Righteous Fire

Xapti, you are dead on correct that higher HP makes things like Life gain on hit or life gain on kill less beneficial, and even a bit true about life leech %, too. Also it makes flasks less beneficial, overall.

But it doesn't make % of life regen/sec any worse, and honestly my tank I was speaking of has 7000 hp so I thought it would be an interesting experiment, at least!

Sure, it might end up being a complete fail of an experiment, but until I personally get my hands on a gem to experiment with on that character, I can still dream on paper... lol.

And yeah, my char would need a strong hitting spell combined with a life leech gem to support it for any duration of time. But maybe the best playstyle is just to turn it on for a few seconds for a group of monsters, turn it off, train the stragglers to the next group, and repeat?

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grogor wrote:

It's not a very support gem heavy build if you're going the life variation, so I think mana costs would actually be lower then most builds. So far they're completely manageable for me just with flasks but that could change.

I can't say that life leech mobs are problematic since I took the Bloodless passive in the far lower left.

Fire resistant mobs are problematic. Elemental weakness might get rid of the problem, I'm not sure since I haven't gotten my hands on one yet.

I plan on using multiple projectile fireball later on as someone else earlier in the thread had the same idea for. The plan is to kill a screen of enemies before they kill me and I feel like I'm going to have more then enough damage to do so.

It's kind of like a glass cannon except it can turn in to a wall of steel whenever it feels like doing so. Will it work in merciless? Who knows. Someone's gotta try and I think it will so far.

I'm working on it. Currently level 42 hardcore marauder. Breezed through act 1 ruthless and currently farming fellshrine to catch up to monster level.

Currently have 1250 life, 81% resists and using righteous fire with tempest sheild/vitality auras. Have regeneration totem but don't bother using it. Using sheild charge/phase run for mobility.

It's working surprisingly well so far, just running around burning monsters to death. Haven't needed anything other than righteous fire to kill anything. Only ran into 1 monster, dual regen/life leech/ fire resist that I didn't bother killing.
few directions I might try to go to improve it, but it r
I doubt Ill be able to do chaos, it really depends on how much I can scale the life up while still handling the fire degen. That really depends on getting better items right now, which I'm working on. The problem I see running into is the ability to out regen the burn with flasks, and im just not sure which point that will happen.

I have yet to try doing anything with the %spell bonus from the skill as its more effective to just burn stuff to death, as it kills fast enough as it is. Might consider it against high life/regen/leech stuff at some point for added damage/life leech.

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indczn wrote:

It's working surprisingly well so far, just running around burning monsters to death. Haven't needed anything other than righteous fire to kill anything. Only ran into 1 monster, dual regen/life leech/ fire resist that I didn't bother killing.

You should elaborate more on what "surprisingly well" is. I could complete merciless act 2 with just a level 1 wand (probably faster than with righteous fire, too), but that doesn't mean it's particularly effective or fast.
You're dealing with around 650 DPS to targets in point blank range. Not only that, but it's at a health cost of around 250 life per second, which would equate to around 83 mana per second. I wouldn't call that particularly effective or fast.

I'd like to see it's effectiveness compared to other builds. Are there other level 42 builds which deal less than 650 DPS while not even being ranged damage? I'd rather doubt it.

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Xapti wrote:

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indczn wrote:

It's working surprisingly well so far, just running around burning monsters to death. Haven't needed anything other than righteous fire to kill anything. Only ran into 1 monster, dual regen/life leech/ fire resist that I didn't bother killing.

You should elaborate more on what "surprisingly well" is. I could complete merciless act 2 with just a level 1 wand (probably faster than with righteous fire, too), but that doesn't mean it's particularly effective or fast.
You're dealing with around 650 DPS to targets in point blank range. Not only that, but it's at a health cost of around 250 life per second, which would equate to around 83 mana per second. I wouldn't call that particularly effective or fast.

I'd like to see it's effectiveness compared to other builds. Are there other level 42 builds which deal less than 650 DPS while not even being ranged damage? I'd rather doubt it.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/32412/page/1

It's in the lower range, but the absurd DPS numbers around that level are stacking elemental damage bonuses with lightning arrow/strike or using flicker strike. Its in line with the tankier damage numbers.

The burn damage is sufficient at that level. I have no problem sustaining flasks. For the most part, I just have to walk/run past a monster to kill it. Stopping

Keep in mind, I have exactly zero things supporting the burn damage, aside from total life, which I'm carefully controlling based on my crappy flasks/required killing speed. No support gems, no damage passives, aside from life. Theres lots of room to improve my

I agree that its not the most efficient build, but if it were, I wouldn't be playing it. It's also noticeably better than ethreal knives, which i have at level 42 as well, which comes with its own horrible mana issues.

So I got this gem on Legacy last night and respecced my Level 65 marauder to try it out.

I could solo MoC easy-- but it was so STRANGE of a way of playing that it would probably take me another hour or two to really lock it down and "get fast" with it.

Also, I didn't have a life leech gem or any leveled up fireball or firestorm spells, so I couldn't test all of my original plan.


Anyways, I ended up trying out a build with +54% life recovery from flasks and 6500 hp. I could have gotten closer to 7000 but honestly with 6500 just the Righteous Fire debuff was rolling the monsters quite fast. The only exceptions to that were high HP rare mobs (usually zombies), where throwing on the Blood Magic / Iron Will / Concentrated Effect Molten Shell really helped speed things up.

So basically, how it went was this: The +54% life recovery from flasks help offset the fact that I decided to go so high on my HP pool. If I drank one of my 1536 HP flasks (60% increased life recovery Divine Life Flask + 20% quality), I would still lose life pretty fast but slow enough that I had maybe 8-10 seconds or so it felt like. If I used my Ruby Flask, my HP pool would go into complete homeostasis-- in fact, it would slightly go up a few HP/sec. very minimal, and the ruby flasks only last 2.4 seconds so this effect doesn't last long. Pretty much everything around me would die by the time I was around half HP anyway, and then I would just use the flask of dousing I made. I made one that either has more charges or better charge recovery, I forget which.

The other weird part is that with 400+ regen, even if you don't extinguish the burning, when you go down to 1 hp you are already regenning so fast that it seemingly isn't a big deal because everything around you is definietly dead by that point. I suppose if it wasn't, and there were a few straggler archers, you would need to retreat for 1-2 seconds to make sure you didn't get hit by an arrow when you were at that tipping point of reaching 1 hp before bouncing back, but that retreat wouldn't last for long.

I was playing around with a flask setup like this:
(2) 1536 HP recovery flasks (+ another 54% recovery on top from talents)
(2) flasks of dousing
(1) ruby flask

I want to go back tonight and try stacking more ruby flasks and see if I can reach a stasis point where if I run fast enough through a mob heavy chaos zone, my ruby flasks stay full.

More thoughts, and the interactions I discovered:

First, I agree it is frustrating that there is seemingly no way to buff the radius of the area that monsters receive the burning DoT from RF. Has anyone CONFIRMED yet that Increased Radius of Auras has no effect? The reason I ask is that the graphic for RF is very similar to an aura, no other reason.

Next, I did try socketing all sorts of support gems to it-- didn't really ever see anything of interest. I even tested a few interesting combos even though the support letter didn't appear on the skill at the bottom just to see if there were any bugs. I confirmed that Culling Strike doesn't synergize with it, I was hoping it might have been overlooked, lol! The only thing that really seemed to affect it was Faster Casting, but that isn't really anything too special for it. It has a base cast time of 1 sec. Maybe if a build was turning it on and off a whole lot it could be useful, I dunno.

Finally, the true double edged sword of this skill-- VULNERABILITY. Vulnerability is a curse that, among a slew of other things, makes the target take 40% more damage from damage over time effects. This works with RF. It was VERY easy to see the effects on the MoC monsters. They dropped FAST. VERY FAST. Here is the giant problem though-- the game got harder in 0.9.9 and some monsters cast Vulnerability ON THE PLAYER! Guess what? While you are cursed, YOU will drop FAST, VERY FAST, if you use RF. so essentially, RF is directly countered by a monster (or player in PvP) cursing you. It absolutely makes it uncontrollable with current itemization and passives. However, using Vulnerability on mobs makes them die a ton faster, so I strongly recommend anyone using RF for the burn debuff to incorporate it into their play.


Last, I was unable to make good use of the spell damage bonus because my marauder was improperly set up in terms of gear and spell levels to use fireball or firestorm. I want to finish the experiment by getting these gems higher level and getting a life leech gem to see whether this build is actually viable and fun or more of an interesting concept project that is nothing more than "interesting"

I didn't combo Rejuv Totem with it (didn't have one), but from looking at the skill in the feedback forum, I think it would be useless for my build as it is a flat HP/sec gain and not a % life HP/sec gain.

Sure, 30hp/sec on top of 600 hp/sec *is* another 5%... but... I just don't think that is really gonna make RF last much longer at all since my HP pool is so high and it burns for so much... and it would slow down my mobility greatly, which is key for maximizing RF's effective killing power.

If anyone knows what Rejuv Totem regen looks like around skill gem level 15, please link it. If it gets as high as 100 hp/sec I would probably try to figure out a way to incorporate it , at least to try it.

Also can we get dev feedback on whether the RF burning debuff NOT affecting enemy totems is working as intended or a bug?

Someone mentioned this 4 pages ago and I noticed the same thing last night. Just wanted to bring this up again in case it is a bug, the devs should know.



Overall, I think this is a very interesting and fresh skill that was added to the game. There are two different types of builds that can try to use it, with two different playstyles. Maybe you can even hybridize it to make use of the debuff and the spell damage on certain characters. I love skills like this that make players think in order to "unlock" their potential. It's way more refreshing and fun than skills where it is obvious how to use them and they are 1-button-press-win-buttons!

This skill is more or less useless now. the only characters who could use it are tanks with high fire resistance. Skill On itself is awesome. I think the only thing this skill needs is to be tweaked that it does not destroy shield (in witch case) as for other cases I have been playing not long enough to know whether other classes could benefit from this tweaking.

I Don't remember whether it destroys the mana shield. If i am wrong, please forgive me.

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visibiliti wrote:

I didn't combo Rejuv Totem with it (didn't have one), but from looking at the skill in the feedback forum, I think it would be useless for my build as it is a flat HP/sec gain and not a % life HP/sec gain.

Sure, 30hp/sec on top of 600 hp/sec *is* another 5%... but... I just don't think that is really gonna make RF last much longer at all since my HP pool is so high and it burns for so much... and it would slow down my mobility greatly, which is key for maximizing RF's effective killing power.

If anyone knows what Rejuv Totem regen looks like around skill gem level 15, please link it. If it gets as high as 100 hp/sec I would probably try to figure out a way to incorporate it , at least to try it.

I believe it gets up to 100/sec. I think I saw one linked around level 15 at 97/sec.


Ive basically observed everything you've just posted about the skill, and agree with most of the comments. I just was uncertain whether Flasks/Regen could cope with a 6000+ life pool.