Ignite

If you're unwilling to chance ignite then I suggest changing fire spells to hit for high damage and have a slower cast time(and reduce crit chance if needed, to balance it out and making Chance to Ignite support gem more useful).

As I said, currently the interaction between fire spells and the ignite effect seems extremely incoherent to me.

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Illedran wrote:

If you're unwilling to chance ignite then I suggest changing fire spells to hit for high damage and have a slower cast time(and reduce crit chance if needed, to balance it out and making Chance to Ignite support gem more useful).

As I said, currently the interaction between fire spells and the ignite effect seems extremely incoherent to me.

You know, there are some hard hitting fire skills too, like the ones that causes exploding dead folks or just an avatar of fire with a bad ass high dmg weapon.

Anyway, there will be more fire skills, no need to change current fire spells.

Also, you don't have to use chance to ignite, I am sure you can find better support gems for spells like firestorm.

Cast speed, crit chance if you use that, chaos damage, lightning damage, maybe crit damage, concentrated AoE, bigger AoE... See, many good support skills to use, even with a six linked armor.

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Anyway, there will be more fire skills, no need to change current fire spells.

"There will be other good stuff, no need to fix what's broken."

You know what, let's bring back Power Charges on spell crits. There are other, more balanced things, so it's super duper fine.

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Drudley wrote:

You know, there are some hard hitting fire skills too, like the ones that causes exploding dead folks or just an avatar of fire with a bad ass high dmg weapon.

Minion Instability currently doesn't scale with +Fire Damage nodes, and usually everything dies in 1 hit from a minion bomb anyway. I never have seen Detonate Dead being used. And how am I supposed to run AoF on a witch? D:

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Drudley wrote:

Also, you don't have to use chance to ignite, I am sure you can find better support gems for spells like firestorm.

Congratulations, your statement proved my point: Chance to Ignite is a very bad support gem.

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Drudley wrote:

Cast speed, crit chance if you use that, chaos damage, lightning damage, maybe crit damage, concentrated AoE, bigger AoE... See, many good support skills to use, even with a six linked armor.

Cast speed - Is incoherent with the current ignite mechanic: more casts means more ignites means more overlapping and thus no real damage gain(from ignite).

Crit chance/damage - Again, incoherent due to more ignite effects due to increased crits, not to mention that fire has a crap base crit rate anyway.

The rest are fine.

Ignite is basically poison in Diablo 2, which was useless because it didn't stack. In Median XL nobody used poison for this reason even if the duration was only 1 second.

I eventually made use of the first frame poison effect (hitting an enemy with poison damage would do damage equal to 1/25 its dps as impact damage) and just made poison spells that hit between 5 and 100 times per cast, allowing the impact damage to overwhelm the damage over time and turning them into just another form of spammable damage spells.

Yes, it reduces uniqueness but nobody wants non-stacking damage. It feels lame and this game is all about [cue Death Race 2000 announcer] VIOLENCE! VIOLENCE! VIOLENCE!

This should be the optimal DPS gain from Ignite on a single target based on average cycles. It does not account for overlapping Ignites, multiple projectiles, interrupted casts etc.

Fireball Witch, 5% Crit Rate, 150% Crit Dam, 100 Base Dam, 5 Casts/4 Sec
20 Casts to Crit = 16 Seconds
19x100 + 1x150 + 1x200 = (2500 - 200) / 2500 = ~8.7% DPS increase from Ignite

+200% Crit Rate, +150% Crit Dam, this is easily done by taking Crit Rate/Dam talent clusters.
Since we're not overlapping Ignites on average, we can extend it to 3 cycles.
20 casts to crit 3 times = 16 seconds
17x100 + 3x375 + 3x500 = (4325 - 1500) / 4325 = ~34.7% DPS increase from Ignite

+300% Crit Rate, +300% Crit Dam, same setup as above with Lv 15 Crit Dam/Rate support gems.
5 casts to crit = 4 seconds, or, 20 casts to crit 4 times = 16 seconds
16x100 + 4x600 + 4x800 = (7200 - 3200) / 7200 = ~44.4% DPS increase from Ignite

To maximize optimal DPS gain from Ignite, you want your casts per 4 seconds x Crit Rate to be 1. After this point, stack only Crit Dam Multiplier.

But, Fireball has terrible base damage compared to other spells.
Lv 15 Fireball: 141-211, 176 average damage.
Lv 15 Freezing Pulse: 248-372, 310 average, +1% Crit and ~76% more damage.
Lv 15 Ice Spear: 201-302, 251.5 average, +3% Crit and ~43% more damage.
Lv 15 Shock Nova: 43-817, 430 average, -2.4% Crit but ~144% more damage.
Lv 15 Ice Nova: 111-173, 142 average, ~19% less damage.
Lv 15 Firestorm: 32-48, 40 average, you need to hit with 4.4 out of 8 projectiles to match Fireball's damage.

Optimal Fireball only matches Ice Spear without taking Spear's massive crit bonus into account. Fireball is only ~24% more base damage than Ice Nova which is a real AoE spell and the Black Sheep of Frost Witch.

Ignite is impressive on paper, like a mix of effects from Lightning and Cold.
Damage increase (Shocked) and the crowd control of Flee (Freeze)
But unless I'm missing something critical, Ignite rarely becomes a key factor in Fire Builds (Avatar of Fire, Fire Witch)
Flee is also short duration, doesn't always work (Champs and Unique monsters?)
Crit too much and you overlap Ignites, kill too fast and Ignite doesn't get fully utilized.
Or in the case of a Fire Witch, simply pick another element and kill even faster.

Caffeine deficiency may produce errors in this post.

Thank you for the math work.
I didn't realize Fireball was so underpowered until that damage comparison of the skills, I feel enlightened :p

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GaiaCaT wrote:

Crit too much and you overlap Ignites, kill too fast and Ignite doesn't get fully utilized.

Especially in a game where the fastest you kill stuff, the better it is.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

so are you saying it was frozen, then unfrozen for a very short time, then frozen again afterwards?

yes, just enough to show the freeze (+unfreeze?) animation.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Might be a sync thing where the client thought it unfroze then received more data from the server saying it was still frozen is that's the case.

Yeah.

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GaiaCaT wrote:

Ignite is impressive on paper, like a mix of effects from Lightning and Cold.
Damage increase (Shocked) and the crowd control of Flee (Freeze)
But unless I'm missing something critical, Ignite rarely becomes a key factor in Fire Builds (Avatar of Fire, Fire Witch)
Flee is also short duration, doesn't always work (Champs and Unique monsters?)
Crit too much and you overlap Ignites, kill too fast and Ignite doesn't get fully utilized.
Or in the case of a Fire Witch, simply pick another element and kill even faster.

I think right now burning has one use, and that's on an AoF templar using a slow 2handed weapon, and taking the burning damage passives.
In any other scenario, problems with burning's efficiency arises, which I agree with what you said.
In probably half (or more) of the cases where AoF is used, the ignite support itself, still isn't that good, because the AoF user would spec a lot into critical hits (power charges), and hence have such a critical hit rate they wouldn't need it.

With regards to fireball, it's hard to compare, because all the skills are different.
— Freezing pulse is a projectile, but it deals less and less damage the further away it is, so technically, it's damage is about half of what it says.
— Spear is also a projectile, but it's reduced damage to any target it pierces (don't know how much)
— firestorm is not a projectile, and hard to compare in general
— Frost nova isn't a projectile, and has limited range. Nonetheless, I think this is the best comparison to show fireball being weak. One thing that also needs to be compared is mana cost though, since if it costs a lot more, it would be hard to achieve it's full DPS in practice.

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Xapti wrote:

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GaiaCaT wrote:

Ignite is impressive on paper, like a mix of effects from Lightning and Cold.
Damage increase (Shocked) and the crowd control of Flee (Freeze)
But unless I'm missing something critical, Ignite rarely becomes a key factor in Fire Builds (Avatar of Fire, Fire Witch)
Flee is also short duration, doesn't always work (Champs and Unique monsters?)
Crit too much and you overlap Ignites, kill too fast and Ignite doesn't get fully utilized.
Or in the case of a Fire Witch, simply pick another element and kill even faster.

I think right now burning has one use, and that's on an AoF templar using a slow 2handed weapon, and taking the burning damage passives.
In any other scenario, problems with burning's efficiency arises, which I agree with what you said.
In probably half (or more) of the cases where AoF is used, the ignite support itself, still isn't that good, because the AoF user would spec a lot into critical hits (power charges), and hence have such a critical hit rate they wouldn't need it.

With regards to fireball, it's hard to compare, because all the skills are different.
— Freezing pulse is a projectile, but it deals less and less damage the further away it is, so technically, it's damage is about half of what it says.
— Spear is also a projectile, but it's reduced damage to any target it pierces (don't know how much)
— firestorm is not a projectile, and hard to compare in general
— Frost nova isn't a projectile, and has limited range. Nonetheless, I think this is the best comparison to show fireball being weak. One thing that also needs to be compared is mana cost though, since if it costs a lot more, it would be hard to achieve it's full DPS in practice.

I was under the impression that Ice spear just had an increased crit rate on enemies after it got to a certain range, not that it did decreased damage while piercing.