Why Firementalist Druid?

[CarloC]

I've been trying a hero edited firementalist hunter druid and it's been... slow. A fission with two synergies maxed does 2.3k damage at slvl30, Volcano with two synergies maxed does 500/500 damage (which is decent), and a level 30 bear with dire wolves maxes does 2.4k damage at slvl30.
This is decent damage. For slvl20, not slvl30. Maxing two of Volcano's synergies means you can only level ONE of Fission's synergies, and vice versa. Let's say we go the route of making Volcano stronger instead of Fission - you need 60 points. 20 for Volcano, 20 for Molten Boulder, and 20 for Fission. At slvl20, you deal 272/272 damage. Which tickles opponents, even when placed under them.

You then need 20 points in Dire Wolves for the bear to be able to tank (and it does so very well). However, you won't be able to dish out enough damage between volcano, your bow (tickles opponents), and your bear's low level damage. Having your bear do some damage requires 20 points in Grizzly.
Now Grizzly does 1k damage at level 20.
Now we're at 100+ points spent.

How the heck do you get anything done as a firehuntermentalist? lol
Of course, you can choose to only max Fission and Volcano, but as a result, they are very weak spells. Fission does noticeable damage, but good luck versus immunes and enemies who have more health than a minion-type enemy.

They are a fun class, but how do you kill stuff in hell?

Edit: To compare, a Sorceress can easily do 5k damage per fireball, 10k per meteor, and 400+ per orb bolt. :S I know Sorcs are supposed to be stronger, but gee willickers batman.

[Samohtnnam]

My understanding of a FireHunter is this:

20 Fissure (maybe 15 to max Armageddon)
20 Molten Boulder (maybe 15 to max Armageddon)
20 Volcano
20 Summon Dire Wolf
10 Armageddon (the more points here the better)
1 Werewolf
1 Fury
1 Grizzly

Yes, the Grizzly will have low damage but his main use is as a tank. Your Fissure or Volcano will be synergized enough to do some damage. Volcano will do physical damage for fire immunes. You will need a Faith runeword bow to do decent damage yourself, and add damage for your wolves. Since the FireHunter is a hybrid the use of one leet piece of equipment shouldn't be surprising. If Faith is undoable then use a might mercenary (Act 2 Offensive). Adding 1 to Werewolf and Fury opens some options for other PvM fun such as Uber Trist (or 1 to Werebear and Shockwave for Baal runs). Armageddon can be used while in wolf form.

Armageddon does land randomly, but for PvM it is very useful. I saw a wolf in PvP using this layout and he was very successful also.

[CarloC]

"firementalist hunter"
I should've made it clearer in the title. They don't max Molten boulder, only fissure and volcano.

[Verashiden]

Fissure Clears non FI mobs with little to no trouble. Playing untwinked I have ~300 Fissure damage and clear mobs in maybe 5 seconds. It's not a power build like a Hammerdin so try not to assume that.

I like the Huntermentalist so much since it's a summoner that's also hands on, making it much less of a bore to play. Also, what kind of gear are you running on yours? And are you using a merc?

[Queen Mebd]

Edit: To compare, a Sorceress can easily do 5k damage per fireball, 10k per meteor, and 400+ per orb bolt. :S I know Sorcs are supposed to be stronger, but gee willickers batman.

And said sorceress will have to wait for Waheed to poke each and every fallen she runs across in hell because she can't deal with immunities.

Of course you're going to have to spread out skill points and forfeit some raw damage for versatility. Just make sure you're using fissure well, be sure to place them in front of mobs or single targets and let them walk across as many vents as possible to maximize damage. Also, I wouldn't bother maxing armageddon, it sure looks pretty but you'd be hard pressed to hit the blood moor with that spell.

[Jary]

This build would be more like half synergizing fireball, then putting 20 into fronzen orb & Cold Mast for versatility, to be fair.

The build isn't a practical untwinked for solo'ing hell, it just isn't. You could but it'd be really hard

Its like using a WoF Assassin... I love fire traps... with 400 damage WoF you can just dominate through normal and most of nightmare. When you get to latter nm and enter hell though, it just doesn't cut it. THe monsters life, resists, regen is too much for the low damage output, so you start to use it more as a secondary and focus more on some kick-a$$ dragontail the majority of the time. (aka, it gets gear dependent.. you need up'd Gore Riders, some good armor, and items that provide leech & CB)

The HunterElementalist is no different. You can get by awesome with just fissure for a while. But sooner or later you'll need a high lvl HoW + grizzly to carry a lot of the weight, which means a lot of +skills to keep the bear from dying too fast due to lack of synergies, and a better bow to improve killing speed ('Faith'). I'm not saying you HAVE to have the best gear, but these days its easy to get a Jalals, COH, 'Faith', raven, dracs, a cheap torch & gc's if you put some work into your item finding and save all your gems and pennies.

If you had like lvl 38 fire/summon skills and a setup like this..
10 firestorm
20 cano
20 fissure
20 HoW
20 Griz

you'll have enough +skills to have a gg volcano/fissure for mobs, and enough +skills to synergize your griz so he wont die in 2 hits.

I'd also recommend doing this if you have a few free points...

1 lycanth
1 werebear
1 shockwave

...your griz will tank a lot, and you can always recast. But you get jumped by a swarm of 8 Frenzytaurs, good luck >.< In those situations, its great to just instantly: *shape into bear, shockwave, recast griz+HoW, shockwave*...or just plain retreat lol. I realize I'm altering the build, but were talking like 3-5 points here and huge survivability boost.

Verashi's right though, it is a really cool build and the hands-on-ness of the build is pretty friggin dope, I think it'd be a lotta fun if you made it good ^.~

[Verashiden]

I'm still gonna prove you wrong on the untwinked part, Jary. And normally you'd max Dire before Griz. During norm and nm your Fissure is the main killer, as you get closer to hell then you start relying on your summons and bow utility more. Just like CL/Orb sorcs.

And there isn't a summoner build that would be scared of 8 Frenzytaurs so meh :P

[Jary]

haha... kk =P

while you're doing that, I'ma prove to you I can clear hell untwinked with my artic blast/summoner druid :scratchchin:

I'll have my trusty untwinked 54ed rare spider bow at my side when the Frenzys & venoms come crashing down >.>

[Queen Mebd]

Arctic blast/summoners are so overpower like sorceresses and firementalists, you should clear the game with a bowler/arctic blaster. :D

[CarloC]

Arctic blast sucks and does 1/3d the listed damage. :P But you can give it a whirl.

Vera, I'm talking about the firehunter in hell. It doesn't matter if fissure is good before then. I know it is. Almost every build is.

The problem I have in hell is mostly unique enemies.

Also, Jary, you need 20 points in dire wolf for grizzly survival. This is why the firehunter, in my opinion, doesn't work efficiently skill-wise. You need strong fire skills, but a strong grizzly. HoW is NEEDED for grizzly to do damage (I've tested a non-HoW grizzly and all he can do is tank), Dire Wolf is NEEDED for grizzly health (he'll be tanking longer fights than other class summons), and Fissure+Volc is NEEDED for damage and fire immunes (but the damage isn't really enough in hell).

To clarify, this is the basic skill setup of a firehuntermentalist:
20 Dire Wolves
20 Grizzly
1-20 HoW (need 20 in hell)
20 Fissure
20 Volcano
+ Prereqs

And that's 100+ skill points right there - a complete build. Without any of these skills maxed, you're left very short handed. That's mainly the problem, as it's not possible to make yourself stronger while keeping your pets versatile, and vice versa. You'll also be complete very late in the game, and will have trouble before then due to how crucial each skill point is.
You can skimp in HoW, but your grizzly won't be the damage dealer you need, and you won't be a great damage dealer in hell as vara has already pointed out.

As I've said, you'll be doing around 2.5k fissure damage and 500/500 volcano damage at slvl30. You'll be doing X damage with your bow and your grizzly will be doing 2.4k damage + HoW + might bonuses, which is good. However, when swarmed, this is simply enough for low player games. If the unique or one of its buddies decides to have a piece of you instead of your grizzly, you're done for. If it's a 'super fast' unique, gg.

And switching to dire bear and shockwave spamming (playing as a humping-animation werebear undermines the fun aspect of the firehunter, imo) only decreases your overall damage by a ton. I'll try this out again, though, but I doubt it will solve the problems had in certain areas (areas with spread out archers especially).
However, this isn't a part of the firehunter, so shouldn't be a part of this discussion imo. :P

[Jary]

Arctic blast sucks and does 1/3d the listed damage. :P But you can give it a whirl.
I feel like such a noob... I never knew that. >.< *crumbles up build and tosses out window* :{

Dire Wolf is NEEDED for grizzly health
Not necessarily. Only to an extent.

The summoning tree synergies work unlike most other synergies, because the bonuses from synergies provided are actually directly affected by +skills from items & charms.

What does this mean?

Basically that 20 points in Dire Wolf will only add AT MOST ~3k health to your Griz. no more, no less. It will always add only that much, there's nothing exponential about it

Lets say you're playing sorta untwinked, and your griz only as 2k life.
That +3k life from maxing Dire sounds pretty good, 'cause it'll bump your bear up to a safe 5k life!

Now lets say you're not as untwinked, you have like +14 skills and your griz has 4k health or so.
That +3k health from 20 points in dire wolf might not be as worth it... 'cause 4k life vs 7k life.. not quite so crucial as that above. Yeah, the latter will be able to tank a few more, but due to the synergistic effect of items skills, you can just recast more at times but as a whole you'll still tank very well. comprende

If the same sorta effect/glitch worked for a fireball sorc that does 10k damage... you could probably put 1 point in firebolt and max fireball/meteor/mast and still pull out like ~8k damage or so. But that's not the case, if you did that you'd lose like half your damage.

[Verashiden]

Carloc, you use Dire Wolves most of the time to spread out enemies, you don't always run around with a Bear. But I'm too lazy to type a long response. Suffice to say, it's not the fastest clearer. The way you're comparing this seems to be that you're expecting another Hammerdin or something. VERY few builds can clear like that. However, I like fun builds. Huntermentalist is fun, not necessarily the most effective.

[Samohtnnam]

And switching to dire bear and shockwave spamming (playing as a humping-animation werebear undermines the fun aspect of the firehunter, imo) only decreases your overall damage by a ton. I'll try this out again, though, but I doubt it will solve the problems had in certain areas (areas with spread out archers especially).
However, this isn't a part of the firehunter, so shouldn't be a part of this discussion imo. :P

I think having the versatility of changing into a werewolf or bear, with Armageddon as backup, doesn't detract from the Firementalist Hunter as you have described. Am I missing what a firementalist is? To me, a firementalist specializes in all fire skills in the druid tree. To me, a Hunter wields a bow and has wolves and a grizzly as a companion.

My option adds Armageddon to the skill layout. If you were out humping as a Shockwave Bear casting Armageddon your damage would be a little lower versus casting Fissure/Volcano in Druid form. My option allows druid or werewolf/bear transformation casting of druid fire skills while maintaining pets during the hunt.