Rain of Fire Question

I have been away from the game for a while. When I left, Rain of Fire (RoF) was the worst power a fire blaster could take. Now that I'm back, every build I can find has it and I was wondering what changed?

Is it the constant ticks giving chances for a Proc to go off? Or is there some other thing that made this power takable again?

I respec'd out of years ago but am looking to respec again to bring myself up to date with changes in the game.

Thanks for your help,

Y.

Short answer: Inherent Fitness.

Now that everybody gets the fitness pool without using any power selections, every build has 3 more power picks. Powers that were easily skipped before are a little bit more appealing these days, that's my guess anyhow.

For a surprisingly long duration recently there actually was a bug that made every tic proc, which as you can imagine allowed you to solo spawns not just with rain of fire, but with freezing rain and any other rain power. They somehow noticed and corrected that, however.

I argue that rain of fire is an important part of fire blast's viability as an aoe set. Taken alone, fireball is fantastic but fire breath is not all that far above average depending on what you like in an aoe. Inferno like other crashing nukes is now, well, not frowned upon, you're free to use it if you like it, but it takes relatively special circumstances for it to be more worth it to suffer the crash than to just keep blasting normally. Fire also happens to get rain of fire, so why not make use of it?

It's on a timer comparable to the so-called mini-nukes, the crashless nukes from weapon sets, but it isn't tier 9 and it doesn't deal all of its damage at once. However, it does slow enemies' movement and make them afraid, which can be useful itself. It's also good if you have a controller or dominator on the team to hold 'em still. Unlike other one shot aoes, it does get two chances to proc since it procs once when cast and once again after ten seconds.

Overall, a pretty good power. It's best for corruptors, though, as for them it scourges twice instead of once while retaining its full blaster damage mod. I call broken on that but the devs have so far not agreed.

Rain of fire gets a bad rap due to people dropping it on the opponents scattering them everywhere. Since most folks like the enemy all neatly stored into a dumpster to kill, having anyone use a power that got them out of the dumpster was frowned on.

Now for a Fire/Fire blaster since you have no status effects to keep the bad guys off you - taking Snow Storm in the Ice pool and Rain of Fire gives you lots of damage and some mitigation.

Plus Rain of fire used on immobilized foes is a nice bit of damage.

RoF also pairs nicely with Hot Feet, especially if you throw a little slow enhancement in it, though I don't see many blasters with that power. I love RoF, but I love it on my dom and corruptor who have ways of keeping the mobs from running right out of it.

Thanks for the update folks.

The scattering effect was the biggest complaint about back in the day - but then I mostly solo so it will make a fair "oh god get away from me" button.

Not sure if the slow numbers are different from Doms to Blasters (probably, but I'm sick and don't feel like looking it up), but my Fire/Fire Dom uses Hot Feet and RoF, and things run around and don't get out of the area of effect. I do sometimes have a AOE mez going, but not always. Mobs melt in no time at all with that combo, and I can only imagine a Blaster makes that even better.

The only issue is end usage, but that should be better on the Blaster version, which isn't an ancillary for RoF. No matter what, though, you can build for it, and it is nice.