Fire spells are in dire need of buffs. Ignite as a base ailment is also terrible compared to shock/chill/freeze

dont worry, right now there's no elemental spell that's good.

Fireball wildshards was so much fun in 0.1 before the nerfs. Shame 

They should redesign ignite to function like ignite in wow fire mages, it should accumulate a percentage of "ignite flagged" damage and spread to other targets passively.

ignite should just explode dead monsters for % monster health when enough ignites were stacked. problem solved

I partially agree and disagree with this.

Honestly I think ignite works best when it's done on a mace character with Avatar of Fire; Hammer of the Gods and Perfect Strike bring this slow but large base hit and it really smooths out the experience where you hit a rare for 3/4 of it's health bar and it really feels bad having to do it again for that little HP he has left, feels like it's just wasting your time. Also hammering a rare and just walking away while he burns down really feels good.

That being said if we move to the top of the tree and look at the spell caster version I see 2 main problems. The fist one is that most spell caster have a way bigger frequency of casting and that means their base hit is much lower and once you get to the point where you have a nice big hit to scale the ignite you are already killing everything with the base hit. The second problem is proliferation; it's getting buffed but I don't think it will still be amazing. It will work fine for some people but it has the same "clunkiness" of explosive arrow ballista totems. First you have to ignite something, then wait for it to spread, then wait for it to deal the damage; but it gets worse as then you have to wait for it to proliferate again and again.

I think the base ailment for fire should be ignite as that makes thematical sense but there should be a keystone that changes it to scorch.

Lightning damage have pure power as the main notable Cold damage have a +1 level notable Chaos damage have a +1 level notable Fire damage have either 15% faster ignite or 8% dmg gain as fire as main notable

Even the passive tree is completely garbage. Volcanic skin should grant +1 to fire skills urgently

Just started leveling a new character(i'm in a2 cruel), incinerate is literally the old spark, if not better, where you just hold down the button and walk through the campaign. I'm not sure how does it hold up in late game, though.

Other fire skills stink, a lot.

Yeah that's always been the issue with that ailment. Chill and freeze offer defense Shock offers a damage bonus

Ignite is just.. There I guess. If anything, fire based spell should have a higher base damage than the others, by a lot. Or an innate boost to ignite magnitude.

Making fire apply Scorch would make it to similar to Shock imo

An ignite is 80% of the hit damage over 4 secs, i don't think thats terrible as a baseline

One thing to consider is that the chance to ignite scales of the damage, so if you're doing small hits you won't get ignites very often

I think the only issue is if fire spells are undertuned then ignite also becomes undertuned, so its more a question of overall spell balance rather than changing ignite

They should just add more skills to the game, diablo 4 has a tiny skillset compared to diablo 3 even, but PoE 2 is even smaller... like elemental spells really needed 4 curses to count against their skillset? Like I want to go lightning, you're pretty much always going to take either spark or arc as they are the only real core spells that exist? 

Meanwhile in d4 I can go, just for lightning, a crackling energy focused teleport build, melee arc lash, chain lightning, mass charged bolts, mass lightning spear conjuration spammer, and ball lightning spammer. It's true that a lot of builds end up being tied to builder/spender or resourcless and spam one good damage skill with 4 supports around it, but I'm still given a large variety of choices even just for lightning sorcerer to pick what I enjoy (not to mention burn or fire or cold or pure conjuration builds). How is it that d4, a game with significantly less build variety than d3, has a larger skill pool than poe2 (and why are so many poe2 skill base damages like this skill hits for 1500 base and this other skill hits 10 times for 15 base ???????)

I might try something something incinerate-prolif-cast on ignite-something after patch. But yeah, it's terrible. So are most skills tbh.

This is my first time playing path of exile and why is it the 2 things I put effort into is the shittiest. I started with blood mage hexblast. Now I can’t use it.

Now I’m in act 3 in the new league and I’m realizing now maybe fire isn’t worth it

Last season I messed up and chose a fire witch. It was hell. I’m so glad I picked right this season. It’s so much easier and way more fun. Only problem is the bosses aren’t as fun anymore because I’m just deleting them. As opposed to dodging their mechanics like last season when my build was weak lol. It was also hard to find good fire gear for trade since no one used fire. Finding lightning gear is a dime a dozen.

I played flameblast last patch and was able to kill arbiter. I had one of the highest damage according to poeninja, with a measly 2k average hit tooltip (20x at max stacks is more like 40k). It felt like I was playing ruthless, especially compared to my league start lightning strike. In maps I had to sacrifice damage for cast speed and aoe, so had a 650 average hit. I really struggled to squeeze anymore damage out of the skill.

Don't worry they'll nerf warrior anytime soon.

Imagine ignite as the only DOT that can stack on top of itself. Probably too OP if true.

I always liked when games associated Fire with fear/panic. When enemies run away or flail around, it actually grants time for the DoT to work.

Knockback is another sensible option.

Spells in general all lacking atm, they were kinda only viable with trigger abuse or Archmage, but those got nerfed into the ground.

Every ignite should taper down its damage from 100% to 0%… the longer the ignite the more overall damage it does… the mods to boost ignite should revolve around extending duration and tick rate, every time you reignite a mob it resets the timer so that starts ticking at full force again! I think that would drive some viability but how it when reacting with other elements might be tricky.

yeah.

Although, I will say solar orb got a nice buff. its much stronger in .2. I've not tried going all in on it yet, but tested out fire spells in my cold chronomancer, I noticed how strong solar orb was. It was a large boon in act 1 boss fight, and throughout the campaign.

https://poe2db.tw/us/Solar_Orb

V .1 Deals (4–96) to (5–145) Fire Damage Ignites as though dealing (13–364) to (20–545) Fire damage

v .2 Deals (4–134) to (6–202) Fire Damage Ignites as though dealing (13–428) to (20–642) Fire damage

That is a significant buff.

Also, I think the third +1 limit item is new. the support was from before.

fireball+frostwall is just as strong as it was before. (well scattershot nerf caveat)

in fact. Fireball+chrono unleash is stronger.

Ignite. Ignite not spreading, and not stacking, and not being able to speed it up, is making Ignite terrible in comparison to shock/freeze for sure. the "explode on death" probably should be built into ignite directly. that is kindof Ignites special thing.

I think another issue is the dot scaling on the initial hit which only kinda works with mace's slams

Also, make fire wall do burning ground, I wanted to try something to ignite the spear tornadoes but there is nothing bar ice that you can use.

Game absolutely need a lot more skill gems. there isn't much variety right now and the combo playstyle they are pushing is limiting it even more.

And dot like ignite/bleed should be their own build styles instead of supplementing hit damage. I hated how everything was scaling off crit damage in d3 and seeing poe2 going that route after poe1 feels weird

Ignite just needs to stack (probably not at full strength for every stack or it’d likely be too strong) so that it fills a role as the boss/beefy target killer and after a certain amount of stacks it should “Combust”, dealing AoE fire damage and spreading ignite to affected targets, resetting the stacks on the original target to 1.

Don’t think this would overlap too much with the other ailments as it’s still DoT so not fantastic for mobbing and doesn’t offer any defensive benefits like slow/freeze

Ignite should break armor or apply a similar effect as shock imo

Blueflame bracers are a popular item for a reason. Even with the nerf to Herald of Frost Freeze is still better then Ignite.

The fire spells also just don't have any cool synergies that lightning and cold skills have.

I've had similar discussions before, because I agree that there's no reason to play with fire spells in PoE 2 because the crowd control of cold spells and the damage amp of lightning spells is just better than the DoT of fire spells (and the spells themselves aren't good enough to make up for the difference) and I've had two ideas that could make fire builds better/functional. 

One was similar to what Riot does with the character Udyr in League of Legends. Udyr has an ability that procs a damage over time effect on something he attacks in one of his forms on one empowered auto attack. If he uses the ability and attacks again while the target is still suffering from the previous DoT, it pops the entirety of the remaining DoT all at once and applies the new one for a nice chunk of "extra" (quotes because it was going to happen anyway, but the sudden spike of damage feels chunky) damage. Similarly for ignite here, that perhaps it could be done that if any target is suffering from ignite and a new application hits, do all remaining damage of the previous ignite at once and apply the new one. This would give fire the "more damage" feel (that shock sort of already toes in on by amping damage for everything) but more strongly coupled with specifically fire skills, at which point that "restriction" could mean that it could be tuned perhaps stronger. 

The other idea I had was something akin to how Destiny 2 handles their solar damage burning DoTs. In D2's case, solar effects apply a DoT called scorch, which builds up in amount with abilities and then ticks down doing the DoT. The catch that makes it interesting is that if you get scorch to a threshold (or combo it with other abilities) it procs a large solar damage explosion affecting the target and all targets around it. If you did something similar in PoE, ignite on a target could build up to some threshold, and if it crosses that threshold it goes boom for damage, which should then apply ignite to surrounding creatures. What this would then do is with liberal AoE application of ignite (flamethrower, solar orb, etc.) you could proc chain ignite/explosions through a group of enemies which I think would be a very satisfying effect. Have some AoE spell perform the buildup, and then some single target spell or something big like flameblast push an enemy/enemies over the ignite threshold and chain explosions and DoTs everywhere. 

I think either way could make fire gameplay more interesting and plainly numerically better. 

I wish incinerate was treated like the warrior skills are. You pay the cost of being slow while casting and having to channel to the last stage but you fucking demolish the mobs. I think the skill demands too much from you with little pay off. If I can commit to casting for full 5-6 seconds without dodging, that hp bar should melt.

Buff spells please next hotfix

Lightning spells also feel bad at the moment, casters in general really

Fire spells are also graphically less impressive than others.

I was playing a Fire spell centered Chronomancer before this update and it kinda sucked that the best choice for fire spells are fire projectile spells for that category which kinda doesn't sit right with me because the bulk of the damage from those skills are the added benefits of having support gems and passives that support projectile and spell which is a loss in my book. I want to burn the world without relying too much on those projectile spells and the rest of the fire spell choices pretty much are to support other spells and even attacks for that matter. The only options I had for main damage were Flameblast and Firestorm and both were on higher skill gem level requirements and doesn't do that well compared to other choices of spells in the other elements. I tried to use detonate dead and other applicable ones for fire spells but it needs a lot of investment in many things to make it work in the long run.

Cold has both chill and freeze. Lightning has shock and electrocute. I think it would make sense for fire to have ignite and scorch.

Im playing a pyro build at the Moment and the game is a ez as shit.

No it does not need a buff. Im completly broken.

Not one shot broken but ez enough

I was wanting to try the fire spell on hit ascend for smith, but I realized there isn’t really a spell worth triggering. All the fire spells are mechanically bad for being cast a bunch of times rapidly.

Hey we got you covered man! Now, Flameblast has a 15s cooldown. I hope this helps!

The problem with EVERY ailment right now is that it’s scaled off the hit that procs it and only one instance of it can be active at a time. So theoretically you need to do a massive hit to get a good ailment on the enemy, but if you hit that hard then you’re probably 1 shotting most everything already. And when you do hit a boss or rare the ailment applied is 1/100000000000th of the hit damage and barely moves their hp bar at all.

Ignite has always been bad in PoE since I've been playing, with the exception of DD ignite because DD was the highest base damage spell in the game. Probably still is, even after the nerfs.

you are right shock/chill/freeze need to be nerfed, so ignite player nolt feel bad

I disagree