Anyone Pushing Fire for Fun?

Sorcerer
1

I’m currently running a firewall/hydra/frost nova build in WT3 and feel like I’m hitting a killing speed wall on nightmare 20 dungeons. I can finish without a death, but clear speed is slow and involves a ton of kiting. Currently level 62 with ilvl 700 weapons; working to get sacreds and legendaries in all slots as well as optimizing my rolls. Also need to fill out and optimize paragon tree.

My guess is that I can slowly grind out the WT4 dungeon but will not have the firepower to farm there.

How are your fire builds doing? I know that the “recommended” is FW with meteor procs, but hydra is just so darn useful in dangerous spaces.

2

I’m pushing full lightning for fun.

Only level 54, but with fully specced perk gear, it’s ridiculously fun.

After I get to 100 or completely unable to, I’ll start a new sorc and flip to Ice, then Fire etc.

It’s about having fun right?

I’m 50 years old. My goal isn’t to rush anything.

3

I am running fire essentially as an anchor/support for my party. I rarely die, can res under duress, vastly improve clear speed with the fireball enchant and I can deal with cancerous elite pack affix combos that no one else can effectively all be it slowly.

4

Yeah, Fire and fun is not something I would use on the same phrase in Diablo 4, it’s very poorly designed. Personally I would just reroll to Ice Shards.

1 Like
5

Yep going with Krips advice on how to play it. But his build does have some items, but that don’t mean it won’t work. Got to improvise where need be.

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I’m only level 56 but my fire build is doing fine in WT3. I run double hydra with DoT mod to proc meteor enchants and spread DoTs to keep me healed. Fire ultimate for elites… drop double hydra, fire ultimate near myself and frost nova into meteor spam with fire shield ready to keep me alive with heal/immune during burn phase if I’m standing in bad or taking too much damage during the 8 second inferno window. Works well.

7

Not if you don’t want that heart to suddenly give out ;D

Is that with Arc Lash? I just can’t melee as a sorc, it’s so dull.

I’m Blizz + Shards and I love it. Although I’m ready for fire. I do have two aspects that help Blizz + Shards so it might be a case of waiting until I find fire. Although I did find that staff that does more dmg with the fire ultimate, looks pretty good.

Ice just seems to have so much synergy though with the frozen, chilled, crowd controlled dmg multipliers. Does fire also have this? I’m level 50 and blitzing through things at the moment.

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I’m playing since lvl 1 for fireball, i think it’s realy cool. teleport/flameshield/frost nova/inferno/fireball/arcslash, realy fast por farming, can kill any dungeons bosses with 1 combo and almost any elite instantly if playerd correctly

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If you get the aspect that gives you 50% ability speed on esu passive procs, you can launch like 7-8 in one inferno. I feels pretty good.

I was messing with the ice shard build though and I can say it’s just so much better. It does what the fireball build does but instead of every inferno, it does it every nova and you almost never run out of mana.

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maybe is, i realy think ice is better, but fire is realy fun. but i also think fire is faster. almost every elite pack dies with 1 fireball after frost nova, and 1 fireball if there was enough trash mobs near it, is realy cool kappa

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The biggest difference I see is that sometimes I’ll have downtime because of mana issues with fireball but with ice shards it’s very rare.

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i managed to keep mana aways up with unique chest that stuns on teleport, boots that imobilize with flameshield, with ring afixes that any time i cc a monster i get 4 mana. got helm that 6% damage restores my defense CDs and passive that lucky hits resets defenses too, is too many cc, every pack i can refill full mana, and in the cases i cant properly manages to do it well i cast inferno to “rebalance” for bosses i can kill with 1 inferno + nova + fireball spam, the main problem is the butcher that take some kiting and can be annoyng

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Does the fireball enchant do damage based on monster hp?

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Is meteor not a build? It has like three aspects and provides immobalize.

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I still haven’t gotten the damn unique chest. It’s gonna be such a game changer and make my meteor build play so much smoother but RNG hates me for some reason. /sigh

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Despite what several streamers said firewall is one of the worst fire spells the only one that is worse is incinerate.

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I so badly want Incinerate to have a viable build. The visual and audio feedback of channeling the spell is really satisfying- I especially love the pseudo-physics of it being able to ‘bounce’ off of walls. Unfortunately it’s severely undertuned, and no existing build is able to make the build reasonably viable in post 50 content.

Still, I’m crossing my fingers and holding out for hope. I’ve already got a build sitting in wait if Incinerate ever gets a buff.

18

I decided to roll a sorcerer that would be fire based from the start.

I did not look any guide and carefully avoids all the builds online and have a strong opinion about following such guides.

I went all the way to 40-50 with a very not optimized build without firewall with arc lash, stun focus and meteor + brute tanking with fire shield and ice armor. It was ugly and slow but extremely face tanking everything.
Ugly and slow and stubborn.

I wasn’t happy using ice armor for my chosen theme and replaced it with firewall (the stun build i was using was going with a staff with massive stun damage bonuses.

I think i finished the campaign and switched to WT3 at 54, so being over leveled made it easy.

And then I just slowly built around fire and firewall. Soloed the wt4 at level 66 to stay on the theme ; I died to the end boss when my burn dot killed him 1 second after.
Ah.

I now use

  • Fire basic skill
  • Flame shield
  • Meteor
  • Firewall
  • Fire ultimate
  • Combustion
    …
  • Teleport because it’s just so practical with 1 point in it

All my gear but chest and jewelry are ancestral now and most have fire / burn / dot bonus.
And it works super fine but for single target when you compare this to other classes erasing mobs so easily.

The legendary burn parangon burn stuff is really a mess.
There is 0 point as a burn sorcerer to have bonus crit damage.

The flame basic skill is … not good … and only there to use the aspect doubling damage when burn damage is higher than enemy life ; it only works for me for now as my staff has a +115% basic skill damage …

But of course it does nothing for bosses.
I think just tweaking these 2 things (legendary burn paragon node and tweaking the combination of burn over life aspect to work on bosses) somehow would already go a long way to make fire builds better.

Also, it really, really, really feels like getting gear for burn is way harder than ice or shock. It is shocking.
I have 3 same unique staff for ice … so great.

Anyway, I like my build, I can use meteors in a row during the ultimate for hard damage.
Immobilization turns to slow thanks to aspect for bonus to cc enemies.

Also, all the mobs that fly around, move around etc are a massive, massive pita. Immobilization through skills should be higher or those mobile mobs be more sensible to it.

It just is very much fun but … don’t look what rogues and druids do around you as you will get depresssed.

This doesn’t say anything about end game and high level nightmare dungeon.

Also, resistance is useless and intelligence should give some more stuff to the class.

19

Update, I beat the WT3 capstone @ level 63 with fireball/hydra, and it was not easy. Elias is pretty much the worst cast scenario: an enclosed space with a boss that likes to snipe you dead. It took maybe 6-8 tries to clear him, but man was that fun.

WT4 is insanely tough as fire @ 63; enemies are really tough and essentially delete me on contact. I can clear content, but at a much much slower rate and with much more risk than random barbs or rogues or whatever.

On the dungeon front, I’ve cleared up to NM24, but I’m not yet reliable finishing that content. I CAN beat it but actually fail dungeons at that level, too.

I’ll probably get ancestral weapons and then drop back down to WT3 to level up my paragon tree a bit and come back to WT4 at 70+.