Firestorm

I have lvl 87 fire witch, using fire trap and firestorm.
Fire storm is linked, Fire Pen, life leech, enhance, concentrated.

Problem i have run in to reflect magic damage = death with cast.
I understand Fire pen gets reflected also. When I remove it I still die just as fast.

reflect - life leech (18% - 8.8%)= 9.2%,
Firestorm damage x reflect 2k x 9.2%= 184 damage reflected.
Reflect damage x resist. 184 x 75% = 46 damage taken per hit. not counting crit chance.
46 damage might not seem like a lot but when you hit 17 times per cast on a mob, you die on the first big mob. 46x17=782 damage per cast, I cast every .73 sec.


I under stand reflect is to make the game harder, but how do we clear a map with it and pull our own when the there is only 1 real way to mitigate the damage and it falls short.
Physical Attack builds can burn hole maps unaffected by physical reflect because they get life leach, life on hit. gear with Physical attack leeched that stacks with gem.
I would like to know. Am I missing something. At this point it seems Casters are getting shafted when it comes to this debuff.

Side note. Its would be nice to have an option to buy a less screen blinding affect for firestorm, this way party members don't dread playing with us because they cant see the fight. Might be nice to have a shorter falling height or fire ball start off small and grow to full size when they hit the ground.

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reflect - life leech (18% - 8.8%)= 9.2%,
Firestorm damage x reflect 2k x 9.2%= 184 damage reflected.

That is not how reflect works, you can't just subtract your life leech value from the reflect value.

Granted you deal 2k damage per hit, that's 360 damage reflected per enemy hit, 90 with 75% fire resistance.

Try Arctic Armour, with a higher level version of it, you won't even notice reflect anymore.

also, i thought reflect was lowered to 15%, but the above poster's comment is still important. leeching doesn't "subtract" the damage you take, its over time after all.

Thanks the use of the shield has made a reflect manageable. feel dumb for not trying this many deaths ago.

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soul4hdwn wrote:

also, i thought reflect was lowered to 15%

It was, but the map mod is still at 18%.

going to try this with the "three dragons" unique helm and shocking blows to triple shock stack mobs for 90% more dmg

i only have a 5 link and i am build for incinerate so i dont want to change my colours but this will be my setup:

firestorm - conc effect - faster casting - life leech/fire pen/inc duration - added cold damage (need a green socket for lmp for incinerate, would prefer inc duration or added chaos/lightning damage)

using cybils paw i will also get 8 life for every fireball that hits on each enemy

should totally rape bosses that stand still i think?

The damage per hit is fine and it shocks great with the three dragons but the aoe feels too big even with conc effect, makes it feel way weaker then it should

I have no aoe nodes iether

I remember this skill feeling much better before the 39% aoe buff it got

I tested firestorm with spell echo today and this combo is so damn op. I calculated the best dps set up of gems: faster casting/fire penetration+spell echo+increased duration+conc effect. I more than doubled my previous cast time and at the same time all casts repeat.

Ok I apologize in advance if someone has already suggested this but this thread is 33 pages now so... I'm not reading it all :)

Can you get a bit more creative from a sound and visual standpoint with this spell?

If I take a spell like Meteor from Diablo, that was an *awesome* spell. It had this initial sound and visual on the ground like 'uh oh something is about to happen' and then it went to 'holy shit that was awesome' as the Meteor fell.

I see the same potential in Firestorm but right now it's basically a bland, flat, machine-gun-sounding effect that completely sucks.

Some suggestions to improve it:

- Random start and end-point angled projectile trajectory. Can you make it feel more authentic and organic?
- Sound, sound, sound!!!
- Uh, make it look and sound awesome so that it lives up to the spell name - perhaps fewer projectiles but more detail (like mini-Meteors)

This spell is kind of like those "Wake of Destruction" unique boots: awesome unique name and a under powered item mods that do not live up to the name.

Oh yeah and the alt mtx for it is just as dumb. The animation is so quick all the detail is lost. Your demo video shows it in slow motion so that we can see that there is actually more detailed animation involved at the end there, but we don't play the game in slow motion, so we don't see that in real-time. The timings for both the standard and the mtx effect is basically rushed.

Thank you!

I'm doing a duration based character and pairing firestorm with vaal storm call, it's working pretty well so far, though comments:

- This is the only skill in the game where having more AOE isn't always a good thing as it spreads out damage, with the newly increased AOE this skill pretty much requires conc effect. The default AOE is gigantic! Which is ok, but makes taking the AOE nodes that I did feel like a mistake.
- The skill isn't that different to incinerate really, which is what I use on my main. I didn't want to end up using cybils again but the skills are just so similar I'm gonna have to.
- With 30+ fireballs per cast and 2 casts per second, I can not only see nothing, but due to each impact playing its own sound it causes all other sounds in the game to stop!

Overall I think the skill isn't bad but it is a little awkward, at least after playing an incinerate character for so long it feels that way. I'd really like it if the sound bug were fixed though, kinda kills the rain of death feeling.