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

@crackmonster:
Arcanevision was just for the low life version asked.
You're right about it, with CI => no use.

I'm curious about how the concentrated effect mechanic works with burning and elemental proliferation:

My understanding is that burning damage is based off the initial strike that ignited, which is why enhancing your crit damage is important (since when you crit you ignite, and the burning damage is based on that crit). Concentrated effect states "more area damage," but when I equip the support gem my DPS doesn't change. I assume this is because the DPS calculation is for the main target, and concentrated effect only affects the AOE damage. Now, it's also my understanding that fireball's AOE is the full effect of the spell damage, therefore effectively all the mobs within the AOE will take more damage but the target itself will not.

Further extrapolating, crits are calculated on a per cast not per target basis, so if I crit, all the enemies around my main target will take the crit damage, multiplied by the percent more damage. But this is where I start to get hazy: since elemental proliferation spreads the burning from the crit, will the burning damage be enhanced by concentrated effect? And how does that work exactly?

Thanks for taking the time to read and try to understand my question!

Fireball has the ability to explode when it hits a target, unless it pierces or chains, diappearing in the process. The damage being shown in the tooltip is that of the non-explosion, the standard projectile that does not do aoe.

Luckily we do not pierce or chain so it will explode when it hits the first target instead of doing single target damage. Anyone in that explosion will be hit by the full blast, including the original target, and the original target will only be hit by the aoe, not the fireball non-aoe as well.

So for all our purposes the fireball we launch is only an aoe. It is affected by concentrated effect like any aoe spell, but it will not show in tooltip since that shows just the single target projectile and not the actual aoe explosion.

When you cast a spell it will do a crit roll, lets say for example it rolls 1-100 (probably does), then if your crit chance is higher than or equal to the roll it will be a crit. That does not mean all targets will always be crit. If you have critical weakness on some of the monsters you can technically risk only critting on those affected by it. When dealing with critical weakness it will add its additional crit onto your crit chance and compare to the crit roll, it will not do an individual roll for that. So yea, pretty much all will be crit in the vast majority of cases.

The burning damage will be enhanced by concentrated effect, because concentrated effect affects all incident hits, therefore the burn is based on a higher damage hit due to it.

One thing i have never got around to testing/asking devs for is whether the concentrated effect will also increase the burn, since burn is an aoe in this case, effectively superscaling with it, but i think not. I don't think so because if you link life leech to your spell it will not steal from burns, and i think burns are cast by their own effect so to speak, and not being affected by most support gems attached to the spell. Would love to know that though :D

Hope it helps!

"

Crackmonster wrote:

The burning damage will be enhanced by concentrated effect, because concentrated effect affects all incident hits, therefore the burn is based on a higher damage hit due to it.

One thing i have never got around to testing/asking devs for is whether the concentrated effect will also increase the burn, since burn is an aoe in this case, effectively superscaling with it, but i think not. I don't think so because if you link life leech to your spell it will not steal from burns, and i think burns are cast by their own effect so to speak, and not being affected by most support gems attached to the spell. Would love to know that though :D

Burning damage, be it one from ignition or the ground effect of a fire trap is NOT an area damage although the buning ground is applied within an area, but simply damage over time. It will therefore be unaffected by concentrated effect (just like the poison cloud of a poison arrow, which too is DoT and not AoE). To increase the burning damage one has to pick passives that explicit state "increase burning".
That's also the reason why life leech won't work with it: the current game mechanics doesn't allow for that with DoT effects. BTW item rarity doesn't work either.

Fire penetration doesnt work either. Well i didn't think it worked, but in my dreams i hoped it would :D

It even has a special graphical effect when turned into an aoe through proliferation, it is not impossible that they could have changed it to be aoe in itself. :(

if fire penetration doesn't work, what's the point of using that support gem? Wouldn't we be better off with increased burning damage or something?

It increases initial damage which means it scales burn normally, if it also scaled the burn then it would superscale by benefitting twice, and it covers up a weak point (fire ress monsters). Without it you can sometimes run into monsters types where you have to spend several additional seconds waiting for burn to kill, with you blaze right through with this, killing them with instant damage and moving on.

I assumed the fire resistance calculation was performed as the HP is actually removed, rather than during the initial "damage dealt" calculation? Am I wrong in thinking this?

Without being absolutely certain for a fact, i have always thought that the initial hit is the damage done past the resistance. It also makes sense since if you have some high fire resistance monsters you do more burn damage to them by proccing burn on less fire resistant mobs and vise versa, you do less damage to others if your burn is only on the big molten golem. That is what my intuition tells me from many days of playing this, but i did not empirically test it.

When we will have a 'official' rework of this build from OP?