fire vs lightning vs frost

I really tried to find out some information which will help me to choose what to choose, but unfortunatelly I did not find anything on forum....

I know that
frost = freeze, chill
lightning = possible 120% damage increase from shock
fire = some burning (I dont know how stron)

1) Can someone compare it also by DPS of each element?
2) I can see that not all elements have same quantity of spells, especially there is really low quantity of fire spells (Fire - 3, frost - 6, lightning - 5)
3) which spells are really usable?

thanks a lot for your help.

Main skills for each are the following.

Fire:
Fireball - Main DPS skill for fire builds, usually with GMP/LMP.
Firestorm - AoE skill that's really nice to use early on for any build, usually put onto a totem later on in fire builds.

Cold:
Freezing Pulse - Main cold DPS skill(Usually) doesn't hit as hard as fireball but it does pierce through everything so does great AoE damage. Hugely spammable with low mana cost and high cast speed, along with LMP + Faster projectiles it wipes out groups pretty quickly.
Ice Spear - The other main DPS skill in totem builds, near constant crits if used at range allows you to freeze most mobs until they die. Often put onto a totem with LMP.
Ice Nova - Another AoE skill, not used much at all in most builds, FP kills faster and IS does more damage.
Arctic Breath - AoE skill that's a little unreliable, needs things to really be lined up for it to work to best effect.

Lightning:
Arc - Jumps between targets, works best on two mobs together combined with chain, easy way to stack the shock effect.
Spark - Combined with fork fills the screen in seconds with little sparks, makes a mess but great for stacking shock on things. Spork is your friend.
Shock Nova - Pretty poor AoE skill that requires things to be within a certain range for it to do anything.


Cold/Crit or fire builds are the two most used, cold/crit gives you great CC both from FP AoE and the IS near constant crits. Fire doesn't have the CC but tends to have better damage so you just blast your way through things, the DoT also does some nice damage with the right items but doesn't stack.
Lightning is usually used as a support skill, doesn't IMO have great single target damage unless you keep shock stacks up, but even then you can just switch to fire/cold and do more damage with those. Tends to be thrown into summoner builds for the extra damage.

i'll explain the nature of each element

fire - this will typically have an aoe component to it, doing blast damage, and has your standard damage range.

the status alignment with this is burn which does 1/3 of the damage done to do fire damage over 4 seconds. this is great against bosses or any enemy with large hp pools, not so great against smaller units since a crit would probably kill them, or by the time they are burned they will probably be dead already. another trait about burn is that humanoids, sea witches and monkeys will all flee when burning.

though with element proliferation even if the burn is on a corpse, this will still cause everyone in the area to take fire damage.

so for pure damage and aoe, fire will be a good choice.

Frost - This element's traits are that its a weaker in terms of base damage (doesnt mean that you cant increase it to be a powerful attack) but to make up for this every cold damage will apply chill as long as the damage done by the cold damage is at least 3% of the target's max health. when chilled the enemy will have reduced cast time, attack speed and move speed. allowing you to dodge and kite very well with this element.

the alignment status that follows frost is freeze which will stun the target. though do not mistaken stun and freeze to be the same. the duration is calculated differently and freeze does not gain benefits from stuns.

another trait of this element is that enemies who die when they are frozen will have 100% chance to shatter, and enemies who die while chilled have a chance to shatter, not sure what the % is. shattered bodies are no longer available as corpses and thus can not be used for corpse spells such as raise zombies, specters, devouring totem, and such.

Lightning - this element's trait is that it will always have a low minimum damage but high max damage, though the average damage will be similar to fire. so if you wish to gamble, this is the element you'll want. if you want very high crit damage, this is probably the best element since with such a high base damage, your crit damage will be very high, though still not consistant.

the status alignment with this is shock which will increase any incoming damage to that target by 40% and each target can be shocked upto 3 times, giving a bonus of 120% damage boost. this is great when playing in a group since no matter what the damage your allies do, your gonna be improving them as well. same with a summoner's build being able to increase your minions damage based on the shocks.

so thats the nature of each element, hope that helps make your decision easier

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the status alignment with this is burn which does 1/3 of the damage done to do fire damage over 4 seconds. this is great against bosses or any enemy with large hp pools, not so great against smaller units since a crit would probably kill them, or by the time they are burned they will probably be dead already. another trait about burn is that humanoids, sea witches and monkeys will all flee when burning.

Just wanted to correct this, the actual Ignite value is 4/3 of the initial damage over 4 seconds, ie: 1/3 every second for 4 seconds. There are nodes in the passives tree which can increase this by up to 80%, and a few items that will do the same.

With Elemental Proliferation, Ignite becomes quite powerful.

really thanks for your answers ...

Hopefully I will be able to choose the right one for me or I will play all of them and buy some slots :-D

I found out that very often, so many interesting thing will drop ... uniques and rare that I am sometime creating new characters to take an advantage from it.

In the end it seems that there is 2 usable spells for each element:-) (not a lot, but to be honest with templar it seems that I can take....

Lightning strike and then combine it with glacial hammer or infernal blow (so not a big difference)

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Frost - This element's traits are that its a weaker in terms of base damage (doesnt mean that you cant increase it to be a powerful attack) but to make up for this every cold damage will apply chill as long as the damage done by the cold damage is at least 3% of the target's max health. when chilled the enemy will have reduced cast time, attack speed and move speed. allowing you to dodge and kite very well with this element.

"reduced cast time"?
-that sucks hairy balls