Good day,
I have been playing my Firewall / Meteor Sorc up until lvl 76 now and after i went from T1 to T3, i felt a huge decrease in power and now in T4, i’d say it is very sub-par, and very much a struggle. It is actually dog poop. Do not recommend.
I know what you’re going to say… play lightning or cold… This is all besides the point of this post.
I try and play these types of games for fun… Outside of fire skill hitting like wet noodles, as indirectly mentioned above, I am growing into my paragon tree and after getting the 2 fire boards, and the 2 fire glyphs which aren’t anything special due to what seems like lack of scaling, I leave myself looking at “what next”, and there’s nothing. Stack cold damage stat for vuln damage? Nice design there. 20% enchantment ? insignificant really… Crackling energy? Chain lightning ? No synergy.
Barb for example always has something on the go and something to get outside of the only true difference being direct damage or bleed.
Am i missing something?
Is it just a go to as multi element?
Multi-Element is a thing, mainly incentivized via Tal’Rasha’s ring and the Elementalist glyph. The ring in particular is a huge damage multiplier, so most meta builds use it - up to 45%, even 60% if you happen to have an Andariel’s Visage, or you’re tooling around in an NMD with the poison evade affix. You don’t have to use it, but it will help a lot with the wet noodle feeling. It can be farmed from Varshan in WT4.
Furthermore, using it doesn’t require excessive investment in other elements. I run it with a FW/Meteor build. Teleport will give you the bonus from shock damage if you nail a mob with the landing, and I swapped out Frost Nova for Frost Blades to get cold. Easy.
For paragon, there are two element neutral boards you can use (Enchantment Master and Elemental Summoner) that have plenty of generic bonus nodes on them. You don’t have to get the legendary nodes if they don’t make sense, just go for the glyphs while collecting stuff like Resist All and Non-physical Damage nodes that are useful in every build you can imagine. Just those with the fire boards give you five glyph slots, which is a reasonable number. For more boards, Frigid Fate and Static Surge also have generically useful nodes in them (albeit a bit more specialized than the generic boards - damage to stunned or vulnerable), but if you opt for them it’ll mainly be for the glyph slots.
I didn’t have an issue in WT3 with FW/Meteor, but I also got lucky with relatively early drops of Starfall Coronet and Tal’Rashas. Good luck!
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Tal Rasha the supreme sorcerer demands your multi elements approach as homage to the craft!
I’m surprised the ring even exists not because it is powerful, but because if they really wanted to, they could just make Elementalist Glpyh 15% each instead of 5% each. Then have some new and interesting affix on Tal Rasha.
Tal Rasha is powerful no doubt. Easy to get 45%. By comparison, you can invest heavily into paragon to get 30% Frigid Fate and it would of course be weaker than Tal Rasha. You could invest heavily into Burning Instinct, and likely…Tal Rasha would still be stronger.
I feel if you are feeling wet noodle-ish, you have not maxed out your single element multiplier options. And then after that you probably are not easily making enemies vulnerable. If you do both, then single element seems just fine.
Maybe, but not for Tal’Rasha’s ring. +30% to 45% damage on a ring is not special. But at least it got a decent drop rate from capstone dungeons.
You think a 45% damage multiplier is nothing special? How do you figure? There’s very few single items or affixes out there that can compete with that.
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No, multi-element is not a thing. It only exists thanks to the Tal-rasha ring because of the huge 45% damage multipliers which in turn also mandates using the Elementalist Glyph. That’s the only reason you run one skill from each element type available to you.
It’s unfortunate because if they really wanted to incentivize that type of playstyle they should have gone a different way and made each skill feel powerful to use instead of all but one hitting like a wet noodle and serving no purpose beyond giving you a damage multiplier.
As of right now, regardless of how you build your sorcerer the vast majority of your damage will likely come from a single source (for example the Icicles in a Blizzard build, the Blizzard itself does no damage). That’s just how the game is designed right now and that’s not likely to change in the foreseeable future.
I did happen to get a Tal’s ring to drop now, and it does help quite a bit, i will say.
Saying this, my Meteor has not broken 250 k damage… I am now lvl 77 and struggle with NMD 30-33 (anything with a boss, takes a while to kill it). The idea was to remain pure fire but it seems that it isn’t really a viable option. I will continue to grind but it’s a struggle! lol - Also - - I hate bringing up Barbs but… my lvl 57 Upheaval barb gets regular 350 k strikes. Like this is a normal average hit. (i’m a bit of a barb addict and have 6 of them, all very different) You’d think that Meteor would be the big dmg nuke Sorc should have. Slow, misses half the time, cost lots of mana - ha. Edit: Also never struggled like this sorc getting through content - lol… And that’s counting frenzy barb, double strike… Not just your overpower HOTA.
I do enjoy doing different things in this game as opposed to the “fastest build for gauntlet” doing NMD 100 in 50 seconds. That isn’t fun to me and if that be how fast i’d clear the game, i’d consider it beaten and quit.
Anyway, i will take the advice in this post! Thanks
Just seems like there isn’t much synergy overall for fire in general. Like the main glyphs are DoT and DD - two opposing builds. Same with the paragon boards but the DoT dmg to be increased by Crit dmg… like ya ok blizzard 
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Meteor without the Starfall Coronet is pretty trash; usable, but not very good for pushing. If you don’t have one, I would advise you to lean into Firewall if that’s what else you’ve got going. Or, if you like the big strikes, swap out Firewall for Fireball with Gloves of the Illuminator and stack critical with extra ranks of Devouring Blaze on the amulet. Either way, it’s not worth putting Meteor on your bar until you’ve got a Coronet.
I opted to maximize FW, with Meteor as the gravy, so I’m running X’Fals with Tal Rasha’s. I’ve been running T80’s and killed the Butcher a couple times; damage isn’t really an issue at the moment. I’ll be pushing higher once I level my glyphs up some more and hopefully get a Coronet that’s better than my current 9s cooldown, but that thing is a huge pain to farm.
I actually just got an X’fals and it’s a complete game changer - That being said, its not even part of the skill tree nor anything really tied into the build.
It is a very nice item though. Loving it.
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If you search for a post called ‘ideal pvp firewall build’ you will find a build that does very nicely. When im in nightmare t100s, i use Tal Rahsa to get a 45 multiplier because enemy has high HP. You should have multiplicative damage aspects on your gold equipment to make your damage meaningful. And if you find yourself dying a lot, you should consider having armor % on 2-3 pieces of equipment.
You dont need to have all 3 elements for all sorc builds. Even within a build where having all elements as your default, there are going to be some use cases where it makes sense to just use one element. For example, as a firewall sorc playing against other sorcs in PVP, you dont need to hit hard as you would against a barb. You just need to hit.
That all aside most maxroll fire builds out there incorporate all elements: frozen orb as enchant, lightning spear as conjuration, fire as the main damage. You get a lot of benefits here from Tal Rasha, elementalist glyph (5% from each element) and 3% per conjuration from Conjuration Mastery.
As a side note, meteor build is weak-sauce in my opinion. It is fun, but is not top tier.
Just an update for my build if anyone ever reads this…
Dropped firebolt, went arclash for CD reduction → that alone is a massive upgrade / feels good / more dps to the meteor build (got a coronet, too).
Dropped firewall, and all burning dmg that direct to burning dmg specifically on paragon. Points into dmg stuff. Again, way better. Save on skill tree too by not getting firewall. Got an extra defensive skill.
Was struggling doing t50 at 84 and with the swap its a rollover.
Still garbage i’d say compared to cold and lightning. Meteor could use some number tweaks, and way more AOE… or reduce the mana cost making it more spam-able. It’s a meteor ffs.
The thing with lightning and cold is the mobs are CC’d in a way where they don’t beat the !@#$ out of you.
I understand the design concept with fire, though… “immobilized” and they take burn dmg. There’s just so little dmg to be dishes out and no way to reset CD’s with DoT’s or the way the whole “fire only” build works.
Unless i missed something, which is not completely out of the realm of possibility.
I don’t have no uber uniques or anything like that. Just the Varshan and Beast in Ice stuff. Anyone can farm these things with a decent build. Fire was a pain and i actually had to ask for help as “all fire” lol.
Anyway, thanks for everyone’s input.
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I think the trick with Fire most of the time is to pick burning or crits and focus on one of them primarily. Fireball builds can actually be fairly powerful and destroy bosses pretty good, but it’s a hard build to level with as you need good gear to make it work well. Firewall too is nothing to sneeze at when you build around it because you can literally just turn the entire room into a giant inferno and then run away while mobs burn to death. In some of the vaults there are room layouts that are basically a circle and I’ve been running laps dropping firewalls everywhere while pulling every pack on the way; usually the second lap is mostly looting all the stuff that died while chasing me on the first lap. It’s fun to be able to turn an entire room into a huge inferno almost instantly.
I’m enjoying this FW build well enough this season, but I’ll probably try Blizzard/Ice Spikes next season for some real damage.
In theory yes… but multi element build don’t work well together. I tried it out mixing fireball, icy shard and balls lighting as enchantment. It works and you can do sigils 100 but far from a S-Tier.
My two cents, I think Tal Rasha ring is a horrible unique on the long term it is ok now while the Game is still semi-Beta. Its huge multiplicative nature, it is the BiS by far.
Any other multiplicative legendary demands from you to keep your barriers or barriers+vulnerable or stand in place or another condition.
Tal Rasha outperform them with two elements only (It doesn’t condition beyond the elements that you can maintain easily).
I prefer more creativity and variety and not have easily obtained BiS.
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Too bad Tal Rasha doesn’t consider phys damage to be a stack type.
But yeah…Tal Rasha should have never been created. Elementalist glpyh should have been 15% stacks from the get go. This frees up more design options down the road without affecdting power levels. Oh well.
That’s kinda the issue with all multiplicative bonuses. They so far outshine most other options that if you’re not using them you’re gimping yourself, which leads to most builds being an exercise in figuring out how to use the most multipliers possible, no matter how awkward it gets with trying to make sure all of them are active all the time.
One of the reasons our class doesn’t pull the same weight as some others is that, particularly at launch, we had squat for multipliers, and most of the ones we did have were highly conditional (e.g. Aspect of Control before they nerfed it). I often think Tal’Rasha’s was added mainly as a way to bring up our power level to something more in line with other classes without having to do any actual work to make it happen. It’s just a lazy way to fix our subpar damage.
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I think every class is meant to be multi-element. There are just too many synergies available not to do it. It does result in more complicated builds, but the results may surprise you.