[1.3]Fireball Witch guide for beginners

If you have any avail +30 dex spots in ur tree they can always be helpful if needed. I recall early on being constrained due to low dex.

My suggestion is a pair of Maligaro's Virtuosity, get a non legacy pair on the cheap (15c-1ex) and grind it up to legacy with trading and currency. Luckily noone wanted to buy my 46% pair prior to the new patch and I've been trading it up for higher and higher and just yesterday finally got some 50s.



Also worth noting is that as the Atziri map fragments now drop more often (sets have come down in price from 6ish ex, to 4, to 3, now to just over 1) the Doryani belts have come WAY down in price. Was able to pick up a 30% pair for only 3ex last night! I expect mid rolled ones (26% dam and under) to be extremely cheap shortly. No dex on these, but +35 str, and str is also something often needed and lacking. As it's an implicit on the Doryanis you can roll it to max with just a few blesseds and dont have to worry about jacking any of the other rolls.

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Onething wrote:

I don't remember seeing this anywhere but I may have missed it. What did you do to meet the dexterity requirements of Fire trap / LMP when they got close to level 20? They each have a requirement of 95+ and the skill tree only gets you to 74. Would you advise picking up a specific amulet w/ dex or speccing a couple extra points into dex nodes?

I had 2 goals in mind: something simple but stable capable of participating in maps actively as well as farm aimlessly for loot when I'm bored. That's goal number one. Goal number two was to make a sorceress from Diablo 2.

So Lightning Warp - Reduced Duration - Faster Casting - Reduced Mana all q20. Boots need 30% run speed but that's standard fare.

Found out fireball is pretty effective in all its forms and likes to get buffed, so here I am. Was thinking Fireball - LMP - Concentrated Effect - Fire Penetration - Life Leech - Crit Multiplier. I plan on going CI because I really want to ignore chaos damage. I've got an old Eye of Chayula and a Dream Fragments so it's mostly about 2 big problems I'm seeing.

1: CI means you can't use your health pool for ANYTHING, auras come out of mana just the same as spells. A mana flask that refills quickly sounds like something I'll need, but with just Discipline and Clarity running I'm still left with a tiny pool. I'm hoping picking up a couple clusters will alleviate this a bit.

2: I'm not sure about survivability VS damage. I usually just make big burly tanks that "get by" so I figured wand+Armor/ES shield with base resistances, armor/ES chest (also for easier sockets), lots ES elsewhere etc etc and then grab the best crit and the best damage bonuses.



Looking for some feedback, the only mandatory pieces in all of this are Fireball, Lightning Warp (I miss teleport), Discipline+Clarity and I'm gonna run CI. That shouldn't be a problem, but again I struggle wrapping my head around whether or not I'm gonna need mirror worthy gear or if I can get totally solid off a handful of exalts due to generally simple premise.

NOTE: The stat nodes aren't exactly mandatory, I just don't know if I'll get stats on certain gear or not and didn't wanna plan for that just yet. Ideally I'd start grabbing some block nodes and more mana nodes unless I'm suprisingly good on mana.

Well Mirror worthy gear wouldnt hurt, but it's not required. You just need decent gear. From personal experience I'll only suggest Rainbowstrides. Either Old Legacy or New Legacy. You'll love that mana bonus and passives that you can spend on shield or damage.

For weapon dont forget dagger or wand. Look for combination of Spell Damage, Crit Chance and Crit Multiplier. Mana Regeneration is nice. Cast Speed is not important, because fireball eats lot of mana. And go for ES shield, because you can get crit chance and spell damage from it. You can get Armor from other places. And take Fire Doryani's belt, with increased Fragment drop rate prices sunk like Titanic.

You can use power charge on critical and run power charges instead of increased critical damage. Inc Crit Dmg should give you bigger dps, but Power Charges more stable dps and less costly in mana(with lvl20 gems: FB with IncCritDmg ~158, with PCoC ~134). But that's question of preference.

In my opinion your current tree has to much damage nodes and not enough ES nodes. So reflect will be horror for you. Of course that depends on what gear you'll be using.

For Passive tree:
1. Near Witch start area either drop one 10 Intelligence node or drop two 8% fire damage nodes. They're not worth passive point.
2. I recommend taking Mental Acuity near shadow.
3. I think you'll need to refund Immolation cluster for ES or Block nodes.
4. Consider taking Coordination for dexterity.
5. Near Witch start are Cast speed nodes would give you more dps, than Crit Chance nodes, because those 15% crit chance nodes are horrible.
6. You plan on taking Armor/ES gear, but in passive tree you took only two armor/ES nodes. I recommend taking "Body and Soul" cluster.
7. And consider taking 7% Reduced Mana cost node near Templar to deal with FB mana cost.
8. Well... In the end, since you dont plan using power charges I think you should just go with Bada CI passive tree, consider taking Throatseeker instead of area damage nodes. In endgame depending on gear you always could do some changes.

I find cast speed to be very worthwhile. On top of the dps gain you can outmaneuver your foes. Witches do kite and being able to get in 2 hits vs one adds up. Factor in the help with crowd control as well.

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faustian1 wrote:

I find cast speed to be very worthwhile. On top of the dps gain you can outmaneuver your foes. Witches do kite and being able to get in 2 hits vs one adds up. Factor in the help with crowd control as well.

Compared to other dps increasing sources like higher crit chance / crit damage for example, cast speed has two downsides for a fireball build:
1) Your mana consumption per second will rise. That may screw up your mana pool to an extend that the benefits of a higher cast speed might get negated (if you cannot spam fb but have to pause).
2) CS doesn't help your burning damage as the damage per hit is not increased. Increased crit damage on the other hand would increase the initial damage and thereby the burning damage.

CS still is overvalued in trade, meaning you pay more for CS than for other mods. So on a pure orb investment to dps ratio, other mods will do better.

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Bada_Bing wrote:

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faustian1 wrote:

I find cast speed to be very worthwhile. On top of the dps gain you can outmaneuver your foes. Witches do kite and being able to get in 2 hits vs one adds up. Factor in the help with crowd control as well.

Compared to other dps increasing sources like higher crit chance / crit damage for example, cast speed has two downsides for a fireball build:
1) Your mana consumption per second will rise. That may screw up your mana pool to an extend that the benefits of a higher cast speed might get negated (if you cannot spam fb but have to pause).
2) CS doesn't help your burning damage as the damage per hit is not increased. Increased crit damage on the other hand would increase the initial damage and thereby the burning damage.

CS still is overvalued in trade, meaning you pay more for CS than for other mods. So on a pure orb investment to dps ratio, other mods will do better.

While everything you said is 100% true in theory, extra CS is great for offense and defense. Unless you're bleeding mana you should be able to sustain the extra cost, and the burn damage is overrated. Fireball is such a hard hitting skill that you rarely need more than ~4 shots to kill a rare. Burn damage is barely gonna help you solo, and noone is going to wait for things to burn down in a party.

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j0zef wrote:

While everything you said is 100% true in theory, extra CS is great for offense and defense. Unless you're bleeding mana you should be able to sustain the extra cost, and the burn damage is overrated. Fireball is such a hard hitting skill that you rarely need more than ~4 shots to kill a rare. Burn damage is barely gonna help you solo, and noone is going to wait for things to burn down in a party.

Maybe you're right. Maybe i overrate burning because i played too much with my explosive arrow ranger over the past few weeks, a build that is centered around proliferating burning damage.

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Bada_Bing wrote:

Maybe i overrate burning

I guess it depends on your play-style, and perhaps solo vs. group emphasis, but I really like the d.o.t. skills like burning. What they may lack in insta-kill-power, they make up for in safety.

As a tangential question, I found your guide really useful and more-or-less followed it to build an invasion fire-witch. But I wound up focusing on firetrap + summons, with fireball as a secondary support skill, mainly because I had almost no physical damage reduction and needed zombies/skellies as a meat/bone shield. I now have IC on CwDT, but 15% PDR still feels very risky even with 3.8K life (Ch'aska almost one-shot me on cruel and I've avoided her on merciless).

So how do life witch-builds usually manage with armor?

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j0zef wrote:

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Bada_Bing wrote:

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faustian1 wrote:

I find cast speed to be very worthwhile. On top of the dps gain you can outmaneuver your foes. Witches do kite and being able to get in 2 hits vs one adds up. Factor in the help with crowd control as well.

Compared to other dps increasing sources like higher crit chance / crit damage for example, cast speed has two downsides for a fireball build:
1) Your mana consumption per second will rise. That may screw up your mana pool to an extend that the benefits of a higher cast speed might get negated (if you cannot spam fb but have to pause).
2) CS doesn't help your burning damage as the damage per hit is not increased. Increased crit damage on the other hand would increase the initial damage and thereby the burning damage.

CS still is overvalued in trade, meaning you pay more for CS than for other mods. So on a pure orb investment to dps ratio, other mods will do better.

While everything you said is 100% true in theory, extra CS is great for offense and defense. Unless you're bleeding mana you should be able to sustain the extra cost, and the burn damage is overrated. Fireball is such a hard hitting skill that you rarely need more than ~4 shots to kill a rare. Burn damage is barely gonna help you solo, and noone is going to wait for things to burn down in a party.

You naturally will be able to get 10% cast speed from LMP quality, those three 4% nodes near witch start, 6% CS Presdigation passive, if you CI you get Blood Rage bonus. From that you get enough Cast Speed to run around. ~0.6 sec to spawn fireball is enough. More cast speed on gear will mean more problems with mana, thus better look for other damage mods.

I agree on burn. For me it's early irrelevant. Damage I get from burning is to small comparing to fireballs damage and rarely mob gets a chance to burn. I dont even try to quality Fireball anymore while trying to get +1 level. Mainly because vaaling is depressing thing, I corrupted two 20/23 Fireballs and bunch of crap trying to get that goddamn +1.

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Thecla wrote:

As a tangential question, I found your guide really useful and more-or-less followed it to build an invasion fire-witch. But I wound up focusing on firetrap + summons, with fireball as a secondary support skill, mainly because I had almost no physical damage reduction and needed zombies/skellies as a meat/bone shield. I now have IC on CwDT, but 15% PDR still feels very risky even with 3.8K life (Ch'aska almost one-shot me on cruel and I've avoided her on merciless).

So how do life witch-builds usually manage with armor?

Aside from using enduring cry/immortal call you have three options for dealing with physical damage:
1) Arctic Armour which helps against titty bitches and voidbearers and other mobs that deal many low damage hits. Good option for SC and HC.

2),3)Cut back on offensive nodes (i would recommend crit and use chance to ignite gem instead) and
invest those points in
-block nodes and/or
-iron reflexes and a few reduced mana reservation nodes; then run a grace aura for additional armour
2)3) is more an option for HC; a SC player might find that too tanky at the expense of dps and take the risk of dying occassionally.