 5) Only a few bosses (Andy, Moloch, Sszak) are truly pwned by Blaze, some are easy (knock-backables like Council), some challenging (tele-bosses like Guardian and Darkness, or Dashing-AI like Darkness and Mariliths), while the rest are very difficult (Mephy, Bhaal, FireImmune stuff). 6) Sorcs are fragile characters, so a strong dps spell is alright.
Arguments for nerfing Blaze: 1) Party members might feel inadequate in boss battles, since they're often reduced to a distraction or boss-timer resetter. 2) Any char doing near the damage-cap every frame without skillers is too much, even when it takes them 30 seconds to acheive this damage.
If there's another patch, should Blaze be reduced or not? Has anyone else even played a Blaze sorc? Should it be reduced by just changing the synergies from 10% to 5%? This would reduce the dmg of my sorc from 30k to 18k, which seems more reasonable.
I would appreciate if others gave arguments for and against. Clearly I could only come up with a couple arguments for nerfing, but they are pretty strong reasons.
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