if global recharge > 200% then corruptor fire blast is the better filler and flares is redundant, and un-needed.
If global recharge < 200% Then Corruptor Flares > Corruptor Fire Blast as a filler, Due to recharge on Fire Blast surpassing 1.06s. However, it's a very close thing. If you're significantly low on recharge Fire Blast + Flares, favoring Fire Blast first is the best way to go. If you can only pick one, as a Corruptor I think I'd make it Fire Blast, but I'd also double check that with the proposed build and at least a 30s chain to be sure.
Corruptor and defender Fire blast (set) is different. Fire Blast (power) for the defender has longer animation (1.67 vs 1.20) time, and RoF has disproportionately low damage (.66x instead of .85x).
For the defender flares is the better filler regardless of global recharge, but flares + Fire blast is still the best filler for low recharge, but favoring flares first. Given the amount of choice a defender has in picking between the powers this may or may not be a good thing.
There is no universal answer, every set is different, and often with small differences between the AT Versions of the same set.
Here's a most recent copy of the spreadsheet I use. Instructions not included, so it's probably useless to you.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15076020/Cha...emplate%29.xls
So, we were having a conversation the other night about different sets' attack chains and which powers to skip, and somebody mentioned that fire blast's preferred attack chain uses flares instead of fire blast, because a chain using flares as a filler winds up having higher DPA.
This didn't really make sense to me; I understand the idea that flares having a faster animation time means more time can be spent using blaze/fireball, and that over a long enough sample this results in more damage, but it seems like this ought to be heavily dependent on recharge and that flares probably wouldn't pull ahead until you'd been blasting away at a single target for a long time (since blast's dpa, on it's own, is quite a bit higher than flares'.)
Is there a thread hiding somewhere on the forum where folks have posted analysis of all this? I started doing it on my own but plotting out chains for different amounts of +rech got pretty tedious. And, does this idea of omitting the second blast in favor of the faster-animating first one apply in other blast sets where the T3 blast has a longer recharge?
@Dysc, on virtue:
Virtue blues: Overnight (DP/MM), Kid Ridiculous (FC/rad), Panorama (Ill/time)
Virtue reds: Block Party (SS/SD), Goldcrush (earth/fire), Deadwire (claws/elec), Snowcrush (ice/kin)