I came back after a few playthroughs of the, what I would call, the pre-alpha, alpha and the beta. I personally like the skill thunderstrike and the change that was made to make it less powerful yet still viable. So far in playing around with builds around it as the main skill I noticed a quirk and a bug. To get the bug out of the way, sometimes it straight up will not do damage and I have to use another spell or two in order to deal damage again with it. What kind of bug this is I have no idea, whether it be a targeting issue, mana issue(using spent mana that is now rage), or whatever else. The quirks I noticed was that I was doing a substantial amount more damage from a farther distance, while in close proximity the spell would only do dozens. To put into a numerical example, bosses that close the gap either take 60 damage or yellow 4,000 depending on the distance.

A genuine problem that I have noticed in the current passive tree that is in the game now is that spell based builds are not nearly as viable. Thunderstrike is incredibly hard to build around without either fully investing into the warlock tree and some crit from the inner red tree. Compared to other builds that clear all content I find that 24k dps is simply impossible currently. I believe that this is a problem that can be solved through the future content thats due in the full game, but as it currently stands spell based gameplay is severely lacking due to the amount of damage nodes given to melee and proj based characters.

Currently I am running what I think to be the best possible set up for a spell based character is, which is a crit and ailment hybrid that benefits from the res% damage increase node in the one outter red tree. I say "think" because I currently do not see any difference with or without the ailment tree.

For any remedies to any of these problems. I would look into the coding of the thunderstrike spell itself and see if you can normalize or add consistency to the damage dealt and uproot the no damage problem. A solution, or rather a suggestion about the spellcasters in general, would be to make sure that all the characters are capitalizing on their play style. A renowned wizard who drops a iceberg on a bear should probably kill the bear just the same as I would expect the brute to chop it to bits. I would also suggest maybe adding that spells like thunderstrike benefit from either projectiles or a channel based modifier on the passive tree.

I look forward to the future content and the patches you roll out.

Best of luck,
BlackWings