Trailblazing Guide to Fire

All I do is active fire tank. Solo tanking Hive E 1st boss is impossible with any tank. What I'm saying is I tank my side of the room fine whichever side I'm on. I play on the villain side. I can show you one day. Just because you can't do it doesn't mean it can't be done. If you read fire's tank role tooltip it doesn't say anything about blocking so you have to active tank to be a good tank. If you can't or don't know how then practice young jedi ... Practice

You gotta be joking. You can’t actively tank. My toon is sitting at 34k of defense before burning and just under 120k of HP. When you apply burning your defense goes up 2-3k and in order to get full 50% which will grant you additional 2-3k of defense, you have to get 50x hits on burning enemies. Maybe, I’m just not skilled enough to do that because every time I’d try my health bar would instantly evaporate with your healer on top as well as your BD+Stoke combo. Fire is great in older content, hell... I can tank regular starro raids without a healer so what? Fire is definitely playable but it’s weaker in comparison to other tanks in newer content because your heals can’t really keep up but I can make it work but it’s not practical in high stress situations where you have constant incoming damage ticking on you. Maybe you can, I can too... I can make it work and survive too but if I did that I would be the last man standing while everyone else in my group is dead. Making it work doesn’t mean it’s effective, there’re many ways to skin a cat after all. I have been fire since the revamp and in my experience “not blocking” but actively tanking just outright -outrageous... especially in new ELITE content. Fire isn’t that great as far as tanking end game content goes, but it doesn’t it’s not viable nor impossible to tank with it. You can, it just requires more work than any other tank there is: convince me otherwise.

In my experience, active tanking really only works when you can keep the adds juggled. When they start becoming immune I start to have real problems. In my tank thread, I don't count crowd control as any kind of mitigation, but every moment adds are helpless is less damage in for you.

The difficulty with fire's active tanking is that you lose fire soul very quickly when not attacking, and it's slow to build up again.

I’ve read all the parts you have posted after your initial claim that “Atomic is much weaker than Fire right now”. I think this is misleading, and I believe you have based this claim against your experience of the latest DLC. Granted that since the start of DCUO there have been instances that have sometimes suited a particular tank powerset. This is nothing new. It doesn’t change the fact though that in general Fire tanking is considered the weakest of the 5 tanking powers.

To say that Atomic “just has combos” in your comparison is also misleading. It’s one part of its mechanic to mitigate incoming damage. If your an Atomic tank combining that then gets knocked over you’ll already be getting a 90% out of block defence buff. That is without any neck mods of course. A Fire tank, who may have been blocking, in the same situation will have its 50% health buff, 30% Fire soul defence buff and then get activation of 50% increase of incoming heals. On paper I think the Atomic set up is far more appealing.

I’m not trying to question your experiences, I just think your comparisons are misleading.

I’ve found this to be true. As a general rule of thumb i’ll play more active with adds than I would a boss. Two handed is a brilliant tank weapon. The 2nd and 3rd lunge is a really effective 8 man knockup. I’ll combine this with Backdraft, Sonic Cry and Chrono Emitters.

Fire Soul is a joke. You need 20 weapon hits every 12 seconds. No other tank has to work so hard for their out of block mechanic.

Fire Soul is a joke indeed, I have the same amount of defense in the dps role as in tank role minus around 50k of HP that gets drained in a matter of seconds and rather weak healing. You can’t really juggle the adds after your first backdraft, once they get immunity and if there’re other adds that come out, eg. hive/machine, because you’d have to be using engulf to pull which doesn’t really help you survive since you leave yourself open for a few seconds and those seconds will cost you a decent chunk of HP. In an ideal world, you’d be using immolation but things get a little bit chaotic with fire and you will find yourself using your immolation, which again, won’t last its full duration. People that are saying that they “actively tank” are probably <15-20 CR higher than the content they are tanking. I would love to see a fire tank go in hive Elite and actively tank and pull the adds lol.

I think thats a major part of the problem is on paper comparisons are being valued over actual in game experience. Its true that when knocked down atomic has a 90% defense buff compared to fires smaller defense buff and 50% health buff to defend themselves with. Whats not taken into consideration when making that on paper consideration is that atomics main way of healing themselves thru combos is unvailable while being interrupted where as fire has 4 tanking abilities to heal and mitigate damage in the same knock down scenario.

I'm also seeing people claim they are able to active tank the new raids basically be called liars like above. Theres an accepted narrative that fire is a weak tank and people are coming out with success stories and more or less being told "nuh uh thats impossible".

I think a lot of people just need to work on their rotations to make sure they have the proper heals and mitigation up at the right time. I prefer dps but unforunately have been tanking lately on raid night and tank hive and machine fine with a less than optimal set up. I clip my self heals together and then when those run out I use immolation and hardlight shield to get me back to my self heal. I only block on adds. We haven't tried elite yet and I wouldnt take my poor gear and lack of a single artifact or cybernetic mod into elite. But those are my experiences and they have been consistent.

These are all really good posts, but maybe you all want to take the Atomic Vs Fire debate over to the Tank vs Tank thread. I'd like to keep this thread-- at least the last page or so of it-- to load outs, methods, and discussions specific to fire.

Soulburn has encouraged me to start my own thread, but I haven't had the energy to re-do the fire guide from scratch post revamp.

I'm currently running Solar Amplifier and Omegahedron for DPS. I do have the Scrap of the Soul Cloak leveled up as well, but my experience is that there is limited use at best of fire's supercharges, so the power regeneration of the Omegahedron makes it more viable. The Solar Amplifier swaps Might & Health when compared to the Tetrahedron, so at level 100, SA gives you: 3% Might, 2% Health, 1% Power, while the Tetrahedron gives you: 3% Health, 2% Might, 1% Power. Due to the current bug as of this posting, I keep the Tetrahedron of Urgrund imprinted in my armory and have the Solar Amplifier near the top of my inventory for quick swaps.

The bug: Heat Vision + Solar Enhancer + Armory Bug

Ah yes... fire's best and foremost power: exposing mediocre-at-best healers.

When I try to tank HIVE elite I can easily be the tank left on the side hanging on to the lone medic when the rest of the group sans one healer goes to the far side and kills everything. Overwhelm me with adds, and unless the healer is on point, I'll go down. I can hang on to Deathstroke, but if I don't time my power casts correctly, he'll throw a knife in my face and KO me. Yeah, I am learning the adaptations I have to make in order to tank these new raids. There is a lot of trial-and-error going on as well as learning the timing of the attacks... just like any other new content.

That said, I've been trying to tweak my SP allocation to find something more optimal... something that will help me mitigate more damage or at least buy the healer some time to do his or her job. Recommendations welcome. I've got 420 of them to apply, and thankfully I don't have to go and hit X for each and every one of them.

Goes without saying, you need the hearty mod which I’m sure you arw using. Then Health, then I’d go dom then resto. I usually tank the adds and have to rely heavily on my hard light shield, stoke sometimes clipped with bd and backdraft. Now, I don’t actively tank because it’s playim stupid in my experience, I do kite the adds around in some instanses like Talia in gcze especially when the adds come out. In hive E, I usually pop stoke then hard light and go into block and do a backdraft when I see an opening. I also use personal dampenings fields and try to save immolation for the oh crap moments or when knocked down so I can go into block and wait for the healer to pop my HP back up. Blocking with your hard light is what will prevent most of the damage, immolation too but I try to save it due to the fact that it’s usable while controlled. You can pop immolation and do backdraft if things get heavy, also I using the soda artifact while your stuff is on cool down helps tremendously. I use it a lot, you can laugh but it works especially with 120k health pool since you will mitigate around 8k of damage in addition to fully restoring your health. There were a lot of times when a combo of dampening field(while controlled) + soder artifact bought be a few seconds so I could get back to my heals and hard light. Then you can go back to blocking while hard light is on. The thing is, you have to be very careful when popping a soder because fire loses most of its health out of block in a matter of seconds even with bd+stoke combo on you, in end game content you will simply get overwhelmed. I’d strongly suggest blocking with hard light and trying to save immolation or personal dampening field+ soder combo for those particular moments. This works for me, but it’s just me who isnm5 talentned enough to actively tank the adds in elite end game content.

Actually, no. I use Quick Healing. If you are doing a lot of blocking, then you lose your 50% bonus incoming heals while not blocking and this can compensate for that a bit. I will admit, though, Hearty is about the only other viable one for tanks in general, and I have considered it.

I went down the path of 100 each in Dom, Health, and Resto so I can get the 10% bonus in each as well as maximizing Critical Heal chane/magnitude. After other allocations (some in Might/Power, some in Precision, movement tree stuff, and a couple of iconics), any leftovers went into Health.

Side question: weapon choice. Do people have preferred weapons? I've been using shield (the lunge you get with it covers better distance than things like Dual Wield, One-handed) crossed with Two-handed for the Home Run mastery. Every now and again I contemplate changing out to DW.

What I've found lately is that I'm popping Chronometric Emitters as if they were Tic Tacs. In Machine reg, for example, what I will do is something like this during the add phases: pull adds to me with Engulf, juggle them with Backdraft, pop an emitter, hop over the pile of adds to the other side, repeat. Of course, I do pop things in between like Immolation, Burning Determination, Stoke Flames, and the odd Burnout to keep people in the group from getting stunned/free them from stuns. I do similar stuff in the first boss fight of HIVE reg. Personal Dampening Fields come into play more in boss fights like Deathstroke. No need for Chronos there because... well... no adds. As to the Terra fight, both come into play especially when I go for Elite.

If the group has good healing, good burn, and a troll who doea all of the functions (power, debuff, stun), things aren't too bad. As I said, fire has this huge ability to expose a mediocre-at-best healer.

As to the soder artifact... yeah. It's been my friend too, especially since I have it at level 8 and it can help the group as well.

Now, does anyone use the Demon's Fang? It seems like it might actually be useful for fire tanks in some aspects. The only problem I see with it is the loss of health bonuses when compared to things like the Legionnaire's Sparring AI. Until something better comes along, I won't even consider giving up the Dilustel Refractor.

I think the starheart gives the same health as the refractor but with a restoration bonus instead of dominance. The cog gives high health and dominance also.

Pretty sure the fang tracks with the omegahedron as far as health goes, so that will be a bit less health.

This is what the Demon's Fang provides at each level:

(20) +Precision Stat, 1% Restoration
(40) +Power Stat, 2% Restoration
(60) 1% Precision
(80) 3% Restoration, 1% Power
(80) Demon's Bite (1)
(100) 2% Precision
(120) 4% Restoration, 2% Power
(120) Demon's Bite (2)
(140) 3% Precision
(160) 5% Restoration, 3% Power
(160) Demon's Bite (3)

Though I do know I have seen it provides some health... just not these bonuses as well. Of course, it's special effect (Demon's Bite) is more about increased damage and power regeneration. It looks like this would be more beneficial for battle tanking.

I know a couple of people who do use it as a fire tank because of the restoration it grants... but it's the loss of health that makes me question it.

Oh man... Hearty is byy far the best imo. I never really liked quick healing mod just because additional healing is practically nothing in the grand scheme of things whereas hearty will give you at least 5k of HP even if you don’t have health maxed. I’ve found that both chrono emitters to be useful on the adds too but they aren’t as clutch as dampening fields especially on bosses. Personally I don’t really like using chrono emitters just because I don’t actively tank or I shall say it doesn’t really fit my tanking style. I prefer popping a 6 second shield instead to get away if I need to and buy me some time to pop my heals and backdraft. I just feel more comfortably with them since you can pop it as you fall on your back. Chrono emitter are great too but I usually try to kite the adds to survive instead and for me personal dampening fields work a little bit better especially in the elite where I don’t like risking to get out of my block without a shield just to stun the adds. I’m too focused on surviving and pulling away the adds tbh and don’t think I could manage both clipping and pulling the adds away from my groupmates and stunning the adds. It’s just a bit too risky for me, not so much in regular but in elite for sure since your health bar evaporates during the time you pull the adds with both stoke+bd going and I feel like stunning the adds is just another thing that if not timed correctly will cost you your life. In my utility belt I carry the soder artifact, supply drop, orbital and breakout trinket and always have dampening fields, speaking of which, gotta make me some more lol. As far as artifacts go, I use the defractor and urgund just because I get around 10% of additional health. I never tried using demons fang but I imagine it wouldn’t be as good as pure hp and dominance and while resto is good, it just doesn’t really do much for me since I’m relying on my 3 shields, soder, block button and kiting with heals. I feel like with resto, even if you have more than 15k it’s just isn’t enough to save you if you are being overwhelmed and now especially it won’t even be beneficial since you can’t really stack it with your core augments. I mean you can use resto augments but you will be losing your health just because resto augments grant you less health, which is pretty stupid tbh because every tank now has to get dominance. I’m not sure how it resto augments would compare to dom augments had they granted the same amount of health on a fire tank since deva took the “one size fit all” approach but I imagine that resto is would still be pretty bad against, especially the ones that hit you like a truck since you won’t have time to heal and your health pool won’t allow your to burning determination to trigger and save you not to mention that if you get hit a few times for 20+k or even worse, but worst of all is in boss fights which will hit you for like 60-70k and require you to block your resto becomes pretty useless.

As far as dps artifacts go I'm a big fan of the solar amp. It gives more might than any other artifact in its base stats as well as 4% might at 120 which isn't too much of a grind. After solar amp to me it becomes about whether you run with a static and whether supercharges are a big part of your LO.

I dont run a supercharge except on single target. I just stick one on my bar at the beginning of hive bc I go in at full, bust off a quick volcanic and hit my armory. I'll sub it back in during the first break and hit the armory again. So bc of that I dont run soul cloak. I also had until recently been running with a lot og precision dps in my static so no one ran tetrehedron of urgund so I run that. (They all went might but they knew I had that artifact so they still dont run it).

If you run with a bunch of might based dps in your static theres a good chance someone runs tetra. And if thats the case and you run a super in your loadout soal cloak is the way to go.

OK, so in trying to do the math on stuff, I see the formulae for shields and healing in descriptions of both Restoration and Dominance and they reference something called a "base healing multiplier" and a "base shield multiplier." Where do I find these numbers? It's easy enough to get the 112.5% of Restoration, 150% of Dominance, etc., because I can see those numbers.

It just strikes me that for fire tanking, those numbers seem to need a little boost because if there really is a balance of the powers we should be able to tolerate a bit more damage, especially if we have maximized our critical healing chance/magnitude and have a decent amount of Dominance and Restoration.

sadly you don't find them anywhere in game. The only way to determine them is to test and test and test.

Here are the base heal numbers for Fire as best as I can tell:




The AVG column is the average per tick of healing, and the total is the average healing over the whole heal. I think I assumed 8 enemies hit by Wildfire.

Had to revamp my LO and rotation for elite and I thought Id share. The main change is to the rotation.

1) Fireburst 2) Inferno 3) Mass Det 4) Wildfire 5) Flame cascade or Metero strike 6) Volcanic Calamity SC

Rotation is 1-2-3-4-1-4-3-4 repeat. 5 is only used if you mess up and go 1-2-3-4-1-3-4 bc fireburst will still be on cd. As far as what 5 should be theres no doubt that flame cascade does more dmg but currently I like having the supercharge generator since its a very rarely used ability anyway.

Without Tetrahedron of urgund and sitting unbuffed at 28.4k might I'm able to hit 28k damage per second from range of a 10s parse.

I go with VC as the SC bc from range FBB misses too many enemies. In my tests runs in say Hive E VC isnt going to miss at all and FBB is a risk.

Thanks. It helps a bit, mainly by making me even more curious and looking to do some data gathering to figure out how to optimize some stuff. Do you find these numbers via the parser? What settings would I have to alter in order to see them?

That said, do we know how the numbers are actually applied even if we don't know the BHM and BSM?

Let's say you have a tank with 10000 restoration and 12500 dominance. The healing equation says BHM * (30% Resto + 25% Dom), while shields is BSM * (112.5% Resto + 150% Dom). This would translate to:

heal = BHM * (.3*10000 + .25*12500) = BHM * (3000 + 3125) = BHM * 6125
shield = BSM * (1.125*10000 + 1.5*12500) = BSM * (11250 + 18750) = BSM * 30000

Given your findings, this would put the BHM at numbers in the 0.01 to 0.1 range per healing tick without any modifiers and based on the power cast. I don't even have a clue how to measure the shields.

I have to believe there's a lot more to this than the basic equations they give you in the stats tool tips.