Lightning Warp

I love the design of this skill but it feels a bit slow for offense. I had a suggestion for it that I believe would make it more useful for tanky builds but wouldn't take anything away from builds already using it as an escape tool.

Maybe Lightning Warp could do damage at set intervals during the teleport's delay. For example what if it dealt damage every .3 seconds to nearby enemies and then an additional burst when the teleport goes off. Based on that the range of your teleport would also effect the damage per mana of the spell. Longer teleports result in more damage and more chances to shock per mana, while short teleports would result in more damage per second instead(assuming the damage intervals were fast enough).

Im currently using this skill on a melee witch lvl 55. This skill is great to tele into the middle of crowds. Problemn is it needs a stun of some sort when u land cause its sometimes difficult to time your attacks right away and u end up getting stun locked. Also instead of precise targeting required to activate it Id prefer just a general area of mouse click. IT can be very difficult to find an opening to click to in crowded rooms. Also this skill still causes crashes. This is a great, fun skill that just neeeds a little more work and polish ot bring it on par with phase run.

Edit: Adding cold damage and very high crit chance seems to help give u that second to start meleeing after u land . Just need to fix the crashes and somewhat difficult targeting system now and this skill will be excellent.

More thoughts: The skill is useful...in pretty limited situations.

I said before that simply running to position yourself is usually more effective, and that hasn't really changed as I lvled. The main reason is that while you are running somewhere, you can track shifts in monster movement and adjust on the fly. If you screw up a lightning warp or enemies move in an unexpected way, well, you're going there anyways, and god help you.

When there's a big wall of enemies that would be difficult to navigate through, it's pretty nice. When enemies are focused on your minions, not moving much and not killing you while you wait for the teleport, it's pretty nice (since you can get in some damage while waiting for the port, unlike running there).

But I have to sort of remind myself to use it. It isn't good enough that I use it because I want to: I'd rather just run because LW doesn't give me enough benefits to justify complicating my monster killing. I use it because I think "hey I said I would try to get better at this lightning warp spell".

This skill is not good for either offense or defense, it's not even a good utility spell since it can't teleport over most objects.

The problem here is lighting warp attempts to roll offense, defense, and utility all into one ability but ends up failing at all three because in order to be balanced it does a crappy job at everything.

This spell suffers from an identity crisis, it needs to decide what it wants to do then become good at it and drop the rest.

It's time for lightning warp to stop being a liberal arts major and pick a field.

As a defensive/utility skill for escaping large crowds, it is completely obsoleted by leap slam, thanks to the enormous delay when trying to travel long distances. One way to balance it would be to add some kind of temporary defensive bonus after it is cast (the character could start to "phase out")

I hope the devs find time to fix the crashes with this skill now that the new patch is hosted. I was having alot of fun with it despite crashing about once per instance until I finally crashed death at 40ish :(

The damage output wasn't a problem at all until that point.If the crashing gets fixed, I intend to remake it because it was a fun.

This skill seems to have an identity crisis. What exactly is it supposed to be? Is it a nuke? An initiate? A ulity / defensive spell?

It feels like it is trying to do much and because of that, missing the mark on all points. It feels weird to try to use it as a nuke by standing on something and porting to the other side of it. It works fine as defensive / utility, but why would i ever use it over ice wall for that purpose?

Just seems like the skill needs some changes.

I, for one, find this a very useful skill if you have the experience needed to predict the enmy's moves and creativity to think of ways to use it (like, bear trap + warp + point blank shots)

Also, the fact that you can warp up/down cliffs is VERY useful.

The damage may be crap, but that doesn't really matter to me.


However, what i REALLY want to know is what will happen if you have 2 Lightning Warp gems, and you try to cast the second lightning warp while the first one is still active (as in still waiting for the teleport to occur).

Will it be castable? And if so, what will happen.

(I'd try this... but I only have 1 gem)

Two things

#1, this spell is honestly too slow. I feel like the cast time should be roughly half of what it currently is, and the cast-scaling with distance should probably be halved as well.

I feel like the right speed can easily be judged by travel time compared to running. For instance with 0% Movement speed you can actually run faster than this skill will allow you to move. That's not really a quick movement or quick escape skill. I would love to see it viable as a quick movement mechanic as well as an escape mechanic, similar to other class abilities.



#2 A slight addon to that first point, using the 20ish% Increased casting speed only makes you move at roughly 10-15% Runspeed. Maybe the casting speed of lightning warp should be based on your current movement speed so that it's always a little-tiny bit faster, kinda like phase walk.