Mids is incorrect here, Incinerate does more damage than Cremate ; the only downside about it is it's a DoT, some of it will sometimes be wasted on minions and lieutenants).
Kick is terrible as an attack, and to make things worse it has a random chance to KB. As with everything, you can make it work, but it's so bad I think you'd be better off just waiting for another fire power to be recharged rather than use Kick, or maybe use the time to position yourself for breath of fire.
As for defense, you just have to find a number you're comfortable with. Most people go for the softcap (45%), some go slightly higher to cover eventual tohit buffs and def debuffs, personally I plan for the former but usually end up not finishing my builds because anything over ~33% def and a luck inspiration will give you the same result for 50 inf per minute when you need it.
Maybe you have a proc slotted in Cremate or something that skews the numbers. My Mid's shows Cremate doing 137.9 damage and Incinerate 172 damage, both with nothing slotted.
Numbers are a bit lower on CoData but I think my Mid's is set up for average damage counting the DoT damage. Anyway, on City of Data Incinerate comes out on top damage wise too.
Kick stinks. It does less damage than Scorch.
Breath of Fire is skipped my most Fire Melee users. I find it worse than Shadow Maul because it's only a 30 degree cone. The range is good but the power has a high end cost, high recharge, long cast time and does little more damage than Fire Sword.
My Fire/SD scrapper does the same thing you want to do rsclark - her single target attack chain is fire sword, cremate and GFS. I also picked up fire blast from the APP pool to slot a decimation set for the recharge but it makes a nice filler attack and gives her some range. I used to have incinerate on a fire/fire scrapper who went the opposite way, skipping all the sword attacks (escept for FSC - too good to skip) and wasn't fond of it - waiting on the dot to finish resulted in to much overkill in many cases. Thats why I have stuck with cremate on the FM/SD so far. The problem is not wasting the DoT on small targets - any big attack has that problem. The problem is waiting 4 seconds for the full damage to finish - any decent scrapper in scrapperlock mode is going to continue pounding on a target until it's dead, resulting in serious overkill.
Incinerate DOES do quite a bit more damage then cremate and CAN do more damage than GFS - mid's is deceptive here because it gives you average value for those attacks that have a random DoT at the end. Incinerate is all DoT but it has 100% chance of the entire DoT ticking - it does 156 damage at L50 (mids counts 1 tick to many). Cremate only does 102 base damage (40 smashing + 62 fire), it has a DoT that can do 4 ticks of 6.26 damage each (80% chance per tick). GFS does 142 base damage (52 lethal + 95 fire) and can do up to 5 ticks of 12.5 damage each.
So if you get NO ticks on GFS's DoT, incinerate will actually do more (156 vs 142) but will take 4.6 seconds to do it. Incinerate will always do more damage than cremate as the most cremate can do is 127 damage if the entire DoT goes off.
I would suggest copying your character over to the test server and trying out the respec - see if you like your target chain with incinerate instead of cremate. Make sure you run one or two missions like you normally would on live and see how it feels.
If you want to slot up a filler attack and you can fit in two powers from the blaze mastery APP I would suggest taking char (to slot a Gaze of the Basilisk set for 7.5% recharge) and fire blast - if you can fit it in, you can then take fire ball as a third AE attack in place of fire breath. If you can't go for the blaze mastery pool, take boxing instead of kick and slot it up - much better filler.
As for fire breath, even if you can't replace it with fire ball from the blaze mastery APP I would drop it like a hot potato. In most cases FSC + Shield Charge is going to give you all the AE you need and both are PBAE attacks that work well with against all odds. A cone like fire breath is going to force you to give up a lot of the damage bonus from AOO to position it, plus the time spend positioning the cone could easily be spent killing big targets while you wait for FSC to recharge.
Globals: @Midnight Mystique/@Magik13
ok, I'm not looking for an uber-IO build or anything, just some basic info on how a couple of powers work before I respec my 38 FM/SD.
I was trying to do a fire sword and shield build with all sword attacks, and as few non-sword punches as i could manage. I ended up taking cremate to have enough powers to keep attacking, but I'm thinking about switching it out for incinerate.
Looking in Mids, Incinerate has a longer recharge and slightly less damage which is probably more than made up for by it being all fire and not a fire/smashing combo, for slightly less end. On average, it looks like less total damage. Am I missing something? Is there something about the use or animation of the power that makes it more desirable and a higher tier (I'm going on test later, but limited testing doesn't tell as much as playing with the power extensively.)
I also too fire breath, but I've been fairly disappointed in my ability to reliably hit enough people to make it worthwhile. If I was opening with it, it would be fine, but I open with SD and breathe fire mainly ends up being a high end single target attack that occasionally hits an extra enemy or 2.
So, how is using Kick from the Fighting pool as an actual slotted attack? It looks like it would be well superior to Fire breath as a single target, but again, there's always the hidden aspects you don't notice, and I never see anyone playing with it slotted out. I figures it might be worth a shot since I was going to end up taking it for tough/weave anyway.
Lastly, for someone who will never have rows of 6 slotted purples, is SD + CJ + tough/weave + maneuvers overkill for defense/resist?