After playing a fire sorc on ladder, I’ve come to the conclusion that Meteor is an extremely underwhelming skill. It’s extremely powerful (~41K average damage, before -res), but is so unwieldy that it sees almost no use. I find it really serves no purpose except as a synergy skill or very specific niche uses.
Meteor’s Time-To-Impact (TTI) delay is 60 frames or 2.4 seconds. I feel this is Meteor’s primary problem. It is extremely hard and impractical to use Meteor outside of a very narrow set of situations. Basically, Meteor is only usable against mobs that stand still for a while or are spawning in at a known location. On top of that, the long TTI delay makes it functionally pointless to use versus its companion skills on any fire sorc build. In 60 frames, a fire sorc can cast 7 Fireballs (56 frames, at 8 frame FCR), and Fireball should be around ~20K each (before -res), for 140K damage versus the 41K from Meteor. This further pushes the use case towards “enemies spawning in soon” where Fireball can’t hit them until they appear. Even if you consider just raw DPS, Meteor is dealing 41K every 30 frames due to its casting delay, and Fireball can be cast 3 (3.75 really) times in the same duration for a total of 60K+ damage (75K+ if extended over an arbitrarily long time). The main reason to use Meteor is to build up a stack of pyres so a boss/baal wave that is spawning in dies a little faster. However, with TZs, you’re less likely to be engaging with baal waves.
This makes Meteor feel very anti-climactic and frankly quite useless. For such a big, powerful skill, it’s just so awkward and unusable. Meteor feels like it’s meant to be the grandiose skill of the Fire skill tree, but it’s very lackluster. It would be much more interesting if Meteor could be used more generally. I think there’s a few ways Meteor could be tweaked to be more interesting and actually usable:
Reduce TTI significantly - This will at least let you use it on a boss group or on mobs in the area. This doesn’t affect Meteor’s DPS since it still has the same casting delay. It will still be out DPS’d by Fireball (and Hydra), but at least it would be fun to be able to use it against enemies other than lazy bosses and baal waves. Plus, it’s a targeted AoE whereas Fireball is a missile. This would let you kill an important target more easily instead of eating through a crowd with Fireball (or teleporting right on top of the primary target). Dropping it to 30 frames might be enough.
Increase Meteor’s impact radius - This would at least give you more slop to land a hit with it. It would also make Meteor feel a little more impressive and powerful. 4 yards feels comically small for a meteor falling from the sky. By comparison, Fireball has a 2.6 yard radius, Blizzard is 4.6 yards, Nova is ~8. Meteor would probably be just fine with 5-6 yards.
Increase Meteor’s damage - This would technically make Meteor more rewarding to use, though leaving it just as awkward. I’m not personally in favor of this. It feels plenty strong as is, and I think any more damage would really be overkill on everything other than act bosses and P8 stuff. Meteor’s problem isn’t that it’s weak. It’s that you can’t use it sensibly on most things in the game.
Fundamentally change how Meteor works - There’s a lot of things you could do here. Meteor could have a V-shaped impact, could have multiple smaller impacts, could create smaller projectiles after initial impact, and so on.
Just to be clear, I don’t think all of those changes should be done. They’re just a list of ideas, and honestly just one of them would be fine (though I prefer not a damage buff).
I’ve found the most effective way to use Meteor against melee enemies is to cast it on yourself (or where you’re going to be) as enemies close in on you. Use Frozen Orb or Frost Nova as a way to slow them down. Move/teleport out of the way at the last moment and they get obliterated by the impact, and the fire will burn the rest of them to death. It’s a good “kill box” build with your character serving as the bait. Ranged enemies typically stay still and fire at you, so no problem there.
I usually cast meteor near a pack, tele right up to it, and then try to hit stun any mobs that rush me with fireball. The problem is that everything will be dead by the time meteor shows up (same if I teleport right up to a group and try the same thing). If I use meteor from a distance and wait for it to land before teleporting in and using fireball, I do a lot of waiting around, and meteor’s radius usually doesn’t cover the whole pack so I have to go in and finish up with fireballs anyway.
Ultimately, you can work around the awkwardness of the skill, but it’s still fairly underwhelming. It feels a lot to me like the skill isn’t working for you, but you’re working for it.
I’ve found that having a Holy Freeze act 2 merc + shooting frozen orbs makes Meteor much more usable since mobs are usually slowed enough that the radius and delay of Meteor isn’t that big of a deal. Other than that, Meteor is rather easy to deal with considering how predictable mobs are in general.
Meteor is fine. Very strong attack over moat skill and very strong at laying down havoc at spawn points like baal minions. Fire sorcs have fb, hydra, enchant and fw to take care of moving targets so it is dumb to ask blizz to make meteor even more viable…and as I always say, sorcs are the LAST class that needs any buffs or improvements…
I leveled to 99 using a meteor/fireball tal rasha sorc this league. I would get like 7-8% exp at level 98 from a flayer jungle TZ on average (the whole hour), for reference. Although I think meteor is amazing and promotes good positioning a lot which is something I like (it is extremely rewarding if you use it well, as someone said cast it on yourself / your merc vs melee enemies, which works amazingly particularly against small hit box enemies who stack up like flayers), I agree it could use some sort of buff since it falls behind other elements. I think the damage is more than enough, the annoying part about meteor is the immense delay to impact and the relatively small aoe, which is small enough to be pretty bad if you cast the meteor off even by a few pixels from where it needs to be casted, but it is pretty bad against big enemies as well, such as urdars, because you can hit so few of those with a single meteor.
My suggestion is to decrease impact delay, increase aoe or both. If they only do one of these, it should be noticeably more powerful. I’d play it next season as well if they buff it.
It’s not that fire is crap, it’s that the entire time you’re casting fireball, you’re desperately looking for a window to cast meteor, because lets be honest, you are probably playing fire because meteor is such a cool spell. The problem is, every time you “weave” it into your rotation, something happens to make it worse than just throwing out 3 fireballs instead. It doesn’t feel “useless”, it’s not that it never has any application, it just never feels good to cast it. That’s all.
Well there’s always going to be a different opinion on the matter. I’d be okay if they changed up meteor a bit. It is cool enough alone to respec fire, until you’re actually using it over Blizzard, Lightning, Nova, Hydra etc. Then it’s like, oooh yeah, I remember why I don’t play fire, this spell takes 40 years to be relevant and I can spam 60k worth of fireballs in the meantime.
well it’s clear you don’t really understand how to use it.
you cast meteor on one set of enemies and focus on another. or cast it first and then just blast fireball, it works. you just have to look at it differently. but i’m not here to try and convince you it’s a good spell, you already have your conclusion.
Sure sure, someone disagrees with you on the validity and utility of a spell like Meteor.
cLeArLy yOu tOo sTupiD t0 uSe iT pRoPerly
okay my man, I make a suggestion about making one of the most under played specs of sorc more fun, and you straight up insult my intelligence. Have a good one chief.
well the way you explained how it’s not good just makes me feel like you personally aren’t using it to it’s maximum capacity. if that in turns make you think you’re stupid well, that’s on you.
but i was just pointing out your relationship with the specific spell (which you probably don’t use very often) so maybe you don’t really have the greatest grasp on how well it could potentially be used. sorry if i came across as rude, i was just trying to point out that it could be used better by someone who was put more effort into using it.
With the action bar and programing the hotkey to my mouse “back” button I really like spamming Meph with meteors while I “fill in” with Fball while meteor is on cool down. Feels super slick.