You have a lot of good gear there, you are lucky. I never get far into hell to find any of that stuff.
You dont need those items. Even with mediorce gear that you can find in a “simple” playthrough (simple = you need a few rounds of Countess/Andy/Meph/Eldritch/Pindle runs), you can complete Hell.
Good gear is needed for being faster when you want to do rune finding runs or just want to get some extra xp. But it is not needed to simply beat the game. Ubers are questionable, but that is mainly designed for melee due to those stupid elemental resists of all mobs because casters were too op already and for DClone you need a merc with crushing blow. But those are end game contents and not Hell playthroughs.
It’s a old post but both builds are still played equally in 2.5 and wanted to put my 2 cents.
I tried both and liked them. For fire, I used mainly armaggedon and molten boulder. Volcano when I want remote. But I’m still testing.
IMHO, the wind druid is more defensive (cyclone armor and hurricane) and fire druid more offensive (armaggedon 1 point in cyclone armor helps but it’s nothing compared to the 20 synergised points and hurricane).
There’s also a question of preferences. For example, tornado is hard to aim and I can understand some peoples don’t like it. A bit like blizzard vs frozen orb…
Compared to sorc, less damage but more tanky. So wind druid is more tanky than fire druid that is more tanky than sorc.
There’s also a question of performances with very budget, budget, average, good and very good gears. It would be cool to make a table to compare both wind and fire for these five levels of gears.
Take care
Wind druid is tanky??? You need to be in the face of all opponents with him.
The fire druid barely enters in physical contact of mobs due to letting the summons hold them up, or knocking them back with Molten. The rest is Armageddon wrecking havok on the screen and Volcano warming up the butt of any Elite/Boss. The only annoying thing is that in certain fights Oak dies pretty quickly and you need to recast it. I have been playing this druid without CArmor and I never really felt that I’d need it, especially with end game (or close to end game) gear.