How to Fire Tank SM

Discussion in 'Oracle’s Database (Guides)' started by AV, Jun 9, 2019.

  1. AV Loyal Player

    Have been told daily by pugs that they've never seen another Fire tank in SM, let alone one doing well, so figured I'd post my boss setup to help people out. Won't bother to post my trash wave build since there's a lot more flexibility there.

    Weapon: I strongly encourage the use of Rifle for every boss but Ultimate Soldier (use anything with a fast, long
    range lunge for him)
    Movement: Strongly encourage Super Speed for tanking in general
    HT Mods: Energized Dash Attack, Fortified Assault (Use Fortified Blocking for King Shark and Ultraman), Breakout Protection, Hearty, w/e for legs (none are useful), Empowered Channeling (I'll explain why this unorthodox pick is BiS later), Explosive Block (makes a huge difference in SM)
    Augs: I suggest all Dom but w/e mixture of Dom+Resto you feel like is fine.
    Affinity Mods: Health, Health, w/e, Soul Link

    Artifacts: Dilustel Refractor + Mystic Symbol of the Seven + Manacles of Force

    General Loadout: Immolation, Burning Determination, Heat Vision, Hard Light Shield, Dash Attack, Robot Sidekick, Bottled City Soder, Sidekick, Personal Dampening Field, Fiendish Brute's Tome (suggest replacing this with Righteous Pyre or Radiant Light for Vampire Lord, Green Crystal Turret for Deathstroke), and Heartthrob (Suggest replacing this Orbital Strike for Deathstroke)

    Stats: Put 1 point into Rifle, 1 point into w/e fast/long lunge weapon you intend to use for US, get what you need from the movement and Iconic trees, then go Hybrid, Healing crit chance, max health, 100 Dom, 100 resto if you can, then you can either dump the rest into Dom or get w/e else you feel like.

    Explaining the weird stuff:

    Heat Vision is the safest and most valuable ST taunt available to you here because it can be instantly jump canceled into block or lunge, triggers Empowered Channeling for a consistent 5% Defense buff that also prevents it from being countered, has extreme range (same as Engulf, can be successfully used just outside of "max" range), and it causes burning (which is required for Fire Soul generation) and DoT. Everything else either locks in you a brief animation (frequently preventing you from blocking/lunging in time), or follows similar rules but doesn't apply burning.

    Robot Sidekick + Soul Link = an additional reliable, persistent 2% mitigation, an additional target for the boss, more body block, and extra damage. Most of the bosses in here will hardly ever kill it and, for the ones that do, since the loadout has six clippables for it, it's never an issue to respawn him quickly/safely/reliably w/o having to slow down or alter your performance in any way (aside from activating it in front of w/e shield/clippable you were about to use anyways).

    General Breakdown:

    Using this is pretty straightforward, but there's a few things to remember:

    Fire Soul - Be cognizant of your Fire Soul status. Some bosses will let you maintain a full 50% defense buff pretty much the entire time, some will never really let you get past 35%-40% except in short bursts. Some will hover around 35-45% but with periods where it's critical to get it as high as possible when it's safe to do so (eg. Ultraman during his calming down phase). It's important to recognize when it's safe to build Fire Soul w/o giving the boss immunity. Rifle + Heat Vision is excellent for safe ranged Fire Soul generation but the 4 tick lunge also makes the risk of the enemy blocking greater. Capitalize on Fire Soul generation when you know the enemy can't block your lunges. Technically you can let it sit at 30% all the time and still win, but it's much easier if you maintain it. The extra 20% translates to 40k ehp and effectively serves as a welcome extra layer of protection. Get your rifle lunges in where you can.

    Lunge Range - Remember that your taunt's max ranges exceeds the range within which a lunge will successfully counter.

    Basically just maintain taunt and reapply burning with Heat Vision when it's safe to do so, doing a calm, rolling activation of your shield-like effects. Burning Determination can be treated like a "shield" in and of itself or clipped onto another power's activation, depending on the situation. Heartthrob should always be clipped with Fiendish Brute's Tome and can either be activated as part of your shield rotation or saved as a panic button. Dash Attack should be excluded from your standard shield rotation and activated when someone dies (especially if it's the healer) and your shield situation isn't great, when a situation's hairy and you want a quick escape via the superspeed it grants, when you need to reach a downed teammate during freeze breath phase to begin reviving before you're frozen, or for any general **** show scenario. W/e RS is killed, just casually clip his re-cast w whatever's up next in your rotation when it's ready (do NOT clip it with your Soder, it's not worth burning Soder cd over when other clips will be ready in moments).

    Be cognizant of your Shields' status and cds. Try to keep at least 2-3 effects up at a time and communicate with your Healer to coordinate the use of their shield (preemptively, not reactively), to help fill the slight gap in the rotation or compensate for when a boss puts some dents in them.

    This isn't the only way to fire tank SM, but I have found this to be significantly more consistently chill and effective than the alternatives.
    • Like x 3
  2. AV Loyal Player

    - You should also strongly consider activating Dash Attack if a boss is granted immunity.
  3. AV Loyal Player

    Edit: It's also totally fine to tank with Engulf + Regenerative Shielding instead. Depends on your preference. With the way described above you lose the activated ability of Dilustel but gain zero-animation liability and the Empowered effect, which is surprisingly effective. Just be careful with Engulf on King Shark, Ultraman, Lex, and Vampire Lord, as the moves you have to react to are a lot more hair trigger.
    • Like x 1
  4. FoolsFire Devoted Player


    The downside to this is that Ultraman many times won't put you in a block of ice. At least that's the way it has happened to me DPSing in Panopticon.
    • Like x 1
  5. AV Loyal Player

    That's a good point. It's not a huge deal though on tank since you're often the point of origin and when you're not, you can cancel. When you are, you don't have to move far. I kinda like using that time to build as much Fire Soul as possible.
  6. AV Loyal Player

    At 21+, you start to enter territory where our piddly fire heals don't push us into "you've healed enough to survive another hit without healer intervention" territory, so you can safely adapt your loadout to reflect this. Same goes for artifacts, as you quickly reach a point where the extra health/dom/resto doesn't effectively allow you to survive any more hits than you could without them. As such, I tanked almost all the post-20 bosses with the following setup:

    Loadout: Immolation - Meteor Strike - Engulf - Phase Dodge - Dash Attack - Robot Sidekick

    Atrifacts: Manacles of Force + Scrap of the Soul Cloak or Dead King's Scepter + Lazarus Pit Water (2nd round only) or Grimorium Verum (1st round or if LPW gets used). This lets you use Dash Attack a lot (basically whenever you remotely want/need to to play it safe) and really lets you dictate the terms of the engagement in pretty much every fight. DKS and GV help speed things up and also swarm the bosses with pets more often, roosterblocking their lunges.

    Note: There were a few bosses where I'd run Dilustel + LPW (then Tetra once LPW down) for the max possible health buff but it likely wasn't necessary)

    Unfortunately, fire tanking 29 (especially the 29 add phases) is extremely impractical to the point it's masochistic and I temporarily switched to Ice. 29/30 can feasibly be fire tanked I just didn't feel like beating my head against a wall where a second of lag could cost us 30-60m of grind.

    For reference, because of the weird damage jump after round 28, Ice tanking 29 is on par with Fire tanking 19 and Ice tanking 30 is slightly easier than Fire tanking 20 (disregarding the bugs I've been seeing at 30 that weren't a thing at 20)....and that's coming from someone who's exclusively played fire since 2012 and has only played Ice for a day. All the other bosses are fine with either.
  7. AV Loyal Player


    You're fine with that CR, your shield will just be slightly weaker. It's just that most bosses require faster reaction than the approach you were using allows and you were trying to use your abilities reactively in general. Mitigation >>>>>> reaction. If you're trying to use BD to heal back and not as a quasi-shield, you're gonna have a bad time. Also, unless your healer is Water, HLS is pretty useless; personally, for most bosses I don't even like using it with water in that you have to clip it to use it safely/effectively at higher levels and it will make you miss at least one healer shield, since water can't overwrite it.

    SM tanking is 99% about dodging/deflecting attacks and PVPing the bosses, especially the higher you get. Regardless of role, you can only take 1-2 hits before you're dead. This is why after 20 you can just give up on stacking more mitigation/healing than is useful and go balls out on evasion boosters.

    I'll upload videos of the last boss I used a traditional loadout on then some of the higher level bosses (will be a day or two since rendering such long fights takes forever).
    • Like x 1
  8. Danne0075 Well-Known Player

    You just have to pop BD for normal stuff like ex: vampire lord eanged tap attacks on R25. Then for stuff like black energy/ red skull attacks overall you pop a shield.
  9. AV Loyal Player

    Round 20:

    On the day we did this we were getting buggy af Scatter Shot ignoring pets so we decided to go two healers and coordinate shields to mitigate. This is also why I'm using Sidekick here instead of Henchmen. Ironically, this was waaaaaaay sloppier than any of the runs in which we got dicked over.



    Round 26:

    I think this is our second attempt but I forget. I do clearly remember though that in the previous attempt the server lagged out and we got wiped when I died to a melee combo I was 20ft away from XD Exact same attack happened under the exact same circumstances in this run and it didn't hit me, despite just barely being outside of its range this time.



    Round 27:

    First attempt / first clear, so we were testing things out.





    I'm currently rendering Round 28. Didn't bother recording any of my 29/30 clears since I had to change powers due to Fire Soul not working as intended (ie. I was getting 1-shot by things that shouldn't have been 1-shotting me, constantly) and I didn't think anyone would care about Ice doing it. Thought I'd recorded 25 but apparently not.
  10. AV Loyal Player

    And here's the last round I did as Fire:



    Sorry I had to replace the original audio