Witch - Fire, sucks.

Im getting a sense in this game that elements aren't particularly balanced

Cold seems fine
Lightning seems broken (there is a reason why everyone is going LS or LA)
Fire seems underpowered (why do fire when you can do lightning?). The only redeeming feature of fire is preventing ES from regenning, and there are many other effective ways to do this

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soranamae wrote:

GGG should look at every skill and think "How can we make this as awesome as Freezing Pulse?"

That would be a good start

Agree 100%

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vorthex wrote:

Fire sucks. Terrible. I have almost every point into fire/elemental damage so far and I still do worse damage than lightning/cold.

You're doing it wrong.

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vorthex wrote:

I have no real defensive abilities as fire, and I still do terrible damage. Not to mention we have like... 2 spells? LOL.

Actually it's more like 4. LOL
Fireball, Firestorm, Flame Totem, and Molten Shield.

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vorthex wrote:

Either totems / lightning / ice is op or fire is underpowered.

Also, you need to nerf Greater Projectiles or make single target damage higher. Because your "single" target damage is even way higher when you're kind of close to a mob with Greater Projectiles. Almost everyone uses Greater Projectiles, its stupid.

Where's your statistical analysis to back this up?
As far as I've seen, GMP is only really used on Ice Spear totems. Most rangers either use a skill that's naturally an AoE or they use Chain. Melees don't use either.

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vorthex wrote:

Totems = effortless, easy to use, extremely fast (so they dont miss) and they pull aggro off the caster. Why would anyone not want to spec into totems?

Because that's not how they fucking work.
Mobs can burn down totems as fast as they're up, this is coming from a dual totem user btw.
They're not that fast, counting summon time to attack time, you could've cast your original spell at least twice. Also, LOL, they do miss. Do you play this game?
They only pull aggro off when they hit. Here's a newsflash: Projectiles are skillshots. It's called a skillshot for a reason: it can miss.

You seem to have the idea that Ice Spear Totems are laser guided ICBMs.

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vorthex wrote:

Oh, and I have pretty damn good items for my level like 70% spell dmg wand almost 100 percent crit chance on it for spells etc, spell damage gloves, shield, blahblah... ANNDDDD... I couldn't even kill a regenerating mob chain casting fireball because it out regenerated me. WTF! Its health literally didnt move. Thats including a -45% fire debuff and chain casting fireball with crit chance/crit damage/ chance to ignite/faster casting...

You're still doing it wrong. Have you heard of The Searing Touch?
I understand that you want to play the traditional witch, waving your staff around like you just got accepted to Hogwarts and such. However, if you actually want to do damage, you'll spec to do damage. I can 1-2 shot mobs with just Firestorm and The Searing Touch.

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vorthex wrote:

So uh, my suggestion is make fire damage better than cold and lightning. Cold has a lot of defensive benefits to it, fire does not. Lightning I view as more of an area effect tree, but should not do as much damage as single target fire.

gize pls maek fire betr den cold/light pls mi has a buttpain

Fire doesn't need anything more than another skill or two. It's extremely boring using the same less than handful of skills for 60+ levels. That's. It.
Fire Damage isn't bad if you know how to use it.

I can't help but question anyway, what are you doing wrong? My Flame Totems only have 600 DPS and they still kill fire resistant Fellshrine mobs on Merciless pretty easily.

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vorthex wrote:

It'd be nice to have a bit more variety of spells too. And the speed of Fireball SUCKS. its SO bad. I run almost as fast as my fireball (and yes I know theres projectile speed increase, but I basically miss 50% of my shots if a mob is moving.. or more??

The projectile speed on Fireball is pretty damn slow. I'll admit that.

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deteego wrote:

Im getting a sense in this game that elements aren't particularly balanced

I'm getting a sense that this game is still in fucking beta.

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deteego wrote:

Cold seems fine
Lightning seems broken (there is a reason why everyone is going LS or LA)

People are using Lightning Strike because it's the only melee skill with ridiculous range. It also scales off physical damage and hits multiple targets at once. For daggers/claws, it's the only ranged skill available that doesn't suffer from desync or bad scaling. For 2h weapon users, they're already fucked when they get to end-game unless they opt for LS.
Lightning Arrow is used for the AoE and shock buff.

This game isn't rocket science but more and more people seem to make it so.

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deteego wrote:

Fire seems underpowered (why do fire when you can do lightning?). The only redeeming feature of fire is preventing ES from regenning, and there are many other effective ways to do this

Why drive this car when I can drive the other?

Firestorm is a skillshot AoE that isn't a projectile. Concentrated Effect makes it stupid powerful, almost like Rain of Arrows. The way crit is calculated in this game, one cast can ignite an entire pack of mobs, even moreso with Elemental Proliferation.
Fireball is a projectile skillshot with the only worthwhile explosion-on-impact skill thus far. Slap LMP/GMP on it with Elemental Proliferation and ignite half the mob. GG.

Okay. First off, you have to watch this. Then read the rest of my post, in this guy's voice.

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vorthex wrote:

I have almost every point into fire/elemental damage so far and I still do worse damage than lightning/cold.

^ Right here. This is your problem. You get over +100% spell damage from your gear. Why on earth are you spending your wealth on points that grant less than +3% damage?

This is what you do. You get these two things, and then Faster Casting if you want it to go all out:




Then you need to get the curses, man. Two of them: Elemental Weakness and Flamabilititity. And hopefully they're in much better items than this crap:



Yeah, I've got crap for gear. Eyes on the ball.

Now, this stuff is hella important. Unless it's changed (and they love to change things on me, so I'm always feeling like Pants-On-The-Ground Donkey), burn damage receives another hit from monster resistance. If they have positive resistance, it does 4/3 your fire damage reduced by that amount. If they have negative; oh you can bet it multiplies that shaz. Needless to say, you can not tolerate any monster walking around, not letting itself be burnt to death as is the natural way of things.

So that's skills.

For passives, you're going to get more out of +% burning damage. The 80% you get from the Templar-Witch area; that's all the offense you go out of your way to get. 60% of your base damage per second, instead of 33%? And it's more than doubled if the monster isn't Hexproof, making it ~half of the source of your damage? Now it sounds like you're using fire.

Without any +skill level gear, this should get you within the 7k dps bracket for sure. It isn't face meltingly fantastic, but it's certainly not hopeless. And unlike shock, it's a bonus effect you're guaranteed to hit a boss with.

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casval776 wrote:

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deteego wrote:

Cold seems fine
Lightning seems broken (there is a reason why everyone is going LS or LA)

People are using Lightning Strike because it's the only melee skill with ridiculous range. It also scales off physical damage and hits multiple targets at once. For daggers/claws, it's the only ranged skill available that doesn't suffer from desync or bad scaling. For 2h weapon users, they're already fucked when they get to end-game unless they opt for LS.
Lightning Arrow is used for the AoE and shock buff.

No, people are using lightning because at 3 stacks its 220% more damage from every source, fire is never going to beat that even if you completely disregard the every source bit

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casval776 wrote:

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deteego wrote:

Fire seems underpowered (why do fire when you can do lightning?). The only redeeming feature of fire is preventing ES from regenning, and there are many other effective ways to do this

Why drive this car when I can drive the other?

Pointless analogy is pointless

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casval776 wrote:

Firestorm is a skillshot AoE that isn't a projectile. Concentrated Effect makes it stupid powerful, almost like Rain of Arrows. The way crit is calculated in this game, one cast can ignite an entire pack of mobs, even moreso with Elemental Proliferation.
Fireball is a projectile skillshot with the only worthwhile explosion-on-impact skill thus far. Slap LMP/GMP on it with Elemental Proliferation and ignite half the mob. GG.

Concentrated effect makes a lot of things stupidly powerful, regardless if they are fire based or not.

The point being made is, that fire as a debuff is crap, hence why most people are still using Lightning/Cold based abilities. Fire has a few strong spells (like molten shield and fireball) but regarding the rest, there are better options.

Yes concentrated effect + firestorm + couple of other things is strong, but something like spark + fork+ LMP/chain + GMP is stronger, just as LA + fork + LMP/chain+ GMP, is stronger.

The number of people I see using firebased skills I can barely put on my hand, and most of the time its fireball (one of the few decent fire spells) and molten shield, which is more used for its spell properties rather than its element (massive armor buff + massive feedback damage)

Right now, lightning is the highest total DPS element, cold is the best defensive element, and fire is... what? I think it's niche ought to be "best kiting damage." I say this, because; burn. If you strikes something via a ranged attack/spell, the target continues to take damage. This is a very good construct, and so I like that fire does this, and think it fits.

Overall, we already know we need more fire skills, and this is acknowledged by the devs. So we shouldn't dwell on that. But about burn:

Burn itself needs a bit of work. Right now it doesn't stack. And perhaps it shouldn't. But what it's doing now could be enhanced a bit to work a bit better. While I don't like to hang my hat on specific recommendations, I do like to make examples. So, for example:

* Could we change burn so that, if a target is burning, a second burn extends the burn time of the first burn, AND if the second burn is higher damage than the first, change the burn damage per second value to the second burn?

This would have the effect of making burn both longer and longer and worse and worse. To a point. After that, how about this:

* Could we add a secondary effect to burn past chance to flee, which is chance to interrupt attack/spell?

I don't agree that fireball is good firespell. Without faster projectiles it is slow and cannot hit shit. And that support then reduces number of support slots. And LMP is must for fireball, chance to burn as well and fire penetration. Culling strike is a much more useful skill then faster projectiles and so is chain or elemental proliferation.

I would not connect Concentrated effect to fireball, apparently it does not work on damage done to the target it hits but only its AoE effect afterwards which is then really small with concentrated (and it has really small base AoE).

Only fire spell that I ever went "Damn!" is fire trap, or more specifically Searing Touch + Fire Trap. But as a green gem it is no fair to call it a spell.

Fireball needs to be renamed into Firebolt, AoE effect removed, base projectiles speed x2 (probably mode DPS given as well; maybe even give it some chance to burn like Arc).

Then a new fire spell called Fireball made that is not a projectile, and has a big base AoE and is a fire version of Rain of Arrows but has a knockback effect that pushes all targets away from its center.

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Wittgenstein wrote:

welcome to beta! game is still being balanced, dev's have specially mentioned that more fire skills need to be implemented - and they will be - and also that fire damage is not on par with other types.

I was thinking of having my unique be a "converts all cold to fire" item as a stop-gap method until more skills are put in, but I am not sure.

Yes cause they haven't had nearly a year of being able to sort out fire magic users have they... oh wait a minute

Plenty of subpar and unpderpowered skills/builds/game mechanics have remained almost identical to when I played this over a year ago. Evasion is still awful and unreliable as a pure form, fire still sucks compared to ice and lightning for witches, melee is still horribroken and unbalanced compared to ranged, stacking all ranged attacks with multi projectiles is still the only thing worth bothering with... etc

What they seem to have done is focus on adding things which paper over those cracks, like totems (And also traps) which are the most retarded and cheap spec in the game, they are so OP its not even funny. Yes I could focus on high single target DPS or even AOEs as a caster OR I could socket everything bar 1 decent spell into totems and just faceroll whole areas of the game... hmm let me think

OP raises valid points, whats the UP side of fire. It doesn't do much more damage, it has no beneficial side effect (except a DOT) like lightning or ice... why bother with it? Adding more fire skills wont fix the awful ones which already exist either.

Fire needs to decide what it's going to be when it grows up. At the risk of being a boring self repeater ;-p I'll, err, self-repeat:

1. Cold is clearly the best element for doing damage and defending oneself.
2. Lightning wants to be the best DPS element.
3. I argue that fire should be the best kiting element.

Regarding #3, I think that means that burn should be reworked a bit. Burn has some excellent potential properties for kiting, and those should be enhanced. I put my own angle on this over in the "About Burn" thread, but you might have other ideas. Post something.

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NagiSoi wrote:

You know what sucks even more than fire? Physical damage xD, it has no effects poor damage... Why i must go elemental damage when i want physical ;(

Life and mana leach. Elemental skills only get 5% leech gems. Physical damage doesn't care about resistances and can push through armor reduction till it is like 5%. Highly succeptable to damage multipliers like additional fire damage and hatred.