[3.0]PewPewPews Official Cheap Firestorm Build - Perfect for Newcomers/SSF

@b1ackic3: Well first off, your gear seems fine. You are running without a shield, so playing it a bit safer is recommended(you should deal a lot more damage due to your 7-link). Second, molten shell won't do much for you. It adds armor, so it will defend you against physical hits. But all the elemental hits won't be mitigated. Plus, the 1.5K armor it adds... isn't a lot. Most enemies will just slam through it.

Try Flesh offering instead. I think, it's extremely important for you to have fast minions. Flesh offering will do that for you :)

You can also try crafting rings and amulets with Essence of fear(minion movement speed).

@magicstop: That's... curious. I have to admit, I ran most content on my necromancer this league. But I just hopped on my elementist, and just ran a few stupid maps(No regen extra life T13 wasteland)(Death and Taxes)(Couple Abyss maps, one with enfeeble).. I don't instantly nuke them, but I can kill them with relatively ease.

Your gear seems fine really. What's your damage output? I hit 3.3K tooltip damage with concentrated effect. That's enough to melt almost anything. Here are a few things I apply to certain mapmods btw.

Status Immunity/hexproof - turn off HoT, just go through it as usual, careful with boss, summon skelly totem then engage, to make sure the boss won't target me.
No regen - Honestly, this mod doesn't bother me at all. As long as my HoT is up, I can just go through it like it's nothing
%less regen - While it often doesn't do much, I do find myself potting more often. Try getting a divine mana pot with reduced charges used. That stuff never runs out, you get 10 charges per full flask, and only need 3 for an additional charge. I've never had any mana issue's thanks to that flask.

What kind of content are you struggling with? Red maps in general? The top tier of red maps? Certain bosses? Could you maybe take some footage so I can see what's going on?

New (well returning after 2 or 3 years) plyer here, wanted to try Witch. This guide and build works pretty smoothly!


Thanks for the awesomesauce guide!

Thanks for the help! I'm having trouble with higher-tier maps (Tier 12+). Usually with bosses, as they are single target PITAs, but also sometimes with mobs. Can't imagine trying to run uber-lab right now, which really bums me out. My tooltip DPS is 2234 with IAoE (which is what I usually run). I'll upload a video so you can see me struggling with a map.

EDIT:
Here's a video of me running a t13 map (Waterways). I die once in it to random mobs, and I have a hard time with boss at end. It takes two videos to capture it all. Total of 20 minutes. For some reason, it didn't capture my audio input, so all of my commentary along the way is lost. Hopefully it still captures all needed info. First minute or two is spend looking at my build/gear/gems/dps and then the action begins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7oZzEf3daE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efrTy4JQgvQ

Wait, you suggest that we use two curses in our Curse on Hit setup, but how do you get around curse limit? I don't see any items that increase it in your build. Am I missing something?

EDIT: Nevermind, Whispers of Doom.

If you got problem with dps try to copy my items, I pretty much melt everything tho u gotta pay attention so u don't die a lot more

@magicstop: first off, the death you had was because of the boss - the ice golems explode on death dealing a percentage of their life. But usually they have a death animation before they explode. For some reason this rare didn't have a death animation, so exploded immediately. Most likely that was a volatile golem as well, so killing him would deal double the damage.

Few things:
- Why do you have 5 skill points open? There is no reason to not allocate them - ever. You can get more life, more spell damage, or whatever! IF you don't know what to get, post your skill tree, I'll help you out!
- What's your life/es pool? You don't have the numbers enabled, so it's hard to see what you're working with.
- You stay back a lot of the time, which doesn't really work too well ever since the new update. Nowadays, I usually cast one storm, and run to the next pack. Anything that attacks me, will be aggro'd by my zombies, and the damage I take will be leeched back by Warlords mark. If you stay back however, you don't be applying your HoT all the time - since you only have a limited window of getting that shock done. I usually have two casts on blue packs, unless they are high health mobs, and stand still for a bit to take down rares, whenever necessary.

As for the boss.. well maybe this was just a bad map to showcase, but this boss can go invulnerable, and while he is, he will reflect damage back to you. Just found out, when I fought him, I don't think he had the chance to even use it(gottha update it in my tier list). Anyways, the moments you almost died were the moments he was invulnerable. Meaning you wouldn't be able to leech, only take damage in return.

I did went into the boss with concentrated effect. I also made sure the skelly totem was up between me and the boss, so there would always be a few minions in between me and the boss. Might be a tip for you?

Even so, I can't really get my head around why you lack damage right now. I feel you should have way more. Can you open up your character page?

Here's my Offence character screen with Firestorm tooltip showing:


Here's my Defence character screen showing with life and shield showing:


I've got 5 passive points not used because I've been considering switching builds and I didn't want to ruin my passive reset yet. Here's my passive tree:

Esminette Skill Tree

EDIT:

Here's my DPS with Concentrated Effect rather than Increased Area of Effect


Should I be running that more?

EDIT 2: Also, here's a video of me eating it again. This time, I'm running a measly t10 (Colonnade) map. I go in, die, and so start filming at my H/O. You'll get to see death #2, which happens pretty quickly thereafter. I was trying to take your advice of playing closer in to set the curses, but I end up eating it and saying "no thanks" to this particular map.

https://youtu.be/bx0Qg1TvRtc

Great build;

Can you please update the full tree?

ATM there are some points missing.

I'm over lvl 60 now, but yet still cannot run the labyrinth cruel. Seems the final boss can one shot me with about 2-3k. Pathetically bad all the labyrinth bosses are op to me, in most builds. One build with 4.5k can get one shotted by the only 2nd boss on the labyrinth, much less the last one (can't make it there yet with many tries.

How in the hell do you find good gear with 80-90+ hp AND 30% resistance much less multiple resistance?

@magicstop: Hm, that's a bit too forward. I guess I should explain this in more detail since I am used to play the build this way. Sorry :s

What I mean is, stay close to the enemies, but have your minions between you and the enemy. Even if the map is rippy as hell, you will be able to fire one or two firestorms, often enough to eliminate the enemy. Those flame curtains you died to? Yeah, they are rippy as hell. They were the first death I had on my tanky firestormer, and I couldn't get my head around why they were so friggin' strong. But they have insane burst damage. You would have lived though, if your minions were in front of you.

I play like this. I just walk toward the next pack. When I see them, I cast my firestorm, still at range. My minions will go beserk, and run towards the enemy. I then walk a bit with my minions, to clase the distance, and cast again. This is what I mean with cast and walk. You stay in movement between your casts. I mean, there are many variants on this, but I generally never just flame dash into the enemy without my minions. That is just suicide, and not just for firestorm. They really buffed the monster damage in higher maps this patch, so be careful for that.

Anyways, to illustrate how I do higher maps, I quickly ran one T14 map on my 90 firestormer. Now... I kinda had one problem - this was the firestormer I used before the big elementist buff in 2.3. So, she had only one golem running. I fixed this problem by changing a few gems around, but now I had my golem on a CwDT. Didn't think much of it, but it did mess around with my golem uptimes. Furthermore, I never did the final lab as well, so I am missing the last two ascendancy points. Her life pool is similar to yours however, standing at 5K life and 1K ES(As a sidenote, I think you are better off with more life in your build anyways, since we don't have any reliable way to regen our ES. Now I think about it, this might be one of the problems why you feel so glass cannony).

Anyways, the map is both Enfeeble & Temp chains, got on top of that 45%(!) extra monster life, monster damage and monster speed. Thanks to enfeeble, I clock in at around 1.5K tooltip damage. Even so, I feel like I'm melting normal mobs anyways.

Thanks to the monster damage however, my minions are dieing all over the place. This combined with temp chains(And the massive lags. Seriously, they were bad)really slowed down my clear speed. But still, I manage to do the map with relative ease. I got low a few times, but I never really felt I was in range of being killed.

Well, for the normal map that is. I did die to Dominus that map. In hindsight, maybe running a temp chained, onslaught extra damage Dominus wasn't the best Idea in the world. The fight also dragged on for way too long since enfeeble and monster HP didn't help either haha :P But I was massively unprepared for dominus anyways, as I was really taken back at how fast he was. When checking the footage, I realised I could just nuke the guy and dash away when he started focusing me.

Anyways, I was able to nuke him down during the second phase. You can see the damage then. With both enfeeble and monster life, that's easily twice the normal health he usually has. Honestly, for a T14, that's pretty damn quick ;P

This is the vid. You can hear me coughing, clicking and whatever in the background. Didn't realise it was also recording my mic.

Anyways, I hope this gave you a better idea how to play the build. :)


@Velaurius: There is a 122p tree in the first post! Here's the link :)


@computertech82: Are you sure we're talking about CRUEL Izaro? I mean, he hits hard, but 3K should be enough to live. At least, I know I usually do Cruel with around 2,5K life. Are you running him unbuffed? So no adds that increase the boss' damage output?

I guess Izaro is also about predicting his attacks.

Whenever I fight Izaro, I always listen closely to his attacks. Whenever I hear him charging, he's always going to use a strong attack with big range. And it's always going to be cast on myself. You can easily avoid that by moving aside.

Another option would be to curse him with enfeeble. If your HoT is unreliable, you can try Blasphemy instead of Herald of Thunder for this fight, or manually cast it.

Lastly, I always use my skeleton totem for Izaro. For some reason, he loves to target my skeletons, and I've seen numerous occasions where his charged attack was focused on my totem, instead of on me.

3K life should be enough, I think it's more about playing it smart then to really outtank his damage output. Let me know if this worked out :)