Witch - Fire, sucks.

Here is my personal rating of fire skills, I've extensively built around all of them before.

A rank
Fire Trap
B Rank
Molten Shell
Fireball
C Rank
Flame Totem
Burning Arrow
D Rank
Infernal Blow
E Rank
Firestorm

Fire Trap is absolutely incredible with burn damage and critical strikes and +AOE.
Molten Shell is incredible with burn damage, chance to ignite, +AOE and elemental proliferation.
Fireball is great with concentrated effect, burn damage, chance to ignite, and ele prolif.
Flame Totem is okay with dual totems. Best with blind or chance to flee on hit, or another on-hit effect.
Burning Arrow is okay with LMP and/or a focus on burn damage and chance to flee on hit.
Infernal Blow is mediocre with burn damage and crits.
Firestorm is terrible and only okay for supportive damage in conjunction with any of the above fire spells. It's pretty much unsalvageable as a main AOE skill, you need one of the others.

The main issue with all fire skills is they are primarily best as dots. Burn damage can be excessive in some instances, but it often leaves you vulnerable. Fire attacks at the moment are poor for long-ranged builds so you must build tanky to properly utilize them.

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Josephoenix wrote:

I've been playing for 7 month sir. fire trap is insanely powerful and no you don't need to be a rogue / whatever... it's best suited for casters. i won't go through the list, but let me say that you need a little more than 2 weeks of playing the game to have tried everything and the ability to understand everything.

as the moderator said, more skills are on their way... but fire isn't "lacking" at all.. if the problem is a lack of spells it is lightning, which they recently added arc for and more will come for that too...

i'm a little tired today so forgive me...but the QQing from players who are "so" new and haven't taken the necessary time to L2P is starting to get to me (this isn't directed solely at you)....

i'm taking a break.

Allow me to apologize in advance, i'm not going to do it later

I dont care how many months you've been playing. Doesn't automatically justify anything. I am level 62 almost 63.

Nice claim "Fire isn't lacking." ends there. Ok? Thanks bro.

Fire Trap? Ok, so Path of Exiles idea of a Fire Witch is running around laying Fire traps all over the place? Give me a break.

I've grouped with plenty of Cold / Lightning / Totems builds, they're absolutely way more powerful than my fire build and almost all my points are in Fire/Elemental talents.

concentrated effect?(50% more damage for free), what spells+ suports do you use? And maybe single target regenerating mobs, GMP applies 50% less damage penalty. I could kill regenerating mobs with fireball mines and bad spell weapon.

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Draqone wrote:

What can I say... i looked at a fire caster option. Made a build. it turned out very much a fire-melee build. So i made a fire templar and what can i say. he kicks ass.

Yes, fire witch isn't very viable unless you go into he templar tree.... but then not all builds should be equally viable.

Ummm sure, not all builds should be equally viable...

But when you think of the most basic Fire Witch, going pure damage and not many defensive talents you should be able to do an incredible amount of damage.

High survivability = should be low damage builds. Low survivability should be High damage.

My build isn't random, it consists of a BIT of health, some resists and the rest fire/elemental damage.

I agree that Fireball is not good enough. I been complaining for a long time is a bad projectiles spell. It would work better as a spell version of Rain of Arrow (but with added knockback effect).

I have a level 65 Fire witch in merciless. She uses 2 fireball gems one for single target and one for AoE, then she uses firetraps with Increased and increased AoE effect. Fireball + chance to ignite does 1.1k dps and the firetraps do 1.5k dps. Then add on flammability curse and things just burn up really fast.

So.... the OP doesn't like most of the fire spells for flavor reasons, and wants more the he does like instead?

Got it.

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vorthex wrote:

Ah yes, Righteous Fire... I think I wanna burn for 100% of my life per second as fire damage as a Witch. Seems really viable.

Fire resist, CS, regen. You don't need to keep it up 24/7, but it's easy to mitigate the damage to something managable, especially if you're properly keeping everything at a distance as you blow them up with fire.

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vorthex wrote:

Flame Totem? I'm not specced into totems. And if you arent specced into totems, totems are garbage.

How do you spec into totems? There's like... one or two Totem clusters, and the keystone only gives you more totems, not better totems.

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vorthex wrote:

Molten Shield? So now you want me to go in and tank with my 0 armor? I'm sure that will go well dude. I'm pretty sure these spells were designed for 1) a Templar maybe, 2) someone who is actually specced into totems and 3) ????? no idea.

Molten Shield gives you armor, and that armor compliments your ES to make it last a bit longer. What's more, if it goes off it does a fuckton of damage. Seriously, LOOK at the damage numbers.

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vorthex wrote:

Theyre trash spells. Not even interesting if you ask me. I'd restart completely with fire if I were the designers, those are not cool spells.

Flame Totem, Molten Shield, and Detonate Dead are all cool spells, in my opinion. Righteous Fire is, too, although I'm not sure it's really a damage spell. Fire Trap works, although it's in a weird place with Fire Witches because they want lots of Intelligence like other witches plus some Strength for other fire spells.

In any case, just because you don't think they're cool doesn't mean you get to ignore their existence. Fire Witches may be starved for skill options, but so is everyone else.

My original HC character in cb, a burning arrow ranger, was lvl71 and rank 4 on the hc ladder before dying to a gpu driver crash, and could effectively solo maelstrom of chaos. Its likely ill build my upcoming mf character around burning arrow as well.

I ran two fireball + firestorm totem + molten shell blood caster marauders to demigod finishes in 1-week cb events. They had strong dps and survivability, could clear high maps solo and never came close to death.

Current HC main runs a pair of firetraps as alternate skills and their burst + dot damage is excellent, as is the ability to snipe targets in locations too dangerous to try engaging with freezing pulse.

So, much as id certainly welcome more fire skills (or any skills for that matter), experience indicates that the current fire skillset is strong and viable from lvl 1 to endgame... providing the build and its execution are up to snuff, that is!

I play a L69 general elemental witch. I haven't specced into specific fire, lightning, or cold passive nodes, but man, my fireball rocks. Not viable? Fireball at 2.4k dps with LMP and faster casting and inc Crit chance. Having almost 50% chance to crit and crit multi of 300% helps. Flame totem with LMP and faster casting does around 1.7kdps. A friend supplied me with this, and I later found another for myself. You haven't linked this, so I'm assuming you haven't found it yet? This will definitely help with all fire witches:


(yes, its my spare, at iLevel 53, I'm going to attempt to 5/6L it!)

Its a fairly common drop, being a build enhancing unique you can spec around, similar to facebreakers.


And also the unique chest plate that enhances burning damage, which I don't have.

Elemtal proliferation rocks, amusing to use.
I haven't tried firetraps, don't have the gem, but it sounds like it will do well with my spec.
Haven't tried Molten shield. But sounds like this would benefit.
How about dual flame totems?

Who said Fire Witches are starved of options? What? All my gear is 4L. Skills I can't use cos I'm full up with gems, no space on my gear for more skill gems. I have too many options!

I am going spec the witch into a specialised Tanky Fire Witch once I get enough orbs or regret. Would be great to experiment with Righteous Fire then too!