Which AoE skill gems are more useful?

Firestorm, like was said, is a great click and forget that even allows offscreen casting onto a target as long as you click on and hold button down. Add some duration increases and casting time boosts with concentrated effect and you can apply a LOT of stacking fireballs onto a single target. And the tooltip is deceiving with it since it shows a LOT less damage then you can get with it.



Ice Nova though I sometimes used as a AoE crowd control with my old melee build, it was like a built in pause button. I had it set up in a way that it would cast a screen perma freeze on everything around me (and proliferated offscreen) as long as I held down the button to cast it (such as for when I'm waiting for lightning warp to trigger)... but ya, the damage still sucked. I also used it in a elemental equilibrium summoner build to flash a screen wide ice spell (weak enough to not freeze often) then allow my fire and lightning aura enchanted minions rip them apart. And again with a sporker experiment of mine that had elemental equilibrium, my 0 damage ice nova boosted the damage of my totems by lowering their resists.