Meteor

Summons a meteor from the heavens to crush and incinerate your enemies.

Meteor is a Sorceress Fire skill (level 24, requires Fire Ball and Fire Wall). You mark a point, and after a pause a meteor falls on it, dealing a large fire hit to everything in a 4-yard radius and leaving a burning pyre behind. The numbers that decide it are the impact damage, 869–927 at level 20 before synergies, and the 1.2-second casting delay.

The numbers

The impact damage comes from the EMin/EMax columns with HitShift 8, so the table's numbers are the damage. The minimum starts at 80 and grows +23 a level to level 8, +39 to 16, +79 to 22, +81 to 28 and +83 a level past that; the maximum starts at 100 and grows +25, +41, +81, +83 and +85 in the same brackets. The jump at level 17 is the skill's shape: 514–562 at level 15, 869–927 at level 20, 1,679–1,757 at level 30. The line reads lvl, so +skills count.

The radius is fixed at 4 yards: Param1 is 6 (the "Explosion Radius baseline"), Param2 adds 0 a level, and the tooltip shows 6 × 2 ÷ 3. The casting delay is the row's localdelay of 30 frames, 1.2 seconds, at every level; the Basin's page notes it was global in LoD and is local in D2R.

The ground fire's duration is Param3 30 frames plus Param4 15 frames a level: 1.8 seconds at level 1 and 12.6 at level 20 (the Basin's older figure is one frame shorter). The fire's damage per second is a tooltip line that reads the missile table and is not in the repo's bank; the Basin's page prints it as 35–58 a second at level 1, 135–159 at level 11 and 250–274 at level 20, assuming three pyre missiles on the target.

Mana is 17 at level 1 and 0.5 more a level (mana 34, lvlmana 1, manashift 7): 26.5 at level 20.

How it works

The Basin's page gives the timing that defines the skill: 2.4 seconds (60 frames) pass between the action frame and the impact, so you aim at where the target will be, or at a target that stands still. On impact the fire damage is applied to everything within the 4-yard radius, and a pyre of 18 static size-2 missiles is created in the same radius, each applying its bit damage every frame. It is fire damage, reduced by the target's fire resistance, see Dealing Elemental Damage and Resistances and Immunities; no attack rating is involved.

The pyre is uneven. The Basin's page says a selected, stationary size 1 target takes no pyre damage at all, a size 2 target takes three missiles (the displayed figure) and up to six in other positions, and a size 3 target takes five missiles where it stands and up to seven elsewhere. It adds that most targets die to the impact before the pyre matters, and the pyre only counts against high-life or high-fire-resist targets. A non-immune monster standing in the fire does not regenerate.

Synergies and +skills

• Fire Bolt: +5% fire damage per level and Fire Ball: +5% fire damage per level (skills.txt Param8 = 5; the calc reads skill('Fire Bolt'.blvl) and skill('Fire Ball'.blvl), hard points only). These raise the impact.
• Inferno: +3% average fire damage per second per level (the tooltip's third synergy line): this raises the pyre only, and reads hard points.
• Meteor in turn feeds Fire Bolt (+16% a hard point) and Fire Ball (+14%).
• Fire Mastery multiplies both the impact and the pyre.

Against players

A player's hit on another player is cut to 17% of its value (difficultylevels.txt PlayerDamagePercentVSPlayer) before anything else, see Player versus Player; the impact and each tick of the pyre are such hits. The Basin's page gives no other rule for Meteor against players.

Build notes

• Level 17 is the step: +79 a level to the minimum from there against +39 before it, so the last four hard points and every +skill are worth double the middle ones.
• The two 5% synergies are also Fire Ball's 14% synergies in reverse: 20 points in Fire Bolt and 20 in Fire Ball give Meteor +200%, and the same Fire Bolt points with 20 in Meteor give Fire Ball +560%.
• The 1.2-second delay and the 2.4-second fall mean the meteor is a skill for stationary or predictable targets; the pyre lasting 12.6 seconds at level 20 is what punishes the ones that stay.