Aaagh! Vast hordes of em

[Ignatz]

Oop, yeah I did mean solo. But, regardless, the argument still holds given the environment in which the skill must / can be used. That's just the problem with CE. It CAN reach unbelievable damage / second levels, but it requires a resource of uncontrollable quantity to do so: corpses. This is basically the opposite hinderance that static field suffers: the former is most effective when monsters are already dead, while the latter is most effective when they are alive and at full health.

CE itself is a fantastic skill, but it's damage / second rate is killed off by the time spent garnering those first few corpses (the critical mass number of corpses) necessary to finish everything else off with CE. You must factor in that time, since it is a part of the whole "killing things with CE" process. And once you do that, it's almost certainly less damage / second than the Zon's unending volleys of MS. (FA is still a faster killer if the mobs are tight, though.) I'll add too that CE is twice as likely to get at least half its damage through, since it's half fire and half physical, but it's also resisted twice as often to do half damage by way of immunities, and also subject to the 1.09 global 50% phys resists. Which means a fire immune monster in hell is only taking 1/4 of the normal CE damage, on top of the difficulty penalty.

I don't quite see how you're supporting the whole "rate of kill" being more important than "damage per second" as a qualifier of how effective a character is. Clearly rate of kill is the ultimate proof, but that's not quantifiable in the same way that damage per second is quantifiable. The only confounding factor to damage / sec being proportional to the kill rate is regeneration rate. So, you take all the monsters' regeneration rates, calculate how much life they're all regenerating, total, in a second, subtract that from the damage output of the character, and you've pretty much accounted for the largest discrepency between the two.