My feedback on fire sorc after 90 levels of play. It's bad.

First and foremost, I'm not asking for any build suggestions or anything. This is just my thoughts on fire elemental spells in POE2.

I haven't played every single league in POE1, but I have put in, at the very least, a thousand hours overall. Mostly played on hardcore leagues. And one of my favorite builds I've made in the past was fireball ignite ele prolif.
So I decided to do fire build sorc as my first character in POE2.

Straight out of the bat it was a struggle. I struggled through the normal campaign. Cruel was easier.
Whereas my friends, who played merc and witch, blasted through with no issues, I was dying on bosses and feeling like I'm lacking damage a lot.

Today, I finally reached level 90. I also already got all the ascendancy (chrono) and killed couple of pinnacle bosses.
So, here's what I think about fire elemental skills in POE2.

The biggest, giant elephant in the room is ignite. IT IS HORRIBLE. It's AT LEAST twice weaker than in POE1.
I invested so much into ignite magnitude; my Flame Wall has the highest DPS of all my skills, according to in-game tooltip - 26006.
Yet, it takes SEVERAL SECONDS to kill even the normal mobs on t15 maps with no modifiers.
And bosses take FOREVER to kill because they barely take any damage from ignite.

Now, let's go down the list of skills.
-Flame Wall. Good skill if you want to support your projectile skills. But shit damage by itself.
-Ember Fusillade. I didn't like it. It's awkward to use. So I didn't play much with it.
-Incinerate. It's ok.. Since ignite is bad in POE2 to begin with, the damage is ok. However, you are losing a lot of mobility when channeling. And if you need to dodge a boss attack (which happens all the time), you lose all the stages of incinerate.
-Solar Orb. Absolute garbage damage. The only use (not counting flameblast) for it is to reliably apply fire exposure on bosses with fire exposure support attached to the lowest spell level so it won't consume mana. As well as for Font of Mana and Font of Life, both of which are kinda weak.
-Fireball. I don't know why they attached the "explode into 8 firebolts" to it, honestly. I would much rather prefer a good old fashioned fireball that flies and goes boom. But anyway... It's bad. I found only one way to use it: Quality 20, Unleash, Scattershot, Wildshards and two supports for damage. That way it has some semblance of screen clearing. But even then it's not even comparable to other builds I've seen people run. Not to mention, my level 26 fireball costs a whopping 448 mana, which is almost half my mana pool.
-Firestorm. I never liked it even in the first game, so I didn't use it much in the second. Can't really comment here.
-Flameblast. Don't like it. Channeling slows you down, mobs will stun you and interrupt the cast. Awkward to use even with solar orb.

Here's an example of how much of a struggle fire sorc is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WqeVs3Smyo
And keep in mind, I invested EVERYTHING I could into fire damage, ignite and flame wall in particular, including FOUR jewels with 13-15% ignite magnitude. My fire skills are level 26. Even so, that flame wall can't kill anything at a decent speed.

Honorable mentions:
-Firebolt. Staff auto-attack skill. Even with all the damage supports it SUCKS. Barely tickles.
-Detonate Dead. Great skill, not from Elemental tree. Does a lot of damage. But casting it is somewhat unreliable: first, the targeting is bugged, sometimes nothing happens after you cast it; and second, some mobs, like delirium for example, don't even leave a corpse.
-Raging Spirits. Ever since they got "fixed" in one of the hotfixes, it's unusable with my build. Because the game spawns a skull on EVERY. SINGLE. FIREBOLT. And then checks if the limit is reached, after which it kills the spawned skull. Since I'm sometimes casting around 340 firebolts at a press of a button, it LITERALLY kills the instance. Everything slows down to a crawl for 10-15 seconds, and then starts to fast-forward to catch up. Which can easily result in death (no, it's not my PC, yes I checked the graphs).
Here's what I mean (this is t13 throwaway map with no mods, just for demonstration):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wws4MT9Wd2k

Conclusion: Fire skills need to be buffed or reworked. Especially ignite.

i have a fire witch.

id say the feedback here is fair honestly, i havent done enough testing and theory crafting to know if my experience is just me doing the wrong things. but as someone whos played a TON of fire in poe1, 1000s of hours playing fire witch builds extensively, making my own builds that can do all content with ease... i did what i would have expected to work somewhat fine and found non crit burn based fire spells to be absolutely terrible.


im reserving my judgement til i experiment more cause maybe i just did it wrong, but first impressions = really bad.

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Snorkle_uk#0761 a écrit :

im reserving my judgement til i experiment more cause maybe i just did it wrong, but first impressions = really bad.

I optimized my passives as much as I could. I have very good gear for my build, skipping all the magic find for all the damage and survivability and sustain mods that I could get. And yet, this is the state of things, unfortunately.

Thank you for confirming that I'm not the only one disappointed in how weak fire spells are.

I went full fire spell on pathfinder for the extra mobility while casting.

With the ascendancy and the mobility support on incinerate I am reducing the penalty by 60%. With 35% movespeed boots I can hold down incinerate while dodging most enemies and kiting nicely. Spreading the burning ground of incinerate can paint the entire map with huge ignites if you gear right and can reliably fuel cast on ignite on it's own.

I did find going for full fire caster had low damage and the biggest weakness, no CC, makes it the weakest overall element for spells. Firestorm is very weak in PoE2 compared to PoE1 and feels like a waste of Mana whenever I try to slot it into the build via cast on ignite.

In the end I went with 2x Blackflame unique rings which give ignite magnitude and convert the ignite damage to chaos. With Chaos based ignites I can run blasphemy despair and withering aura and use a low level essence drain cast on ignite to inflict wither using the support to reach cap (70% more damage taken multiplier) and also hinder enemies. The main damage scaling for this build is still fire damage but the debuffs on enemies are chaos based so I still count it as a fire spell build.

I know that there are some decent projectile-maxxing fireball builds but the best ones convert fire to cold so you can freeze for CC.

On its own, fire struggles hard unless you use some conversion to cover its weaknesses.

Problem is actually larger. Any build that doesnt have any form of CC has issues if its not one tapping majority of endgame content.

Same with with minion arsonist build. Relies heavily on fire damage and has no real CC. That leaves you only one option, kill fast stuff and build you char tanky af.

Core issues are also still one shotting mobs or if you get CC'd. If you dont CC mobs that means they have more chances to CC you and kill you. So at some point ether if you dont kill fast mobs on screen you need CC to control them.

Yup, I also leveled as a fire sorc since on launch.

I started with Ember Fusillade (horrible skill) + Flame Wall + Detonate Dead for the ENTIRE campaign. Eventually, I swapped to Fireball instead of Ember F.

Anyway, I agree with everything you said.

I'm now no longer using any fire spells as my main damage. And while I think Fireball does a great job clearing endgame maps, it's weak AF vs bosses. I wanna see someone using Fireball as a main damage skill to clear a pinnacle boss sub 5-10 seconds, but we all know that's fucking impossible.

For reference, I'm a lvl 95 Stormweaver with all ascendancies. And I've even used fireball to kill the Arbiter, but it wasn't my main source of damage. It simply served to destroy my Ice Walls, which were doing the real damage.

Yesterday I swapped my ashen staff for a new chiming staff. I was finally done with PATHETIC firebolt that did NOTHING to help me plug in my weakness of dealing with bosses and strong solo targets.
Instead I took Ember F..
And while it's doing marginally better, and Sigil of Power sure does help a bit with increasing my damage potential, it's still a MASSIVE pain in the butt to use Ember F. - it's just such an awkward and inconvenient skill. Having to wait every time for it to shoot, even with Fast Forward support is very annoying.
Not to mention it doesn't even have stages counter, so with my super fast cast speed I can go beyond 11 and not even know about it, all the while it still drains my mana.

If Ember F., instead of waiting, would start shooting as soon as I let go of a button - that would've been SO MUCH BETTER.

Edit: Just killed a t15 map boss - the giant skeleton torso in a hole. It took me SEVERAL MINUTES to kill it.
It's not that terrible if you look at it in a vacuum, but if you compare it to other people with non-fire builds who nuke bosses at least four times faster, it feels kinda bad.
Now the main question here is - what is the intention of the developers? Is fire where it's supposed to be and other skills need to be toned down? Or are other skills represent how it's supposed to be and fire skills need to be buffed or/and reworked?

Ember Fusillade is so ass! It's such a terrible skill to use. So clunky, so inconvenient!
It made me gave up on fire theme for my build, and I just swapped it to spark, to spam through flame wall, when I'm dealing with single target enemies like bosses.

Funnily enough, I now can actually kill bosses 5 times faster than before AND it's significantly more mana efficient. Which is absolutely absurd, considering that I have almost no damage bonuses to anything except fire and ignite.

Personally, I like Ember Fusillade quite a bit. It's my favorite fire spell to use. But I reckon I use it differently than most... 2-3 taps with Scattershot for 6-9 shots, maybe I get the bonus 8. That keeps me very mobile. And I don't reduce the delay time, instead just casting other stuff then. That said, it isn't perfect. You do need to fill that delay. Can't imagine it feeling good without WASD. You cannot up the duration of your stuff, or else you make Fusillade worse*. And so on. It's basically one of the few elemental spells that feels good to use by itself against a single target. But while it appeals to me, I don't think it's as good as it could be.

And yeah, ignite is bad. Spells that interact with ignite are generally bad. Fire is way out there on the tree, so you have to spend more to get less. And the spell line up is just missing utility.

* Note that longer durations trash Cold's Ice Bomb as well. Really, both should do more damage based on the delay, so that, if it goes up from the base, they hit harder.

For Ember F. Try Titan with maxed out reduced duration. You can turn it into an instant cast skill.