Fire Birds kind of underwhelming

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21

Imo, that would be too fast imo. I think having stacks drop every 5 seconds would be better, that way we effectively get 50 seconds.

That’s another way we can do it.

Most likely, numbers can certainly be tweaked, but I’d like to avoid a global damage bonus.

The idea is to give builds that don’t benefit or utilize high ias the chance to build combustion stacks quickly. For example a pure meteor build would take a large time to build stacks. Also in the set’s current form, it’s possible to have max combustion stacks thanks to Disintegrate, so my suggestion is there to maintain the ease of getting max stacks without needing to rely on either channeling or signature skills (as they’re some of our faster hitting skills).

There’s the following in the post:

What this means is that every 5 seconds of you not attacking, you’d lose 5 stacks, so it’d take about 50 seconds for you to actually lose all of your combustion stacks. That should help maintain the combustion stacks unless you happen to run into an area with no monsters.

22

No objection on the 1 stack per second, on my part.
As for the nerf I would be careful not to loose too much power. 4000% as a general boost seemed large from just reading the set stats. I would have it there in the 6pcs in order to have toned down accordingly.

23

I hope they get this set kinda right on the ptr-duration. Doublechannel is not the thing I and probably many other want to see on any build.

Magic missle with mirrorball triggers it but the dmg isn’t realy good (at least how i tried it). I don’t know if i miss something about the function of this set. It is ignite --> gather 50 stacks --> hit ignited enemy with a second firespell. Am i right here?

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24

the dmg feels super random. I did some 115s as a test. Around 20% of their health would go fast, then nothing. this happened with MM and SB. I noticed I get procs around 12-20 trill, but its not often. It’s far more often with EB. As is, it’s horrible to play.

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25

Still feels like a very weird to play set… After all the reworks it still feels clunky to me. Not something I would enjoy playing, even tried the ones that are OP right now, also feels more like work than enjoyable gameplay.

26

Well, is the 6-piece actually proccing Area Damage? Anybody checked this?

27

Actually Firebird is quite fun in T16. Every Elite dies instantly with Explosive Blast triggering 6p bonus. The Combustion stacks stay between 48-50. And with Captain Crimson + Obsidian ring you can cast Explosive blast so many times you can kill even stuff in GR.

28

I agree with a stack fall-off timer… maybe copy Taeguk?

Also, FB6 sucks compared to T6FB4, so rework incoming…:roll_eyes:

29

Huge rework needed. As it is now FB6 need to be proc at a very high rate with fire skills, area damage, and in partu games the build will bd un-playable due to lags…
I imagined that would be something else, e.g. Desintegrate to not trigger area damage, and only from yime to time to use a skill like Meteor that will proc area dsmage and big hits… but it seems skills you use to proc FB6 does even benefit fto items that increase the damage of that skills, at least for Meteor not work…

30

it plays just like manald heal except with flame ward. the dmg is ok. 115 is easy. this is the only viable version of it that ive played. lots of AS helps. stack the global dmg buffs.

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31

The grace period should be a bit longer than Taeguk.

And regarding a rework of the rework… depends on whether the current 4 piece was intended or an oversight. They need to do a little more on the six piece no matter what, though.

What they must do is fix the bugs first and foremost so that the proc is reliable. Then, afterwards maybe buff the effect like this:

Fire skills other than Disintegrate attack 50% faster, strike twice and cause combustion whenever they hit an ignited enemy. Combustion spreads Ignite damage multiplied by the current stack size across 10 yards around the target and can cascade once

32

Making it ignore proc coefficients would fix the uncertainty. Forked Lightning on my 70%CHC build filled the screen pretty quickly with fragment/shame, and it melted T16, but I got CRUSHED at GR100…

33

I’d be ok with disintegrate proc’ing the 2 piece. It would be better than constantly toggling AT. I’d rather it just blow stuff up.

Funny thing, you don’t have to use a fire spell to ignite enemies. Lol…

34

I wonder if sVr did… Rob posted a high FB6 clear with no AD on gear. Have to think somebody checked it before he went ramming through 140s.

EDIT: But there’s a 139 clear at 14k paragon with AD everywhere.

throws up hands

Guess that doesn’t mean the AD does anything though, they could just be carried by their outrageous paragon.

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35

For short…still the same bananas despite blizzard diablo dev’s effort to impress us, LOL. I agree that Firebird still remained disappointing

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37

Yeah, 8k → 14k is about +3 GRs of extra damage via mainstat. So that 14k guy is actually -4 GRs vs Rob, at least for now. And, if AD does nothing, it’s not like it actively hurts you: just gobbles up some rolls that would be better spent elsewhere, but that’s probably only about 2-ish GRs worth of damage.

If AD did work, on the other hand, then Mr. 14k + AD should be obliterating 145.

Edit:

Also of note: Rob using Furnace rather than Woh in the cube. I saw somebody mentioned the extra EB’s from Woh counting as procs, which then wouldn’t trigger FB6. Not sure if anybody has confirmed that…

And, he’s using CoE rather than Zodiac (along with Strongarms and BH: Spellsteal). So, he is “burstifying” his damage. I have to think a bit about the relative value of the extra damage of CoE + Spellsteal + Strongarms vs extra EBs from Zodiac.

I guess Zodiac’s value goes up the more CDR you’ve got, right? Like, if you could get the EB cooldown to 1 second, each Zodiac proc would offset 100% of it. Whereas if it was 1.5 seconds, you’d offset 67% per proc, and at 2 seconds, 50%. So even though additions of CDR, when you already have a lot, sort of have diminishing returns, they could significantly increase your EB rate…

It looks like Rob is carrying either 60.75% CDR or 64.68%- impossible to tell since I can’t see if he has Enchantress with her new ability. So that means EB cooldown is 2.12 - 2.35 seconds. And, that’s how often he can cast it. With Zodiac, and the setup I was pitching, you can get to about 73% CDR, which gives you a EB CD of 1.63 seconds.

When I did a quick test, Disintegrate doesn’t seem to tick Zodiac as fast as it ticks damage. But, with that + the EBs, I was getting at least 2 procs/second. Let’s say you get one every 0.5 seconds, and also that they basically line up with your EB cooldown. So, right when you cast EB, the CD is 1.63 seconds, then immediately goes to 0.63 seconds. A half second later, the remaining CD is 0.13 seconds, which then goes to 0 from the next Zodiac proc. So, notably, in this model, a good bit of that Zodiac proc is wasted. But, let’s continue on…

So, with this pattern and setup, you can basically trigger EB 1x / second, as opposed to the 0.42 - 0.47x / second that Rob would be getting. Which would, in turn, mean Zodiac is giving you a damage multiplier between 2.1x and 2.4x. Also, considering how much of that 2nd Zodiac proc was wasted, you could probably shed CDR rolls on rings for average damage. But I’ll think about that later…

With Rob’s setup, I would guess that you pop Spellsteal 1 second before your CoE Fire cycle begins, which lets you get Deathwish buff back. Spellsteal is additive (right?), and, let’s say on a good pop you can hit 30 targets. So, between that and Strongarms, the additive buff would be +120%. Combined with Taeguk, that’s 3.0 / 1.8 = 1.67, so a +67% buff. So, during that Fire cycle, his damage is 3x (CoE) * 1.67x (Strongarms + Spellsteal) = 5x

He could also keep the Spellsteal buff up all the time, though at the cost of dropping Deathwish for 1 second every 5 seconds (when Deathwish is down, you do only 23.5% damage). So on DW downtime, he’d be 3x (additives) * 0.235x = 0.7x.

So in a full CoE rotation of 16 seconds, his damage profile would be:

0-4: Fire: 5x (20 total damage dealt)
4-5: Lightning - Deathwish: 0.7x (BH pop at second 4) (0.7)
5-8: Lightning: 3x (9)
8-9: Arcane: 3x (3)
9-10: Arcane: 0.7x (BH pop at second 9) (0.7)
10-12: Arcane: 3x (6)
12-14: Cold: 3x (6)
14-15: Cold: 0.7x (BH pop at second 15) (0.7)
15-16: Cold: 3x (3)

So that works out to, essentially, an average 3x multiplier (49 / 16). That’s better than the 2.4x or so that you might be able to get from Zodiac, assuming it works the way I think it works. Then again, those numbers are assuming pretty high density for Spellsteal to work on. Zodiac might be better against smaller numbers of targets (with, say, only 5 targets hit, Spellsteal + Strongarms would only give a +25% buff, rather than +67%).

Anyway, food for thought!

Edit #2: Just occurred to me that you could still use Strongarms + Spellsteal without CoE, i.e. combine these with Zodiac. But, Spellsteal will eat Zodiac procs, so I’m not sure how the damage profile would work out. My gut says it would be pretty good- as long as you can keep up at least a 1.6 “rate multiplier” on your EBs, I would think this would beat out CoE.

Edit #3: Popped by Rob’s stream and saw that during CoE Fire damage phase he is not only spamming EB, he also switches from Disintegrate to Flame Ward. As a result, his combustion stacks decay, but his # of hits is increased. Interesting.

38

If they were given enough time, I would make small changes for what is being seen. Small changes like adding 1 to 2 second pause before stacks start falling off.

That 4000% damage increase has made me scratch my head from when I first saw it. As soon as I got 4P up, I could just sweep disintegrate across a group of tier 6 mobs and they would all die very quickly. No legendaries supporting it. I could have probably gone higher, but I know DR would not be enough at that point.

I went up to tier 10 with a bunch of legendaries and the full T6 and things still died extremely fast, but the one shots on me made me start checking other options.

Edit:
I have ran into a situation where I consider this set to me bad. And I mean, REALLY bad.

Did a regular T16 rift and was not having any real issues. The only one I ran into was one of those sudden one shots. I have a feeling it might be reflect damage, but I am not certain. When I had the boss spawn, everything went downhill. I got Orlash. I usually can kill him with no issue. However, I had to be so mobile that I could not keep any stacks up. I was being so mobile that an elite got pulled. No stacks plus the extra mobs and it took more than 10 minutes to get the boss down.

Yeah, they need to change how you lose stacks. As of that fight, I do not want to deal with the set. It just makes it way too frustrating.

Edit 2:
Just for clarification, that run was with no other set bonuses, just FB by itself.

39

thought I’d test the inevitable archon. Well… it doesn’t work at all. I ignited the enemies, went into archon, and nothing. Archon was on fire rune and my beam was read. Apparently it can’t proc the fb set 6pc. I tried the beam, punch, and the blast. I guess they don’t count as fire skills?

Twisters tic only every 0.8 seconds I think. This seems to make them very hit or miss.

@Rage

I’m pretty sure EB is just extra dmg/toughness. Almost all the damage is from FlameWard. it hits a lot harder for me than EB.

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40

6P Firebird (running w/ EB) obviously still a bit buggy/weird, but the overall design/concept fills a pretty big hole in the Wizard build repertoire – something speedy & ABC that speed clears bounties, rifts, and low GR’s. IDC if the set is a GR pusher or not, Wizards already had/have that. Feels good/smooth to just hold down disintegrate and cycle between teleport and EB.

6Tal/4FB is obviously quite strong for GR, but at the same time it’s not really the speedy build that full 6p Firebird is because you don’t have the same mana efficiency (i.e. you can’t just hold down disintegrate and spam teleport + EB like w/ full 6p).

So each one sort of has a niche, but seems like the 6/4 needs to be toned down somewhat (hopefully stays viable, it’s very fun too). Overall rework really appreciated (but DH changes not so much).

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41

6P Firebirds is pretty buggy and underwhelming, the following skills seem to not even benefit at all:
Twister (Gale Force)
Meteor (Shower, Molten)
Archon (as a straight multiplier to reverse for skills)
Hydra (Mammoth and Blazing)

Meanwhile things that have no skill modifiers at all like Black Hole and Sparkflint seem to trigger.

Needs a lot of work.

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