Flickering Flame vs. Ravenlore

I am currently running a Fire Druid.
He is wearing a Perfect

Ravenlore with a 5/5 fire facet, a Phoenix in a

Monarch, Enigma in AP, Ravenfrost,

Stone of Jordan, Heart of the Oak,

Mara's Kaleidoscope,

Aldur's Advance,

Magefist,

Flame Rift -70, 20/20 Torch and 20/20/5 Anni with misc mf/all resist small charms. He is maxed out in all resists but fire which sits around 64%. Merc is using Infinity polearm and

Tal Rasha's Horadric Crest, Fortitude.

Would a Flickering Flame in a +3

Armageddon or +3

Fissure be better than a Perf

Ravenlore with a 5/5 Fire Facet when it comes to damage.

If you would find such a pelt, Flickering Flame would be on par with your perfect

Ravenlore.

The big plus on Flickering Flame is that your fire res would be maxed (and then some) and you could free up some room for MF small charms.

Seems like a number crunching question-
Flickering Flame: +3 fire skills, +3 more to aremegadon and

Fissure, -15 en res (if rolled perfectly, I’ve rolled 2 and they were -11 and -12…) and

Resist Fire, all other stats are meh.

Raven Lore: +3 elemental skills, -25 en res, +5fire damage, 25 all res.

I don’t know if the plus skills equates to more actual damage they way the -res would, the all res is nice too. I’l bet Schnorki will be here soon to test!

If you’re only missing like 9 fire res I don’t know if I’d worry about it, but I don’t play a fire Druid.

Off topic question: I found both a

Ravenlore and

Earth Shifter recently, is

Earth Shifter feasible for a fire/ Wind druid?

In term of damage:
Vs non-Immune, a perfect Flickering Flame (-15 res and +3

Fissure) is better than a perfect faced 5/5

Ravenlore.
Vs Immune, both are really closed.

I personally chose flicker for my fireclaw+armag shifter (got a +3/+3 base). Tried

Ravenlore before, but preferred to sell it for good. Flicker works awesome, imo.
The main reason is when you have massive cumulative fire

Pierce for the mobs, then +damage/skills is more logical than extra 10%

Pierce. My dru benefits from:
1) merc's infi - 85%
2) Plague main weapon (LR proc) - 57%
3) Phoenix shield - 28%
4) gg flicker headgear - 15%.
Extra 10%

Pierce + 5% damage - vs extra +3 to both main skills (at really high level, btw) +

Resist Fire? I'd say no.2.
At last, that beaked

Cap looks more ugly than my

Spirit Mask flicker

Nate wrote: 1 year ago

Off topic question: I found both a

Ravenlore and

Earth Shifter recently, is

Earth Shifter feasible for a fire/ Wind druid?

Earth Shifter is melee. Full Fury + armag wolf, big hard str investment, and maxed synergies for ur

Fissure procs. Build is pvm, a bit clumsy, yet playable. What helps most is a2 might merc + infi, and swap with amplify when necessary. Or sunder usage even.

Nate wrote: 1 year ago

I’l bet Schnorki will be here soon to test!

Oh...ok, fine...I was actually gonna leave this one be because fire druids are annoying AF (both to calculate [see disclaimer below] and imo to play ^^) but if you're blatantly calling for it then I'm going full ham!

If you really boil it down, you are comparing your added skills from flicker to 5% damage and -10 res.
Anything that isn't part of your staffmods will obviously be better with

Raven as you're then comparing 5% dmg and -10 res to literally no gain.
The fire res for yourself you really don't have to worry about as an ele druid can very easily cover that and be capped without sacrificing a single bit of performance for it (mainly because

Raven allows you to

Cap all of your other res without using a single small charm slot for that).

Now, looking at an average but high-end build, you're going to be at about level 48 skills with 25% penetration with

Raven and 51 skills with 15% penetration for the flickering staffmod alternative with an additional 85 (17 on immunes) penetration from Infinity in both cases. Let's look at all 5 skills just for the hell of it and go straight for the numbers, accounting for the extra %dmg from

Raven's jewel and considering that many of the druid fire skills aren't just "fire dmg" but instant phys dmg + instant fire dmg + burn damage all of which will affect results to a different degree*. What we get is this:
The above shows the actual, raw, theorycrafted damage numbers (base dmg sourced off maxroll for the time being), taking into account everything from %dmg to -res. The confirmed expected outcome is that on no-res targets, flickering wins hands down, simply because you can add 3 more skills vs. "only" 5% dmg as the target res will be capped at -100 for both, meaning the extra -10 res do nothing. As your target resistances go up however, the -res from

Raven quickly becomes more important and a bigger factor. For

Firestorm,

Fissure and

Armageddon,

Ravenlore starts being superior with as little as 10 fire res on your target.

Molten Boulder at 55 res. And

Volcano as the straggler at 95 res. Come 95/Immunes,

Ravenlore wins across the board.

An alternative to the above is of course to not gear for skills primarily but to instead rock a Phoenix for extra -res. If you do that, as one would expect, the tipping points shift up a bit, due to 10 more -res being far less impactful as you start out with more of it. At the same time however, your overall +skill being lower shifts the base dmg in such a way that other tipping points actually get pulled down. As a result, what you get is

Ravenlore winning on everything except

Volcano starting at 55 res and

Volcano joining in at 80 target res:
Ultimately, as one would've expected off the bat, the answer as to "which is better" depends entirely on where and what you farm and how often you come up against fire res. That having been said, fire res and immunities are about as wide spread as it gets so personally, based on the findings above, I would never consider flickering for a fire druid unless I know for a fact that I will exclusively only ever be farming the very few zones that never have fire resist base mobs. For any less niche/more allround build, I for one would go with

Ravenlore hands down all day every day because I would be expecting a certain, relatively high level of average target fire resist. This is especially true for a skill/Spirit build although generally, that same expectation would have me using Phoenix over Spirit on a fire druid as well as the overall combination starts being better quite quickly. Though with Phoenix, you do have to juggle things around a tad more to still be res-capped across the board.

Note:
If you're looking to truly focus on dmg and forego the allrounder-factor of it (i.e. make res a lot harder, if not impossible to

Cap, drop FCR and other support stats, ..) then facet-stacking (in both, weapon and shield) is the real way to go. See post further down.

*Disclaimer:
Fire druid skills are annoying AF to generalize because many of them are a combination of fire dmg, phys dmg and fire dmg over time. To make it worse, for some, the phys dmg can be blocked individually. For others, it is only blocked in combination with fire. For some, the skill effect itself inherently prevents/reduces tick dmg duration depending on target. And so on and so forth...
As a result, some assumptions had to be made about how much each aspect of the skills matters. In this case, I went with a somewhat neutral 1:1:1 as we're more looking at an overall comparison than final realistic absolute numbers. What this means is that for each fire dmg hit, there is 1 phys dmg hit and 1 dot tick. The dot tick amount will of course be subject to just how long a mob stands in it so if you 1shot targets or move them out it goes down while if you're facetanking a standstill target/boss it goes up. As tick is assumed >1, everything shifts (very) slightly in favor of fire and hence

Raven/Phoenix while <1 gives you an equally very minor shift towards phys and hence +skill (flickering/Spirit).
The phys dmg is presumed 0 res and unblocked. As you assume higher res/blocking, everything shifts (again very slightly) in favor of fire and hence towards

Raven and Phoenix.
The fire hit dmg should be the easiest as it is the base assumption but even that can occasionally be blocked (together with phys), meaning it effectively drops below 1 hit avg. This would yield the same result as increasing the dot duration, meaning you again shift things very minorly in favor of

Raven and Phoenix.
All in all, I dare say the chosen approach probably averages all of that out decently well for the sake of a relative comparison. Just don't use those numbers for assumptions about final real-world absolute dmg without acknowledging the possible shifts.

It also depend on your weapon.
If you use a faceted weapon, you will want FF which provides more +skills.
"Thanks to" the annoying casting delay of fire druid, a 6 faceted CS can be considered.

mockingbirdreal wrote: 1 year ago

It also depend on your weapon.
If you use a faceted weapon, you will want FF which provides more +skills.
"Thanks to" the annoying casting delay of fire druid, a 6 faceted CS can be considered.

See? And that is why I wasn't gonna get into fire druids..didn't even remember that as a weapon choice this morning.

But yes, excellent point.

Went ahead and expanded the overall comparison "a tad" more to include a 6-facet weapon paired with Phoenix, Spirit or a 4-facet shield.
Turns out that makes the decision (a lot) simpler..

I'll spare you the massive numbers but long story short:
- 6 facet weapon + 4 facet shield +

Ravenlore wins against everything else on immune targets for

Molten Boulder,

Fissure,

Volcano and

Armageddon, albeit baaaarely.
- 6 facet weapon + 4 facet shield + flickering wins against every other combination in every other scenario. So anywhere from 0 to 95 res and for

Firestorm even on immunes.

Even against immunes, the flickering variant is so close to the

Ravenlore one that it would certainly remain the overall winner imo.

Though going that route will make resistances a fair bit harder to get sorted, to say the least. Solid trade-off there.
Good thing you can switch to your CtA/Spirit off-set for a bit of

Teleport speed at least..

Schnorki wrote: 1 year ago

Oh...ok, fine...I was actually gonna leave this one be because fire druids are annoying AF (both to calculate [see disclaimer below] and imo to play ^^) but if you're blatantly calling for it then I'm going full ham!

Well done! You never fail to go above and beyond

Schnorki wrote: 1 year ago

Nate wrote: 1 year ago

I’l bet Schnorki will be here soon to test!

*Disclaimer:
Fire druid skills are annoying AF to generalize because many of them are a combination of fire dmg, phys dmg and fire dmg over time. To make it worse, for some, the phys dmg can be blocked individually. For others, it is only blocked in combination with fire. For some, the skill effect itself inherently prevents/reduces tick dmg duration depending on target. And so on and so forth...
As a result, some assumptions had to be made about how much each aspect of the skills matters. In this case, I went with a somewhat neutral 1:1:1 as we're more looking at an overall comparison than final realistic absolute numbers. What this means is that for each fire dmg hit, there is 1 phys dmg hit and 1 dot tick. The dot tick amount will of course be subject to just how long a mob stands in it so if you 1shot targets or move them out it goes down while if you're facetanking a standstill target/boss it goes up. As tick is assumed >1, everything shifts (very) slightly in favor of fire and hence

Raven/Phoenix while <1 gives you an equally very minor shift towards phys and hence +skill (flickering/Spirit).
The phys dmg is presumed 0 res and unblocked. As you assume higher res/blocking, everything shifts (again very slightly) in favor of fire and hence towards

Raven and Phoenix.
The fire hit dmg should be the easiest as it is the base assumption but even that can occasionally be blocked (together with phys), meaning it effectively drops below 1 hit avg. This would yield the same result as increasing the dot duration, meaning you again shift things very minorly in favor of

Raven and Phoenix.
All in all, I dare say the chosen approach probably averages all of that out decently well for the sake of a relative comparison. Just don't use those numbers for assumptions about final real-world absolute dmg without acknowledging the possible shifts.

I never realized how many different factors were coming into play. Thank you for going above and beyond for answering my question. You are an asset to the community.

Schnorki has always given me constructive and realistic advice, even when my questions have been… unique

So I’m mostly done leveling a fire Druid, should get to the point where I can wear all the gear this weekend, any play style recommendations?

It’s surprisingly fun, fast and powerful. I’ve pretty much done everything so far on p7 (except bosses), and never needed to farm for exp.