heroes + searing flames question

on another thread, several people said they run with 2 searing flame eles, as one wont do any damage, and burning is needed by one ele for the second ele to do THE real damage.

Now I had never considered using 2 SF heroes before as what I do is to use mark of rogwort to hex. with arcane echo to duplicate searing flames - After applying rogwort I use my 2 searing flames eleite skills.

So which is best - 2 eles or 1 ele with arcane echo ?

seems daft to me to use 2 heroes of the same type

I run two SF Eles; works great.

I doubt one would work very well. Heroes are terrible at figuring out what to echo (you'd have to manually do it a lot), and I also notice they aren't too slick about keeping up their Fire Attunement. That problem would be compounded only rolling with one.

Just my 2g.

well i do tend to micro manage my heroes

personally, i run 1 sf ele, and the other being a burn spam with dual attunements(immolate, rodgort's invocation, etc..) works pretty well for me.

and yeah, heroes suck with echo.

Two SF eles, one with Mark of Rodgort. Put Liquid Flame or something on the other.

Be careful with giving them a bunch of spammable attack/general purpose spells: if you do, they'll spam everything randomly. And you don't want that, as it cuts into the damage output, you want them to spam only Searing Flames and Burning Gaze. If you give them stuff like Meteor Shower or Maelstrom, disable it and fire it manually as needed.

Heroes dont suck with echo if you put it to the left of the bar -it always gets used first

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no you put arcane echo to the left of the bar, it gets used first, then you click searing flames (which I keep second on the bar) , so u have SF x2 - works every time

You use 2 SF eles to keep the targets burning so you can get the damage off SF and the energy off Glowing Gaze. If you can mange to keep burning on by other means(where the hero AI won't screw up) then by all means go for it. Its just simpler with 2 SF eles for those that don't like to micro-manage.

And yeah, heroes are bad with Echo as you can't manage them all the time. Given the near spamability of SF to begin with, there's little point in echoing SF anyway.

i do 2 SFs, and a ToF para for a lot of situations. the SF eles I have take attune, SF, glyph of lesser, glowing gaze, and then mesmer skills like drain enchantment, power drain, leech signet, rez sig. They spam SF, interrupt effectively, and are NEVER low on e

Considering the recharge of SF, I don't know why you'd want to have two copies on the one character. You may as well just spam the single copy and not have to micro echo.

Also, one of the main points of having multiple SFs was that you needed burning to do any damage, otherwise you just wasted an elite for permaburn. The old SFs burning duration was low so you'd about have to choose to either hit for damage or skip it to cast glowing gaze for energy. So one SF ele was little better than just something to fuel 'they're on fire' for paras. You needed at least two to ensure a good rate of actually hitting for damage. The burning duration is about double now so you can get a couple of hits in before they're not burning anymore. You may be able to get by with only one Sf nowadays. Though it really is a skill that gets better the more people there are that use it.

I've found there to be MAJOR issues with hero's energy when running searing flames over longer battles - what do you guys do for energy?

my other skills would generally be
aura of restoration - weak self sustenance

energy upkeep staple:
fire attunement
glyph of lesser energy
glowing gaze

more energy management
channeling - cheap stance that returns energy for any spell cast if enemies are near
drain enchantment - they use it well enough, is cheap, gain 6 overall
leech signet - cost nothing, gain energy if they interrupt spell

And I still think heros run low.

Going a SF ele with triple SF heroes is a good enough tactic, it'll bring you through lvl 24+ areas easily enough as the dual monk/rit henchman should be more than enough to cover any problems that might possibly exist there.

I personally wouldn't advocate it for the higher tiers of PvE though due to it's inflexibility and the glass cannon nature of the elementalist

Heroes actually use SF very well.
A single SF hero will routinely get in 2 SF hits per burning cycle (highest possible) as long as you don't clutter up their build with too much other stuff with high cast times to distract them from spamming SF.


As for the OP's questions:

- Echoing SF is a waste of energy and a skill slot. SF's recast is far too short to justify echoing it, either on a human player or a hero. If you want to increase the spam rate, just give your hero Ele a dual 20/20 fire wand & focus set (commonly referred as a "40/40" set) and you're good to go.

- 2 SF Eles working together is very efficient for a number of reasons.
First, it saves you a skill slot because you no longer need Mark of Rodgort. Use that skill slot for a utility skill instead (more on that later).
Second, it nets you one extra SF hit per 7 second burning cycle that you wouldn't have gotten if your 2 SF Eles were hypothetically working alone, because of the synergy savings when it comes to the burning. In other words, while a single SF Ele can get in 2 SF hits per 7 second burning cycle, dual SF Eles can get in 5 (not 4) SF hits per 7 second burning cycle, because only 1 of the Eles needs to start the burning. This synergy savings increases as you add more SF Eles into the mix, which is why SF Eles are so much better in groups than by themselves.

One last thing.....
Don't forget about utility. Because they have the energy and open skill slots to run it, Eles are great utility characters. Many people assume that SF bars are too full and "dedicated" to SF to run any utility. While it is true that an SF Ele has less room and energy for utility than a Mind Blast Ele does, the SF Ele still has 1 to 2 slots and a little bit of energy to run some pretty helpful utility.

Here are a couple quick examples of good SF builds with some affordable utility build in:


[skill]Fire Attunement[/skill][skill]Glyph of lesser energy[/skill][skill]searing flames[/skill][skill]glowing gaze[/skill][skill]liquid flame[/skill][skill]Enfeebling Blood[/skill][skill]Weaken Armor[/skill][skill]Resurrection Signet[/skill]

Adding something like Enfeebling Blood and Weaken Armor (two fantastic and affordable skills) goes a long way, and 8 att. points in Curses is all you need to run them effectively. (Note: Ignore what is says in the skill pop-up descriptions, Enfeebling Blood and Weaken Armor now cost 1 and 5 energy, respectively. Weaken Armor's description is outdated too.)


[skill]Fire Attunement[/skill][skill]Glyph of lesser energy[/skill][skill]searing flames[/skill][skill]glowing gaze[/skill][skill]liquid flame[/skill][skill]Steam[/skill][skill]Restful Breeze[/skill][skill]Resurrection Chant[/skill]

Here we add Steam, which does both decent damage and 8 seconds of blind at a modest 8 att. points in Water. And the burning requirement is pretty easy to meet for a SF Ele. You also get room to add one of the best self-heals in the game for casters (no points in healing needed) and a hard monk rez. These two skills might be something you'd want to bring when playing in PuGs for example. Or swap in Aura of Restoration if you want a cover hex. Or go E/Rt and bring a Rit rez like Death Pact Signet. Or you could throw some points into Earth and bring a Ward or two. Or how about throwing 9 points into Prot and adding Aegis? Whatever suits your fancy; these were just a couple quick examples. As long as it's relatively cheap and doesn't require too deep of an attribute commitment, you can add it in your utility slots without hurting your damage output from SF or running out of energy.

Utility is your friend, even in a SF build.

I wouldn't run Weaken Armor on a hero; he will spam it whenever recharged on his target, even if the previous application of cracked armor was still there.

If you're going to be putting utility on a SF character then make sure the utility is not spammable.

As this is posted in the Elementalist section, not the heroes and AI section, I am going to assume that you are talking about taking SF heroes when you are an ele yourself, in which case if you really must run searing flames then 1 hero running it in addition to yourself will in most areas be adequate as you can set up the burning for each other. As far as I am concerned though, with the exception of certain areas (secret lair of the snowmen for example), there are far better elites and builds that can be run, not least snare+savannah heat builds, plus in most higher end areas I run the 3 necro hero team set up. In my experience ele heroes are usually the first to die, and just overload any monks in your group trying to keep them alive.

Wol

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