[3.0]PewPewPews Official Cheap Firestorm Build - Perfect for Newcomers/SSF

how important is cast speed? i picked up a 10% cast speed jewel and it made no difference whatsoever on my tooltip. dps stayed the same, cast speed went down from 0.36 to 0.34. not sure if its worth it at all. maybe more effective to get cast speed on the support gems in my 5L? or maybe i should just go get fire damage instead on jewels? not sure. i have no clue how you got down to ~0.22 cast time. whenever i get cast speed on my gear the impact it seems to make is minimal and i have a total of +166% cast speed on my firestorm w/ the jewel and +149 w/o (no clue why it falls 17% instead of 10%).

Assessing your real dps with firestorm is a matter of elegant guessing actually since the tooltip just give you information about the avg damage of a single fireball. Faster casting is huge, since it helps you to pile up more storms and help your mobility locking you on animation for less time, and it makes uptime of elemental overload easier to sustain.

My advice is to test it yourself, and i think volley is the best benchmark you can have since it's easy and has enough life to give you the chance to harmlessly keep an eye on his lifebar. Just try a few runs and it will give you an idea about how different setups benefit your room.

@187UNDFTD: Elemental focus will remove the chance of dealing any status effects with our skills. Even though we still shock every now and then, our uptime of HoT is far lower then it should be. We also miss out on the 50% flat damage increase, we get from shocking our enemies. All in all, I say it's not worth it.

@alkoxide: Very. Cast speed is quite odd, since, like you say, it does not visually add to our damage output. But it does, and has many uses besides that.
Since it's hard to actually display the damage output of firestorm(it all depends on how many storms you've cast, how many of the actual bolts are hitting that certain enemy, AoE etc etc), the only damage output the tooltip shows, is the average damage one bolt deals. That means, the duration of the firestorm, the cast speed of the firestorm, the AoE of the firestorm are not included even though they increase our damage output.

Cast speed does not speed up the time between bolts, that remains the same. Cast speed shortens the time we have to wait after we cast our firestorm. This means, we can use another action faster after we used our initial firestorm.

If we cast multiple firestorms on top of each other, this will increase our damage output, since we pile the firestorms on top of each other. And there are many cases you want to put two or three firestorms on top of each other, outside of bosses.

But, it also allows us to move away faster after we cast our firestorm. Bascially enhancing our mobility.

So cast speed increases our damage output, and increases our mobility(and also increases our clearspeed).

Now, I get 16% cast speed from my wand, have a level 18 spell echo(68%), and a level 19(38%) Faster Casting, and have a jewel that gives me another 4% cast speed. We also get another 8% from the tree. Meaning, I have 134% faster casting total. According to my offence tree I have 187% though. Not sure where I get that extra 50% from. Probably forgot something.

But yeah. Don't underestimate Cast speed. If you are dieing to Izaro, Atziri or other hard bosses, try picking up more cast speed might help :)

Really enjoying this build, finally got a new wep and moved up to doing t7/8 maps now.

Happy to hear :)

Made another quick vid btw. Found a nice Terrace map with both Enfeeble and Monster life. First thing that came to mind was "Well, that's a nice damage test!" Sallazzang, the boss from the Terrace map, is known for being hard to take down. While the boss had gotten a few nerfs over the time, as far as I know, none has affected his sustainability. Hence, this boss should be hard to take down, especially with those mods.

All Excited I decided to jump into the boss room... only to be majorly dissappointed.

Welp, at least this proves the build has plenty 'o damage. And the worst part is, that I'm far from maxed on my gears. Just a 5 link, no godly tier weapon or added damage from jewelry, and my firestorm isn't even level 20 yet, or has any quality yet.

I've been shouting out that Firestorm is op, ever since 2.0. Not sure why it got buffed in both 2.1 and 2.2, but this is getting out of control GGG :D

Also hoping for a 6link chest at some point, only a matter of time till I find one or get enough currency to buy one.

How is my gear coming along? Just hit 80 today using this build.

@imoshu: You've got some nice gear there! There are a few things you can work towards though(besides the obvious 6 link)
- See if you can get a nice firestorm mod on your helm. With the gear as it is now, you shouldn't be having much trouble killing merc Izaro(I usually farm Izaro on the better days, so 3+ keys, or short laby's)
- Same for the boots, some of the upgrades can increase your survivability or damage output by a decent amount.
-With catarina 5, you should be able to craft faster casting on your shield :)

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Appels_Zijn_Gezond wrote:

@imoshu: You've got some nice gear there! There are a few things you can work towards though(besides the obvious 6 link)
- See if you can get a nice firestorm mod on your helm. With the gear as it is now, you shouldn't be having much trouble killing merc Izaro(I usually farm Izaro on the better days, so 3+ keys, or short laby's)
- Same for the boots, some of the upgrades can increase your survivability or damage output by a decent amount.
-With catarina 5, you should be able to craft faster casting on your shield :)

Sweet! I'll start farming Merc Izaro for those enchants, I still need a bit more currency for a nice 6l, and I've been trying to get Catrarina to lv 5. I should be able to do it today. Thanks!

This is my gear so far, I've been having a good amount of success, been able to clear some T10 maps with no real issues so far. I'm not really sure where the best place to go from here is, I've got a I've been trying to 6L, but I'm crazy short on dex and would have to take the 30 node in the tree as well as craft it on my amulet I think to even wear it as it is now. But I assume 6L is probably a ways away.

The build is a lot of fun and very strong though, it's very satisfying to clear the bulk of trash in maps with 1-2 Firestorms. I've had no luck getting Firestorm enchant on helm so far though, There seems to be a ton of helm enchants.