Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="WalterKovacs" data-source="post: 5543518" data-attributes="member: 63763">a - Fire does suck for effects ... especially for controllers. While there are some control effects (in terms of "I will punish you with fire damage if you don't do what I want you to), it's mostly damage in big areas, damage over time and things like that. A fire wizard is arguably striker secondary.  b - Scorching burst suffers from being from PHB1. The control power of the wizards at-wills was horrible in PHB1. You had a long distance basic attack that did nothing but damage. And a burst ... that did nothing but damage. Cloud of daggers was nice, but outside of using it with the orb to maintain it, it lacked control (a zone that damages at the start of a monsters turn and then goes away doesn't really encourage the creature to move ... you can do some pushing/sliding tricks to use the damage multiple times, but really that's more dealing damage to lots of enemies/clearing minions). Early on, the controller role wasn't well designed. The wizard was a bit more like what the sorceror ended up being ... a striker that spreads the damage around, and clears out minions. They did have some nice control powers (sleep), but it did take them releasing arcane power and PHB2, etc to really figure out what a controller was supposed to be. As a result, most of the newer wizard at-wills are better than the originals. Thunderwave has been mostly replaced by strands (it does still have some use ... it pushes farther with a high enough wisdom, and does benefit from being thunder based and thus can be increased in size.) So ultimately, scorching burst is basically a victim of the tendency to avoid errata as a power upgrade (with the exception being printed erratta, like the powers that went into HotFL and thus got a boost, like fireball, and many of the encounters, etc. The level 10 effect for the pyromancer effectively makes scorching burst catch up and be worth taking, beyond the damage boost from the pyromancer's bonus to damage/ignoring resistance. That is the price of specialzation ... you may have to give up on powers you want in order to use the specialization benefits more often. It's quite possible that, until 10, the pyromancer may use at-wills that work off his second school if those ones are better.</blockquote>

Verification