Silas Can BURN IN HEALTH! and So Can You!

This is a guide for Thermal Radiation. Chances are, dear reader, you may already have a Thermal Radiation Corruptor/Mastermind/Controller, or therm as they are known on tha streetz. But Therming can be hard! You’ve got to keep shields up and heals and debuffs and oh god its overwhelming oh god oh god i can’t breathe help please oh godohgodohgoddddd.

IT IS OKAY. TAKE DEEP BREATHS. I will help you. Unlike your emotionally distant father who would just disdainfully gaze over a corner of his newspaper, slowly shake his head and sigh, Silas is here for you. Unless you read this entire guide, take it all in and then continue to suck and be awful at therming. In which case your father and I will both sigh, then go have a beer, watch the game and talk about how we wished things had turned out differently. SOMETIMES THAT IS JUST HOW IT GOES. Don’t worry though, you have plenty of prospects

That said, your father and I do hope this guide is helpful for you. Without further ado,

Why Thermal Is Awesome And You Want To Be One:

• Setting people on fire without subsequent incarceration.

• That’s definitely a big one.

• Great resist shields.

• No but seriously being in jail is pretty bad you guys

• Awesome ranged AoE –res –def debuff

• Fast cycling anti-mez and tohit/dmg buffs

• ST –regen –recov –dam –end

• Hell of flashy rez which will annoy all melee when used (yaaaaay)

• Heals to keep you and teammates on their feet

• The ability to turn teams from wiping every other spawn into steamrollers

Powers:

Warmth: PBAoE team heal

Slotting Recommendation: 5 Doctored Wounds, everything but the straight recharge, it recharges decently fast as is.

How to Use: As a heal for yourself, or as a small top-up heal for several allies. This does not root you, so if you’re getting whacked you can backpedal while hitting this. Ain’t no way no b*tthole no how that a dead therm gonna be of use to the team, son.

Fire Shield: Ally +resist (smashing, lethal, fire, cold)

Slotting Recommendation: Max out the resist, these should be giving about 22-23ish% resistance when slotted. I went with Titanium Coatings for the hp bonus. You also might want to put an end red in here unless you’re already getting good values, because shielding an entire team can be heavy on the blue bar.

How to Use: Keep on allies. All of them. At all times. Seriously. Not hard to do, dogg. This and Plasma Shield will cut down incoming damage to almost all damage types, givin’ you more time for the Cauterizin’. Apostrophizin’. Unlike Cold or FF shields which can lose some of their usefulness if the team is already softcapped because of VEATs or whatever, the chances of your team all being resist capped are minimal. So keep these up. Bind them so you don’t have to be all clicky clicky clicky.

Cauterize: Ally +heal

Slotting Recommendation: Same as Warmth. Recharges fast as it is, but needs decent healing/end slotting and heal/rech bonuses are totally the sexiest. Okay, fine, maybe not THE sexiest, but pretty sexy.

How to Use: As an ally heal, interestingly enough. Heals for twice as much as Warmth and is ranged, so generally easier to use as an ally heal.

Plasma Shield: ally +resist (energy, negative, fire)

Slotting Recommendation: Again, like Fire Shield. Max out the resists.

How to Use: Same as Fire Shield. These powers make writing these guides so easy. Hooray!

Power of the Phoenix: Ally rez, +special

Slotting Recommendation: Barely. A single recharge or end red IO is fine. If you want set bonuses Doctored Wounds can work.

How to Use: As an ally rez. Someone dies, use this. Things to note however: the +special is a pet summon at the location of the ally who got beatdown. It does Knockback, a little damage and a stun. So anything around the dead ally is thrown back and stunned, which can be cool, but can be annoying depending on the situation. It’s also important to note that unlike some other rezzes, it makes them Untouchable for 15 seconds, so right after you rez them you can’t heal them (not that they would need it anyway) or shield them (more annoying).

Thaw: Ally +res (stun, sleep, hold, immobilize, confuse, fear, cold, slow)

Slotting Recommendation: I went with an end rdx and a range. This is so you can hit people with it from further away and Thawing a lot of people can be rough on endurance.

How to Use: Two ways. Either you’re fighting stuff that mezzes a lot like Malta because lazy design is lazy so you keep it up as a preventative measure, or as a fixer for when people occasionally get mezzed. If you’re fighting stuff that only mezzes occasionally, just keep it up on the squishies or when people say something like zzzz or whatever.

Forge: Ally +tohit +damage

Slotting Recommendation: I went with 5 Adjusted Targettings. The +damage is unenhanceable which is fine because you want to be enhancing the +tohit anyway. You want to max out the recharge on this as well. With the Adj Targettings, I went with the whole set minus the straight ToHit IO.

How to Use: ALWAYS ON THE BRUTE/TANK BECAUSE THEY SHOULD ALWAYS GET ALL BUFFS EVER. Haha, no. You can keep this on several people easily, but be mindful of how damage buffs work. They work on base damage, so ATs with high base damage (blasters, scrappers, stalkers, doms) will get more use out of it than ATs with low base damage like brutes. That said, if you’re fighting stuff that has a lot of defense or tohit debuffs, keep it on people who need their stuff to hit.

Heat Exhaustion: ranged foe –end –recovery –regen –damage. Bam.

Slotting Recommendation: 2 accuracies, 2 recharges. You want this to hit and you want it back up ASAP because it will straight up ruin a dudes day.

How to Use: This is one of two powers that separate you from being a pure buff/healbot. Underwhelming animation, overwhelming effect. Hold out your hand, the littlest whoompf. Oh, was that it? Oh, wait, your regen, recovery and damage are all totally boned. Man, it sure sucks to be you. Find a boss/AV/other thing you want to hit as like a Peacebringer and die almost as fast.

Melt Armor: Click. FWOOOMPF. AoE –res –def

Slotting Recommendation: Definitely an Achilles Heel –res proc, other than that this can get tricky. You’ll probably want to frankenslot a few sets and HOs because you want to get good values for accuracy and defense debuff while maxing out the recharge.

How to Use: Target either the biggest badguy in a spawn like the AV or whoever is in the middle of a spawn and click. Bam. Everything in its fairly big radius will have shot resistances and defense, allowing you and the rest of your team to shred them. So hit this whenever its up on nice big spawns and enjoy the show

How To Not Be Awful:

• Blabla, keep shields up or [Insert Creative Threat]. Seriously though, it’s a lot easier to get defense buffs than resist buffs since no one plays Sonic because it’s BOOOORING so your shields will almost always be worthwhile. They also give you more time to heal people as the damage reduction is more reliable than defense.

• Bind follow to a key so if someone is getting kicked around you can target them, hit your follow key and queue up Cauterize. You may hit a wall depending on where they are, but it still quickly and efficiently sets you on the path to where they are so you can get to them in time.

• Speaking of Cauterize and getting to people in time, putting a range IO into this can be handy so you can hit people from further away which can be helpful if they’re an idiot and run away from you instead of towards you when they’re catching hell. This happens a lot, fyi. Get used to it.

• This. A thousand times this.

• Unless you’re going to be therming a lot in PvP, don’t make frigging macros announcing your powers. If people aren’t sure you’re doing your job they can check their buff bars and for huge fireballs hitting the enemies. Unless of course, you’re not doing your job. In which case, scorn.

• Get good at judging hp bars for healing whack-a-mole. If a brute is at 75% health, Warmth isn’t the right power to go for, if a squishie is at 75% health, Cauterize isn’t the right power to go for. Roughly speaking, when enhanced and assuming some +hp from accolades/IOs/Frostwork/whatever, Cauterize will heal aboooout 1/3 of a squishies health. For Scrappers/brutes/tanks, it’ll heal about 1/4ish.

• That said, also bear in mind the nature of Cauterize and Warmth. If they’re not fully needing the full heal of Cauterize but are far away you’re better off hitting them with Caut than wasting the time running all the way over to them for Warmth.

• What you can also do (and will sometimes need to do) if someone is taking a lot of damage is run towards them hitting Cauterize and hit Warmth as you get close to them. Practice jousting with Warmth so you can run past people and hit them with it.

• Mobility is key. If you’re using SS, get Hurdle with Fitness and have 1-2 jump IOs in it. If you’re using SJ, get Swift and put 1-2 run IOs in it. Ideally run both SS and SJ for maximum movement. You’re often going to be the least protected person on the team because you can’t shield yourself and can only heal yourself with Warmth.

• Stealth is also key. Buy a stealth IO and put it in your travel power, SS being ideal for this. Thermals who can quickly get to where the buffing/debuffing/healing is needed without getting splattered are good thermals.

• Build for +hp, +rech and +rec if you’re going for IOs. You’ll want about 40-50% rech, more is overkill unless you’re a controller because it’ll make minimal difference to your long-recharging powers (Melt Armor and Heat Exhaustion). Shielding, Forging and Thawing a team as well as blasting and throwing out the debuffs can leave you sucking more wind than a fart fetishist. Which is totally gross, so don’t be that. You’ll want about 20ish% rec on top of Stamina to keep you going, less if you’ve got Conserve Power from Mu Mastery. This is important because unlike a Cold, you don’t have any way to recover end from your secondary so you’re relying on IO bonuses or PPPs for it. The +hp is more or less to taste, but you’ll want a decent chunk to keep you alive.

• Learn to judge enemy groups and team makeups for how often you need to use Thaw. If you’re fighting a group that has a lot of mez like Malta or Rikti you’ll want to keep it up on all the squishies, unless there’s an assload of defense that will stop those mezzes from hitting in the first place. Keep a row or 2 of Break Frees for yourself. Waiting for a hold to wear off while someone gets smooshed by a Chief Soldier is hell of uncool, brah.

• While you’ll always have a lot to do with shielding, buffing, healing and debuffing, do remember to blast. As a corruptor you can bring significant damage to a team, especially with Scourge kicking in on debuffed enemies. However, don’t go overboard with the offense. You want to be able to respond to a dropping healthbar quickly and being movement-suppressed with a load of aggro is a bad way to go about doing this.

• Six times!?!?

• Part of the whole offense thing is making sure you at least have one or 2 attacks and one AoE. A lot of full teams will have a lot of buffing/debuffing going on making your heals pretty superfluous. This is totally fine. Don’t get in a big huff because people aren’t clamoring for your totally leet healz. Kill stuff. If you’ve got no blasts and everyone is shielded, you’re keeping Forge/Thaw up, debuffs are out and no one is needing heals, you’re gonna get bored in a hurry.

Battlefield Awareness:

This is something which I totally forgot to add to the guide first but is quite possibly one of the most important skills for a good thermal. Or empath. Or pain. Or any support character, really. Battlefield awareness. See which way the battle is flowing, know where people are. Icons for attacks will appear shortly before the damage does (depending on animation times) so if you see a whole bunch of attacks stacking up on someone who isn't necessarily very equipped to take them, start moving towards them so you can get to them in time.

Often times playing a thermal 100% reactively to drops in the health bars will not be enough to keep people from dying. So watch the buff bar, keep an eye on mobs to see who they're going after, as you're moving around get in the habit of panning your camera around so you've got full 360 degree awareness of whats going on. This is also comes back to your offense. If you see stray mobs going after a blaster or fellow corr or whatever, help them out with attacks too. If you're at full health and the blaster is at 10%, that aggro is better on you than on them. NB: this does not mean put grabbing aggro higher on your priorities list than healing them. I just mean, for example, in the above scenario, I would go after them with Cauterize queued up and once it fires off and is recharging I'll quickly throw out a Ball Lightning or Lightning Bolt.

As easy as it is to get healing tunnel vision on one person who is getting hammered, don't forget the rest of the team. Learn to judge when someone can handle themselves. While you can feel awfully good about yourself for keeping that Blaster on their feet with 3 Chief Soldiers trying to slice them up, if half the team is neglected as a result you have Done It Wrong.

What Goes Well With Thermal:

I think some kind of blast set that has some kind of utility to it. I personally went with Elec to stack with Heat Exhaustions –end –rec because drained dudes are dudes hitting my dudes less so I have to heal my dudes less. Savvy? I’d recommend Sonic too, because it’s got phenomenally good DPE and –res to stack on hard targets with Melt Armor.

Rad is also an option for mad proccage, but I would advise caution with Irradiate as it’s a PBAoE and melee is generally not somewhere you want to be as a therm. While Fire Blast works thematically, I personally saved it for secondaries which allowed me more leeway in blasting so I could really make the most of its raw damage.

How Silas Be Doin’ It

Observe:



Notes

• *: Usurper. I didn’t mention this in my other guides, but if you’ve got the time I would recommend you go ahead and get this on any corruptors you have. I say this because relatively few people have this, and if you’re a support junkie like me you want to be able to bring whatever the team needs and be able to start the RSF.

• 45% rech. With Hasten I find this is plenty for me in terms of getting good uptime on Heat Exhaustion, Melt Armor, Forge and Conserve Power as well as bringing my AoEs back up quickly when I can use them.

• I monitor my tohit so I can know if debuffs have shot it to sh*t before I blow Heat Exhaustion or Melt Armor.

So. Another guide done, hope it’s been helpful.

Acknowledgements:

Just Oz. For helping me a tonne with my therm build and teaching me damn near everything I know about therming. Thanks, broham. A better thermal there is not.

This receives the

"Oz Stamp of Approval" for total awesomeness. If you don't know how to play a thermal, you should now after reading this. The guide is what I like to call "Dead on Balls Accurate" (DOBA), when it comes to informing/educating others about how to play a particular role.

Silas pretty much hit the nail on the head with just about every major aspect that comes with having to play a thermal.

A good portion of corruptor players don't know how to play a thermal or they treat it like playing a blaster. Which of course not true. Thermals, buff/debuff first, then attack stuff if you have tiem. One thing I want to stress. Under no circumstances, should you EVER, put Warmth on auto and put yourself on follow. Anyone who does this, doesn't really know how to play the bloody set and it just saying "hey I'm a clueless noob that doesn't how to do stuff". The only exception to this rule would be for stuff like hami raids/rikti raids. I wouldn't get all up in someone's face about it, but I myself don't ever put warmth on auto. I'd much rather leave Hasten on auto, that's just me.



Slotting Recommendations

Melt armor - I went with 2 recharges, 1 end redux, 2 Lysosome HOs, and one achilles heal proc. (This power can use a metric @ss ton of endurance)

Fire/Plasma Shield - I would suggest 3 titanium coatings and 2 impervium armors. As Silas mentioned, thermal can be VERY end heavy. You need as much recovery as possible. (If you're able to afford it, picking up a miracle+recovery and numina++ and putting them in health will GREATLY help with endurance recovery issues you'll encounter when playing a thermal)


Power Recommendations

Silas is 100% correct when he says that mobility is key. I would suggest that one should take up hurdle and combat jumping. Slot those up respectively with at least one jump IO. When you're doing something such as fighting Romulus on the last mission of the ITF, a good chunk of the team is huddled around Romulus smashing his face in. Combat Jumping + hurdle allows you to keep moving relatively quickly and staying out of harms way. In case you didn't know, Combat Jumping + hurdle doesn't suppress your movement if you attack. So you can jump around like an idiot on crack and blast stuff but still keep close to the team without getting movement suppression.


Playstyle recommendations

The only other advice I can add to this is that when you play a thermal, you must be able to pay attention to detail. If you're not good at keeping tabs up on people or just paying attention in general and you'd prefer to just smash stuff, reroll and play something else. Preferably a brute. But when you play a thermal, you should be able to keep an eye on the team window, monitor their HP/buffs, as well as your own.

If you're doing something such as a Master of Lord Recluse Strike Force, I would HIGHLY recommend you tell the team leader to invite you to the team last. Why? You're going to be the last person on the team and everyone else's name is stacked on top of yours. That way it makes your life a hell of a lot easier when it comes to buffing people. You start at the top of the list and work your way down.

One thing that always plagued me when I used to play my thermal was I would see someone was dying but I couldn't find them fast enough to heal them. So what's the solution?

Bind Follow to a quickly accessible key on your keyboard. If you see someone getting into the read, click on their name in the team window, hit Follow and start spamming Cauterize so you can heal them ASAP. This will GREATLY help if you're in an environment where people are jumping around and it's hard to keep track. (The first mission of the LRSF where everyone has to kill Chasers and get the bombs is a good example of the team running around)

I've got around 36.25% recharge on my build. With that in mind, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to keep Forge up on 3 people at any given moment. If Forge is up, cast it on the appropriate person.

Thaw - CAST THIS ON SQUISHIES. I've been on countless teams where the thermal didn't cast Thaw on those that needed it. Silas mentioned it, I'm mentioning it again because it's bloody important.

If you want to go real hardcore on binding stuff. What you can do is bind certain inspiration types to your F keys. For example, F1 on my keyboard will always activate either a Tier 1,2, or 3 break free in my tray. That way when I'm stunned I don't need to spend timing looking for the bloody inspiration or clicking for it. Just hit F1 and we're back in business. I'm not talking about "organizing" your inspiration tray so that the BFs line up to be where F1 would be. What this does is that F1 will always "pop" a BF regardless of what's in my tray. If I have a BF in my tray, no matter where it is in the tray, F1 will pop it.

Great guide!

therm is such a great set, and it's rare to find good therms

Had to read that thread title twice >.>

Good guide.

I love my thermal, one thing to note is that the set is VERY playable with only SOs (throw in a stealth IO, and couple recovery uniques for good measure, thats all they really need though). Therms can easily perform on par with other sets fully decked out. The set is just that good.

[For Corrs] I'd recommend going sonic over other primaries (unless for pvp where you'd want to be elec) because of A) how endurance light sonic is, and B) resistance debuffing. Add in Mu Mastery and you'll never run out of endurance

I think this is your best guide yet Silas. Kudos to you!

Why you sending offline messages to a gold farmer? :P

Better humors, more usage of cartoons in future please. I think I learned from this guide. Unfortunately it wasn't something that pertained to just Thermal. Oh well, good job!

Dread: Totally agree with you about Sonic, only recently tried it myself and am now kicking myself for not having made more of my corrs Sonic. Its really just that awesome.

CriticalKat: I dunno, while you've definitely got a good point about most people not knowing or caring enough to know when to use Thaw and when not to, I disagree about buffing for the sake of buffing. Thawing half (as an average number of people without mez prot on a team) in addition to your shields takes more time and endurance. Sure, you can do it and I frequently have to (on LGTFs or whatever) but if I don't have to, you can sure as hell bet I'm not gonna. If keeping Thaw up isn't necessary, I'm not gonna keep it up just for the sake of buffing people when I could be doing other stuff.

The whole point of these guides and stuff like the How To Not Be Awful sections are to encourage people to play their characters better and more effectively. Which, in my mind, often includes judging when and how to use what powers. I would rather have a thermal on my team who is really on the ball and uses Thaw when they need to and is blasting/healing/debuffing away, rather than a therm who always keeps Thaw on half the team.

Eh, guess I'm rambling a bit. My point is just, I think Thawing people if they don't/aren't going to need it is a waste of time since you've already got Fire Shield, Plasma Shield and Forge which you have to keep up so you're better off doing other things. Thawing people who don't need it is Busywork, imo. Makes me think of bad thermals and emps who stack Thaw/CM on the lead brute >.>

Your point about the buff bar is a very good point though and its reminded me of something I don't think I mentioned in the guide at all, so I'll be editing in a new section to correct this. Thanks

Edit: OP has been edited. Yaaaaaaay.

Great job Silas, and I agree with all the major points. A couple things I would throw in myself:

Learn how to judge the rate of incoming damage. One of the trickier things to do but it helps you determine your next heal target if you can tell with a split-second judgment who is more quickly losing the larger percentage of their health. It sounds easy, but can change things completely in certain situations. Example: You have a brute and a dom on the team, the brute is at 50% health and the dom is at 75%, since the brute can probably hold their own without the heal a little longer and is probably receiving damage more slowly, heal the dom. (Granted, this is also subjective and something that you learn from playing support more than any guide can try to explain it).

The thaw animation is a pain in the ***. No, really, I think its worse than CM. That being said, "learn" the activation time so you know how long you'll be rooted when you use it. Learn of course meaning not to memorize the activation time, but rather to know by feel about how long it takes so you can judge if you need to make distance between yourself and a mob before you hit it.

One question I have, for targetting team mates quicker do you find it helps to have cauterize + team mate number bound in the numpad? i.e /bind NUMPAD1 "+ $$teamselect 1$$powexec_name Cauterize" and so on down the team line. I find myself quite frequently frustrated with my therm though, to the point where I'm pretty close to deleting her. Reading this though has me rethinking that a bit, I might give her another go round. And, what is the keybind for follow? >.>

Amy: Yeah, for me its definitely a question of prioritization. Buffing for the sake of buffing = bad news bears.

Kas:Nah, I never really use the Numpad but if it works for you go for it. I just click them in the team window and hit q (my bound key for Caut)

I've got x bound to follow (/bind x follow) so its right below my movement keys for easy access.

Dude, ty, srsly, ty. I was waiting for someone to put up a post-i16 guide for therm. I rolled a Nin/Therm MM 2 days ago and am having a blast with my no-longer-so-squishy ninjas! But having never used therm b4, this is all I'll need for reference. Again, ty!

I will have to agree with several points!
I LOVE My therm. She is one of my absolute favorite toons to play.
And as Kahlan stated it is rare to see many thermals much less a well played one.
Very Nice guild! I was actually a bit wowed by the detail you went into. Very sweet!

Also my take on the thaw buff is this... I dish out ALL my buffs in every buff rotation no matter what AT or situation. I do it out of making it simpler to make sure everyone is covered and not have to pick an choose. I do this with my emp as well as my kin.

Also I originally played my therm before an emp and I was taught by the Pingus how to PvP with her and play support for a team. It always seemed to me there is a little slower/grounding animation time from putting out a thaw as opposed to a CM. But this is also maybe one good reason that I buff EVERYONE on a team an not just the people who really "need it".

Yeah, as you and Kat have said its a PvP thing, where you would want to keep Thaw/CM on everyone even those with mez prot. But in PvE where you don't need to, I find sometimes its wasting valuable time to do so which could mean someone dying on MoRSF/STF. Or even (less melodramatically) more time to blast/debuff/use other buffs you HAVE to keep up (like the shields/forge).

I started reading, then noticed a Scarlett link.

The things I would do to that snowflake.

I'll finish reading later.

Right? Bill Murray is a lucky old *******, that's for sure.

I really dug that movie.

It was awesome in main ways. You ever been to Japan, B?

Sadly, no. One of the few places on my list that I still need to go to.

I don't do karaoke, either. And, panty vending machines sound creepy.

Karaoke is awesome fun (but I will neither confirm nor deny the presence of copious amounts of alcohol), didn't see a panty vending machine though.

Also, . One of my few actually useable pictures that weren't blurry as hell courtesy of jetlag handshakiness.

Everytime I see the title of this thread, I start humming this song.