Ball of Lightning Needs a Rework – Overtuned skill

Teeba_Shei · April 22

Ball of Lightning needs to be brought in line with the other overtuned skills being addressed in the current PTS cycle—especially with subclassing on the horizon.

The core issue with the skill is that it’s not functioning the way the tooltip describes. According to the description, Ball of Lightning “intercepts up to 1 projectile attack made against you every 1 second for 3 seconds.” But in reality, due to the way projectile travel time interacts with the skill, it ends up absorbing way more than 1 per second—often dozens within a split second if multiple players attack at once.

In large fights, this effectively makes the user immune to projectiles, which is already a problem. But it’s even worse when you consider that the skill also teleports you out of melee range. So now you have a teleport that also gives near-total immunity to both melee and ranged attacks for a few seconds.

This is the exact kind of hard-counter design that’s historically been nerfed in ESO—think of Dragonknight’s Reflect before it got reworked. Abilities that invalidate entire playstyles shouldn’t exist in a balanced PvP environment.

A better approach might be to rework Ball of Lightning into a ranged damage reduction effect (say, 25-35% for 2-3 seconds), rather than full-on projectile immunity. That would keep the spirit of the skill—mitigating ranged pressure—without making it an “I can't die” button.

Would love to hear others’ thoughts, but I think it’s overdue that this skill gets some dev attention, especially since similar power-creep skills like Hardened Ward and Polar Wind are finally getting looked at.

TheLoreMaster420 · April 22

I’ve been really happy to see the current PTS addressing a lot of long-standing issues with overtuned skills—Northern Storm, Polar Wind, and even Hardened Ward getting adjustments is a big step in the right direction for overall class balance.

That said, Ball of Lightning has been a major pain point for a while now, and it honestly feels like it slipped through the cracks again.

Joy_Division · April 23

Sorcerers have had Bolt Escape for over 11 years and most of them, by quite a large margin, prefer Streak.

I think your proposed solution would make it out of line. Warden's absorb and reflect/stun or major heroism, DK's get 50% resistance for 6 seconds + freedom of movement, and you think that a ramping cost that provides a fraction of that resistance for a fraction of the time is in-line?

It's thoughts like this that make me very wary of subclassing: because people are pouncing on it as a time and justification to nerf the crap out anything they do not like or makes our classes once fun to play.

Hotdog_23 · April 23

Just know that the skill used to block 100 projectiles per second before they changed it to 1. Or at least that is what is in my old brain that I remember they said when they changed the skill awhile back. Too late and lazy to find the comment they made at the time.

It seems like they only changed it because someone posted a video of someone being chased by a large group and using the skill and basically taking no damage from it for several minutes.

Stay safe

Major_Mangle · April 23

As much as I agree that streak/BoL has been slightly overperforming (mainly streak tbh) for quite some time, it's not as oppressive/overtuned compared to range damage. If anything we need more counters to range damage, not less.

Teeba_Shei · April 23

Try playing a ranged build versus someone using ball of lightning and you'll understand why it is overtuned. It becomes a hard counter when you're ranged. The skill still absorbs 100 projectiles in one second. Once that one second has passed it does it again. You can't realistically use ranged attacks when ball of lightning is active. It also absorbs ultimates like meteor, soul assault, and bow ult.

Just to be clear here since there seems to be a misunderstand of how it works, the ball will only stop absorbing attacks once an attack has hit the ball. Since there is a travel time on all ranged abilities, except maybe force pulse, any attack fired will get absorbed until the first one hits. Wait 1 second and it will start doing that all over again. The end result is the ball can still absorb 100+ attacks in one second.

When this skill is in use you essentially lose the ability, as a ranged dps, to do damage to the player.

katorga · April 23

How do you know if the server deficiencies that make it appear Bolt Escape intercepts more than 1 projectile are not in reality making your projectiles not land?

I see that happen every single night in Cyro. I even saw that during vengeance.

gc0018 · April 23

I do have a Sorc alt, and it takes me 30 second to recall what skill "Ball of Lightning" is.... I am just curious about that at what percentage of sorc actually using it not streak?

ForumBully · April 24

I haven't run bolt escape since it used to actually do whats being claimed it does now. You would've really hated it back then.

supabicboi · April 24

its no where near overtuned, overused, overpowered, for this discussion to continue. maybe 3/10 sorcs uses it?

a good indication something is busted, is if its overused.

Zyaneth_Bal · April 24

supabicboi wrote: »

its no where near overtuned, overused, overpowered, for this discussion to continue. maybe 3/10 sorcs uses it?

a good indication something is busted, is if its overused.

More like 3 players per server tbh

Zyaneth_Bal · April 24

True, it does need a rework. At this point literally any change would be an upgrade.

Zyaneth_Bal · April 24

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

Try playing a ranged build versus someone using ball of lightning and you'll understand why it is overtuned. It becomes a hard counter when you're ranged. The skill still absorbs 100 projectiles in one second. Once that one second has passed it does it again. You can't realistically use ranged attacks when ball of lightning is active. It also absorbs ultimates like meteor, soul assault, and bow ult.

Just to be clear here since there seems to be a misunderstand of how it works, the ball will only stop absorbing attacks once an attack has hit the ball. Since there is a travel time on all ranged abilities, except maybe force pulse, any attack fired will get absorbed until the first one hits. Wait 1 second and it will start doing that all over again. The end result is the ball can still absorb 100+ attacks in one second.

When this skill is in use you essentially lose the ability, as a ranged dps, to do damage to the player.

As someone playing a ranged build: this is not true. In those few interactions I have with ball of lightning it always performs as poorly as the tooltip describes.
Should be more apparent if you actually try using ball of lightning yourself, then you’ll be able to see that it works as intended. It’s honestly odd you didn’t test the skill itself before posting.

Pinja · April 25

I didn't want to boost this tread, but I use BoL and I still have to roll dodge if I want to survive heavy amounts of incoming ranged attacks. Since it's nerf years ago it's only been a slight grace skill when facing ranged opponents. Charges and other gap closers still find their mark and negates the distance you get with Bolt Escape and morphs. It's like fighting Nbs with evil hunter, but more versatile. If you put a gap closer on it becomes trivial.

Bol used to stun, do damage, and absorb all projectiles. It's lost a of of life.

MashmalloMan · April 25

I haven't used BOL over Streak in 8 years? Tbf, I never liked Dizzy Swing which is about the only place a stam Sorc would use BOL over Streak because they still had a way to hard CC.

That said, I've wanted to use it and might if I take Assassination for Surprise attack due to it being instant + off balance, but I don't even know if I'll like that playstyle yet. Just a theory.

My interest in BOL isn't even about the projectile absorbtion, it's about the CC immunity because I enjoy high movement speed. So if you asked me, delete the projectile absorbtion because it's similarily problematic to old wings, replace it with 4s major expedition. I find it very weird that the class typically asociated with speed, doesn't have a decent major expedition option and it's attached to our armor skill, to which you need to give up minor expedition for. A Nightblade in comparison, can take Concealed Weapon and Path of Darkness to stack major/minor expedition. Much better design.

After that change, juice up Boundless Storm because it's been lacking in design for a long time. Something like:

Boundless Storm = shock, 6m radius, 30s, minor exp, +6% dmg per tick up to +90%
Hurricane = phys, 6-10m radius, 20s, minor exp, +12% dmg per tick up to 120%

Make both morphs give minor exp, start at 6m radius instead of 5m to better match the new 7m melee range vs the old 5m range. Boundless Storm still lasts 30s, but now also gets a slower damage scaling value to make it competitive to Hurricane in DPS, but over a longer period of time. Hurricane starts at 6m too, final radius ends 10m instead of 9m, rest of the skill stays the same, already great skill.

Shrug.

xylena_lazarow · April 25

Ball Lightning is purely defensive, while Streak is both defensive and offensive, making Streak the more efficient PvP bar slot. Ball Lightning does hard shut down some builds, but so do a lot of other tank skills that PvPers don't have room for. That said, I do agree it's badly designed and should probably get a rework.

Alpheu5 · April 25

>Ball of Lightning
>Overtuned

Ha ha ha ha

Ball of Lightning barely functions as a defensive skill since they removed the stun and reduced it to 1 projectile every second. You're better off dodge rolling out of a streak 9 times out of 10 to avoid the inevitable gap closer that follows. The biggest benefit it had post-nerf, at least in the time I gave it a chance in PVP before abandoning it, was that it still had the potential to absorb very poorly timed Meteors.