Firestorm

I really enjoyed firestorm during the stress test weekend (I can give more feed back if I had a beta key, just saying...) and the one concern I had was Bigger AoE passives the witch can delve into.

I liked the idea of a witch hurling huge balls of flame, but from what I've seen, and a little of what I've read on the forums, it seems that the AoE size increase reduces the damage that firestorm does.

is this being looked into? Has it been fixed? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Pie?

Since its increasing both the fireball impact area and the overall drop area, theres more "miss" space introduced when you use increased aoe things if its proportional.

For increased aoe effects to buff firestorm rather than hinder it, the fireball inpact areas would probably need a 2x bonus over the "drop area" they can land in for it to scale properly, or even not increase the drop area at all only the fireball aoe.

I'm not sure i understand how amplify works with this skill either. The radius part is fine (increase fireball aoe, increase drop zone) but for the +10% damage, is that affected by the -80% damage on firestorm? Does it end up applying +10% -80% = extra 2% damage? or does it stack additively with firestorm to be (-80%+10%) = -70% reduced damage?

Tried a fire witch during the stress test. Can't say I had any difficulty getting through the game at all.

Uniques and bosses dropped like flies in mere seconds of being under the firestorm.

This was the only targeted aoe duration damage spell I found, which made it invaluable for both killing stuff while they concentrate on hitting zomies, killing stuff because they only have 1 way to reach you, or simply killing stuff because the shield+ potions can actually sustain quite a few hits.

Passive build was mostly +fire damage and +mana on killing blows. Never had to use a mana potion again once I skilled the +15 mana passive, as Firestorm would drop group of monsters, getting more mana than I spent casting the thing. I didn't even feel the need to support it (piercing fireballs were fun though, but that's another topic), besides using the Elemental weakness curse (mostly on resistant uniques).

Anyway I felt the spell was both too powerful compared to the rest of the spells, yet I found no equivalent spell in other elements, making it totally necessary in my eyes.

-Mildaene.

The sounds of the Firestorm fireballs hitting the monsters should be louder (or changed), it doesn't give a good enough sensation of impact (for example the Fireball spell has an excellent impact sound). Also the monsters could scream a bit more because of the Firestorm, just to better suggest that they are affected.

Maybe i don't hear the impacts i expect because of my sound card: Sound Blaster X-FI.

In my opinion, Firestorm needs to fall down faster..
The time it takes from activating the skill, to the point where it actually hits the ground is too long.

When fighting against fast moving enemies, it's pretty hard to time the correct drop-down location compared to the enemy movement speed and "pre-combat" animation.

At this moment, my Fire Witch is lvl 37, where I'm focused in Pure spell (fire) damage and increased Burn damage.
I can fry the enemies at a pretty good speed (both packs and bosses) and burn effect works very nicely with this skill.

Since patch 0.98 I've leveled a fire damage witch to Ruthless and find Firestorm to outperform Fireball in every respect. It is superior as an AoE spell, a single target spell, and is spammable as a primary attack spell. I've paired Firestorm with Chance to Ignite and Item Rarity support gems and continuously spam the spell against any encounter. I think witch gameplay would improve by making two changes to the Firestorm spell to give it a niche alongside Fireball.

I would like to see the base AoE radius greatly increased to remove Firestorm's single target superiority as well as give it a clear distinction as an AoE vs Fireball. The base AoE radius currently is small enough for enough of the 8 hits per cast to land on the same target to out single target damage Fireball.

I think another improvement to Firestorm would be to increase its rain duration, maintain the same fireball droprate, and give it a cooldown. The result would be a cast and forget AoE that frees the player to weave in other spells of their choice. This change would make witch gameplay more engaging and robust as the player would be encouraged to mix spells. It may even attract Templars and Dex/Int characters to include it in their repertoire.

Thanks again Grinding Gear Games for making a wonderful game in the true spirit of D2.

I agree, that would make things more interesting, but it would also nerf the fire witch, and to offset that fireball would have to get a slight buff.
I'd like "weaving" spells a bit more, right now it's curses and firestorm only (Ruthless also)

I would agree with sentiments about firestorm seeming too strong relative to other spells. I've only tried out fireball, cold snap, and spark as alternatives so far, without much in the way of support gems, (still low level) and firestorm seems by far the highest damage spell available to me. (I still find cold snap useful for AoE crowd control).

Personally, I'd prefer to see an increased mana cost instead of a cooldown, if the damage remains as is. (I'm biased, as I'm trying to break Eldritch Battery and have been much more successful in getting absurd amounts of mana than I have been in spending it.)

Passives

Edit: reading about how burning works, I'm guessing Firestorm benefits less from burning than other fire spells, due to each hit doing very low damage, and burning not stacking. If this is the case, then perhaps it will be less impressive at higher levels, when it's more feasible to abuse the burning effect.

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Kldran wrote:

I would agree with sentiments about firestorm seeming too strong relative to other spells. I've only tried out fireball, cold snap, and spark as alternatives so far, without much in the way of support gems, (still low level) and firestorm seems by far the highest damage spell available to me. (I still find cold snap useful for AoE crowd control).

While this may be true for most spells, you also could argue that all those spells except spark with very fast cast and mp are useless in the lategame and so is firestorm.
By using concentrated area you can keep your damage high enough to just nearly get through merciless,but you have no way of killing enough in chaos.

The only spell that can do that right now is probably icespear with its 600% artillery crit bonus.

This spell was good before the 80% damage nerf. We need to go back to a maximum of 50%, increase the base crit chance, or do seperate crit rolls for each fireball.

Because of the way how "increased spell damage" is only added together it is impossible to reach usable damage values without crit on spells.

Edit: Sorry, I just got the game a couple days ago, and I got so exhausted that I accidentally replied in the wrong topic. How do I delete this post?