fire, ice, lightning

Hi,
Im new in this game and i started playing witch. Currently im lvl 13. I didnt use any skill points. I want to know the pros and cons for fire ice and lightning. I dont ask which is better. Of course all of them are good at something and bad at something. I want to know this. Which role does what in parties ?

level 13 without spending any skill point!? i wonder how many times you died and how hard the game seems to be to you... in my opinion in this game you should start to create a new character with a general idea of a build, testing the passive tree on-line before and then in-game. if you plan to create an elemental spellcaster you have to decide now what skill you prefer.

take a look here http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/11707

actually it wasnt that hard. I just dont want to waste any of those points.

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gobeklimarul wrote:

Hi,
Im new in this game and i started playing witch. Currently im lvl 13. I didnt use any skill points. I want to know the pros and cons for fire ice and lightning. I dont ask which is better. Of course all of them are good at something and bad at something. I want to know this. Which role does what in parties ?

Fire is the worst right now, the additional effect burn is pretty meh.

Lightning shocks enemies and causes them to do more damage.

Ice has the best spells probably, and the additional effect is freezing them, which is basically a stun.

thanks. and one more question. Is ice + lightning build viable ?

For the record;

Level 12 witch, hardcore, no passives allocated other than the 2 starter ones (+40% regen, +10% spell power).

Died 3 times (1 time was me not paying attention), almost died soloing Brutus. Re-rolled on death.

Thanks for the info on the different elements, I was in the same position as OP.

Lol i played 44 lvls without spending a point and it was damn simple - died about 10 times - most of it was in last location of the act 3 xP

This is my experience with caster builds:

Lightning builds require the most gimmicks to "get going". It's very hard to scale their spells, and the only one that does reasonable damage has a massive drawback(Shock Nova, with its inner AoE in which it doesn't do damage). They have a very high damage potential due to shocks.

Spark is fairly effective on its own, providing lightning with a good all-rounder spell.

Arc is great at something noone really needs to do - clear low numbers of spread out mobs. Arc's main benefit is that it's the MOST AWESOME looking spell in the game.

Shock Nova is very high damage but has a significant drawback, requiring you to position yourself carefully to actually be able to hit mobs.

Lightning trap is a really good addition which adds a second "use out of the box" spell for lightning(along with spark).



Fire builds have the excellent fireball + multiple projectiles for single target(due to an effect called shotgunning - being able to land all the split projectiles on the same mob). Fireball can also make use of burn, which can be scaled to be a really high damage dot, and applied on whole packs via high crit/chance to ignite + elemental proliferation builds.

Most of the fire spells are excellent on their own as well, but don't make good use of the burn mechanic - firestorm is a great spell scaled by AoE increases. Incinerate deals very good damage, although it usually requires "tank" builds because you need to sit in one spot(just like inferno in D2).



Cold holds the reigning champion of simple & effective spells - Freezing Pulse. On its own, it's not very impressive, but once you add faster + multiple projectiles, it has high range, high damage, and can be shotgunned for great single target damage as well.

Cold snap is a great support due to a ridiculous freeze chance. Some builds try to bypass its cooldown to make it a primary nuke by generating lots of power charges.

Ice spear's damage is way too low, making it hard to be a main nuke. Its almost guaranteed crits in its second form give you great CC though(decent chance to freeze things when crit), and it can fuel builds which need crits to generate their resources.




To answer your question, in a party, a lightning build can provide shocks which scale *all* damage. A cold build can provide significant CC. Fire builds simply provide more damage.

Is it a good idea to focus on all three elements or just to focus on one?

You can definitely build a passive tree without any specific focus(simply taking +elemental damage and +spell damage nodes). Actually using all three elements may be unfeasible due to not enough links on your gear to create multiple strong spells.