Trying to understand Righteous Fire.

I've always had a desire to build a Righteous Fire build. I know the skill was changed in 1.0, and I figured I'd give it a shot.

So, I assembled some gear, and started building.... "what I thought" was going to be a Righteous Fire build. But as I started putting supports on Righteous Fire, I realized that they weren't showing as displayed, making me wonder....
Are they there and the tooltip is bugged?
Are there very few supports that actually work with the skill?
What is going on here?



None of those supports show up as linked when I put it on.
Neither do the supports in



When I link those with RF.

So, now that I've got a char into cruel, that i've been building with the specific goal of being an RF char, Am I.... doing it wrong? Do the skills not interact in a way that I thought?

My intention, was to:
increase my area of effect radius. Thus, making RF a larger zone.
run arctic armour, as it should, in theory reduce the damage I take from running righteous fire.
increase both my life, and mana regeneration, with passives / auras / gear (i guess?) to keep help offset the mana / life costs of these spells.
increase my fire resistance post 75% with passive (elemental adaptation), Aura (purity of fire), and gear (saffel's shield, or rise of the phoenix)
Use a pair of Ruby Flasks, so that I could get a little more fire res out of it.
Curse mobs with flammability, turn on AA, and RF, and go nuts. As long as possible.

Oh right. And stack HP until my ears bleed.

At level 40, I'm able to do this. I can sustain AA

standing still.

While under the effects of


I'm currently capable of staying HP Regen + (with a life flask running)

But, I'm worried. It's not sustainable right now. I'm not at a point where I would even think of using RF as more than a trash clearing skill, and only then, when I know that I have all the stars aligned, and I'm not going to die.

Other than that, I'm still running around using

Against scary stuff, and bosses.

Sorry for rambling.

Anyway, Does Life Leech worth with RF? Would LGoH?(I'm guessing not, since it's not a hit)
Can RF Crit?
Can RF Stun based on the amount of damage?
Can RF be augmented by ANY Support Gems?

Any help that people can toss my way now, so that I can get this build together, and to a point where it is functioning, would be awesome.

Alright let's get to it!

First: Righteous Fire applies a degeneration effect in an area around you. (I think by applying a specific debuff which then does fire damage?) It does not 'hit', the way fireball or an attack would. Because it doesn't hit, it cannot crit, stun, leech, or ignite. I'll admit I'm surprised fire penetration doesn't work, but if you want to sustain it, you wouldn't want that support on there anyways. This is because any supports that apply will increase the damage done both to your targets and to you. (So Fire Pen would all but guarantee you would take twice as much damage as normal!)

Support gems that do work include Increased AoE and increased burning damage. I think concentrated effect decreases the size, but leaves the damage unaffected?

Second: Righteous Fire is intended as a 'burst' skill. You turn it on, you nuke everything with your suddenly increased spell damage, you wait on an empty screen to burn out and recover. It's not intended to be something you leave running all the time.

Now that doesn't mean it can't be done! But it means you need some fancy tricks to do it. One thing that is vital to the build is this shield. Note the +8% to max fire resistance: that alone takes you from 75% resist to 83% resist, or from 25% damage taken to 17%, so it reduces the damage taken by a third right there. You'll probably also want to run Purity of Fire for another 3% or 4% resistance, as well as taking the Elemental Adaptation passive if you can.

I really want the rise of the Phoenix Shield. I just haven't seen it for sale, so I've also been thinking about Saffel's, which also increases it by 5%.

Thanks for the clarification. That explains why things aren't working. The lack of leech is going to make it a little more difficult, but we'll see what I can work out.

Thanks for the info again, I appreciate it. I'll set to work on making it work. I figure, the thing that makes it work well, is that my life, also doubles as my main damage component.

I'll bekeping a log of how it goes with the new RF works for me, as I get things working.

People use righteous fire for the spell damage bonus, not really to do damage from righteous fire itself. Not since release (where damage to opponent was changed from 100% to 50% of your HP).