Fireball

Lov'It! But in dark environment it should spawn some light. As it's fire it would in real live, too.

I started this weekend with a witch and choosed this gem over sparks and nova as my first reward and i liked it. As i moved on and got firestorm as my second skill to attack i had now a good spell for attacking groups and one for attacking single targets since in the early lvls the fireball had more dps singletarget than firestorm (about 10-20) but since then (i played till about lvl 28 and had both skill gems equipped since i got them so they lvled both all times) it seemed like my firestorm outpaced fireball even in singletarget dps. I had a higher chance to ignite support gem in my firestorm but even before that i rarely used fireball in the "later" lvls i got to play. I think about midway through (dont exactly know what lvl it was) 4 out of 8 projectiles of my firestorm had to hit a target to get the same amount of dps fireball has which is ok i think because fireball would still be more effective against moving single targets but at the end even 2 or 3 projectiles killed the enemies even without the burning effect and it was a lot faster than 2 casting two fireballs on one target.

Initial speed of FB is bad. Need to be increased by 20-30%.

I seldom use Fireball, but sometimes when I cast it on moving enemies it seems to hit them, the ball explodes but the enemy doesn't take any damage.

(I only have a single support gem linked to it, increasing burn chance.)

Anybody else seen this?

This is based on my experience leveling a witch to Ruthless in patch 0.98.

Personally I find Fireball frustrating to hit targets with. Its small hit box with slow projectile speed finds me missing targets a lot. Outclassed by Firestorm in every regard I only seem to bring Fireball out briefly to try with new support gems before removing it from my hotbar again.

I think Fireball would benefit by being a larger projectile that would make it easier for players to hit their target with the slow and powerful projectile. A slow and powerful projectile of inevitable fiery death would make for more enjoyable gameplay. In its current form the spell should be renamed lackluster Firedart.

Fireball's projectile is too difficult to hit enemies that aren't moving directly towards you with. Even enemies running away can dodge it, because of the high delay before firing it after you click to cast it, and the very slow projectile.

Its base speed should be increased by about 15%, and its hitbox increased by about 10%. It would also be fantastic if the casting point of fireball was a bit earlier in the animation, as it feels to be in the rear ~20% or so, should be up closer to 40-45%.

I use firestorm over this spell on my fire/summons witch all the time, even if I applied multiple projectiles to fireball I still think firestorm does more total DPS due to how hard it is to actually hit things with fireball.

My high level witch finally makes use of Fireball and boy does it pack a punch. However, it takes a complex combination of support gems, passive skills, and spell weaving to beat out an unmodified Firestorm.

Fireball's advantage over Firestorm is that it hits much harder in a single shot. This gives it huge advantage in ignite damage. However, burn damage suffers from fire resistance being applied twice. Once my witch boosted her burn damage through passive skill points and obtained the ability to strip 80 fire resistance off of mobs from applying both Elemental Weakness and Elemental Equilibrium, the ignite of Fireball started to shine. I hold mobs in place using Cold Snap. It also helps tremendously to get increased area effect radius to boost the impact explosion size.

I think few witches will find use for Fireball without meeting all these conditions.

Is it intended that Fireball with multiple projectiles does extra damage on singletarget enemies?

Despite hardly having much %fire dmg compared to cold dmg, I do more damage with my 1.3k fireball against FIRE resistant enemies, than my 2.4k freezing pulse does.

I guess it's the splashdamage from each explosion stacking on the same target.

Intended?

Here's an actually game improving suggestion rather than a balance complaint:

The fireball tooltip, or character page description tab, should be updated to detail the explosion damage in addition to what I understand to be the ball's pierce damage. Currently, supports like "Concentrated Effect" and passives like "Area Damage", which it is claimed elsewhere on the forums will add to fireball's explosion, if not pierce damage, do not affect the description. Also, it would be helpful to know the actual aoe radius for comparison.

My suggestion, add the following three lines (and more if applicable for other damage types) to the character page description:

"
Spell Total Explosion Damage: xxxx
Spell Total Explosion Fire Damage: xxxx
Explosion Radius: xxxx
"

Can we get fireball burn effects to use our iiq/iir?

Sort of sucks that increasing gem quality or burn damage nerfs your loot.