My frustration with Firestorm

TLDR: This skill is broken, badly scaled and just a giant pain to try and build successfully. Still sane Exile?

I really wanted to make Firestorm work but beginning to give up hope in its current state. Here's my journey....

Let's first cover the skill itself:

• AOE, Sustained, Fire, Duration, Payoff
• Duration 6s, Storm Radius 5.6m, Impact 1m
• Cast time 1.4 sec
• One impact every .1sec, 150ms delay to actual damage
• Limit 1 Firestorm
• 80-122 dmg at level 20
• Consuming an ignite upgrades an impact to 482-723 dmg (roughly 5x)

Looks cool right? Well let's dive into what this actually plays out like....

• The area of the storm is basically screen wide and increases/decreases to AoE mean you affect both the storm and impacts themselves so you truly gain little change. I've tested as much -AoE as I can find and noticed barely any change to effectiveness as you'll see meteors land on monsters and do no damage because the hitbox of them is smaller than the impact overlap. Increases to AoE means a single impact might hit multiple monsters or it just might be offscreen because of how big the storm is and hit nothing.
• Impacts are not restricted to the environment so in PoE2 where we have countless bridges, thin hallways and winding passages, then all of your damage can just hit offscreen and do nothing. Impact spread is random.
• Limit increases are broken for Firestorm. The unique amulet and support gem that give +1 Limit to firestorm does nothing so the hope that you overlap storms to fix this randomness somewhat isn't possible.
• Reduction/increases to the duration doesn't change the rate of impacts so increasing duration technically increases damage by giving you more bolts but....
• Firestorm doesn't move with you. So if you wanted a longer firestorm, you better enjoy sitting somewhere for long periods of time.
• It's always 1 ignite = 1 improved firebolt so if you actually increase the number of impacts through duration you are lowering your DPS.
• The damage from consuming an ignite is abysmal. With no changes to duration, you're looking at 60 bolts. Let's say you're standing in front of 5 ignited mobs that somehow don't kill or stun you while you're casting a 1.4 sec spell, that means you get 55 base and 5 improved (which equate to 25 base in damage). That means 80 bolts of damage compared to 60 bolts = 33% increase. Single boss or rare? 6% increase. Compare this to Lightning Conduit which can get 6000-10000x increases.
• If you somehow got all -duration on the tree (64%) + supports (55%), you'd get it down to roughly 30 bolts in 3 seconds. So you'd be increasing your damage increase by consuming ignites 2x (so 13% on a boss) but you'd have half the chances of actually hitting them giving the AoE.
• Recasting resets immediately, losing any improved you had queued up later in your 6sec duration that never landed.
• Cast speed seems to have no effect besides the initial casting, and there's no projectile tags or mechanics, so no way to change the rate of impacts.
• We'll just pass over the fact that I'm sacrificing my already limited ability to see with hard to notice rampant death-effects and pools/AoEs that just melt you.

Despite all this, I figured I'd give it a try... why not? It can't be that bad.... right?

• Radiant Grief ignites everything around you, so I'm using that to consume constant ignites. It doesn't seem to be instant with reapplying ignites, so you can cast twice in a row before the ignites happen again. Thankfully Firestorm doesn't care about the power of ignites like the god-awful "cast on" changes.
• Because the damage is pretty horrendous, I figured I'd need to get a hefty multiplier increase via shock so I went Stormweaver (also gives me single target via Lightning Conduit). Double 80%+ shocks gives a lot of damage and I can also upgrade my exposures a pretty hefty amount (using Blessed Bonds to land all three exposures easily of 60%+). I ran Archmage + Grimfeast and did some mana stacking.
• Other options I considered:
  • Demonform Infernalist is comparable unless you go for infinite/lesser-life stacking. Survivability might go up with their damage converting using a cloak of flame and the dog could give you walking fire exposure so you can wear actual gloves (or try the 100% spell damage ones). Tempting second choice but I had a Stormweaver and gold to blow.
  • Chronomancer has no real damage upgrades and my fantasy of adding +cooldown supports was vanquished the moment I realized you cannot stack these supports. I was hoping since +limit was broken I could make one awesome firestorm with a cooldown that matches duration but yeah, not possible. The only thing I can imagine here is permanently time freezing mobs so they actually die to the firestorm while you watch Netflix and wait 10minutes.
  • Gemling does give you +levels and more importantly quality (increasing impact size) but is nowhere near any nodes that affect the build so unless you want to just go jewel slot collecting and are filthy rich to get the right jewels, you're out of luck.
• In the end it was horrible, struggling to do even basic maps. Every once in awhile, I'd see an improved firebolt actually hit a group but for the most part the damage on firestorm is so low (even with exposure/ailment stacking for high damage passives) that it wouldn't even shock - I had to use ball lightning and stormfire support to land 2 shocks on a rare (stormfire is bugged and isn't affecting the 2nd shock) and then I'd one-shot it with conduit... but why then am I doing anything with firestorm? If I tried to use it for "clear", I'd be running around like a madman from a giant pack of mobs, I'd turn to consume the ignites and if I didn't die during the long cast animation, I'd be running around and most of the time the impacts would never hit them.
• If you just cast comet once with spell echo, you out damage the entire firestorm in 1sec instead of 6seconds with a bigger radius, more predictable area, double the crit, a FASTER CAST TIME and you can freeze whereas firestorm can't because of the "payoff" tag.

Who the hell designed this thing?! Thanks for listening to my rant on Firestorm.....

Side note: Cool and interesting builds that require multiple interactions seem to be dead on arrival in PoE2. Most uniques are terrible besides their special effect so you're sacrificing massive amounts of defensives and power in a much harder game where a majority of your power is in your gear. Most importantly you lose out on resistances which you cannot get on the tree and early on are much much harder to stitch together. Even with 2-3 uniques, I felt the complete hell of trying to fix my resists and I was completely sacrificing the ability to have any spirit on my amulet or chest piece. Whoever thought Idol of Udurn was balanced correctly needs an extra flogging.