Guide: Fireball CI Curser - Proliferated Burning Critical Fire Damage | In-depth | SC |

Has anyone sticked with The Searing Touch all the way ?
I really like it so far and think of taking Serpent Stance and the outer
Ar/Es templar passives and not going all the way to shadow.
Also since this build has a lot of fire passives I think I'll get minion
instability also.

I'm also torn between using Fire Trap or Fireball on my ST.
Right now I'm using it like this.


But I'm 45 right now and have this passive tree

Currently leveling a burning witch according to what I read here (my 4th witch); almost lv 68 atm and it's by far the fatest I leveled, the damage ouput is crazy.
But there's something I was wondering, as i could read burning damage does not stack, but how does it really work?
Lately I'm relying more on fire traps than fireballs and for luring purposes I tried to use a flame totem with lmp wich is a great totem btw (the cast speed is so fast that any "on hit" support you add proc instantly even with a low %) so basically I got used to throw a fire trap at pack of mobs, curse the pack before trap explodes and then place the totem next to the burning patch to keep them in the aoe and everything die really quick. But if I do this does the burning damage from the trap prevail?

Is it just me or is this build very fragile until end game? I am currently lvl 47 and struggling so hard in act 2 cruel. My damage output is great but I die so easily. Should I have taken all the energy shield nodes early rather than follow this guide? I only have 500 life and 500 es at my current lvl, when does it get better?

Picking CI before the act 2 Cruel is a good thing. Personnaly I stacked several Skill Points to get the whole CI node in one time. Then you buy a good CI chest or something that will give you a huge amount of CI (with scaling passives) and you're good. But, indeed, you will be way better later. I am currently level 72 with this build and it is a real carnage.

Got a fire witch to lvl 71 now and I love her! Definitely a different approach than my lvl 79 cold crit witch. I decided to drop all Crit Chance since I wasn't really able to hit high crit chance with a searing touch. So instead I opted for more energy shield since this build does not have ES life leach, survivability is a little more difficult at times. I also decided to stack high burn dmg since that seems to be the majority of the dmg that I deal. I also threw in elemental equilibrium and put on a 5l Arc w/ chain to great results. Couple that with temp chains, flammability, elemental weakness, arc's ability to create stack shocks and elemental equilibrium's -50% to fire enemies just melt.. Also helps out when enemies have immune to curse you can still do a debuff to the enemy.

On a side note I notice that if an enemy is burning and I hit them with arc, the burning dmg does insane dmg all of a sudden, this means that burning dmg does not count towards elemental equilibrium?

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sm0ke52 wrote:

Got a fire witch to lvl 71 now and I love her! Definitely a different approach than my lvl 79 cold crit witch. I decided to drop all Crit Chance since I wasn't really able to hit high crit chance with a searing touch. So instead I opted for more energy shield since this build does not have ES life leach, survivability is a little more difficult at times. I also decided to stack high burn dmg since that seems to be the majority of the dmg that I deal. I also threw in elemental equilibrium and put on a 5l Arc w/ chain to great results. Couple that with temp chains, flammability, elemental weakness, arc's ability to create stack shocks and elemental equilibrium's -50% to fire enemies just melt.. Also helps out when enemies have immune to curse you can still do a debuff to the enemy.

My own fire witch is level 63 atm and I'm waiting for the 5th of June to reconsider her build as a whole.

Just made some very basic maths regarding critical strikes, assuming 0%q level 20 gems :

Considering this Skill tree :

Increased critical strike chance : 390 %
Critical Weakness : 10% crit chance

Fireball base critical strike chance : 6%
-> Fireball crit chance : 39.4 %

Fire Trap base critical strike chance : 5%
-> Fire Trap crit chance : 34.5%

This also assumes you are using a searing touch, hence have no additional crit chance from a wand/shield. Max crit chance for fireball would otherwise be around 45%, while fire trap would sit around 39%.
I'll probably invest some time in theory-crafting a fire build of my own after the next patch, will stick to my dual spork till then.

"

sm0ke52 wrote:

On a side note I notice that if an enemy is burning and I hit them with arc, the burning dmg does insane dmg all of a sudden, this means that burning dmg does not count towards elemental equilibrium?

Elemental Equilibrium says : "Enemies you hit with elemental damage temporarily get +25% resistance to those elements and -50% to other Elements".
And since burning damage does not actually hit, it won't trigger EE. This is also why burning damage builds can't make a great use of IIQ/IIR support gems.

looks like this is a contender for the adjusted build come 0.11

It is hard to say before i know the values of the clarity adjustment.



I'm going to sleep now, sorry i've been slacking answers this thread lately i had to take a break. If you prefer to play with fire trap i suggest you play that, but i love fireball more and i dont like to hide behind traps so thats why im building a build to do that without issues :)

EDIT: Btw, im 86 now and this build is really starting to shine, this is a really good build :D

Big ups, this patch definitely boosted this build.

I lost around 4.5% energy shield, from 6380 to around 6100 (i guess they reduced monster damage by around 10% so thats a boost).

I gained 6% dps or so, realistically expect about 5% damage increase. We like damage.

Reflect was nerfed by 10%, and given my around 4.5% reduction in energy shield and 5% dps gain its about the same as before. Reflect was my biggest concern.

Clarity is boosted a tiny tiny amount when running inner force compared to before, but unfortunately not enough to justify removing inner force. Still, a boost.

Hurray, we survived the patch and came out stronger than before!

EDIT: Review/editing of builds is coming soon, i need to test for a couple of days before i can say what is more ideal. Almost nothing has changed.



Basically you just want to get elemental dominion and that's it. To free 3 points up to get that you remove the 2 points to get blaze in shadow area and you take the 6% energy shield point from the witch starting area away.

In addition, with perfect end-game gear, you will now be forced to only have grace and haste only level 18, since they changed the shadow 30 dex point to 20 dex plus 3% cast and attack speed. That means we have a 10 dex deficiency, which results in about 100 evasion lost from grace, and 1% movement and cast speed lost from haste.

That's about the main changes. Ofc we get slightly lowered resists from purity, and less evasion from grace due to inner force nerf, but nothing major.

now don't take "Inner Force(12% increased effect of buffs on you)"??

I'm still taking inner force, it's still 4 very strong points from all perspectives and the extra mana regen from clarity is invaluable.