Update 39 Fire tank ideas

So ps4 users here so can't post on test so feel free to post in test if this idea is like by anyone. I have two ideas which I think would help fire tanks.

Fire tanks outside of block die the fastest and have no way really to take damage on their own. I suggest bringing back the +25% health bonus of some powers that fire had at launch. Powers that I would suggest adding this to would be enflame, stoke flames, burnout and burning determination. These are all tank moves that many tanks already have on their load outs.

The next idea would make fires self heals not only heal them but increase their max HP by their self heals. This buff would last 12 seconds and would stack and kinda work rages health can keep stacking and has their max hp changing while have the buffs timing off.

Both these would give fire tanks ways to tank more damage and specing for self heals worth it.

It's clear that fire tanks could use some love though.

If you don't want to block while tanking..... get ice

Agreed and there seems to be alot of bad tanks out there these days because they think they dont need to block. Attacking and doing dmg as a tank is great, if u are able to pull it off. Now the game is pretty much easy mode atm so u dont have to be great to do dmg while tanking. But ive seen more then my share of tanks that NEVER block and then have no idea how they die LOL.
The OP does have some nice ideas for fire tanking tho. Ive played all tank power and currently play rage and ice and i block in t6. Your a tank, your supposed to block. Im really gonna laugh at the tanks that never block when t6 raids come out and they are getting 1shotted all over the place.

Can we laugh at you if we are able to stay alive fairly easily without blocking? I very rarely block, there's only a couple of attacks in the entire game that I actually block through. When you can stack your health up to 200K fairly easily, heal back all damage taken for 8 seconds, and successfully ignore every rage crash blocking becomes mostly a thing of the past. I don't even block in sm and even after getting to round 6 I have never been the first knockout in any round.

I switched from fire to rage to be done with turtle tanking which leads me to the OP's post. Not trying to sound like a pessimist but if the devs really knew how bad fire tanking is right now compared to the other tank powersets they would have begun this revamp with the tank side of fire instead of the dps side. Since that didn't happen, it is safe to assume that they don't know and if the people creating this game don't know then what hope can you have for them to properly fix it?

I would post some ideas but I (along with many others) have been posting ideas all over the forums with no feedback from any of the devs. In fact, a lot of testers are giving good ideas in the testing feedback forum and none of the devs have said anything about fire tanking. It's a shame to wait for over a year for a rightful revamp to your powerset only to have the dps side revamped and not its support side which is really the side that needs the most work.

To be fair to the devs, they have the server data and from the raw numbers they have, the DPS side was noticeably lagging behind the other powers. Unfortunately, I don't think the problems of Fire Tanking show up well in that kind of data.

Then go into SM and be required to block anyway

I'd LOVE to see that... considering I run with a Rage tank in SM (I'm Ice, he's Rage) and he's 106 with 188 (possibly higher? idk...) SP. He still blocks, so unless you have a god mode cheat, I would love to call your bluff.

If you're USPC Villain side, hit me up (Cerventia) so I can see this supposed "god-mode" rage tanking you speak of, cause I aint buyin it.

EDIT:

Some quick math for you. Starting at 10k (give or take 1-2k, not important), you would need to stack 190k health to get to the 200k you claim.

We'll give you the benefit of the doubt with 2500 (easy math) dom. I've heard somewhere recently that Rage tanks actually gain double the Health they're supposed to (4/3 as opposed to 2/3) which means that each power cast would grant you roughly 3333 health. To get 190k, you'd have to hit 25+ powers within 12 seconds (however long the buff actually lasts) and maintain hitting powers at that rate to maintain that level of health with the two bosses out, and 50+ times once you have one boss left.

If you're successfully achieving that level of health, I REEEEEAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLYYYYY want to kick your trollers' behinds for putting up with that.

That being said, I believe that maintaining that level of performance would be near impossible based on cooldowns.

You're basing your numbers off of using a power on one add, rage gets 2/3 of their dominance added as health per power used per add the power was used on. Since there are a minimum of 4 adds per wave and 2 bosses per round you can now factor that into your equation and see that reaching that 200K health mark doesn't take 25+ powers in a 12 second span to achieve.

Now that you can see how easy it is to stack health, maybe you can start to see this "god-mode"rage tanking i speak of as you call it. If not, let's procede farther. For 8 out of every 10 seconds, I am completely invulnerable to damage because of rage mode so that leaves me with 2 seconds that I am able to receive any damage. From what I have shown you on health stacking are there any adds or bosses in the game that can deal out 100K-200K damage in 2 seconds?

Starting to believe yet? If not, let's procede farther. Let's say my health was only stacked to 120K and in those 2 seconds a group of adds was able to deal 70K damage to me (highly unlikely). So now I still have 50K health and I go into rage mode again. Now it just so happens that every power on my loadout heals me on top of what rage mode is healing for on top of what the healers are healing me for. So now i have rage mode healing me, my other powers I'm using healing me, and another healer healing me (2 healers in sm) all while stacking my overall health pool even higher from using self-healing powers.

So there's all the information you need to see that turtle tanking even in the slightest isn't required by a rage tank. What I'm trying to say is just because you have to block or your rage tank leaguemate has to block doesn't mean every tank has to block. Granted, it can be more difficult to use this method on a single boss more difficult doesn't mean it is even difficult, it just isn't as easy as it is with a group of adds.

Sadly I am on USPS Hero or I would love to show you just how OP rage tanks can be. I have walked into Nexus many times by myself testing and perfecting different loadouts and ran many loot-locked raids trying to become a better battle tank and I get many tells every time I log on asking me to tank something because of that. Sorry bro but ice isn't the best tank power anymore.

Ragebringer doesn't have a cooldown, heals for the same amount of damage dealt, and I can do roughly 6-8 of them with one full power bar. So i guess you can call me a troll friendly power *****. I run sm with ice tanks to and they all ask me how I survive so easily without blocking. My answer is simple, rage is beast.

So far, I haven't run into too many issues with tanking as fire on Test. Having run AnB, Dox, and Nexus, the difficulty seems about the same as they were although certain abilities come off faster and how the control is maintained is a little different. I'm still working through my rotations with a a couple of different power loadouts but one thing has remained constant.

As a fire tank, you really have to understand the combat mechanic and anticipate the adds more than you would for either ice, rage, or earth. Your mitigation and effective ability is still tied to the understanding of your self heal and CC ability. It is definitely a challenge to be great with fire as opposed to the others where you mitigation allows you to stack defense or health (or some combination in-between) but there's obviously people in the game who have done it and are doing it.

Overall, I think the new changes to fire are more geared for DPS and the tank side hasn't been tinkered with too much either way but that's just after a few runs with a relatively overpowered group of characters. I may dial my gear and skills down a little bit to see how the changes affect people at the lower levels and if it is significantly more difficult or changed, I'll update based on what I see.

I'm also talking about tanking high end content like SM you have to stop blocking to use a power to keep hate. All tanks do this and fire has the greatest risk of dying when doing so compared to the other tanks. This is because none of their powers really help them take damage like the other tanks have. The self heals don't help tank more damage just to heal a small part back. A very small part.

This is what this about giving them abilities or mechanics to actually take damage around the same level the other tanks can tank in and out of block in end game content such as SM.

Fyi ice tanking still requires you to block

I've always been told ice and rage tanking are considered "going the easy way" because of how simple it is to use those powers as tanks.

The problem with buffing a fire tank is that in PVP it'll be almost IMPOSSIBLE to take one done based off of what some of the community wants. You give a fire tank a decent troller in PVP and "fix" his healing abilities, he's not going down.

Cool, glad to see someone is actually testing it out. All of that content is easy for fire right now though, as is the T6 alert. The big problems with fire only show up when you go into Survival Mode and need to gobble all of the group's resources to keep you alive. That's what I keep hoping someone with access to Test reports on.

The hard data that should show Fire lagging behind on the tank side is how many Fire tanks are (not) appearing in later Survival Mode rounds. It's possible to go a few rounds if your group can dump massive resources into healing and power to keep you alive, but that approach is not very efficient or fun to play.

Is nice to see more people worried about the tanking side of fire.
Please, keep the ideas and suggestions in one place. We have this thread running for a couple of days and Mepps said that we should post our feedback in there or in the test server thread : https://forums.station.sony.com/dcu...ments-in-update-39.212004/page-9#post-2676117

There is only so much blocking you can do, when a heal dies, or your juggled, you run the risk of dying, self heals are not enough to keep some fire tanks alive even when blocking while the healer gets picked back up...

I do believe I took the two bosses into account... I didn't take the adds into account because that's actually somewhat doable, however, with the adds all focusing you (which will happen from time to time), and hitting fast enough, you'll still drop insanely fast without blocking.

As for the bosses, yea, 25+ times per 12 second period when both bosses are up, and 50+ times when only one is left... that's what it would take to maintain 200k, which you claim is "easy".

Again I feel for your trolls.

EDIT: I also based my numbers off something I heard about Rage getting 4/3 their dom as Health, as opposed to the 2/3, so if in fact that was a lie, and they only generate 2/3 dom into health per enemy... you can double the amount of power casts needed...

I feel sorry for the FIRST TANKS. They got straight up ignored.#SHAME SHAME

I'm not gonna continue to deviate this thread from its original purpose but all I have to say about it is believe it or not, it happens. Every good tank knows when to block and I'm no different but since I run all content with my leaguemates and we've been playing together for a couple of years so we're familiar with each other's playing style, I know that over 90% of the time I'm not gonna need to block.

I'll block whenever I see our league trolls' power bars running low or if the healers are struggling to replenish a 100K-200K health pool or on certain in-game attacks such as the warrior's one-shot attack but it is rarely required for me to block so if I don't need to then why would I?

I tank the T6 alert with 4 or 5 pieces of dps gear most of the time, spec into precision and crit hit chance and magnitude, and I alway have just slightly below the recommended dominance required. I consume a bulldozer soda to put me slightly above the recommended dominance and tank it just like normal only now I do block for the 2 seconds that rage mode is on cooldown but that's only because my actual tank stats suck so I'm really squishy. Even then my health never drops below 50% and I always end up doing more than half the damage of the dps'.

I'm not bragging on myself, I'm more or less bragging on the rage power. Just watch Deathmike's videos where he solos content like paradox with his rage toon and you tell me how many times he has to block. The truth is I don't think the devs realized what exactly they were creating with the rage power because when it comes to survivability, no other powerset can contend with a good rage player and that's not an opinion.

The T6 Alert part, is kinda cute, because I do that on my Ice Tank and I never block... without a healer... and I usually pull 1 million damage in a 30 minute run (I pug everything, so I'm not playing with the same people every time.)