Trailblazing Guide to Fire

Okay. Would I go back and get all the dom and health second row innates from each tree or pick certain trees and focus on spending enough to get the wm innates?

For Fire Tanks, your self-heals are now as important as your high health. Since Dominance increases both, you should grab that first. If you get all the Critical Heal bonuses, you'll get about a 20% increase in total average healing. That's a hefty boost. Definitely go for those. There is one in every weapon tree, and I would get them along with Dominance or Health. Then I'd make my way down the trees-- unless you want WM (which is useful for reduced power use). If you need WM, just go down the two trees that you're going to use, then go back and get all the Dominance, Health, and Critical Heal T1 Innates. Then start going down the other trees.

For going down into the final row, you'll (probably) want to start with the ones that have both Dominance and Health in the first row and fill out the rest from restoration and power on the second row. For the other trees you'll have to buy 10 or 11 points of those lower value tier 2 innates to unlock the ones at the bottom (assuming you get the 4 weapon attacks + 3 health + 3 critical heal). I would choose ones that have the +3 dominance in the second tier. 3 Dominance is doubled in tank stance, so it's really +6. For 6 points of dominance you'll get 13 points of buffed health, plus an additional 1.5% base healing bonus. 10 points of restoration is a 2.5% base healing increase, and 14 health is 22.4 after the 60% buff.

Defense is also useful. But since you get a health buff based on your Health and Dominance, and since so many of your powers give a good self-heal, investing your skill points in those stats gives more of a return.

hi all, I just changed to fire to test it out and im dps since I dont have any tank gear. I just ran a few duos to get warmed up and used to the power but i'm having issues with both damage and power.

the loadout I'm running is overheat, burning determination, fiery weapon, inferno, and fireburst. my sixth right now is a sc but i might change it.

rotation is overheat clipped with BD and FW. then inferno and fireburst spam until fiery weapon is up and then I repeat
Anyway, I'm running duos and I find that I'm burning through power very very very fast, and my damage is atrocious. I did 3 t7 duos and i didnt break 1 mil damage running with similar geared partners while running out of power at the same time. is there something I'm doing wrong here?

Duos are not a really good way to test damage, as there are certain powers that will just rule against weak adds.

Overheat is mostly useless. I wouldn't bother with it. Inferno is a dps win, but I wouldn't use it in a duo, except against bosses.

If you're doing really poor damage and running low on power you're probably losing volatility. Fireburst, Mass Detonation, and Flame Cascade are the ONLY powers that extend it. Fiery Weapon and Inferno do not. You only have a few seconds to extend it and if you don't you will lose power regeneration and Fireburst will hit for 32-50 base damage instead of 218-300. Also you have to actually damage something in order to get the volatility extended-- so if someone kills the add you were aiming at before you finish casting it then you can be out of luck.

Try something like BD/FW -> FB and see if the simpler rotation improves things at all. For the big fights, and if there's a troll along for the ride, I generally wind up using

Inferno/BD/FW -> FB

If there's no troll, I skip inferno until FW is off cooldown so you can clip it. If the fight is going to be a long one, then missing one rotation worth of Inferno's DOT isn't going to impact the numbers much. If it's a short one, then you're probably better off getting to fireburst more quickly.

that might be the problem. I'm noticing im not even getting the pot sign to show that i have am active during this raven fight on dc and I'm getting juggled a whole lot. im going to assume 1 interupt is enough to make me have to start over recasting bd to get my am going?

Not if you're able to get a flame cascade off quickly after interruption to extend volatility if it still happens to be going. But it's a short window.

hrmmm ok i'll try to add flame cascade to my loadout for those interuptions to see if i can keep it going and just save it for emergencies.

also, is it just me or does the volcano sc hit like marshmellows?

Yeah, VC has lost some of it's oomph. I still keep it in my loadout though. It has a nice root/stun for adds in boss fights.

And yeah, FC does very little damage. I keep it in my loadout for the very reason of keeping that volatility going if I'm interrupted. I really only use BD-inferno-FW-FB most of the time.

You can improve the supercharge hit-- at least the first one-- by doing a WM combo into it. If you don't use WM, Fireburst hits harder.

If you look on the first page of the guide (and do a little math) Volcanic Calamity hits for 137-204 total base damage, while the total of Fireburst's 4 hits is 218-300. If you hit one of the WM combos that gives a 3x crit bonus that first hit becomes as strong as a fireburst.

I hate testing supercharge powers, so the actual spread of the damage might be a bit wider, but the numbers are close enough to give you an idea of what you can get out of them.

I didn't know about WM into supercharge. How did I miss that? Good to know. WM's easy enough to pull off.

You used to get a good 50+k by using it after a WM. But then...they nerfed the hell out of it.

A fellow fire-user in my league said it wasn't hitting as hard, but that's ridiculous.

WM used to be incredibly effective when used with a supercharge, because every tick of damage would get the WM bonus. Now it's only the first tick.

I am Sorry, i forgot to say that to get those 50+k you must be under the right circumstances: DPS Trinket+Fiery Weapon+Supply Drop.
With all that, after the Explosive Shot Mastery, you've get 3 big hits (first was around 20k and the others around 10-15k) and the DoT from VC.

not logged in right now cuz im at work and i cant see names, But what about the 25% sc thats like a small heal, would you consider saying that's worth a look? Otherwise I've got 2 unused skill points ( 1 probably going to defense or solomon) and i'm trying very hard to not buy robot sidekick cuz i hate pets.

Reignition is a decent self-heal for the Tank side but without the 80% healing bonus it will be weak as a DPS.

You might want to throw in a movement supercharge. Or run with Mass Detonation just in case the battle is too hairy to get close enough for Fireburst.

As far as Iconic powers, the two Critical Attack bonus ones are a good call, and you might want to consider Wisdom of Solomon for the extra Power it gives.

i have the crits, i just consider that as a mandatory part of every dps build so i didn't mention them lol. what do you think about word of power? I haven't tested it yet and im theorycrafting from my workdesk but seeing as I find myself needing more power more often than not I'm going to tee that up later and see what happens.

Just wanted to come back and say thanks to everyone that helped me out the other day, by dropping those suggested powers, im able to get back to the power balance i need and identifying when and when not to explode the world around me in fire made a difference. thanks again guys.

When I was Fire I used Vacuum Bubble for a little bit of extra power to the group or just myself from time to time. The reason I used the movement supercharge over Word of Power is it saved a power point for something else and WoP has a pretty short range compared to Vacuum Bubble. I'm assuming Speed Drain for speedsters and whatever acrobatics use have similar range as VB (just a guess though). I would go VB/Burning Determination/Fiery Weapon->Fireburst spam.

Any of you other Fire vets have any trickery for not getting lunged out of Fire Burst every 5 seconds during a tankless run of Cathedral? I pop burning determination a lot more often to help with immunity a bit, but it only goes so far. Paying attention to lunging adds gets a little difficult at times when there's more than 3-4 on the screen at one time.