What’s with the lack of love for Fiery Melee?

[leeowensoas]

I feel like I frequently see FM brought up as a set that needs adjustment, mostly because it’s really old. Obviously mechanically it lacks any primary mitigation in exchange for more damage, so sets that out damage it and have mitigation are arguably better in most ways, but I feel like I see people talk about fiery melee as “bad” and I just don’t really feel it. Maybe it’s cause I pair it with Shield, which is godly, but I feel like my FM/SD scrap is just as solid as my WM/SD Scrap, and people are super into WM these days? Is there something I’m not seeing that explains this reputation/perception?

[Yomo Kimyata]

I think that most of it is because, as you say, it's an old set and it has no secondary effects (so no great proc opps).  It's not overtuned.

 

But I can't stand it for its animations.  I detest elemental swords and I hate breath attacks.  But that's just me.

[Thrax]

I also had the fire breath although I usually tried to make dragon tons to make it work. I just can’t get past the fire swords.   I keep wanting to try it out but can’t get too far with it. Seems like it should hit a lot harder when it’s secondary effect is more damage. They should just crank up the adds dots and make it a melee dot class. Savage melee has a lot of damage from their dots. Bleeding and being on fire should both hurt about the same I guess. 

[Bill Z Bubba]

10 hours ago, leeowensoas said:

Obviously mechanically it lacks any primary mitigation in exchange for more damage, so sets that out damage it and have mitigation are arguably better in most ways, but I feel like I see people talk about fiery melee as “bad” and I just don’t really feel it.

 

I think you answered your own question. As a scrapper primary set, it's still gonna get the job done.

 

For me, I haven't had a concept that forced the use of fiery melee, so I've not chosen it because there are numerically better options on the table. I have, in the past, had fiery melee scrappers, brutes and tanks, but they've all been deleted.

[Bill Z Bubba]

I'll add this, though: IF we were to go back and rebalance every attack in the game and include cast time in the equations, we'd probably be having a very different conversation.

[Sovera]

Fire Breath sucks. A medium range narrow cone has zero place in a melee set. It's fine for ranged since they will be at range, but someone in melee will have to leap away (or up) in order to make use of it, or be prepared to hit three mobs out of the ten surrounding them.

 

Fire Sword Circle has nothing special to its name. It's damage is the normal PbAoE damage and it's animation is a touch slower.

 

So basically the AoE is meh.

 

Then we look at the ST and we look at pylon tests (useful as a metric if nothing else) and see it has.. actually okay times. Not better, not abysmal, but within the usual range. Except it has no useful effects, part of the damage is still DoT based (someone correct me but I believe the best chain doesn't include Greater Fire Sword?), and the animations are not particularly fast.

 

 

Plainly it's not terrible, it's not great, it just slid into mediocre obscurity. But the game is easy enough that it works and things die so it hasn't fallen into really-bad-why-god-looking-at-you-KM.

 

But it does fire damage that bumps its usefulness past pylon metrics since things that shine on a pylon (claws, DB, StJ, even Martial arts) get roadblocked by the very common S/L resistance in actual gameplay.

 

Tbh if it wasn't for the late AoE (I don't consider Fire Breath an AoE) meaning three TFs hitting things one by one, I'd try a Fire Melee for funsies. Actually, only Tankers and Brutes get the late AoE

Edited January 7, 2022 by Sovera

[Erratic1]

7 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

I detest elemental swords and I hate breath attacks.  But that's just me.

 

It is not just you.

[KC4800]

Have you ever tried a Fire/Fire stalker? yeeesh

 

The highlight for the set, I kid you not...is placate.

[Gobbledigook]

Fire melee offers no mitigation effects like knockdown and stuns etc which help boost survival. It has only +damage which it still isn't the best at. It can't be procced out the same as other sets. It can not take a FF proc.

 

The damage is ok as said above but for a set that is damage only it is a little bit lacking. 

 

Yes it would be nice if the set could have a minimal graphic setting to avoid the fire swords.

[MoonSheep]

10 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

I think that most of it is because, as you say, it's an old set and it has no secondary effects

 

i think you’ll find the secondary effect is death 😁

[Bill Z Bubba]

47 minutes ago, MoonSheep said:

i think you’ll find the secondary effect is death 😁

 

Truth! Especially with regen as your secondary and all those long cast times keep you from clicking your mitigation.

[Bill Z Bubba]

54 minutes ago, Gobbledegook said:

It has only +damage which it still isn't the best at.

 

And that's the real problem. It should have the best damage output, ST and AoE, because it doesn't do anything else. But as it stands, it's barely middle of the road.

[MoonSheep]

11 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

Truth! Especially with regen as your secondary and all those long cast times keep you from clicking your mitigation.

 

aw naw i meant the secondary effect on enemies 😛

 

fire melee is quite a good damage dealer from my experience over the years, cremate and incinerate are pretty good and dishing out FSC with the scrapper crit active does some decent damage

 

my main is a /fire dom and i’ve always liked having DoT, i find when i play non-DoT sets things always straggle around almost dead but not quite

[Krazie Ivan]

lol -mine (FM/SD) doesn't even have a slotted attack till L24...
because, honestly, why? both sets are late bloomers.
same reason i built it for icap Def, high E/N Res, & +Rech... below L30 it's a dog, but late-game incarnate/L50+ the fire dmg starts to shine (well, more-so) vs S/L resistant foes that other sets start to slow down against (go Blaze to further this). it was fun to play tho, despite the drawbacks. build is from 2014-ish, and i never bothered to rebuild it on these servers, but i'll post it if you want.

Bill is spot-on with what FM's issue is, animation time vs dmg could use a rebalance pass.

Edited January 7, 2022 by Krazie Ivan

[Gobbledigook]

1 hour ago, Krazie Ivan said:

Bill is spot-on with what FM's issue is, animation time vs dmg could use a rebalance pass.

Most sets could do with that tbh.

[The_Warpact]

Its a set I've tried and tried with no success, it seriously needs looked at.

[PeregrineFalcon]

Am I the only one who likes the fire swords and wishes that all of my Fiery Melee attacks could have them?

[The_Warpact]

4 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Am I the only one who likes the fire swords and wishes that all of my Fiery Melee attacks could have them?

Nope I love elemental weaponry, and wish the same. I love my ice melee swords.

[Lazarillo]

10 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Am I the only one who likes the fire swords and wishes that all of my Fiery Melee attacks could have them?

I can tell ya my Ice/ Stalker would increase in fun factor by a factor of 7.2x if I could just replace the Frozen Fists animation with a sword animation. 

And I figure Fire Melee would just sort of generally benefit by at least being to do all of either/or.

[Sovera]

Swords fit some concepts but not others. Alternate animations would be nice. I'm actually looking at it anyway since I've not done a Scrapper in forever, and a Fire Meleer in even longer. Time to try a Fire/Stone and see how it behaves.

[Without_Pause]

Alternate animations would be great. Rebirth I believe did it for Ice melee.

[lemming]

28 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Am I the only one who likes the fire swords and wishes that all of my Fiery Melee attacks could have them?

One of my favorite characters is a Bio/fire tank.   Is it a high performer? Not really, but not bad.  A little squishier than a couple of my other tanks though iirc, I still have some sets to slot into it on the defense side, but normally if I pay attention, she's unkillable.

I do have Overwhelming Force & Avalanche slotted in attacks, so the occasional knockdown helps and with Bio, the regen is normally more than sufficient to mitigate incoming damage.

And yes, more fire swords would be nice.

[Vanden]

8 hours ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

I'll add this, though: IF we were to go back and rebalance every attack in the game and include cast time in the equations, we'd probably be having a very different conversation.

 

What if we played Devil's Advocate for a bit, and judged it on the merits that sets were balanced around when it was created? I.E., if we pretend there's no procs and ignore activation time, does it at least come out on top that way?

[Crasical]

'I throw fireballs' has more aesthetic appeal than 'I touch people with burning hot fingies'
And the set being split between sword attacks and touch attacks is awkward.

[Bill Z Bubba]

32 minutes ago, Vanden said:

What if we played Devil's Advocate for a bit, and judged it on the merits that sets were balanced around when it was created? I.E., if we pretend there's no procs and ignore activation time, does it at least come out on top that way?

 

By what metric though? Just tally up the best attacks that could be chained using 1acc/1end-red/1rec-red/3dam in each and then compare time per chain to get DPS?

 

We could... or we could accept that there was a ton of powerset imbalance from the get go which is why claws had such a major makeover.

 

Edit: phrasing

Edited January 7, 2022 by Bill Z Bubba