Flares or Fire Blast on Fire/ Corrupter

[Kachooman]

Quick question which is better in terms of damage? I notice a lot of builds skip fire blast and opt for flares. Is there a reason for this because at end game both end up with sub activation recharge times. In game I see flares with activation time of 1.0 and fire blast with 1.2 but more damage per activation.

 

Thanks for your help!

[Griffin]

I’ve noticed a lot of builds with flares as well and don’t know the reasoning. The animation is awful in my opinion. I always go fire blast.

[Auroxis]

Flares is part of the best attack chain on a high recharge build. Blaze-Snipe-Blaze-Ball-Flares.

[Kachooman]

So the extra 0.2 throws out the attack chain, right!

 

Thanks for the clarification!

[Griffin]

I honestly can’t see how it would be better than fire blast.  Is the longer animation needed for the other powers to recharge in time?

[Coyote]

I honestly can’t see how it would be better than fire blast.  Is the longer animation needed for the other powers to recharge in time?

 

Flares has a shorter animation. You have a gap after Fireball, but it's short enough that you can fill it with Flares, thus getting you to the high-DPS attacks sooner than if you filled it with Fire Blast.

[Griffin]

Did they change the flares animation? Is it not standing there with both arms up anymore? I want to test this when I get off work, I just remember hating the animation.

[Coyote]

Did they change the flares animation? Is it not standing there with both arms up anymore? I want to test this when I get off work, I just remember hating the animation.

 

That exists, but you also have the option to raise a single hand at the target and fire fire from a single palm.

[Trickshooter]

Did they change the flares animation? Is it not standing there with both arms up anymore? I want to test this when I get off work, I just remember hating the animation.

 

That exists, but you also have the option to raise a single hand at the target and fire fire from a single palm.

 

I think Griffin is asking about the original Flares animation where your arms are above your head (shared with Heat Loss, Fulcrum Shift, Gale and Sonic Siphon) which was 2.17 seconds long.

 

That animation was tossed when Blaster's got Defiance 2.0 in Issue 11. Flares default animation now is a 1 second animation doing the pewpewpew arms.

[Griffin]

Yep... Trickshooter nailed it. I didn’t treatise the animation was ever shortened. I need to test it out. I’ve been taking fire blast this whole time. The more ya know,,,

[CaptTastic]

I actually really like both and get both for my levelling build. Once you get enough recharge with IOs though, there is literally no reason to take flares. Fire blast recharge on my perma-hasten kin is down to one second so surely you just take the higher damage attack.

[Griffin]

I would have thought the same, but I have started to question that. Using another comparison, on my ice/cold I have taken both ice bolt and ice blast for leveling. I always figured I would keep ice blast, but after digging a little deeper in pines I’ve noticed the DPA, even though both are very fast animations attacks, the actual cast time is ever so slightly longer for ice blast than ice bolt. This puts their DPA nearly the exact same, but ice bolt recharges significantly faster than blast. I am on my cell phone so do not have Pines in front of me but will post the numbers later if anyone is interested.

[Griffin]

here are the numbers for ice bolt vs ice blast. Will include Flares vs. Fire Blast as well.

 

Ice Bolt

DPA: 35.11

DPS: 8.04

base damage: 41.71

Cast:1.188

 

Ice Blast

DPA:37.01

DPS: 6.95

base damage: 68.4

Cast: 1.848

 

The values are super close, most give ice bolt the edge due to the much faster recharge, and the DPS number is actually higher.

 

Flares

DPA: 35.46

DPS: 12.51

base damage: 42.12

Cast: 1.188

 

Fire Blast

DPA: 38.9

DPS: 10.31

base damage: 56.48

Cast: 1.452

 

Pretty similar numbers. I just reealized pines had this power stat window, which is pretty nice. Really lets you compare things more grainularly.  Do most go off of DPA or DPS? Alos, is DPA is using the activation time, what is DPS using  to calculate the value? Does it somehow factor in recharge timee as well?

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Obitus]

I think there's a bit of confusion around this issue because Fire Blast isn't consistent across ATs.  Corruptors get a better version of the power than Blasters (and Sentinels, apparently) do - with a cast time of 1.452s instead of 1.848s.

 

For Blasters, Flares has a ~16% advantage over Fire Blast, in terms of DPA.  Combine that with Flares' faster recharge timer and you have a no-brainer for high-end attack chain filler.

 

For Corruptors, Fire Blast has a ~10% DPA advantage over Flares.  This apparently holds true for Defenders, too, and of course the Dominator version of Fire Blast is just flat-out insane on high-end builds, because Doms not only get the better 1.452s activation time; their version of Fire Blast also has a longer recharge timer, which increases its damage scalar (and thus, its DPA).

 

Pretty similar numbers. I just reealized pines had this power stat window, which is pretty nice. Really lets you compare things more grainularly.  Do most go off of DPA or DPS? Alos, is DPA is using the activation time, what is DPS using  to calculate the value? Does it somehow factor in recharge timee as well?

 

It looks like Pine's is just taking the damage of each power divided by its whole cycle time to give you "DPS," i.e. 42.12 / (2.18 + 1.188) = 12.51 DPS for Flares.  Of course this is extremely misleading in anything except an extremely low level context.  We all take more than one attack, after all.

 

We generally emphasize DPA because animation/activation time is the only unavoidable (or unimprovable) bottleneck in an attack chain.  That's not to say that recharge time is completely irrelevant, of course, but at high levels of global +recharge the base cooldowns of your lower-end attack powers tend to become much less important.

 

And that brings me to Ice Bolt/Blast.  Yes, Ice Blast's DPA isn't that much better than Bolt's, and yes, Blast has a significantly longer recharge timer, but if you're shooting for the "best" attack chain of Bitter Ice Blast -> Freeze Ray -> Ice Blast, then Ice Blast's recharge isn't the problem.  The main challenge will be in shaving recharge off of BiB.  If you can do that, then Blast will take care of itself.

 

Blast also has a qualitative advantage in that it just does better damage per hit.  Ice Bolt is a frustratingly weak attack on a Corruptor.  I can't tell you how many times I cast Ice Bolt at a nearly dead minion only to have it come up short.  Dropping it when I got enough +recharge was a great pleasure.

[Griffin]

Thanks for the clarification and details,Obitus. I didn’t know fire blast was different from Blaster to corruptor. I feel I did know it was better on dominator, for some reason. That seems to stand out from lost knowledge back in the day. Did you pull the corruptor vs blaster animation numbers from in game? I got all my info directly out of pines, so it may not have the right cast times in for each AT.

 

I also appreciate the insight on ice bolt be ice blast. I’m pretty sure my build (just posted an updated build on these forums - all, please critique!) has enough recharge to warrant swapping bolt for blast. I have both for leveling but will only have one in my final build.

[Obitus]

Thanks for the clarification and details,Obitus. I didn’t know fire blast was different from Blaster to corruptor. I feel I did know it was better on dominator, for some reason. That seems to stand out from lost knowledge back in the day. Did you pull the corruptor vs blaster animation numbers from in game? I got all my info directly out of pines, so it may not have the right cast times in for each AT.

 

That's a deceptively complex question.  I did use Pine's for the numbers in the last post, and although I haven't personally verified them recently, they should be accurate for well-worn sets like Fire or Ice Blast.  I'd be more skeptical of Pine's numbers for newer sets.  If you're ever unsure, you can verify by checking either in-game or on the archive of City of Data, which unfortunately isn't quite complete (no pet power info archived, for example); still, it's a great resource for most powers data.

 

There is a caveat, though, and that is that you'll find two different types of activation-time figures.  When we're discussing attack chains or DPA or DPS on the forum, we tend to use Arcanatime, which describes practical cast times based on the way server processes events (named after forum MVP Arcanaville, who invented the method for accounting for server ticks).  In other words, if the game tells you that an attack takes 1 second, then in practice the attack will take 1.188s.  I believe Pine's uses Arcanatime by default, and thus its numbers will be more accurate, assuming its data is up to date.

 

Here's an example of how Arcanatime changes DPS calculations.

 

I also appreciate the insight on ice bolt be ice blast. I’m pretty sure my build (just posted an updated build on these forums - all, please critique!) has enough recharge to warrant swapping bolt for blast. I have both for leveling but will only have one in my final build.

 

It's pretty hard to get BiB down to the 3.036s recharge time necessary to run BiB->FR->IB, but you can get damn close, and small gaps aren't that important.  My Ice/Storm build has 102ish% in global recharge (before Hasten), and still has a ~0.3s gap.  But a tiny gap is often better than using a sub-optimal attack to make things seamless, and Corruptors usually have enough other things to keep them busy (debuffs, etc) that they're not going to run continuous single-target attack chains very often, anyway.

 

FWIW, I swapped Ice Bolt out of the build long before I hit 50.  IIRC i had something like 60-70% global recharge (plus Hasten) at the time.  Even then the gap wasn't super noticeable.  YMMV.