Burning Damage

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Ladderjack wrote:

I ran a Fireball witch with my regular group prior to OB and it gets even sweeter than you might realize. If you run Lesser Multiple Projectiles and another projectile amp like Fork or Chain, you get lotsa fireballs. When you do this, the normally not-so-useful blast radius becomes just stupid. Tightly clustered groups of mobs become explosive tinder and the world just burns. =)

Yeah, I'll certainly play around with it, especially since I bought the dragon re-skin for it (which is awesome) - though the Firestorm one is still my favorite. (Skeletons one is nice, too).

I am trying it right now with:
Molten shell + concentrated effect + fire penetration gem + chance to ignite (+ extra flammability curse).
Base Molten Shell Damage is around 9200 - 14500 DPS at lvl 18 gem (tool-tip DPS about 22K, but this is pretty much irrelevant).
With a 16 gem level "chance to ignite", it scales great, especially in PvP.
I can pretty much confirm your calculations, by eye, that is, since there are not any damage numbers displayed.
Downside, I think, is that, if you hit, at the same time, using another skill, after the Molten Shell critical has occurred, a possible new critical hit (by the other skill), seems to replace the (hugely higher) burn damage incurred by Molten Shell. Is this assumption correct (new critical hit, by any other fire spell, replaces the current burning damage, with burning damage from the critical hit of the other skill)?

May i suggest an elemental proliferation gem.

With it you will wreak havoc abound.

You guys might be interested in my Burn Change Proposal, here:

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/239419/highlight/

Sadly though if your rolling an ES witch you'll have to reroll before being able to do higher maps with fireball builds, but HP witch can roll it np.

the only problem with burn builds is that either the enemy dies too quickly for the burn to do much at all, or your critting too often and your burn gets over written by new burns.

only with elemental proliferation will make a burn build some what viable.

because in order to burn a target, you must crit, that crit will most likely instantly kill the mob unless they're rare or a champion. if they do survive and you hit again within 4 seconds (which is usually the case) and if your crit chance is high (which again is usually the case to insure a high chance of burning your target) you'll most likely replace your old burn with a new one, thus you lost x amount of seconds (x being the remaining time on the burn) of damage to be replaced with a new one.

where as if you had lighting, a shock will just increase your next few damage based on the shock duration. making no wasted damage lost.

with elemental proliferation, even if the target dies the burn will still continue to apply to anyone within the area.

so if you do want to make a burn build, I suggest either pairing it with elemental proliferation to allow the burn to apply to large amount of targets.

or pair it with a kiting build where you can hit the target with a burn attack, then run away and set up another hit once the burn is done.

The last time i made a burn character it absolutely demolished everything that its gear would allow it to survive.

Using only a 3 linked fireball and a far from max leveled gem i needed just 1 fireball to kill entire packs, including the rare mobs in them.

I made that character only to farm fellshrine and everything there dies to 1 crit, all packs, using 5 quicksilvers to haste the process.

In maps it worked somewhat when using some more granites etc - but my ES gear was mediocre to say the least (1900 ES) and i also didn't have an overly defensive build, which amounted to great issues with flicker mobs and such, which basically murdered me.

I am sure however that i will be able to make it work, in particular after the new CI es nodes, but for now i am playing a different character.