Firestorm

This skill has some serious cons.

- cannot expect serious damage from the burning effect of fire skills.

- cannot use herald of ice (fire skills in general)

- cannot use with EE.


I have a non-crit character which uses,

RF
EO
6L(with penetration gem)
Flammability
gems almost all 20/20
Vaal haste

could not kill a rare Volcanic Golem with regeneration aura in a Tire 10 map without any damage penalty mods.

I saw a famous streamers used once this skill for leveling, so it seems it is not bad for leveling purposes.

It may be good for crit builds for endgame levels, but at least my non-crit build lv.90 is not good at all.

By the way, the all fire Ice Storm might be much stronger and faster than the firestorm, since it has the innate chill effect which firestorm does not.


Also the fire balls of firestorm should have some inner core inside the ball of flame to fall from the sky, so the damage could have some physical component.

What is a good wand for Firestorm?

+% spell dmg?
+% fire dmg?
+X-Y fire dmg to spells?
+cast speed?

Which to prefer?
Is +X-Y fire dmg to spells inferior since firestorm damage effectiveness is 30%?

What's the best way to scale it's damage?

does cast speed decreases the triggering time of individual fireballs?.
meaning, the spell has a fireball land every 0.1 second for 2 sec(=20 balls). would cast speed make a fireball land every 0.05 sec(for ex.) for 40 fireballs over 2 sec?.

if it works only on the initial cast it's lame.

no, that would be double dipping!, exactly what the game needs right now. some competition for the poison.
(also, remove spell echo; always, remove spell echo from the game. until the game dies or i do, i'll hope for that)

I've made 2 different icestorm builds in previous leagues and decided to try firestorm this time to compare skills mechanic 'feeling'. I give up.

problems:
2 sec duration is too low; 3.5 is minimum 'ok-ish' for firestorm mechanic.
there is no way to increase duration, helm enchant is literally unobtainable (and too low), duration nodes are 'denied' because of lightning warp anti-synergy, duration gem is just wasted socket.
so, scaling cast speed and avg damage is the only way to make the skill 'work'.

animation is too flashy, with vaal haste on I can't even see the ground.

.9 cast time is too high, skill can't 'oneshot'; there is no build-in defensive mechanic like chill/freeze. it needs .6 sec cast time to be comparable with icestorm's 30%-100% mobs slow.

damage scaling is worse compare to icestorm, gem level progress is too delayed, lvl 75 - 18; 84 - 19; 90? - 20. at that lvl (85) I had 1200 int and base damage similar to lvl 24 firestorm.

suggestion: tune down skill effect, it shouldn't be that intrusive.

I love Firestorm... That and Dlame Totem rock.

Flame!!!*

Firestorm really needs its particles optimized for better performance. The first character i made in breach used firestorm as his main skill. The skill often caused massive fps drops, especially in the breaches themselves. I had a very tanky character and was able to survive most of the time, but it basically came to "I'm going to hold down my attack button and hope I'm still alive when this stops being a slideshow."

My other character (blade flurry) that I made second does not suffer fps issues beyond the norm.

For some context on my PC, i was playing discharge mjolner pre 2.5 without too much issue. At times firestorm causes more graphical lag than mjolner did, which is pretty crazy.

Firestorm at the moment is one of the best leveling & racing skills. Any buff or nerf seems to be quite significant

What will 3.0 bring for Firestorm
- removal of chaos conversion double/triple dipping
- potentially more duration on the tree?
- change of base dmg? (due to changes to ignite mechanics and mentioned numeric changes to fire spells)


The performance takes a big hit still. I tested only slightly how my Poisonstorm Marauder works with Ryzen 1600 + GTX 1080, still drops bellow 40, haven't tested in party play. I guess i will drop again into slide show due to server performance with too many hits.

adding duration or lowering the fall dmg frequency will only amplify the performance problem. Cast time makes Firestorm excelent for playing it with Cast while channeling, traps or mines.
That said, it makes self cast mapping or totem use quite crappy.