Spines/Fire/?

Looking for anyones experiences with Darkness epic on a Spines/Fire. Especially torrent and tentacles coupled with Burn. Pros? Cons?

+ Enfeebled set in tentacles for 4% ish extra melee
+ -tohit of dark powers sounds good on top of ~33% melee def
+ Burn with tentacles - yummy.
+ Force feedback proc in torrent
- torrent does knockback? hows this work on bosses.

So whats the catch in the real world. Never taken burn yet on a fire melee toon but im toying with the idea.

With i16 just around the corner what are your thoughts on blaze mastery with Spines/Fire? Will burn be as effective without tentacles ? Is burn even neccessary with the addition of fireball ?

Thanks...

Also possible for Tentacle IOing, the two accurate tohit debuff sets, for different defense bonuses (+recharge, +end and/or +acc).

The only problem is that 5 of your last 6 slots have to be dedicated to the power for this.

Warning: the Tentacles are pretty narrow for a cone.

Energy Torrent does knockdown (unless critters weak to kb), including bosses that don't have resistance. It's also quite a bit wider-angled than TT.

I know most immob powers give the baddie a resistance to knockback so im not sure on the numbers with TT and torrent but if you hit TT first they might not get KB'd

I think going with darkness would be best because TT-->burn is just like you said, yummy

Hmm thanks I did wonder if tentacles would stop torrent doing knockback. Im still quite tempted by torrent though. Not great on teams but then plenty of other aoe goodness in the set and still viable I guess for solo mishes in buildings and stuff and AVs. Petrifying gaze w/basilisk set 4 slotted might be better as a pre.req for tentacles maybe? Narrow cone kinda sucks though. My usual game time is spent fighting bosses in AE, running oro arcs, the shorter TFs etc but not worried about PVP.

So is anyone really making good use of burn+tentacles then? or will i respec into it just to respec out again after i16 lands.

I don't have room for any epic powers on my Spines/Fire, but I did take Burn and it is useful. It's great as an extra mitigation tool when I'm being overwhelmed by 52 bosses or the like even with 35% melee defense. The scatter from Burn really isn't that bad, most mobs still stay in range of Quills, Spine Burst etc.

From my experience with Soul Tentacles on villains, I really don't like the cone immob. It really works a lot better on Brutes because they have an option for targeted AoE immobs.

On my fire tank I found the immob+Burn to not really be worth the trouble. On a spine/dark scrapper, I would think you would run into the same thing that I did--the minions and Lts pretty much melt very quickly without using Burn and the bosses require stacked immobilizes. So the guys you would most want to use Burn on are the ones that are the most difficult to immobilize.

Of course the set bonuses may make it more valuable and you're using an AoE immobilze too. But the basic immob+Burn is not worth the trouble a lot of the time since I doubt you're having trouble killing minions or Lts.

fail