does elementist witch get better? low clear speed, normal difficult

So I'm playing as a caster witch, going to spec elementalist. I'm using fireball as my main ability.

I have two other end game characters both zerkers. One is a totem build the other is molten strike leech build.

I made a thread about this, but I feel like caster builds are weak. Both my zerkers were able to run lab, the totem zerker did normal lab at 27 with izaro buffed all the way up. If I did it on this witch, I would get two shotted.

The only other caster build I was able to do labs on is a inquisitor pizza sticks build.

Personally, I'm leaning towards totem builds because I can spam the totem let that kill the boss and I can just focus on running around dodging boss attacks.


Right now my clear speed on normal is subpar. I have to use ASM to keep getting the power charges. Fireball's cast speed is slow.

Normal bosses like Piety take forever to kill. On my molten strike build I killed the end normal bosses fast and easily. Totem build took a little longer. I killed malachai on my totem dude with just right click, a cat on my lap and fries in my other hand.

Any of my caster characters the tentacles get me, or the stuff on the ground. Can't move when I'm in the middle of casting. ><

I have been playing this game for a couple of months now, I'm seeing some big imbalances between skills and playstyles. I don't understand why, for example, vaal righteous fire should be in the game. I've seen people on youtube one-shot hydra. I've seen builds where people chain 3 active skills together and nuke bosses. For melee I see a lot of blade flurry I think it was ( the channeling skill); I hate the damn skill. But that is what a good portion of dualist or shadow builds use. I'm going just play my two zerkers I guess. I'm going to try ranger.

The other problem I have with this game is the loot. It's quantity not quality. GGG needs to take a page from Blizzard and make smart loot a thing. I run a ton of maps. I'm around t7-9 right now. never find a thing. been buying all of my gear.

The performance of your character in normal is not indicative of its endgame performance.

At the top end, casters do tend to be weaker in general than a nicely decked out melee, the man advantage of a caster is it doesn't need to be decked out fully to get good performance so it's suitable for starting the league or playing mostly/fully self found.

Also, although Fireball performs decently enough in endgame, it isn't a strong levelling spell, try something else. If you're set on a fire projectile spell, Molten orb with two threshold jewels is pretty sweet if you can stand the effects.

The loot is what you expect from an online economy game, if there was a good chance to drop something your char needs the market wouldn't function. That said, I tend to be mostly self-found until mid maps where I start going for my final setup so it isn't terribad.

Casters do get better.

They are pretty crummy in Norm/Cruel though... Even a lot of Merc they're kind of meh too.

For a number of reasons:

- They're independent of weapons. This means while a Melee/Bow user will gradually power up as they get new weapons for which their skills use the base damage from, a spell user is kind of stuck until they can move on to 5/6L gear and get more supports for their gems.

This can be alleviated somewhat by using items that boost the level of gems though, since spells are entirely focused on their gems being dope af, more links and more levels on them means much more power than that of Melee/Bows get from these things (With exception of certain skills that are pseudo spells like Explosive Arrow and Caustic Arrow)

- Casters are usually ES. Due to the main casting nodes being at the top of the tree, it's usually easiest to go ES. However, ES sucks early on. Before you get decent bases and the ability to craft good multipliers onto said decent bases, your health pool will be suck.

To top it off, you'll also have to be dealing with Chaos damage penetrating ES for a lot of your career, because Shav's and CI tend to really be more functional later when you have a decent ES pool to back them up (While Solaris is workable earlier, it doesn't provide ES itself, again hampering your health pool total)

- Lack of sustain. It's much harder to get strong sustain early on for casters. Especially elemental ones. Since it's really easy to get some leech going on attacks and life regen is naturally next to life nodes, melee/bows can find it easier to ramp up their sustain early.

Meanwhile casters, have to invest into other sources of leech such as the support gem, Warlord's Mark or if you're lucky Vinktar's. In addition, because of ES being your likely health pool, you also need to invest into Zealot's Oath or Ghost Reaver for these sustain options to even do anything for you.

However, once you do get to the higher levels and get past these drawbacks, casters do scale rather well.

Their area of effectiveness can be pretty huge since they can abuse Projectiles like a Bow user.

Their damage can be good because they have opportunities to multi-dip rather easily (Given how many "Spell Damage" and "Elemental Damage" nodes they have access to).

They can be safe because they can Totem their spells if they want.

They also can get some pretty nutty uniques that massively bolster their damage output too such as Doryani's Catalyst.

But yeah, they can be a bit tricky to level up when compared to non-casters, especially if you're not twinking them to power level them into the point where they can start getting good bases to make functional gear.