Why fire?

I logged into the game a little earlier today to see if I had any tickets to claim. I didn't, but while in, I started looking through the first few pages of arcs.

I saw a Crey's Fire Cyborgs in Hall of Fame which I assume is a fire farm since other obvious farms reference it in their description.

I saw about a dozen obvious fire farms within the first four pages of arcs, most of them on page 4.

I'm not looking to raise the old farms vs. no farms argument; that's not getting settled soon, regardless of how I feel about it. What I'm puzzled about is WHY fire? Why are all these farms fire-based and nothing else? I'm guessing that fire-attacks are potentially highly unbalanced when compared to resists?

Because fiery aura gives a huge boost to damage and also caps fire res. Defense isn't as important when you can load up on purples (which are 2.5x better than oranges) beforehand, so defense sets are out, and the other resist sets only have maybe a damaging aura and a recharge boost compared to FA's damaging aura, Burn, and FE.

It's possible to make an energy or theoretically a dark farm but it's not optimal and the whole point of farms is to get the max xp or tickets/second so...

1 > Fire Tanks have good Fire Resist
2 > Fire Damage vs Regen is easy
3 > Fire Damage from enemies has no side effects (Slow, -To Hit, Stun, etc)
4 > Maximum gain

What we really need (not just in A/E, but overall) is a Threat or Challenge rating... something to do a quick comparision between player and enemy and reward accordingly... this and so many things would go away... IMO.

Dude, have you looked at the Brute forums lately? Yeah. Now that Burn no longer sucks, Fire Armor just melts enemies....of course it's also kinda squishy, except against Fire damage.

The Brute forum is actually the only AT board I've never been in but it's pretty easy to note that even without slotting you can get 67.5% damage resistance to fire.

@SupaFreak: A "true" threat assessment would be good in theory but is probably a calculation nightmare since it'll fluctuate massively due to a number of variables.

Yea, a "true" threat assessment would be a calculation nightmare...

In theory it would be nice... but the more I think about everything that'd need to be factored in, it'd be a huge undertaking.

Maybe at least a Primary vs Secondary matchup tho... *shrug* ... dunno

In a sense, the fire farms are a good thing for a very subtle reason: if they are *this* prevalent, it suggests the farmers out there haven't come up with anything better to exploit. To be honest, the idea of filling a custom group with nothing but comm officers (or immunes surgeons before that), or filling maps with mastermind "bosses" (which were really no stronger that lt's but gave boss-class XP) always struck me as somewhat clever. Unethical, but clever. (Hey, I loathe cheating and cheaters, but that doesn't stop me from being able to recognize when the method of the cheating is somewhat clever.)

On the other hand, the concept of a fire farm is so stupidly obvious that it really doesn't require any cleverness, creativity, or intelligence to think up. Heck, the entire time I was leveling up Pro Payne, it was really obvious to me that if I wanted to be really lame about it and just get him to 50 ASAP, all I had to do is fill a huge map with a bunch of mobs that do fire damage and basically have no real defense. I would have felt like a lazy slob for doing it, but I did know it was an option.

What I'm interested in seeing is if the developers ever do something about this. While I doubt it (I think they've given up on trying to do anything about the farms, and their disgust with the phenomenon has probably led them to ignore AE completely), I wouldn't be totally surprised if one day the alpha values for every fire-related power you can give to a custom mob would be reset to 0.