How can a Firebird build compete with Tal Rasha's after 2.4?

Question

In patch 2.4, the Firebird set has received a damage boost in the form of +25% damage per burning enemy. But Tal Rasha's also received a boost, now adding +500% damage per stack. This seems horribly unbalanced: Even if I average 20 burning monsters at a time - and that seems like a lot, given how quickly white mobs die - I get damage bonus equivalent to a single Tal Rasha stack, and when I play with Tal Rasha I rarely have less than 3 stacks active (plus 2.4 made it easier to keep up 4 Tal Rasha stacks anyway).

I confirmed this with my own gameplay, the damage output difference was immense. Now, granted, my overall gear when running Tal Rasha's is of higher quality, but the difference was like two orders of magnitude.

Am I missing something here? Is there a way to make Firebird more competitive? As a hardcore player the extra life it provides is very appealing, but it's just not worth the huge damage loss.

Answer 1

Looking at the descriptions it's probably due to the fact that Firebird's Finery deals damage from Fire only, while Tal Rasha deals from all 4 Wizard elements making it harder to build up +Element% on your character. Suppose you have +120% fire damage, which isn't too difficult to accumulate, you would be at least doubling all your damage from Firebirds -

Dealing Fire damage causes the enemy to take the same amount of damage over 3 seconds, stacking up to 3000% weapon damage as Fire per second. After reaching 3000% damage per second, the enemy will burn until they die.

Your damage is increased by 25% for each enemy that is burning. Elites that are burning increase your damage by 600%. You can only have one Elite damage bonus active at a time.

So you could potentially deal 6000%+ dps as Fire, and suppose you DO have 20 white burning mods, which isn't as unlikely as you might think, you can get swarmed by 30-40 mobs in high density areas quite often, then you have: 20 * 25% = 500% + possible 600% for elite = 1100% times Fire 120% = 2420%

So you've got DOTs running on mobs upto 6000% weapon damage per second, and also potentially dealing up to 2420% damage with each attack.

Seems competent to stand up to the 2000%+ increase of Tal Rasha (give or take the random boost you can get from Convention of Elements, but it's not easy to time).