Is melt armor any good?

My lev 45 ELEC/NRG blaster is 45 now and im respec'ing him.I generally rely on range,not too much blapping. i had elec ancil, and although i liked the static discharge, i dont care for the turn into electricity power that the elec tanks get. whatever its called. EMP looks good, but now Im thinkin'... FIRE.
Thought I would grab bonfire and melt armor but i don't have any experience with either one.
I would welcome some relevant input.
What are the ranges like on those two?
Is the Melt armor De-buff serious on AVs and EBs?
Is Char better than Bonfire?
Tune in next week, same blast time, same blast channel.
Oh, and thanx.

well char is a single target mag 3 hold and bonfire lays a patch of fire on the ground that KBs anyone that hits it you decide whats better. Melt armor not really that good like
-10ish% res and -15ish% def. Range on char is 60 feet i think.

I prefer Char to Bonfire, but Bonfire can be very good if you use it just before things go bad (it will then prevent the bad in most cases).

Melt Armor (except the original, corruptor version, Edited to add: which is what was ported to Controllers and MMs, so those two have a decent version as well) is, IMO, the worst power in the game. It uses vastly too much endurance, has too small an area of effect, the recharge is too long, and the value on the debuffs are pointlessly small. It does have good FX (visual and sound).

If you would like a cool emote that costs 23 endurance and can only be used every three minutes, Melt Armor may be for you!

Agree with Nexus... Melt Armor on non-Corrs/Trollers/MMs is pretty bad.

Char is pretty good. But has been nerfed from the Fire/ controller version. Thirty-two second recharge...cof cof.

I have never been tempted by anything in the fire ancillary group. Heck, Fireball has a 32 sec recharge.

I do like physical perfection.

With blasters, I'm not keen on any of the ancilllaries.

A single target attack with the same attack time would give an additional +5.9% Defiance damage buff over what Melt Armor does (which gives a normal AoE buff of +4.0%). That's only around a 2.5-3% increase in Damage since you're already going to be over 200% base thanks to slotting and other Defiance buffs.

It also only last 9s, but assuming you have such an attack available then it has a 100% up time versus Melt Armor's 20% base. And even that assumes you can use all 40s of the MA debuff - that is all of it versus all of the targets for 40s. That's just not going to happen. It's unlikely many, if any, target is going to survive for more than 25s. Most will be down in less than 15s. So the effective up time of Melt Armor is probably less than 10% of base Recharge except in AV and EB fights. The very place you want to use single-target attacks. In an AV fight the cost of using an AoE in your attack chain is about the same (-2.5%) as the buff from using a very well-slotted Melt Armor regularly (+2.5%).

The closer you look, the worse the Blaster Melt Armor appears.