GU 43: Fire Tanking Improvements

Please use this thread to discuss and give feedback about Fire tanking improvements.

I thought this update would be a pretty decent buff to fire tanking based off how it performed on test. Turns out I was wrong. This update is simply amazing for fire tanking.

Burning Determination was healing me for over 10k total in the few tests I did today and the extra burst portion to Stoke makes what was an already great power even better. With a now buffed resto sitting just under 4500 I feel almost unstoppable.

Love it.

Fire tank need some balance in pvp arena...they are near unstoppable. Please do something to fire tank you guys over buff if

its day one dude. honestly how many times have u fought a fire tank to develope a technique? this is embarassing. yes with the super charge active its a tuff tank to take down. how about any rage tank who is great at rage crash advoidance? i disagree and like many others who have posted can still drop a fire tank. i love my fire tank also but as a guy ho uses every power tank except ice i say i disagree. its an opinion and everyone cant have the same one.

i forgot. THANK YOU TO THE POWER DEVELOPERS FOR LISTEING AND ADDING SOME TANK IMPROVEMENTS TO FIRE. it was refreshing to this long time vet to see you guys not have this in the plans and the quickly add it in and do a decent job. this easily could of been pushed back some with the size of this update. fire was already my go 2 power and you made it funner and stronger. tunso 4 dcuo pres lol

I love the changes alot but it wasnt a complete update. Immolation is a useless pi with 2 powers (immo & enflame) which should be one. So place for... ... Guess what...?!? YES a range pull.

Apart from that fire tanking is much stronger now. Thx for that Tunso and the rest of your great team.

Question: why did u decrease the resto buff? I got only a 17% buff yesterday. From 4640 to around 5420...

Wasnt it higher on test????

Greetings

Hey Dev's thanks for the healing buff and improvements to burning determination and stoke flames fire tanks have been in need of a buff to help with survivability. It means alot that you listened even though there are those who kept saying we didn't need this. My one request is that you don't ignore the requests for a long range AOE pull while low pressure and amazonian lasso are good they don't give you a self heal which is the core function for a fire tank. Some argue that backdraft is enough but what happens when you have adds spawning on the other side of the field and you already have a group of adds on you. Currently your option without using the the Iconic or movement power is to wait until there close enough for backdraft or jump over to them get aggro and jump back hoping the mob u already had didn't follow you though your team most likely causing a whip. The requested pull is a requirement for tanks and not having it puts you at a handy cap because its a part of your job that your not doing. Lastly just as a purist I would like to stay true to my power and not have to grab an ability outside of it just to for fill a role.
Thanks Again.

I like the additional Healing from Burning Determination and Stoke Flames.

It would be helpful if Stoke Flames & Spontaneous Combustion swapped places in the Immolation tree.
Enflame, Burnout & Stoke Flames are primarily Tank powers.
Meteor, Overheat & Spontaneous Combustion are primarily Damage powers.
Swapping Stoke Flames & Spontaneous Combustion would place the Tank powers in the same branch.

spontaneous combustion is a key feature of many fire dps builds, fyi. rotation is inferno, fw, wm into spontaneous combustion, OH/stoke

Taking an idea from ice..how about allowing fire to use immolation instead of burning det as our am/power back mechanics..ice gets its am/power back mechanic in a tier 1 power where as fire only gets it from a tier 5 power ATM.
Then have immolation stackable/ refreshable like cold snap. Having immolation dampen (or burn) the incoming damage. Having immolation refresh could keep the fire going none stop just like ice armor.

I think in general things like am/ power mechanics need to be even across the board for similar AM's. Same tiers to unlock and same amount of powers that interact with the am.

So back to tanking.. Make immolation a damage dampener ( ie..you burn away the damage before it ever hits you). This would dampen damage by a small percentage. With that idea, then make burning det similar to my idea for immolation but make it dampen 100% of damage for the exact time it takes to do a pickup.. That's what like 4 seconds..this way we wouldn't be overpowered or copying other tank styles but it would give us an ability to regain our health if all goes bad and if use directly in front of a fallen teammate you could pick them up without being ko'd in the process.

That's my thoughts from a long time fire tank and someone who truly thinks fire can be great with a little love. Thx

i am of the small majority i guess because i dont care if they give us one. in the beggining it would of been nice but its pretty much 6 tiers down during the dcuo history and we have done just fine.

I can't believe the dev team didn't think about this. It was already the strongest tank in PvP and now it's gotten much better. They had time to neuter HL for pvp on test, but in the meantime made Nature and Fire OP in pvp.

So I finally got my hands on the changes. I definitely feel like I can save my own life when I take big hits now. I know longer feel like wet tissue paper. What's even better is that if you time your heals just right , you can be almost full HP sometimes because your buff wears off and you get the heal before the buff.

Some things I would like to see:


Maybe get burnout to have a HoT or be a bigger burst heal than Stoke and Determination.

I'm Iffy on the pull but If Fire gets a long range pull, Ice should get an AOE pull, and Earths Pulls should be brought to parity with the others. Honestly , I think Rage had the right idea with giving a tank all the tools for any situation. The movement powers are theme breaking ,honestly speaking. We should be able to be effective at CC without breaking your theme. Rage (and to a lesser extent earth) personifies that.

Switched to fire to see the changes and it's awesome. It's a fun tank power. You have to play it like its fire. If you don't time your heals/blocks properly it's the same as if you don't time your shields properly or canceling a rage crash in time.

The only things left to "fix" are more for convenience, but I do think would help. A long range aoe multi target pull, which has already been mentioned as something being looked at, would be nice for both fire and earth tanks. Also swapping stoke and spontaneous combustion in the power trees would help clean that up.

Also just to mention it, the am is a ton of fun as well. And surprise surprise, it's very effective. I think a lot of complaints from fire players come more from users wanting the power to play like another, and not from fire actually lacking in any particular area. Want a crappy am!? Go try earth's pet mechanic, then tell me how bad fire's is.

I was thinking, since the pvp tank buffs are completely separate from pve now, fire's health buff should also be looked at. It's definitely good now, but it could be better. These new heals are great, but you are still coming out of block to cast them. And even when timed properly, until that multi target range pull comes, gathering adds in a timely manner is still a pain. A bit of a health bump wouldn't hurt I don't think.

It's 1.6 health and 2.2 dom now. Maybe bump each up to 2.5? Just a bit extra to help out.

Most of the people here seems to be more concerned about survivability than tanking it self, which is understandable. The restoration buff helps that's right but I think the general tanking problems are still there.

Need a long range multiple target pull. There shouldn't be any compromise with that. A tank who has hard time getting enemy attention isn't a tank.

Give fire some kind of mechanic to mitigate damage( No, something other than the obvious one) for a short time. Could be something with a long cool down if it feels like "op". Heck take off the "heal recieved/resto bonus" for that short amount of time when that power is active. This will ensure we have the ability to actually prevent a group disaster like other tanks.

The Immolation tree- this has been said an repeated for over a year now, I don't understand what major part of fire's gameplay mechanic is preventing from doing a simple reordering of abilities.

Thank you for you guys' continuous efforts to fix a power with a population that keeps getting lower and lower everyday.

PS- If you can allot some time to take a look at DPS AM as well, that would be great.

I liked Tunso, the all videos that I saw wasn't good, but after the GU43 I think is good. The only things I can tell to become better is:

- Decrease cooldown of Backdraft a little, maybe 1,5 second just.
- Make the Restoration buff passive, not just if you have 81 item level. And I will explain why. New players need to understand the mechanic since they start to play. Right now, Restoration become very important to Fire, so, they need to learn this how they start to play as tank. For me the restoration buff is amazing. I can heal my self very good. But a new fire tank, that is joinning the game, need to learn this at the begin, not just in T5.

Some issues that I fell
- A problem with the flame cascade that is occurring now. When you start to do flame cascade, sometimes my toon Jump for nothing. My character still do the attack, but he jumps a lot. I will see if I can record and I will put here to show you. This isn't happen before the update.
- My power bar is going down to fast, I don't know if something happen, but before the update, I didn't fell this problem.

The rest is good. How we say in Brazil:

"Eu comi minhas palavras"
Translated:
"I ate my words"

Fire tank reborn!

First off, from a Fire lover since day 1 I started this game, the changes to tanking are pretty darn awesome. Personally, I love it- the heals are on point & Fire still feels like Fire. Great job & thanks for the attention. If I could give some bits of input about any future considerations to further develop & "perfect" this power (nothing's perfect, sure, but what's wrong with striving for the best?), from a gamer's perspective, it's be great. It would be taking a look into the current power's available for use and consider "cleaning up" the power trees. Having Spontaneous Combustion on the "tank side" of the tree and Stroke Flames on the "DPS side"... why?

Just asking, if there's a reasonable reason, then by all means, keep it, but to me (and many others) the arrangement doesn't really make sense. Switching the powers' locations on the tree could open up much more possibilities for a really tight build, without having to sacrifice skill points for Iconics (including pulls).

I've no gripes over needing a ranged pull, but by all means, if it were included, dooo it! It's be extra useful, and not be overpowered if done right. Just throwing stuff out here...

Next big thing to me would be too define the Immolation PI. As of now, Immolation still poses the question: "what "is" it, really?". Adding a tangible benefit (besides 10% CC buff & Fire-starter) would benefit it a lot. Personally, I'd like to see HoT ticks while Immolated, as small as they would be. This would offset melting away while blocking in fresh gear in new content, give Fire actual passive damage mitigation. Kinda like a set it and forget it kinda thing; like Ice's shields, Earth's Golem, and Rage's pull-all-adds-and-become-immortal mechanics. Idk if calling it a "passive DM" thing is the right terminology, but I hope you get what I mean. Just my two cents. Basically, I'd like to see Immolation truly "defined", however you wana slice it. So far, great. Fire's on it's way towards perfection (if there ever really is)!

Yes, I think Stoke fFames needs to change with Spontaneous Combustion. I can have one more iconic power that I can buy Critical Healing Chance. Right Now I can just buy Critical Healing Magnitude. With both Iconics, Fire tank can be really good.

Devs, if you do this, the Fire Tank will be amazing! This will give me a chance to buy in Immolation tree the Flashpointm insted meteor, and I can have another biuld in the same spent points, giving up the SC int the corridors and using the flashpoint.

This will be great!

The update is very good.

I still wish the Trees were fixed
I still wish the resto buff wasn't so brain dead
I still wish the movement pulls were balanced
I still wish the immolation PI wasn't so half-*****

but from a gameplay perspective this is a very good update. We will see its true results through at the release of new content.

What cyberpunk said is pretty much on the money. There is not much more I can add save for this: In the early days fire tank was a dps tank, part of how fire aggroed mobs was via damage. I say up the damage fire tank does as well or lower the power cost of abilities. After all the justification as to why fire cost so much in the early days was due to healing and damage it did. Like cyberpunk I am completely on board with a long range multi target pull. It is a pain trying to run around and backdraft mobs especially with its cooldown. I am on the fence when it comes to a shield but if something like that were to be implemented how about something along the lines of the human torch or your DC analogue fire where a tank hits it and becomes living flame ala those characters with the shield mechanic working where objects melt or destroyed before touching them. For bosses and enemies they take damage and run the chance of a passive cc where they catch flames. This mechanic could works as a combination shield and damage aggro with a long cool down or something that functions as a supercharge. Having said that I do think what has been enacted are very good steps in the right direction and some of what I wrote in the previous fire tank post I take back. Some! I do believe it should not have taken so long for fire to get the love it deserved, especially in light of devs breaking it in the first place but tanking with the new changes is quite enjoyable.