Fireball

While the damage increase was needed, the spell is still inferior to FP. FP does more damage, in a larger area, with less mana.

One of the biggest drawbacks to fire is that the number of mobs with a base fire-resist stat is greater than lightning and cold combined. There are fire resistant skellies everywhere, blood apes, dingos, and goatmen. Cold has the already slow zombies, and lightning has necros. Physical resist mobs are only found on rare boss mob. More balancing of what mobs get a base resistance would definitely help in this regard.

Level 74 witch pure fire build.
New up comming pure crit/multi/SD/Cast speed/ level 55 witch.

A few assumptions;

1) GGG builds these skills as "starting points" for a massive variety of build options to be made.

The aim is not to have a skill which only has 1 build option to be remotely viable, but instead to have 1 skill which has dozens of various builds, some of which are better than others but which all are unique.

2) That there is some underlying equation which is adhered to whilst making skills (gems or spells etc). *( This I however fear is where spell inbalance is at).

3) Raw figures will be looked at, no discussion of "most mobs have fire resistance etc" exterior influences wont be discussed, and are irrelvant when talking about balancing a skill gem.


Fireball:
- No support gems;
1) Very slow projectile, painfully slow.
a) Does it need to be slow ? Is there a benefit in being faster, if so what is the trade of received for being slow? No, Yes & no.

b) Compared to other skills (arrows/spells/etc) its worst 40% the speed.

- So it has penalaties compared to other skills and gains nothing in return - unbalanced, increase - inversly proportinate to the disadvantage other skills would suffer from having these "penalties applied".

2) miniscule hitbox, probably the smallest of any spell i've tested. Raw figures would have to be supplied to confirm/deny this.

a) Those cold "fireballs" in vaal pyramid, You can avoid them by the 1.5 times the width of your character and still be "hit" by them. Yet you can fireball right past mobs and see the animation head over their model - infuriating.

- To a lesser extent hitbox rego is something that shouludnt affect the skill itself, but should be addressed within the mechanics of skill system of the game - moving onto the next aspect.

3) Area of affect is tiny, almost very tiny in comparison to other skills.

a) Fireball, Assumption being that its an explosive one ,has probably the worst AOE ground coverage in the game compared to many skills.

b) Calculate the total area covered , in game ground real-estate where monsters can stand, and compare it to other spells. Example 1: Freezing Pulse, has nearly 30 times the area coverage of fireball. Hitting 15-20 mobs with a single FP compared to 2-5(at best) with a single fireball say's it all.

c) Fireball doesnt pierce by default, requires a support gem to be able to do that.

- Fireball AOE i believe to be the core problem & solution for the matter with the spell. If it covered the same area a FP covered (in all directions, with reduced damage the further out it went) Suddenly you'd have a "powerfull spell" that could be used to hit lots of monsters at once. *(side note: affect of elemental damage to be consider later)

4) Fire damage , side affect burn damage (which doesnt stack and is rather small even with maxed out level 74 fire witch with burn damage maxed.


a) Balancing elemental side affects is hard because frankly they dont balance. What needs to be done is a reversed engineered solution. When a effect is incredibly weak compared to that of other elements you have to result in increase/decreasing the base damage of the element to compensate for its advantages/disadvantages.


- I think the burn affect compared to slow/freeze , shock/stun cannot compete. The solution is actually not t change any of them but to balance the damage output.

- Guage how useful it is to freeze a monster to wail on it, Guage how useful it is to slow a monsters movement by 50%. When you have that value, apply that as bonus damage to fire. Or reduce ice's damage by that value.

Guestimate example:

Ice damage .6 of normal
freeze/slow side affects

Shock damage .8 of normal
stun side affects

Fire damage 1.25 or normal damage
Additional .15 damage from burn.

Anyone who puts any value on movement speed (or temporal chains for pack control) sees how retardely powerful chill affect/freeze is on monster, Basically it makes them punching bags, Shock to a lesser extent, but still highly affective.

When mobs get hit by fire and still swarm you and you die - the value of fire's extra damage is not so kickass when your survival rate is vastly less than shock and massively less than ice.




Fireball , Support gems:

I wont go into the above listed details, i will however summarise.

1) Support gems seem to negatively affect firespells more than other spells, massively so.

2) Anyone who uses "build" combinations for firespells needs to remember these are also available for other skills. There is no argument that can be based using support gems when the raw fireball skill gem itself is hugely weak in comparison to nearly all other skills.


Final note:

The witch I am raising currently is a non element based witch, The aim is to have a generalist witch where I can interchange any spell and be able to compare it without having passive node skills interfearing with the base comparison.

Level 55 summary:
Ice vastly superior in damage, utility, area coverage, hitting both resist cold and non resist cold mobs.

Shock close second for damage(spam with spark ugh), and second utility - due to the stun, area coverage is also very good.

Fire average damage, about 25% behind cold, no utility what so ever (even with burn damage - not like you wait for them to burn out before casting another spell), Aoe is laughable in comparion to ice/shock, even with storm it can be cast 2-3 times and can have massive miss rates (compared to a guarentee'ed hit rate with FP over a vastly larger area.).


I am thinking that I might have to post a general post to outline a lot of this. Uncertain if its way to late for this however.

I'm a level 60 Witch who uses Fireball as my back-up base weapon to assist my main endeavour of Minion proficiency.

I chose Fireball as my first Skill Gem.

I currently have 4 Support Gems assisting my Fireball, all linked in and operational - Increased Critical Chance, Increased Critical Multiplier, Increased Burning and Added Lightning Damage.

I have used some Passive Skills to enhance it, mainly Extra Fire Damage percentages and some Spell Damage percentages.

I can only concur with what everyone else has said on this thread.

I chose Fireball because Fireball is the Standard RPG Mage spell. The spell no mage should be without. I'm expecting a huge ball of flame to engulf a specific area of effect, it's strength weakening from the centre to the outer rim.

Generally, the actual Fireball in PoE is small and a bit pathetic. It's more like a round arrow with a teeny bit of splash damage than a Fireball.

Occassionally I have been able to one-hit kill a monster but in the main it takes 2 or 3 hits to take out even something as simple as a brown monkey. The red ones, ironically, seem to be easier.

Against mobs it is particularly weak and not something I would recommend, but firing into mobs which are distracted by minions or totems and it is really quite effective and possibly the ideal spell to use in this scenario.

I think the fireball should have a homing device. Aside from mobs stacks piled up around my minions it's very difficult to specifically target an enemy. One slight movement from the monster and the Fireball just zooms away into the off-screen and in these scenarios only hits the target on about 50% of shots taken.

It does, quite regularly, just zoom right over a monster's head. I was wondering if this was the monster's evasion rating doing this, but then, looking at this thread, it seems it has a very small target area which I can well believe.

At level 60 my DPS is around the 850 mark which is quite weak compared to other spells, especially when you consider many monsters have strong Fire resistance, but that's just me being lazy and not swapping to other spells as the need arises, I'm just totally tuned into firing Fireballs into my minions.

How would I improve it? Have the Fireball have either a homing device or get one of the devs to look at a Fireball in Balder's Gate and ask them to mimic that!

I'm using fireball on a level 39 templar with 52% increased area of effect. No extra fire damage from skills, about 30% elemental and spell damage from gear.

When you shoot a fireball that has a fork support gem attached to it, the first hit won't do AOE damage, and I think it should. It just seems weird that an AOE skill loses it's AOE due to a support gem.

As a side comment, I didn't bother using fireball to level my templar, as it was completely useless until I got lesser multiple projectiles. It's damage was just too low, and it's AOE too small to kill crowds.

Now, at character level 39, and with fireball supported with mulitple projectiles and fork, it's actually a very good skill. It decimates mobs an single targets alike in tight spaces.

The gems says AoE but AoE passives that boost AoE skills don't boost this. It's obviously bugged because if you pair it with a concentrated effect gem the mana cost goes up but the damage doesn't.

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Phang wrote:

While the damage increase was needed, the spell is still inferior to FP. FP does more damage, in a larger area, with less mana.

One of the biggest drawbacks to fire is that the number of mobs with a base fire-resist stat is greater than lightning and cold combined. There are fire resistant skellies everywhere, blood apes, dingos, and goatmen. Cold has the already slow zombies, and lightning has necros. Physical resist mobs are only found on rare boss mob. More balancing of what mobs get a base resistance would definitely help in this regard.

FP will only do more damage at point blank range. The damage listed on the tooltip is for point blank range. Damage as short as half way is 50% lower then the tooltip.

Though I do agree that FP is still an overall stronger spell especially considering you can just use Ice Spear for long range.

In my opinion Fireball needs a faster projectile speed. This wouldn't even increase the DPS of the spell, only would make it more viable especially for PvP.

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Vipermagi wrote:

The direct hit and the AoE are separate (if the fireball pierces, it does not deal AoE damage, for example). My guess is that it can only list the direct hit damage, and not the AoE damage.

It should be rather easy to see the damage difference.

Hrm so if Fireball only hits 1 target, does not pierce and explodes, does that target take the AoE damage or the single target damage? (basically should I bother with Conc Effect on Fireball or not?)

are the passive skills "increased area damage" additive with spell damage? for example if i can get 8% increased area damage or i can get 20% spell damage. which one is better? i want to know if the area damage is just added to the rest of the additive increases or is multiplicative on top of those.

also if i have a concentrated effect gem linked, will that lower the radius of elemental poliferation that is also linked ?

all "increased" add to each other for whichever ones apply to a specific skill.

con effect does reduce the AoE of elemental prolife.