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I think all the Fire guides I've read think Bonfire is a crappy power good only for skipping... but doesn't the immob from Fire Cages cancel the knockback from Bonfire?
Bonfire looks like it does massive damage, and contained critters just standing around in it while Fire Caged... seems like a pretty good pair of attacks. It works to drop Fire Cages on critters standing in a Burn patch, too. 
I'm comparing the stats in Mid's - it gives Bonfire a 45 second duration. So it'll be on the ground there, pulsing KB and damage for 45 seconds? And Fire Cages has a base 27 sec duration, but the -KB effect only lasts for 12 seconds, and it doesn't look like Immob enhancers lengthen the -KB time, but it'd be easy to re-apply the Cages before 12 seconds are up.
My Fire/FF just hit 32, and I'm going to respec and see how Cages + Bonfire + Imps works, and can't wait to add Repulsion Bomb to the mix.
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It works very well indeed.
Before
After
That's my Fire/Storm in DA pre-imps.
The zombie on the left got knocked back because I missed it twice in a row with cages. All that carnage happened from the time it took to for him to get knocked back and then stand back up.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
Yes Fire Cages will stop things from getting kb'd. I don't have any high lvl Fire/ controllers but I know I use Bonfire offensively all the time on my Fire/ doms. I generally open with Flashfire then hit Cages+Bonfire and jump into melee with Hotfeet to quickly melt everything.
Elec/Cold Troller AV/Pylon/GM/TF/SF Soloing Antics
everytime...he gets me everytime.... DAMN U BOOMIE
-- _Ilr_
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz. Bonfire is the best tool bar none for identifying that you need to slot more accuracy in Fire Cages.
The problem with Bonfire is that you are guaranteed to miss one or two mobs with Fire Cages while it's up. Bonfire will throw those guys a long way away. They will sit out there and snipe you to death while you are dealing with the rest of the mob. To be honest, it takes a lot more time to deal with the stragglers that bonfire tosses out than using bonfire saves you in killing the majority of the mob. So Bonfire has a few uses, but damage isn't really one of them because it will actually slow your kill speed.
One of my favorite uses for Bonfire in the upper levels (like the STF and ITF) is throwing it under AVs and EBs with knockback protection . . . it becomes a nice 45 second patch of Damage over Time, while knocking back any lower level foes who want to intrude on your efforts to beat the snot out of the AV. In the STF and ITF, it is great to let you keep beating on the big baddies while being able to ignore spawns that happen along the way. On the STF, I love using it on Recluse's Towers -- it does damage on them while knocking back the Repairmen from being able to make repairs -- one of the best stratagies anywhere.
Yes, Fire Cages + Bonfire is decent damage if you keep spamming Fire Cages, but generally, I don't find that it is worth it -- spamming Fire Cages uses a lot of endurance that you could be using to do other damage. And as previously stated, you have to go chase the ones missed by Fire Cages.
LOCAL MAN! The most famous hero of all. There are more newspaper stories about me than anyone else. "Local Man wins Medal of Honor." "Local Man opens Animal Shelter." "Local Man Charged with..." (Um, forget about that one.)
Guide Links: Earth/Rad Guide, Illusion/Rad Guide, Electric Control
Bonfire is also ridiculously powerful on certain office maps. If you toss it on top of the table in one of those "conference room" type rooms enemies cant escape the radius and just get thrown repeatedly into the wall. It's like Earthquake or Ice Slick with damage.
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The problem with Bonfire is that you are guaranteed to miss one or two mobs with Fire Cages while it's up. Bonfire will throw those guys a long way away. They will sit out there and snipe you to death while you are dealing with the rest of the mob. To be honest, it takes a lot more time to deal with the stragglers that bonfire tosses out than using bonfire saves you in killing the majority of the mob. So Bonfire has a few uses, but damage isn't really one of them because it will actually slow your kill speed.
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It's quiet easy to slot cages apropriately for the task. You can get the end costs down to about 8 per cast, you can increase the recharge so it can be double stacked (this eliminates most of the miss/kb problems), you can add extra accuracy, and even throw in a proc or 2 depending on your global set bonuses.
If you want some extra melee defense 6 slotting Enfeebled Operation into Cages is a cheap and easy way to get the most bang for your Cages+Bonfire buck.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
Yep, since Fire Cages can use AoE and Immob sets, it's easy to frankenslot Cages get max accuracy, recharge, and endurance reduction. Wouldn't I have to chase or otherwise deal with the ones missed by Cages anyway?
I hadn't yet thought about dropping it in those corner offices full of badguys. That'll be super useful on the heroside Respec trials, both for clearing the rooms and keeping baddies off the Core.
I'll have to practice bouncing critters between Bonfire and Repulsion field for some one-man ping-pong lolz.
bonefire does identical damage to caltrops. Not something I'd write home about, but if you have nothing else then ok. It also doesn't benefit from containment, which would make it a lot better imo.
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The problem with Bonfire is that you are guaranteed to miss one or two mobs with Fire Cages while it's up. Bonfire will throw those guys a long way away. They will sit out there and snipe you to death while you are dealing with the rest of the mob. To be honest, it takes a lot more time to deal with the stragglers that bonfire tosses out than using bonfire saves you in killing the majority of the mob. So Bonfire has a few uses, but damage isn't really one of them because it will actually slow your kill speed.
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Wait, one or two guys will snipe your controller to death? Did you skip Char or something?
I team with the Repeat Offenders.
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Yep, since Fire Cages can use AoE and Immob sets, it's easy to frankenslot Cages get max accuracy, recharge, and endurance reduction. Wouldn't I have to chase or otherwise deal with the ones missed by Cages anyway?
I hadn't yet thought about dropping it in those corner offices full of badguys. That'll be super useful on the heroside Respec trials, both for clearing the rooms and keeping baddies off the Core.
I'll have to practice bouncing critters between Bonfire and Repulsion field for some one-man ping-pong lolz.
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With a 5% chance to miss each mob no matter how high your accuracy is you have a statistical chance of .25% to miss any mob in each spawn with double stacked cages. So about 1 in 400 mobs.
With appropriately slotted powers you can use the 2x Fire Cages, Bonfire, Hot Feet combo to drop an entire spawn of minions in about 15 seconds.
With a resistance debuffing secondary like Storm, Rad, or TA you can drop that down to about 10 seconds.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
My post is from my experience soloing Dark Astoria with my Fire/Storm in the mid 20s. No self heal, endurance heavy Primary and Secondary. Yes I have char, but it was much easier killing all the mobs in a group before I got Bonfire than it was after. The ones Fire Cages misses ( it's going to miss 5% per cast, so you WILL lose at least two during the duration of the Bonfire, more likely 3 or 4 ) get thrown a long way off in multiple directions, so it's not easy to see them while you are in the middle of the ones you managed to root trying to drop them before Flashfires wears off. Before Bonfire I had to chase one or two down, after I got it, I had to chase 3-5 down. Yes, Five minions sniping at you for the time it takes to get to each of them and drop them individually will hurt you. After the initial kill of the main group, you are low on endurance, and trying to drop things. Applying Char to 4-5 different mobs while trying to kill one at a time is a losing proposition.
I had similar experience with my 48 Fire/Rad. She has much less scatter and much quicker kill speed when she doesn't use Bonfire so I'm going to stand by my contention that it slows kill speed, and is a very situational power rather than something you would use to increase you kill speed vs anything but AVs.
On teams it may not matter so much because the blaster or scrapper can track those guys down and drop them easily. For soloing large spawns, Bonfire hinders more often than not.
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My post is from my experience soloing Dark Astoria with my Fire/Storm in the mid 20s. No self heal, endurance heavy Primary and Secondary. Yes I have char, but it was much easier killing all the mobs in a group before I got Bonfire than it was after. The ones Fire Cages misses ( it's going to miss 5% per cast, so you WILL lose at least two during the duration of the Bonfire, more likely 3 or 4 ) get thrown a long way off in multiple directions, so it's not easy to see them while you are in the middle of the ones you managed to root trying to drop them before Flashfires wears off. Before Bonfire I had to chase one or two down, after I got it, I had to chase 3-5 down. Yes, Five minions sniping at you for the time it takes to get to each of them and drop them individually will hurt you. After the initial kill of the main group, you are low on endurance, and trying to drop things. Applying Char to 4-5 different mobs while trying to kill one at a time is a losing proposition.
I had similar experience with my 48 Fire/Rad. She has much less scatter and much quicker kill speed when she doesn't use Bonfire so I'm going to stand by my contention that it slows kill speed, and is a very situational power rather than something you would use to increase you kill speed vs anything but AVs.
On teams it may not matter so much because the blaster or scrapper can track those guys down and drop them easily. For soloing large spawns, Bonfire hinders more often than not.
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I've found this to be accurate as well with one exception. Even vs AV's it lowers damage output if you are talking about a tricked out AV killing build.
I was hoping it would be a viable replacement for LS on my fire/storm AV solo'er after Castle defiled it, but it is a very poor performer due the exceedingly long cast time in a sinlge target scenario.
The aoe damage it does has potential in a long fight, but as stated it is usually misses at the beggining that are a concern rather than as it goes on. Once they are knocked out of the patch they are out and will more than likely require mouse targeting.
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My post is from my experience soloing Dark Astoria with my Fire/Storm in the mid 20s. No self heal, endurance heavy Primary and Secondary. Yes I have char, but it was much easier killing all the mobs in a group before I got Bonfire than it was after. The ones Fire Cages misses ( it's going to miss 5% per cast, so you WILL lose at least two during the duration of the Bonfire, more likely 3 or 4 ) get thrown a long way off in multiple directions, so it's not easy to see them while you are in the middle of the ones you managed to root trying to drop them before Flashfires wears off. Before Bonfire I had to chase one or two down, after I got it, I had to chase 3-5 down. Yes, Five minions sniping at you for the time it takes to get to each of them and drop them individually will hurt you. After the initial kill of the main group, you are low on endurance, and trying to drop things. Applying Char to 4-5 different mobs while trying to kill one at a time is a losing proposition.
I had similar experience with my 48 Fire/Rad. She has much less scatter and much quicker kill speed when she doesn't use Bonfire so I'm going to stand by my contention that it slows kill speed, and is a very situational power rather than something you would use to increase you kill speed vs anything but AVs.
On teams it may not matter so much because the blaster or scrapper can track those guys down and drop them easily. For soloing large spawns, Bonfire hinders more often than not.
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The pics I posted previously are from my experience in DA at level 26. I did not experience the problems you are bringing up.
My endurance consumption was nominal. My attack chain started with Flashfire (Cinders if Flashfire wasn't recharged), Cages, Freezing Rain, move into Hot Feet range, Cages, Bonfire and then stand there and burn stuff to a crisp refreshing Cages as needed and alternating Char/Ring on the lieutenants to take them down almost at the same time as the minions.
On the rare occasions that a mob gets missed twice with cages a single char will keep him where he lands until you can finish him off or, with a bit of skill, you can Ring of Fire the mob you double missed with Cages before it gets KB'd.
It does take a little practice to get it down but after that it's a cake walk of a salvage fest.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
Bonfire is a crappy power--for dropping in the middle of a spawn to do damage. Bonfire is a great power for area-denial and other situational uses.
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Bonfire is a crappy power--for dropping in the middle of a spawn to do damage. Bonfire is a great power for area-denial and other situational uses.
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Only if you are careless. I find that dropping Bonfire in the middle of a mob that has -kb applied to them from Cages to save me about 5 seconds on minion only mobs and 10 seconds on mobs that have multiple lieutenants. For a Fire controller that isn't a /kin that's a respectable savings in both time and reduced incoming damage.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
My favorite thing to do with bonfire is to play "bowling" on the ITF. On the platform in the last mission I love to throw bonfire in the middle of them and see how many I can make fly while they're in formation..... 
I rarely use Bonfire as an area denial power since it can do nice dmg.
Elec/Cold Troller AV/Pylon/GM/TF/SF Soloing Antics
everytime...he gets me everytime.... DAMN U BOOMIE
-- _Ilr_Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
I think all the Fire guides I've read think Bonfire is a crappy power good only for skipping... but doesn't the immob from Fire Cages cancel the knockback from Bonfire?
Bonfire looks like it does massive damage, and contained critters just standing around in it while Fire Caged... seems like a pretty good pair of attacks. It works to drop Fire Cages on critters standing in a Burn patch, too.
I'm comparing the stats in Mid's - it gives Bonfire a 45 second duration. So it'll be on the ground there, pulsing KB and damage for 45 seconds? And Fire Cages has a base 27 sec duration, but the -KB effect only lasts for 12 seconds, and it doesn't look like Immob enhancers lengthen the -KB time, but it'd be easy to re-apply the Cages before 12 seconds are up.
My Fire/FF just hit 32, and I'm going to respec and see how Cages + Bonfire + Imps works, and can't wait to add Repulsion Bomb to the mix.