Fireball

My only complaint is a visual aspect. The fireball could be a bit larger, it just looks so tiny and weak (yet it is not).

Fire Witch 1-30

Socketed with increased critical effect. I'd like increased critical strike too, but gg random skill gem drops and bad quest reward choices.

I find this skill much improved since I first tried a fire witch in .92. It feels "right" as for damage, and the crits let me kill higher hp regen mobs when combined with crit curse. I use crit and elemental curses combined with it (am still waiting to find/quest reward temporal chains curse for extra fast packs).

It would be nice to have some increased projectile speed and increased spell critical damage in the witch passive tree.

Also, so the base crit for most spells like this is 5%. I have passives that give 7% increased critical strike, while other trees give increase spell criticals at 25%.

This means that my total power gain for 1 level up is .35% crit. The witch tree needs more spell only passives since the have a higher power budget apparently.

Fireball in general seems to be very powerful. At a rather early point the splash is strong enough not to have any other aoe-skill. I see it as significantly better than rain of fire in this aspect since rain of fire is too random to use reliably! This coming from experience with only low level witches(level below 25) though.

"

radiatoren wrote:

Fireball in general seems to be very powerful. At a rather early point the splash is strong enough not to have any other aoe-skill.

My experience in early levels was a different one.
Though I intented to play a fireball witch (and skilled +fire damage), I still ended up using shock nova (except versus single targets) until a very high level when I had 4 to 5 fireballs (with multi), because it was just so much more effective. Even now I still use nova against very large groups.

Fireball is a great skill versus medium sized groups of enemies once you hit that 4 projectiles. But leveling up a fireball witch is faster and easier with nova.

0.9.5 feedback below this post

The new graphic is definitely an improvement. Still a bit small though. Maybe you could make it slightly increase in visual size when the player gets +AE or levels up the gem.

Also, did you change the initial area of effect radius in 0.9.5? Seems to be a tad larger than before, but maybe I am just dreaming.

DMG seems still too low compared to frost spear. Even with some of the +fire dmg talents is hard to overcome frost spear dps wise.
I dont know how to make a viable firebuild bc if you have to focus heavily on +dmg and crit talents to compete with the dmg of other spells and sacrifice everything else, which makes you vulnerable especialy to ranged mobs.
Fleeing mobs helps a bit, but the +ignite chance support gem almost seems mandatory for that matter.

and since fire is so crit dependend, raising the base crit chance might help I think.

I mean... u can go full frost spear build and combine it with cold to ice support gem, have a higher crit chance, slow stun AND burn effect, which also does more dmg bc of the high dmg capabilities of frost spear. AND crit is easier to get since its closer to frost related passives in the tree.

"

nemy123 wrote:

"

radiatoren wrote:

Fireball in general seems to be very powerful. At a rather early point the splash is strong enough not to have any other aoe-skill.

My experience in early levels was a different one.
Though I intented to play a fireball witch (and skilled +fire damage), I still ended up using shock nova (except versus single targets) until a very high level when I had 4 to 5 fireballs (with multi), because it was just so much more effective. Even now I still use nova against very large groups.

Fireball is a great skill versus medium sized groups of enemies once you hit that 4 projectiles. But leveling up a fireball witch is faster and easier with nova.

Wow that's exactly what I did too. I wanted to start out with Fireball, but I ended up going with Ice Spear because it had better AoE and better single-target damage, but then soon discovered that it wasn't good enough anyways so I went with Shock Nova just like you.

Fireball is hitting less targets, for less damage, with lower crit chance than freezing pulse. It has longer range, but that's it. With its lack of slowing effect, we can't stand around firing it as much, so it stands to reason that it should deal more damage when we do, as well as because of its lesser aoe. In addition, the longer range does not help because the targets we'd want to use it on (i.e. archers) are constantly blocked by melee monsters getting in our face, whereas pulse would go through them anyways, in addition to its higher dmg, cc, and bigger aoe. This spell just feels very underpowered before you get to support gem levels.

Like the persons above, I find myself reverting to nova spam even though I planned my character around projectiles. It just seems much more viable to kite around a large pack just outside of their range spamming electric nova than to depend on projectiles... especially fireball.