The devs seem to be on the verge of nerfing DW/flurry because of the constant nerf threads. That's cool, but what about the powers that are bad. Like sorcery and mental? Those need to be buffed at the same time DW is nerfed, because unlike the top tier powers ST vs DW st WM, sorcery and mental can't keep up. Or get anything close. Ik the loudest voice in the room usually get's the most attention, but nerfing DW and not touching the lowest pftt dps powers is really unfair
They didn't imply they were nerfing DW/Flurry they said they were looking at balance, which likely means WM balance, ie. making every weapon and WM a viable and equally useful alternative. DW, as it is, is only unbalanced vs other WM which are clunkier, less useful, or less potent overall. In terms of overall balance, its where it should be. LMAO. Everyone has always dramatically underestimated fire in every way, for almost as long as the game has existed. That said, everytime someone says "x power is weak" I meet people using that power at top-tier level so I really hope the devs take community balance feedback with a grain of salt.
I never said it was weak I just said to buff it so it could be in a better spot. More so on the tanking side than dps.
Gotcha, thought you meant DPS and I was like "whaaaaaat?!" Fire tanking is still really, really good, it's just very different, especially from situation to situation. It's always been dramatically undervalued. IMO, it's overall fine but it's easily the most SP thirsty and hardest to use of the tank powers. Personally, I like that in that it feels like a more advanced role with a lot more flexibility. I totally understand where you're coming from though because even I am nervous when I see other fire tanks in my group, as I don't typically see them doing very stellar. It could maybe stand for a tweak to make it a little easier to use or something but I imagine it's quite hard to buff at all without kinda breaking it in the hands of experienced/high SP players.
Fire still took the biggest hit at stats revamp out of any of the tank powers, you could argue atomic but that has more to do with breakout profiles and the powerset itself. Eternal Flame saw a huge nerf to where its not really practical compared to other possible supercharges to where before stats revamp it was one of the stronger tank sc's. The devs completely flipped fire by pushing it towards an active tanking meta where we lose the extra healing in while blocking and trying to maintain a combo meter just to have Fire Soul proc to any helpful degree is not practical where even with Rage needing a combo meter as well they still have fevor and rage mechanic to draw support from. To get any sort of noticeable healing return we need decent investment into resto because of the base healing values on BD and Stoke. What makes Fire viable now is that the deficiencies are being covered by the Mystic Seven artifact allowing us to have the defense we miss from a lower fire soul and added healing scaling to our SP in resto.
That's quite fair actually. Stoke is really only useful for add tanking and is still quite underwhelming given how weak its ticks are, even at max prec. Burning Det is very much in the same boat in that it's great on adds, still useful on ST, but not nearly as effective as it should be against enemies that do primarily burst damage (eg. everything in SM but Ultraman, and even then only thanks to Scatter Shot). Instead of proc'ing on each hit, it should do healing based on the amount of damage dealt up to a max threshold that's at least on par with how much it can currently heal in a best case scenario. It's not a shield but it's supposed to accomplish the same overall effect with the caveat that you have to survive what hits you in the first place to get the benefit, and the benefit is supposed to that it pumps your remaining health up enough to eat an additional hit.
hey just give me an 8 man shield as a nature healer and i'm fine. typically when i as a healer wipe or have numerous deaths, it's cause obviously the entire team isn't that great, for instance i ran through atlantis fight for the throne 2 days ago and half of the whole team died continuously despite having 3 healers (myself included). i wanted to give the first two healers the benefit of the doubt when we all spawned in and i saw we had three healers, but after about the sea beast boss fight and numerous deaths it was pretty clear i should have STAYED a healer to begin with.
Since we're talking about buffing (or FIXING) broken powers, I would say Ice needs to be looked at. It was actually brought to my attention by Siramez that Snow Devil doesn't actually do what its suppose to do and Ice Boulder Strike is still bugged and wont hit any enemies if the ceiling is too low. Examples include the Titans Targeted Alert on the first boss and the Sea Beast in Throne. I also think Avalanche should have a Frostbitten Power Interaction. And honestly, I think that's all it needs. Maybe a slight damage buff overall, but the tweaks alone should subtle until further testing could be done. Ice Boulder Strike and Snow Devil need to be looked into though because the power is broken and I shouldn't have to be forced to switch to a different power or not use a specific power that is indeed probably one of the strongest powers in its powerset just because its broken. I brought it up awhile ago, and nothing was said by anyone. Its getting kind of aggravating because no one is acknowledging it, and its not even just my power.
I like the way it is now, personally. I did a lot of Fire tanking in PW/Epic Odyssey pugs back during OC and while I still enjoyed it, it felt bland compared to the new approach. When HoP rolled around, I was starting to get sick of it. When I got back, I had mixed feelings about Fire Soul at first but have come to really enjoy it, particularly in SM. I do think the cap should be higher though, given the risk:reward ratio is a lil meh for a lot of content right now. I've always hated all of our SC choices to be honest. When I think of fire-based DC characters going completely ham I'm just completely disappointed in what we've got. I wish we had something like a mfin massive fire beam that did big burst AoE damage on DPS and, for tank, Knockback + big initial heal + prolonged/enhanced BD effect. I agree that Mystic Symbol brings our healing more in line with where it should have been but didn't find fire to underperform before the artifact was released, just that the healing aspect was uninspiring. It really feels like Stoke/BD should both just be sort of innate Fire abilities; it would have a more appropriate flavour and account for the fact it`s often hard to justify the use of a slot in many scenarios.
In that case us sorcery healers also lack an 8-person shield.... (Aside from the Transcendence super-charge, and it doesn't work in all situations.)
For sure Fire definitely wasn't engaging really as a tank and exemplified the turtle tank but I felt the devs went too overboard at stats revamp to swing it the other way. Active tanking is fine but the approach to base it around defense was incorrect and really base defense for all tanks should be the same and then have the mechanics like ice armor or earth's dom etc increase the defense ontop. Fire in the past even before OC was the best juggle tank there was, I was flight and would low pressure (cause fire and crap pulls) and then high pressure them and with the staff combos could keep everything juggled the whole time in Gates in the hallways etc. If they are going to make Fire tanks about healing and not the shield meta that's fine but it has to actually make a difference. Sometimes Fire tanks just turn into poor man ice tanks running HLS, Amazon and Dash Attack because the HOTS are too weak and even spamming backdraft only gets you so far with a 15-30k burst heal. There is NO REASON why we shouldn't have the pre stats revamp mechanics back with a flat 60% buff to health and 2.2x your DOM and then have 80% bonus to healing-in. They should have made fire the one to break the shield meta and focus primarily on its healing and have Eternal Flame back to the way it was as well having 2x healing for every single hit received and the group immunity because old eternal flame would be perfect for those moments in SGE tanking multiple add sets and the beam from harbringer that's where it would excel. I personally didn't mind the turtle tanking but I knew it wasn't for everyone but I miss how fire was the go-to tank for any fight where the boss had high burst dmg attacks like in SM. It took skill to make sure you had immunity so you didn't get countered and remaining mobile out of block.
Yeah, I agree with all of that. While I like the additional, more active options Fire Soul brings, I'm similarly not totally sold on it being a raw def buff. Feels off flavour; end result is nice but at the back of my head I'm always kind of wishing it did something like increase health + resto/dom and healing received instead, cuz while the eHP benefits of the def buff are nice, without benefiting our self-sustainment capability or the ability of the healers to keep us above the "the next hit is lethal" threshold, it also makes me feel like some of that "poor man's ice tank" blahness. Also, the lack of visual reference bothers me. Weirdly I actually loved the turtle tanking in OC/WoL then began to dislike it in HoP. I think that's due to HoP bosses feeling like they took for gd ever at the time and the tanking I remember felt suuuuuuper inactive. I do miss the 2.2x Dom and healing received, especially the aspect where you had to factor that into your thinking if there was ever a period of sustained dodging where you'd have to pop something to maintain the effect. My number one concern with Fire tanking right now is that the base health buffs we get aren't enough for newer or lower SP players to thrive in Elite content compared to other tanks, which is a big reason why other Fire tanks make me nervous. When a core component is the ability to have more eHP than other tanks, it really undermines the concept when so much of that is now dependent on SP and artifacts. I could def get behind Eternal Flame if it was like that. Right now, I'm usually like "well... I could use Eternal Flame.... or I can use Dash Attack which is basically a guaranteed '**** and live every time' card for half the cost." I usually end up running neither. I wish they'd give us a new Supercharge move, just something that felt Fire-y and could apply to both DPS/Tank roles. Samesies for juggling. I remember the first time I realized you could stack the physics on clipping fire powers and staff combos so well and it's what made me decide to settle on the power. I sometimes wish there were more adds on the way to bosses so I could justify the full on "bounce them 20ft in the air" kit all the time.
Aquilo (the namesake of my forum handle) is Ice, I have noticed what you are talking about as far as IBS..but I don't use snow devil a lot, so I haven't really noticed anything there..I don't use Aquilo too much anymore, but when I do, i would like to have one of his hardest hitting powers to work correctly. @Dark Soldier: I agree that getting knocked out of combos with atomic sucks..However, it's part of the challenge with that powerset(in my opinion)..you get stunned or knocked out of your combo..use a break out...or pop a shield to get them going again..I also understand that with as frequently as we get knocked around...that is not always an option..so..I'm not sure how to go about handling it, but I don't think that making atomic immune to knock backs and stuns is the answer.
Fire could definitely use some love in both the tanking and dps department because I do think it's a incredibly fun power but is no where near as practical as something like rage or earth. I think the idea about making internal flames good again and increasing the base healing received to allow the heals to be bigger because although the new artifact helps the healing it's got nothing on rage . I also think the universal defence buff is nice as fire has very little defence in fire so your bigger health pool may be bigger but you don't have as much defence so you take more damage
