Sick wand, wand that makes you sick.
The sorcerer’s had a bad week. Thanks to a scorched-earth style nerfing of defensive stats, Diablo 4’s magic user has turned from glass cannon to a pile of shattered glass. This is due to Blizzard’s wide-net philosophy hitting them harder than other classes, while not buffing their barrier generation or stats to compensate.
To add insult to injury, the sorcerer’s new ultra-rare unique—The Oculus, a rare wand—is barf-inducing, literally. The Oculus gives you the teleport enchantment for free, replacing your evade with a short-range teleport. However, this also causes it to teleport you to a completely random location. As PC Gamer’s Tyler Colp witheringly put it: “maybe it’ll teleport you to an action RPG that loves you.”
This might technically help the sorcerer from not folding in half as soon as a monster breathes at them the wrong way, but in practice it’s, uh. Just watch the video below, courtesy of reddit user dreamknoxville, which I should warn you contains a lot of flashing lights and might cause motion sickness.
This is what the new Sorc unique gameplay looks like (Flash Warning!) from r/diablo4
Aside from just looking like you’re rubberbanding at low ping, it’s clear the game’s camera—which is glued pretty close to the ground anyway—isn’t designed for rapid short-range teleportation. With no visual effect to break up the jumps, each jolt has this weird slow-down where the camera pumps the brakes after each teleport, leading to a stopping-and-starting rollercoaster that makes me want to hurl.
I’m not alone in that assessment. User so4d_st commented: “Got dizzy just by watching this clip, imagine playing hours like this,” while user metalmike6666 wrote: “Lmfao, I literally burst into laughter. This shit is hilariously terrible.” It’s not all bad, though—some players seem to like the fact this ultra-rare unique plays really, really weird, “it’s so fucking absurd I kind of like it.”
Still, just watching this in a tiny embedded video is giving me motion sickness, and I can’t imagine grinding for hours under these conditions. Unfortunately that’s been made more likely by other unpopular choices from this patch, which added a higher cost to certain Hellfire Event chests, nerfed player damage across the board, and had a weirdly spiteful-feeling 2 seconds added to teleporting out of a dungeon.
It all makes me feel a little bad for sorcerers going into season 1, though perhaps the defensive versions of the Malignant Hearts will soothe the pain. Until then their class is weaker, the game is slower, and all they got was this wand that makes them sick.
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