Searing Flames/Invoke.

Which would be better for heros to run, they both can dish out some massive damage.

I also heard that almost all mobs in game have + armor to fire.

Prefer Invokers who can be easily turned into B-surge for areas with heavy psych dmg.

If you bring pair of SF eles, consider bringing para with They're on fire or mes with Fragility or derv with Reap Impurities, but remember Destroyers are immune to burging and high resistant to fire, so SF is useless against them, which makes you to completely rebuild your team for most EotN an some other areas.

Searing Flames is horrible; at least Invoke works.

Quote:

Past around 80ish armor your elemental spell in general start weakening noticeably, and 100+ makes them quite underpowered. Against the near-60 armor crowd SF reigns supreme. At about 80ish base armor you want cracked armor and/or armor penetration on your spells (so either another mesmer to spread conditions or switching to air). Once you get to 100 AL enemies you really want to have both cracked armor and AP spells, or to switch over to armor ignoring spells.

Generally this translates into SF making everything around lvl 20ish explode on sight, Invoke putting out the best damage against enemies around lvl 24-26, with lvl 28+ enemies causing significant damage drop off unless you take special measures to bypass their armor.

Of course, these are only rules of thumb based on the AL = 3 * lvl + prof bonus rule of thumb. Some monsters have an extra -20 or +20 to certain elements on top of that (destroyers being the biggest example, with their +20 vs fire), and others ignore it entirely and have haxx0rz 160 armor against everything (RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO these guys). That said, its possible to beat nearly anything even with SF, you just do it quite a bit slower.

On a side note, Air has the ability to inflict weakness/blindness, which can massively nerf the damage enemy physicals can output. I don't really count cracked armor for much since its single target while your nukes are AoE, though it combines very nicely with mesmer condition spreaders. Fire OTOH doesn't really have any support at all.

Also of note is that an upcoming update will apparently change all of this. Its expected that enemy armor will get a general nerf, though exactly what and how much isn't known.

In general air builds are better for Hm and very decent in NM too. You don't want to use any other element in HM and as people have said you can swap elites round for utlity(b-surge, thunderclap even) just makes it ace.


Kunder could you source this update note? I'm interested.

Searing Flames does have an important upside (that it shares with discord). SF builds can rely entirely on SF for damage, meaning that you dont have to use up more space on your bar for more spells to inflict damage with (like you would with invoke). Therefore, you can devote more space on your bar for monk, necromancer, and rit support skills. Its really a very similar concept to discord - the only difference being that a devoted SF team will require BiP to assist with e-management (so that you don't have to devote the SF's entire bars to e-management).

Quote: