Anyone else having issues with fire sorceress?

My brother is playing one. I am Lightning Arrow Deadeye Ranger. I have about 7k dps on my standard bow attack and I think 6k on LA now. This is after just finishing Act 4 and heading to the interludes. My brother has around 2.2k on Fireball, and it doesn't take long for him to run out of mana and then be waiting on mana potions to recharge, so not getting a lot of damage in. It also seems he has to try and choose a weapon with a good skill on it, the one he currently has seems to be no good on bosses because it needs corpses. But it had other good skills, so it's between having something he can use the main ability of consistently, or having a big buff to other stats (where scaling seems to pale compared to my Lightning Arrow Dead Eye).

Any tips that might help him out? We're still basically tearing through the campaign so far because of how much damage I do, but obviously he'd feel better if he had a more functional build going.

My opinion is they should just let you choose what skill you get to use for free on sorc weapons. Getting good rolls on affixes but the wrong free skill (and vice versa) seems like it would feel bad.

Yeah well no offense buddy but you're playing the most consistently top meta build since 0.1 so it isn't exactly fair to compare it to something like fire sorc which has never been close to top tier.

The DpS tooltips doesn't show the Fire Infused Fireball so the 2.2k isn't really relevant. Also, Fireball isn't good at mono target. Living Bomb + Fireball is great for packs but not for boss.

For boss:

- Flame Wall (Fortress + increased duration) -> To add flat fire damage to any projectile that pass through - including yours.

- Frost Bomb (Abundance + Spell Echo) -> With Potent Exposure support & Exposure bonus from passive tree you can reach -100% elemental resistance (so -50% on boss) + Cold Infusion generator. Again it also boost your lightning damage greatly.

- If he want to only play fire spell, Ember Fusillade (Multishot + reduced duration) is good but a bit clunky to use. If not, Frost Dart (Rapid Casting + Elemental Focus) hit really hard (especially with the Cold Infusion) and is easier to use.

Theoretically, you could also use Lightning Infusion on the Flame Wall to also add flat Lightning damage but I do find clunky to cast Orb of Storm just for that purpose as it does no damage & don't provide much utility either.

Hope it help

Ember fusillade is the strongest single target fire skill, use that for high single target dps against bosses. It's also more mana efficient than fireball.

For clearing packs using fireball, you need to generate fire infusions - living bomb is the easiest skill to use, grab +1 limit and do combo of x2 living bomb, fire ball for consistent remnants.

For damage scaling, + level of spell skills/level of fire skills is the most important source of scaling on gear. Downside is more mana cost.

Weapon swapping also exists, so you can assign all your spells to your strong boosting spell weapon and use the basic attack of your other weapon set. Go to skill menu and uncheck the I / II check boxes to assign spells to weapon set.

Hey there been playing a fire sorceress myself.

As others mentioned getting infusions regularly is key. Currently there are 2 skills to generate fire infusions. The first is living bomb and the second is snap.

Living bomb is available early and cakasaur as said should be used in a 2 spell combo for clearing.

Ergo living bomb x2 + fire ball.

Snap with cooldown reduction + harmonic remnants should always leave you with enough remnants to go around and just using fireball for 3-4 packs before snaping again. Snap can be used for clearing or can be used on dead burning bodies. Its pretty neat throughout campaign.

Depending on links/gems available I recommend something like:

Fireball + multishot (later wildshards/siones temper + unleash) + deliberation + zenith/controlled destruction + fiery death etc

This should give fireball good aoe overlap. Shooting 3 fireballs with mutlishot will only consume 1 infusion but buff all three fireballs. (Same with wildshards but i prefeer siones temper and not just wildshards)

For single target I went with incinerate. Its okay damage and I might swap but id has very little visual clutter and costs no mana just fuel. Ontop it will generate burning ground by consuming fire infusions and the ignite can be snapped granting you a fire infusion back on boss fights.

Ember fussilade is definetly not a bad choice either. Even fireball is possible if you stack alot of icewalls around your target and overlap the explosions that way. If you find/buy the unique sire of shards your brother will always shoot 5 fireballs that can result in alot of overlapps via icewall and help immensely with clear. Dont know about the price tag though.

Obvisouly there is always a option to swap to a other element or mix elements. There are some good videos about sorceress out there that showcase lightning/cold/fire sorcs or witches (bloodmages).

Thanks for the tips everyone. I passed them on.

I'm currently trying the same thing this season (I wanted to do something different). I abandoned snap and took the exploding corpses spell from the minions tree and have had a lot of fun creating a stack of dead bodies and then boom!

This has also been very helpful when enemies crawl out of the abyss when I come across those. Bodies are already everywhere and usually wipe those over aggressive little suckers out.

I've been swapping between Solar Orb and Firebolt for my main weapon & using Fireball + Living Bomb when I come across larger packs and magic enemies.