[1.3]Fireball Witch guide for beginners
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Hey there, thanks for the great guide. This has been my first character and I've gotten up to level 85 in Domination. Clear speed is great in high level maps - fire trip crits just melt everything on the screen with ele prolif and fireballs can take out pretty much any elite in a few blasts to the face. I was worried about squishiness for a while, but after getting Dream Fragments and stacking ES up to around 7.5k I find I don't have any problems with survivability on almost any map mod as long as I play smart. I've deviated a bit from the guide - am currently specing into the block chance nodes in the Ranger / Templar areas for some extra tankiness since killing things is really a non-issue at this point. I got Rainbowstrides and a Rathpith for some spell block, too, and am thinking of swapping out Eye of Chayula for a Stone of Lazhwar once I stack some more block if I find I can live without the stun immunity.
After I got enough ES I dropped the summon totem and went with Ice Spear linked to a 20/20 PCoC, faster casting, and GMP to generate power charges due to its high base crit chance and not wanting to sacrifice a link on my fireball - LMP - conc effect - fire pen - life leech. It's a little annoying though, having another active skill to manage - do you just link PCoC to fireball? Anyhow, currently saving up for a six link and looking forward to seeing what changes the new patch brings to the Witch area. Increased Crit Damage will make fireball ridiculous. With 7 power charges I crit about 2/3rds of the time with Fireball, not counting the bonus from Crit Weakness. IGN: magic_cat
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" from the mechanics page on "Block": "When an attack is blocked, the game also calculates if the attack would have caused a stun were it not blocked. If it would have caused a stun, the blocking animation is played, stunning you briefly." In other words, just because you have a high block chance and don't take damage often doesn't mean you won't get stunned. If you take off your eye of chayula thinking you got 70% block chance, think again. Every attack, blocked or not, will stun you. | |
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Block: what Kiedel wrote.
With rathpith and rainbow strides you should get 70-80% of your block as spell block. If you spend some points for Phalanx you will get an additional 15% (i would take those 4 block nodes before deflection). Ethereal Knives and the evangelist attacks aside, that gives enough protection vs spells as their elemental damage also gets mitigated by 75%. Imho stone of lazhwar won't be needed. Pcoc: I personally don't use it on my fireball witch. It would be an option for a sixth link that i don't have. And juggling between 3 spells is just to much hassle for me. If it doesn't bother you too much, getting the charges surly boosts your dps. | |
" Oh, duh. Good call. Eye of Chayula it is then. Moments like these kind of make me wish I had gone life instead of CI, but with my gear and the passive in the Templar section I'll have 95% of block chance applied to spells which ain't bad at all - it's mostly for phys spells (evangelists and EK like OP said) since my resists are capped and reflect isn't much of an issue with fire traps. " Yeah kind of a pain, but with Ice Spear + my base crit + a 20/20 PCoC + 7 power charges Ice Spear in its second form is at the cap for crit chance which makes it not too bad to throw one in every now and then to refresh my charges. I'm thinking of trying reduced mana + tempest shield + PCoC once I stack some more block to see if I can use that to passively keep up my power charges while playing solo, which is one reason I wanted to go Stone of Lazhwar as well. IGN: magic_cat
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I just wanted to post to thank you Bada_Bing for this guide. Just started the game a few weeks ago, and have been following your guide for my fire witch. Only level 58, but it has been tons of fun.
Thanks again! PS. First post. | |
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Hey Bada_Bing, I'm planning on rolling this build as it looks powerful and very fun. I have a few questions that I feel didn't really get touched on:
1) Can you comment on CI vs Life using this build? Which do you feel is more viable and why? I'm not sure what the main advantages of CI are besides chaos immunity. 2)Could you link your gear so that I have some idea of what specifically to look for? 3) What do you think about putting reduced mana + flammability + temporal chains on say a level 5 CWDT? |
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" 1) Chaos immunity is not the reason to go for an ES build. That would put the cart before the horse: The main advantage of an ES build is that you can get more ES on your endgame gear than life. You can have up to +109 life on your chest but 400-800 ES on an endgame chest. With the passives from the tree your ES pool usually is 50% - 100% larger than a life pool would be. Of course taking ES instead of life in the tree and no life on gear means you will have only several hundred life and will get one shot by chaos damage enemies. That's the reason one takes CI. To remove all life and get immunity. A normal life char has a big enough life pool to not be threatened by chaos damage. The downside: Smaller pool to choose gear from + ES gear gives no damage mitigation to physical damage. Life builds on the other hand can use armour or evasion gear. A CI char also suffers from status ailments and needs special gear to not get stun locked or perma frozen. For beginners i usually recommend life gear because of the better availability. The second reason is that fireball and fire traps use a lot of mana. A life build can take Eldritch Battery to boost the mana pool and thereby the mana regeneration rate (i have that on my char). A CI char can't do that and might run into mana problems. 2) It's pointless linking my gear: What gear you need depends on the mods of your other gear pieces. Life and resistances being the most important stats (on a life build) it wouldn't make sense to recommend let's say a triple res ring if you alreday have max resists. Some rough guidelines: Life and resists are the most important stats on gear. Look for amulets that boosts your DEX among other attributes as that attribute is always hard to increase for a witch (you need it to level your LMP or GMP gem). Don't buy stuff with cast speed mods. They cost extra currency and might just screw up your mana pool. Crit and spell damage are more desirable offensive mods. Use shields that give +24 to all resist. That will give you more freedom on your other gear. When going life, you will probably wear armour/ES hybrid gear. That fits best with the colour requirements of your gems and give some extra protection against physical damage. 3) Don't put two curses on your cwdt gem. When triggered they will just override each other. Use a defensive curse (either enfeeble or temporal chains) and enduring cry (for damage reduction) on a low level cwdt (lvl 1-5). As a second line of defense you can put a molten shell and a decoy totem (in case you don't want to use skel totem all the time) on a high level cwdt (max all three gems in that case). In neither case do you need reduced mana as triggering those spells doesn't need any mana. | |
" I appreciate your help. I will be doing a life based build as you recommended for me. I'm still getting my head around this game if you couldn't tell already, haha. So from your OP it looks like aside from fire trap and fireball, there's room for a few other things. You mentioned a couple auras which I will work into my build, but as far as another offensive spell, what do you think of Storm Call? I've used it for a bit and it seems very powerful, and I know there are some bosses with fire res like gravicius and the like that it would be useful against. Also, how should I gauge how high I should level a gem? Is there some sort of system you go by? Will you be updating your trees for the new patch? Last edited by ChillQuill on Mar 2, 2014, 3:00:17 PM
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" Fireball + fire trap is enough. You don't have enough sockets on your gear to use another offensive spell (unless you want to drop something more useful out of the aura/cwdt/skel totem pool). You also don't have enough passiv points to support another element. Flammability (or elemental weakness) curse + fire penetration usually is enough to kill even fire resistant mobs. I don't think switching to a badly supported lightning spell would give you much better results in those cases. Level your gems to max. 2 Exceptions: Cast when damage taken + enduring cry. When using that combo, leave CWDT at lvl 1 and enduring cry at level 5. Be careful with clarity as it reserves a lot of mana when maxed. It might be a good idea to use 2 clarity gems (keep one in the backhand while leveling). Stop leveling the first at lvl 10 and max the other to 15-18. If a lvl 18 reserves too much mana you can still go back to the lvl 10 clarity. It's a bit tough to give an exact level of clarity as it depends on your overall mana/mana reg. rate (including that on gear) and other auras you are running. Sure i'm gonna update. | |
" You are AWESOME. Thank you so much for the help. |
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