Firestorm

-0.2s between each bolt per quality point. according to the wiki sounds wrong, swore with max quality the interval is 0.12 seconds.

Just wanted to say in response to the last few pages of this thread, that I am having great success with firestorm. The fact that it can be stacked multiple times in the same location makes it perfectly viable, and hard to compare to something like flame totem.

Asking for impressions from you guys: For a single target within the area, what percent of the fireballs will hit it on average? 50%? 20%? 10%?

If you were attacking a giant marshmallow that got hit with every fireball and stood in the full duration of the rain, this skill does something like 60k DPS non-diamond at high levels with good gear*. My question is, how much of that will actually get applied to all enemies?

By comparison Freezing Pulse at the same high level/gear will do something like 35k DPS before the falloff. Even being pessimistic about your positioning for the faloff, you're getting about 20k DPS to all enemies.

For firestorm, if the average enemy within the radius is hit by 50% of the fireballs, then it's crazy good, dishing 30k AoE DPS. If only 20% of them hit? Then it's decent: it will get the job done but not at optimal efficiency. If enemies are only hit by 10% of the fireballs, then it's pretty bad.

*Stacking firestorms with increased duration of course

Depends on how much duration and how much radius boost you have, mostly radius boost. If there is no radius boost and no duration increase, then you should expect 3 bolts to land, less for tiny targets and more for larger targets. Sounds like the dps listing might be corrected finally if your dps listing for firestorm is at 60k. Not sure if firestorm still runs its dps listing for only one bolt. then again i didn't have a caster at high levels.

Increased duration increases likelyhood a solo foe might get hit but almost as many to miss. Increased radius makes the spread larger but the bolt's burst catches up this time around, catching more foes. A 40% increase to AoE caused a single for to take 5 hits out of 8 instead of 3 hits out of 8 on average. Duration will be a slight multiplier as it'll be more bolts flying around.

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soul4hdwn wrote:

Sounds like the dps listing might be corrected finally if your dps listing for firestorm is at 60k.

Sorry, it's not my tooltip, that's from a spreadsheet for a decently geared lvl 90 character on a 6link :p (for reference, gear at 150% spelldmg/25% ICS/+80% crit/+50% critdmg, linked Conc Effect, Faster Cast, Increased Duration, Fire Pen, Inc. Crit Damage)

3 out of 8 hits makes the skill pretty good. My own limited testing with an unmodded lvl 1 firestorm seemed to confirm your assessment. 5 out of 8 with increased AoE bonuses makes the skill amazing! (though of course the 60k number is with Conc Effect, so only +10% AoE after factoring passives).

Of course that's also not factoring whether enemies will actually stay inside a 2 second long Firestorm, but Decoy Totem/zombies/facetanking can take care of that :)

lv 90 is pretty unreasonable. you should aim for between lv 65 to 75 (less the better) for passives. while for skills, use lv 16 gems which are roughly lv 54 to 58.
that said, i have no idea how to suggest number of points used due to the extra skill point added and unknown info about act 3.

i wouldn't mind sitting around for 2.7 seconds for something to die in a single firestorm XD (45% dur from passives + support of 80%).

The spreadsheet comparisons I'm going through right now are mostly character at lvl 90 because I'm interested what character type will most efficiently grind to 100 in Open Beta :)

The 45% duration passives are interesting. Pretty far off but you get a decent bit of crit stats on the way. I looked into a shadow build that got them but then it missed out on the AoE increases by the templar start which is a pretty big drawback.

Id love to have cold based variant for this skill, since I loved d2 blizz soso ;-;