Fireball

In my opinion "elemental proliferation" can make Fireball OP, because it gets so much AOE while it still keeps the damage of a single target spell.

Nowadays you see people only go for chain and similar crap but they completly disregard the damage reduction.

However, fireball can be build pretty effectivly, imagine this:

-Fireball(20% quality to save "chance to ignite")
-Elemental proliferation (insane AOE)
-Firepenetration (makes "critical weakness" the better choice over flamability giving insane damage potential)
-increased critchance (for more ignite chance)
-added lighting damage (for shockstacks)
-concentrated effect (assuming that it works only with fireball AOE but not EP aoe)

+Searing touch with 6 links and critbuild


I am pretty sure that such a setup would be a lot of damage overkill. Currently I am doing such a build and the damage started to really shine in Act 2 cruel.

Though I am heavily underleveled(-5!) i oneshot packs of mobs if I crit and if I dont crit the buring is sufficient to kill packs of zombies in 2-3 seconds.


its true: Fireball is a pretty bad skill but it SCALES EXTREMLY WELL with certain support gems.

The key supportgems are in my opinion Elemental Proliferation and Concentrated Effect.


I hope GGG wont nerf my build since it will PROBABLY turn out to be completly OP^^
But I will have to see how it works, currently I am very satisfied with the build and I never had caster who dished out so much damage. Also the build synergizes well with the playstyle of a witch(hit and run).

Ignite is completly underrated imo

Cold witches suffer a lot of damage penalty due to the nature of low damage of coldskills and the multiple projectile malus.
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Renor wrote:
In my opinion "elemental proliferation" can make Fireball OP, because it gets so much AOE while it still keeps the damage of a single target spell.



I dont see why Elemental profileration does insane damage, i mean its still 33% over 4 second and this gets even more reduced if u get ignite more often then every 4 seconds, cause it doesnt stacks and the dmg is thrown away so the best outcome u can get is 33%/4 dmg each second what is like 8,25%/sec dmg of the original dmg.
Even with shock this would be weak assuming u can get 3 stacks and i doubt with the duration u get from added lightning damage that this will even happen. Maybe im wrong but for me this sounds pretty much underpowered and thats what fire is.. hoping for a buff soon.
Last edited by xXSaithXx on Feb 6, 2013, 4:27:08 AM
Ignite has some interesting mechanics that make it both amazing and terrible depending on how you use them... At least from my understanding of the mechanics.

Btw, ignite is 33% per second over 4 seconds.

Ignite is reduced by fire resistance. So, Mob with 50% fire resist, 100 fireball crit (base,after crit) would do 50 damage, then the ignite also gets reduced by half to 25/3 per second! But a mob with -50% resist, a 100 fireball does 150 damage, and then the ignite does 225/3 per second! Flamability and All res curse and fire penetration... (Vulnerability and torment chains also help)

Theres burn damage passives in the tree that add up to 80%, by the nature of it it would be multiplicative. So a 100 fireball with 50% fire damage, would do 150 damage, then the dot with 80% burn would do 150*1.8/3 per second. With the burn passives you really doing 240% of the hits damage over 4 seconds. Or 59% of it per second. On a -50% resist mob thatd be 360% of your original hit (which was 1.5 due to the resist already) over 4 seconds.

I have a hard time fitting fireball ignite into a crit build though, but fireball itself and flamability (and possibly a gem) give ignite chance so I'm thinkin non crit ignite build...

You're forgetting Chance to Ignite, which gives the biggest % chance to ignite on hit out of all the available options. 20% Quality is 2nd, Flammability is fairly weak in comparison to either but also reduces resists so obvious choice.

Though I'm currently doing an explosive arrow build and the skill is tons better for ignite shennanigans than fireball, since you can stack 5 "hits" to explode in one single hit, making the ignite that much stronger. A bit sad that a bow attack eclipses the common fire spells for fire status builds. Know another that also does better than fireball? Molten Shell. Does a ton more damage when it pops.
Well im not sure if the resistance counts for the burn damage too, but even if it get still outclassed by far by the other elements.
I mean cold has by far the best defensive utility fire has chance to flee, but this is annoying as hell either for a team or urself cause they ran out of every aoe.
So this even reduce the whole team damage.
Now there is shock which can stack to 120% bonus dmg of all sources and not even over time, instantly.(In my opinion its overpowered as hell 40% of all sources would be more then enough)
And on top of that most base dmg of lightning spells are even more then the fire ones.

Whats fire missing is his own role its hybrid atm and a rly bad one my solution would be this

Ice most defensive roles like it is
Lightning has the best team utility cause it boost all damage
So for me the obvious role for fire would be the most standalone damage without the utility of lightning that boosts the whole team and removing chance to flee of course.

Of course any other good role would fit in too(but for myself i dont find any other), just no
hybrid role, noone loves the "jack of all trades, master of none".

and we're back to: "buff the cast speed, buff the projectile speed and buff the aoe it does".

OR they could just make fireball a pure aoe spell which benefits from concentrated effect and increased area of effect support gems.

Currently it's a direct damage spell which does damage to nearby units, not an aoe that explodes on the position where the target is.
It already benefits from Inc. AoE and Conc. *shrug*
I wanted to do a fireball witch, but after playing up to level 18, fireball is really disappointing, and it doesn't seem to improve later when I read the comments.

It's sad when firestorm is a better single target than fireball :-/
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Well firestorm maybe better on single target but fireball is the better aoe with the right gems
Does the AoE effect also have a chance to ignite or stun enemies around the initial target?

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