Been Gone, Need Assistance

[Xyzima]

Hey so i havent played in a while because i have been at basic training for the navy.

i Have a 20 monk, and 20 sorc, and am now vip(was premium before i left)
my sorc im dedicated to turning into a wizard, but a lot of the feats and enhancements seem to be changed. besides having to look through all the patch notes(last time i played is when red fens came out). can anyone summarize the major changes. and possible give some advice to start playing my characters again with these changes?

[Isharah]

I don't know about your monk, but about your sorcerer, I can give you some input for changes from u9.

1. Sorcerers can effectively nuke now, that is with proper gear a couple of sorcs can take down Harry in normal shroud in one minute.
2. (at least in Orien) Sorcerers fill nuker niche and are no longer expected to have godly enchantment DC.
3. Most common end-game savants: Air (make sure to work on your evoc DCs if you choose this) or Water. Savant PrE requires spell focus for evocation, so you might have to do a feat swap.
4. Some spells you will want to play with: niac's biting cold, eladar's electric surge, crushing despair (brief -5 penalty to will save, allows you to hold stuff even more effectively than before), symbol of death, deep slumber (many sleep immunities lifted) among many.
5. Extend doesn't work on offensive spells anymore.
6. Wail now takes forever to cool down. CD has been altered for many other spells.
7. Polar ray's a lot cheaper now.
8. You can now instakill epic mobs.
9. Elemental enhancements are now chopped up differently (each element has its own line).

IMO if you are a warfreak and enjoy nuking effectively, stay sorc. XD

[xtchizobr]

5. Extend doesn't work on offensive spells anymore.

in my opinion, this was simply an abomination. makes the feat a **** useless waste of a slot, and severely nerfed Acid/DoT and crowd control spells. Haste and Displacement are not enough reason to take it.

the firewall nerf was sorely needed, but taking away Extend kind of ruined the entire point.

give me a reason to cast something, please, because being a buff bot and watching the barbies run around hacking stuff up for free (instead of me dropping half my SP bar to kill the same encounter in the same amount of time) is just dumb.

i don't want to nuke, but nothing else is actually effective because they keep nerfing all the interesting spells.

blanket immunities do not a challenging monster make.