Firestorm

Heh, after playing with a Flicker Strike Duelist and seeing/hearing about other builds with their DPS in action...

Firestorm with +flat damage actually seems pretty balanced compared to them. Internal Witch balance is completely out of wack in that this spell makes a mockery of everything else in our own arsenal and doubles up as an amazing boss killer, but that's about it.

I was aiming to go frost, but got this gem early on as a drop.

Now that it passed level 6, it's one of the higher DPS spells I have.

Yet it seems to level off there and this with the low quality upgrade, seems to make this skill only very usable during a short section of the game.

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unicron wrote:

I was aiming to go frost, but got this gem early on as a drop.

Now that it passed level 6, it's one of the higher DPS spells I have.

Yet it seems to level off there and this with the low quality upgrade, seems to make this skill only very usable during a short section of the game.

I've found it's best if you leave it at level 1 and give it Added X damage support gems, especially Chaos Damage, and maybe Cold damage for defense. Since the mana cost comes mainly from leveling up Firestorm, and all leveling up Firestorm gives you is a paltry damage bonus, it seems much better to not level it up at all.

For example, one person mentioned in the global chat that after leveling up his Firestorm he had somewhere on the order of 80~111 fire damage and +500~600 chaos damage from Added Chaos Damage. The fire damage ends up being a very small portion of your overall damage.

Another added benefit of going with Added Chaos Damage is that you also have a great way to deal with those pesky Elemental Reflect mobs.


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I wanna say Firestorm is overpowered right now because of how much stronger it gets from Added X damage supports, but it honestly seems more like all the other spells are underpowered. If, in the future, when spells are boosted, I'd recommend increasing Firestorm's base damage and giving it a -x% overall damage penalty in order to accomplish the net effect of making flat +damage support gems weaker for this skill, as right now a single support gem can easily increase Firestorm's damage sixfold.

I think the interaction with flat damage gems is intentional. This rewards you for being smart and not levelling up firestorm.

I'd say firestorm is fine and everything else is just underpowered.

Oh heavens, its not intentional, GGG already flat out stated it.

Its just their holiday induced lack of manpower probably resulted on low priority for this fix.

What if they change the gem. Make time b/w fireballs .25 sec base from .15. But add a reduction of .01 per 2 levels such that at lvl 20, its back to the base. IE. A lvl 20 firestorm of any quality will result in the same damage output. Whatcha think?

I ve found a 9% quality and it didn't make much sense. Meteor every 0.14 seconds instead of every 0.15 seconds. That's not even an extra meteor over its entire duration. That can't be okay right? When I equip a normal and a 9% Firestorm they show up as exactly the same dps too in Offense tab.

my build and relevant equips
passives


equips




RESULTS:
lvl 8 firestorm
25 mana per cast
32-47 damage per hit
248 - 376 damage if all 8 meteors hit
4 zombies with 791 health that explode for 1582 damage
3 spectres that explode frequently
7 minions drawing fire from you so you can firestorm things and the occasional minion explosion to kill of the massive numbers of weakened enemies

notes:
the dps for this spell is displayed assuming only one hit occurs throughout the cast
chances are you'll get between 4 and 8 hits or more with bigger numbers since it can hit more than one target with each meteor
so the resultant dps is between 170 and 336 (for just the expected 8 hits)
and currently i am lvl 29

performance:
one shot whites
2-3 shots on blues
the minions hoarding around and locking down most bosses holding them in place until they die from firestorms or minion explosions

if you don't level your firestorm and add an chaos dmg to it your dmg will tenfold on lvl 31. also the mana cost will drop significantly.
doing so will make all fire dmg passives irrelevant, using only added spell dmg you can easily stack up a lot of damage.
by adding a cold dmg support gem you can get freeze on crit, combined with most of the available crit chance and dmg passives in the tree your dmg will be high enough to farm chaos starting level 43.
the only downside on that seems to be that you wont get any xp if you farm through levels 15 levels above your character and not doing so is simply not challenging.

on level 71 i have 2.1k dps which is enough to kill everything in chaos with 2-3 ppl in it. by removing the item Quality/Quantity gems from my armor replacing them with concentrated area and crit dmg i can easily reach ~4k dps with firestorm while keeping the manacost on a managable 23.
I still had a lot passives left after skilling all dmg relevant nodes so i have both big circles with energyshield bonus and the item quality/rarity passives.
my weapons give me high crit chance and my amulet a lot of crit dmg all my other equipment is optimised for energyshield and a lot of item q/r
with 25% crit chance and added cold dmg i freeze a lot of things, but i plan switching to daggers once i find some good ones with >160% crit chance for spells and some faster casting which will probably not only up my damage but also give me even better crowd control by freezing everything.
Here are my 2 wands and my amulet :

This skill got 2 blatant problems.

First, the natural scaling of the gem is just plain awful. It's much better to leave it un-leveled (is that a word :P) to abuse the second problem

Second, added chaos, added frost and added lightning damage all affect this skill way too much.


I'm sure that you can agree with me that keeping a spell at lvl 1 on purpose and linking 2-3 of those supports with maybe concentrated aoe or increased duration shouldn't deal maximal damage for almost no mana cost.


I'd suggest making the added supports to only give a percentage of their normal strength per meteorite and to make the scaling much more interesting (increase the radius of the meteorite damages, amount of falling meteorites, duration of the skill are all interesting options).