Trailblazing Guide to Fire

nice , would give it a shot when I can sort of gear up to be ready for the new content , missed out on the free 210 cr thing

Yeah and on top of that don’t forget to get all the innates, half the iconics from the iconic tree to cc the adds and then spend 60 into crits so you can kite the adds all over the room and hopefully not die before backdraft registers in the combat log.

Sadly, it sure seems that way. I know this was meant a bit as a joke... but low SP/augment/artifact and unmodded fire tanks just have a much harder time surviving when compared to other tanks, even if you put the fire tank in the hands of some of the most skilled tank players in the game. The supposed king-of-the-tanks self heals are less useful than a bandaid and a bottle of mercurochrome. If fire's self healing is supposed to be that good, I should be seeing healing out numbers that make me look like a sub-par healer. It isn't until you get the assistance of outside-the-powerset items and powers like Scrap of the Soul Cloak, Eye of Gemini, and Pheromone Bloom, that you start to actually become more viable. This tells me that fire's damage mitigation as a tank needs some adjusting... and I think ObsidianChill's tank-related videos are starting to show that.

The clip is what really matters. My loadout varies depending on the raid but in general I run Immolation - Burnout (for team cleanse) - Backdraft - Hard Light Shield - Phase Dodge - Fireball (if there are two tanks, as is usually the case in elite Atlantis content) - Supply/dampening/sidekick/pet. For older raids that still require a tank I'll replace fireball with engulf. I'll dump my SC for eog before a fight but I don't run it during. Almost everything is clippable.

There’s a difference between clippable and usable while controlled. You can only clip stoke. Immolation and bd can do both. Backdraft doesn’t clip but is usable while controlled and you can clip after that but it won’t really make any difference, once you are on your butt your only options are backdraft/immolation/ and sucky burning det which btw only lasts for like 9 seconds and has 18 seconds. You can be god tier clipper but it doesn’t change the fact that you can’t mitigate damage with your defense and especially with lower health pool. Immolation is much weaker shield compared to others tok so idk why people would waste most sp and spec dom, as long as you are able to cc the adds you have plenty... I’d still run immolation though since it does absorb some damage but all skill points would go into health first then resto and a few into dom.

What serous fights have control you can't instantly break out of though? Getting CCed has never been an issue for me whatsoever. Breaking out is a fundamental anyone tanking serious business should have long mastered and in no endgame content is getting CCed frequently a thing as tank (or even really in general).

Resto before Dom is a terrible, terrible idea... Especially for people who don't have many SP, since a player would be actively devaluing their SP by taking that route. Even with the minimal healing in my loadout, I have enough sustainability that the healers only usually need to jump in for the big spikes where the resto couldn't help anyways. In any situation where you need a big spike heal, you're either getting overhealed by the healers already or you're already dead, same as it is for every tank. If a fire tank gets a huge spike of damage and decides to leave block, unshielded, to toss a piddly fire heal, they deserve what they get. Most of the time, all Plus your shields break sooner if you're stacking resto, so you're placed in situations where your resto can't help you more often anyways. Combine that with the fact that if you have a heal centric loadout you have less shields and you're eating more unmitigated damage by far. You're basically nuking your eHP, which is what fire taking is entirely about, in every possible way. It's real bad.

If that's the direction people are taking, it's the reason why the gen pop thinks fire tanks can't hack it. We're not wannabe healers, we're massive health batteries for which it's our goal to stretch out as far as possible with maxed out mitigation. A slightly stronger fire heal does nothing in elite where you can get shredded unshielded. Our healing is top-up only... We're not designed or meant to replace a proper healer in any way. Damage doesn't come in evenly, it comes in lil chips followed by massive spikes. There's nothing in our kit that can heal 150k health fast enough to matter, no matter how you slice it.

Of course you'd go DOM before Resto in your loadout. You run virtually all shields, so you're playing like a high-health low defense ice tank. There's nothing wrong with that if it's working for you, but for Fire Tanks who want to heal themselves more, Resto wins.

Those are all good points... though there are several Fire Tanks who run Elite with healing builds and manage to get by.

I believe you started talking some time ago about how if you want to be a more active tank having higher Resto will win out over higher Dom.

I will probably be tinkering with my SP allocation again, as well as looking at my augments. Currently I run a Dom & Resto adaptive and 4 Dom origins. I've toyed with 3/1 Dom/Resto in origins as well. And while I do put a lot of SP into health, I've prioritized getting Resto to 100 over Dom because if you want Fire Soul to be even of minimal use you need to be mildly active.

It's also still effectively 50% heals thanks to a combination of secondary fire effects and mods, with those heals not requiring me to expose myself or lower my ehp at all; everything in the loadout has a secondary or secondary+tertiary healing effect. For example, I recently tanked COT(E) adds + 2x subs on lb and my health dipped below 50% exactly three times in the entire fight, for which Soder was always up anyways. The healers never had to worry. Our self-healing is great, for top-ups and sustainability, it's just not a replacement for raw mitigation. Any shield + block results in better ehp management than any relevant (ie. Non-SC) fire heal, regardless of stats. The "pure" heals available require us to sacrifice either shielding, CC, or cleanse and it's just not worth it... Hell, even flashpoint has better ehp return on anything but bosses.

Ppl can "manage" elite with a lot of non-ideal things and the resto playstyle results in exactly the hyperactive health bar that makes everyone (myself included) distrust fire tanks. It requires virtually flawless play combined with a lot of luck and fast healers to be successful, especially when tanking multiple dangerous enemies. It also results in constant stress on the healers and mostly only works because the player ends up getting constantly overhealed by them anyways, which not only defeats the purpose but means there are times the tank dies because they had to waste priority heals on something they shouldn't have. It's doable, just really not great and gives fire a bad name.

Most common lines I hear from self-heal fire tanks in elite:

- "If I had known I was gonna take so much damage I would have popped my supercharge"
- "Fire really needs a buff" (same sentiment from resto tanks in this thread)
- "I'm going to switch to Atomic"

It's really not of much use for serious tanking. Just look at the extreme eHP gap between Fire Soul and just blocking, then factor in that, for example, elite enemies have a predilection to lunge in general and it's a recipe for disaster compared to the much safer and more stable alternative. And for what? Marginal tank DPS gains (that any DPS would trivialize) and overworked healers?

That sounds like something I would have said. Certainly if you're going to have stoke flames and burning determination in your l/p it's true. But it's just not the case if you're going to be active by running 3 or 4 shield abilities. Although to be fair, your effective HP with shields is highest when you block. On the other hand, my experience with Elite is no matter how high your health is you can't really just sit and block in elite. If you don't kite and juggle you don't survive long. Your mileage may vary.

All of this is true. Well... I don't know about the COTe part I wasn't in that raid... but everything else is true, and bears out in all the math I've done.

Fire Soul needs to top out at 80% instead of 50-something% for Fire to match the performance of other tanks while active and trying to self-heal. Using lots of shields is an out-of-the-box way around Fire's limitations.

Yeh 80% seems more appropriate. I can appreciate for the devs that it's hard to balance without making us OP but at 60% we can sometimes get combos off then other times get just wrect. The mitigation boost has to be sufficient to ensure we can maintain a cc rotation or it ends up being pointless.

Personally, I don't feel using hl or pd is that outlandish. My tank runs the same number of off-power slots as most good DPS do. That said, I did appreciate that other tank powers can be more pure with their loadouts.

You did say you were going to work on the numbers too, but I guess other stuff got in the way or took priority.

As you noted, though, trying to just sit there and turtle in elite will let you survive one or two hits. I still have not figured out the adds in last boss in COTE... though I have been able to get past first boss doing the adds. One of my league mates has an atomic tank... and he said atomic has it even worse in COTE than fire because of the difficulty of trying to combo and kite at the same time. Been meaning to try a trick someone else suggested: get up "in the air" and turn the adds into yo-yos.

As to Throne Elite, I have a much easier time tanking Rath... and we tend to have problems when either the other tank goes down or somehow I get blocked from getting heals by getting one of the artifact vessels between me and the healers.

It sounds counter intuitive but you can actually turtle while kiting as fire. It works especially well in COT(E) because the adds are craaaazy dumb in that as soon as you get any distance on them, they lunge you. You can roll a circle around them doing roll -> pull clipped with w/e -> block -> All the ads lunge your block and fall on their assets -> queue Benny Hill music -> repeat. The only thing you gotta watch for is the skull attacks from the sub-bosses, for which you don't wanna be mid roll and might require Soder if you eat em unmitigated.

I'll have to give that a try. Thanks.

As to "Yakety Sax," does it come with the customary video speed-up?
(I play a saxophone too... you think I don't know one of the more famous tunes played on said instrument by its actual title? )

Ah...your mistake is thinking that they care about making Fire somewhat equal to the other tank powers....they don't unless they plan on making it OP for a bit to get the FOTM players to switch....then nerf it a month later.

Case in point. Fire went years without a shield....the only one without some version of a shield, even though there was a fire shield already coded in game on Heat Wave.

I play fire and enjoy it, but I've given up trying to compare it to other tank powers. I do ok as a tank, but it's a struggle...always has been.

Reinheld

Ok...next time we are running something and you are tanking I'm playing that all the while over mic. It's on you to yo-yo the guys for the full effect.

Reinheld

This may be obvious to you, but I'll point it out for any newer players reading this thread: as a tank, you don't have so much a rotation as a strategy. Counters are way more important than damage as a tank-- which meant blocking quite a bit, not using smoke bomb when you're likely to be countered, and throwing in block-breakers when you see that.

Your rotation will benefit more from Restoration than it will from Dominance. This is more or less the exact opposite of what Crash Allen does-- there's not a shield in the tray. That's not necessarily wrong, but it will likely not perform as well as a rage tank. That having been said, it will probably work if you have the eye of gemini and soul cloak artifacts at level 120 or higher. Your self-heals get effectively magnified by the eye while it's up.

Here's the catch with that loadout... unless you have both Scrap of the Soul Cloak AND Eye of Gemini at level 160 plus run the Supercharged Pheromone Bloom III head and Extended Supercharge chest mods, this loadout will not work because you will not regenerate supercharge fast enough. You will also need to run, as L T pointed out, restoration-heavy and far less emphasis on Dominance.

If you want to use a weapon for the cc than you’re better off with handblast over bow. At melee HB has a fast cc aoe ability that can be comboed again for a longer cc juggle. Same with range. Using tap range x3 than hold will give you a nice aoe ranges cc for kiting. Issue being the lunging. Combo that with another hold will give another cc on top of that.