Thoughts on Shotgun Nerfs to FP?

The incinerator tank got almost everything nerfed. Block, arctic armour, CoD/LC if you used them, soon shotgunning and MoM/EB. Not much left for defense for caster.

Afternoon all,

In the 1st week of the Beta I tested 2 things,

1) freezing pulse
2) fireball

I levelled with FP and tbh without lmp it was very good and did plenty of damage, with lmp in my honest opinion it was severely lacking especially as the damage was considerably less. It also felt as if FP is now more of a melee spell if there is such a thing

Fireball however is just as fine as it always was excluding the single target dps, the explosions mean that you still clear as efficiently as when shotgunning was implemented. However I managed to mitigate this by firestorm, on a single target it did considerably more damage compared to the lmp fireball. So I wondered upon a balance solution but running both together.

I could not however find a complimentary skill for FP, then my thoughts started to wonder towards the new skills that may well have not been released into the beta as yet. Maybe this new cold skill Chris mentioned in ZiggyD's interview will do exactly what firestorm did for lmp fireball when I was testing that.

I certainly hope so although I don't believe hope is necessary as I have full confidence in GGG as always :)

GG GGG

The thing is, incinerate tank build was way stronger than FP. Incinerate tank could clear anything very easily and survive. FP, on the other hand, is inferior to incinerate in bossing Atziri and Uber Atziri. It takes a buttload of exalts to get good enough gear to clear atziri and uber atziri with FP. With tank incinerate, its much easier.

Anyways, I think FP has been fundamentally changed and will be one of the most weak cold skills. Why use FP when you can GC?

Nobody has mentioned how Added Lightning (Shock) interacts with LMP/GMP. Shocking is pretty important to shotgunning spells.

"

pianokingx3 wrote:

The thing is, incinerate tank build was way stronger than FP. Incinerate tank could clear anything very easily and survive. FP, on the other hand, is inferior to incinerate in bossing Atziri and Uber Atziri. It takes a buttload of exalts to get good enough gear to clear atziri and uber atziri with FP. With tank incinerate, its much easier.

Anyways, I think FP has been fundamentally changed and will be one of the most weak cold skills. Why use FP when you can GC?

havent fought atziri myself..but always thought it was a little unfair for builds built to curse, freeze or ignite or w/e..being (haha :P) left out in the cold when it comes to bosses which are immune to status effects/curses etc...

Maybe GGG wants more than one super skill that work with single and multiple targets. With the damage buff Fp will be not bad at all to clear trash and for single target you can use another cold spell, like cascade or ice spear. This will increase the value of caster staffs without +3, wich is nice too.

I disagree with shotgun. It made since. It's a mechanic grounded in reality, hence the name shotgun. Close up, multiple pellets or projectiles would hit most or all of the target, where as far away you may hit them a few times doing less damage overall.


Also, Incinerate was OP for the fact that for minimal investment you could wreak havoc and be tanky. Freeze pulse on its own is a dainty little area of coverage with no real way to scale it up, whilst Glacial Cascade can take advantage of area buffs in tree, and does damn good in a reasonable area of effect, coupled with the Hypothermia gem, frostbite, and cold pen.

Just to note: FP has been buffed substantially in the closed beta since it started.

It's weaker than it was before with GMP against a single target in melee range, but the damage is a lot more reasonable now.

It's always been a great skill in general due to its high crit chance (for a spell), low cast time, and inherent multi-hitting, so I don't think it's going to be unusable.

Also, the new support gems are not bad for it. Any cold spell is going to love the new cold support, and really, how much more packed can you get: Freezing Pulse with Spell Echo, Empower, Cold Pen, new cold support, Crit chance/multi/power-charge-on, Faster Proj/Enhance, GMP (for aoe purposes, not damage), Faster Casting, Added Cold/Chaos/Lightning...

"

pneuma wrote:

Just to note: FP has been buffed substantially in the closed beta since it started.

It's weaker than it was before with GMP against a single target in melee range, but the damage is a lot more reasonable now.

It's always been a great skill in general due to its high crit chance (for a spell), low cast time, and inherent multi-hitting, so I don't think it's going to be unusable.

Also, the new support gems are not bad for it. Any cold spell is going to love the new cold support, and really, how much more packed can you get: Freezing Pulse with Spell Echo, Empower, Cold Pen, new cold support, Crit chance/multi/power-charge-on, Faster Proj/Enhance, GMP (for aoe purposes, not damage), Faster Casting, Added Cold/Chaos/Lightning...

The thing is, FP already has an inherent disadvantage from other spells in that its damage gets extremely reduced over distance. It made sense for FP to do more damage the closer monsters got to you. It was a high risk, high reward situation. Now, you're putting yourself at great risk just to do 100% of the damage you should be doing.

And to refute your point about new support gems, why use FP when you can use glacial cascade? GC benefits just as much from the new cold supports as FP does. It was already on par with FP but with the shotgun nerfs, I dont see a reason to take FP over GC.

"

xSyK0TiC wrote:

Also, Incinerate was OP for the fact that for minimal investment you could wreak havoc and be tanky.

There was nothing op with incinerate. It was a way for people to play the entire content without spending gazillions of ex for gear (new players or ppl who hated trading). And don't tell me that this was the op thing about it every FB char could do the same and what happened? Right they balanced FB a little. But what have they done to incinerate? They simply killed the skill - right now (in beta) it is completely crap. I've seen a friend trying to build a new incinerator and it was a pain even to watch this shit. Nice trashmob clearing as always but the single target dps is just..... not even horrible is strong enough to describe this shit. :/