Charged Bolt (BlizzCon 2008)

Charged Bolt is a tier 1 skill from the Wizard's Storm Skill Tree.

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This article was last up to date:

BlizzCon 2008

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Charged Bolt

Charged Bolts carpet the dungeon floor.

Active Skill
Description: Launch a volley of electric bolts. Critical hits from lightning damage stun targets for 2 sec.
Rank 1: 3 bolts. Each deals 1-8 damage.
Mana cost 8
Prerequisites: None
Damage Type: Lightning

The spell, familiar from Diablo I and Diablo II, returns in Diablo III. As previously, Charged Bolt send out a smattering of randomly-scattering charges, each of which deal minor damage to any enemy that passes over them. The strength of Charged Bolt comes not from the damage of each bolt, but from the carpeting effect of repeated casts. These can turn the floor into a field of death for any enemy without lightning immunity.

Hands on Report

Flux discussed the Charged Bolt skill in his Blizzcon Wizard gameplay report.

Charged Bolt is the third Tier 1 skill, this one from the Storm Skill Tree. Charged Bolt has been featured in Diablo I and Diablo II, and I’m sure everyone is familiar with it by now. Three little crackling bits of lightning are sent forth along the ground, where they zig and zag a bit, but move in a more or less straight line away from the Sorceress. I didn’t use this spell much, but it seemed to me that the bolts spread out quite a bit more than they did in D2, and that made it hard to hit anything in front of me with more than one bolt. That’s now how it looks in screenshots though, where the bolts seem to carpet the dungeon floor quite nicely. More testing will be required.

As soon as a Wizard leveled up, she earned a skill point, with all of the Tier 2 skills were available. The Tier 1 skills were open as well, but since Active skills could only get 1 point in the Blizzcon build, there were only passive skills to put that point into, on the first tier. I doubt that too many people at Blizzcon spent their points on skills like Arcane Power out of their great eagerness to add 12% more damage to all of their Arcane skills. (Not that that would have necessarily been a bad strategy, but most players were eager to see and try out the other active skills, not to incrementally boost their existing ones.)

Media

See more screenshots of Charged Bolt in the Image Gallery.