Cind3rs

Join Date 04/2009

TB ring of fire vs hybrid

I'm just not seeing Ring of Fire as a great ability to get 1 point in, early on. It's a GOOD ability, but it's fairly expensive on mana for little damage. It works vs newer/unsure players as a deterent, but even at high level, it doesn't put out the damage. Maxed out at 1500 dmg, that's still over 10 secs and is helpful, but I'm having fairly good luck skipping Ring of Fire and using the points into frost nova.

Not sure what it looks like on paper, but it works well in game. Fire Nova takes care of my higher level creeping (priests, etc) that would take longer, but generally, getting +50% dmg on form change is enough at low levels to do the deed quick.

Frost nova is pretty damn useful, whether for running or chasing. Fire build TB is very quick. If you need to run, freeze them and the slow after affect will pretty much save your bacon. Chasing, if you can catch up enough, freeze and then your teammates are on him, and he's slowed. Level 15 freeze is golden, with 3 secs frozen and -40% (I think?) slow. They're screwed. And it's an interrupt vs scrolls or long potions.

Ring of Fire is a low level aid. It may even be worth keeping lvl 1 in it for easy creeping, but I really feel like it's wasted, when at low levels, TB has so many options to pick that would do better.

BTW, I don't think deep freeze is worth getting. The extra fireball damage is nice, but all those points wasted! And it takes away the debuffs. If I slow an enemy 40%, I don't want to trade that for 375 dmg! I can rack up 375 in 2 hits, which I'll get on the slowed DG, plus many more.

Deep Freeze... it looks great, but I'm just not seeing it useful at low levels. It, imho, just causes a retreat to a tower until they're abilities are up again. Small victory, but takes mana and doesn't bring the pain enough.

Thoughts?

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But Tb needs faster level up than anyone else. Because if you are going for fire build, you need to lv up the fire balls to kill someone.

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I've mostly found TB to be annoying to play against; ring of fire is used for leveling in safety, and deep freeze for preventing people from locking portals, or Sedna from healing.

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I find RoF a very useful skill. despite it's mere 150 dmg/s, staying in RoF while the enemy (most strong dgs are melee anyway) would increase the change of them flee-ing and thus increasing your survivability. at end game when the enemy have massive amounts of grunts / cats / giants / priests etc, a well placed RoF could easily turn the tide (since good generals know how to micro their minions out of RoF). Placing RoF in a lane can help increase your chance of capping it. like mentioned by rav3nix, RoF can also help to clear towers safely. a good combination would be using frost nova before casting RoF. minions would be stuck in it for at least 8 seconds which can clear most if not all of them.

Deep freezing is really good. despite the debuff removal, if a sedna were to be pressured, an interrupt by deep freeze would make her panic more. this could easily lead to a extremely long cooldown which is always good deep freeze is not just for damage. it's main purpose is to interrupt hence, you don't have to max deep freeze. do take note that deep freeze doesn't remove the passive slow debuff from permafrost.

the description of deep freeze is "if the target is affected by frost nova or rain of ice, deep freeze consumes..."

maxed frost nova only reduces movement speed by 20%. however, frost nova's purpose is to aoe stun and not to reduce movement speed. the reduced movement speed effect from the ending of the stun is just .. i guess an extra freebie .

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The stronger benefits of Deep Freeze are the interrupt and the obnoxious cooldown increase. For example when you're fighting an Oak that you know is going to shield and heal or teleport at low health, you can Freeze him and if he shields in the next 7 seconds it's going to take a whopping 77 seconds for him to shield again (assuming it's max rank). Another example is when you just freeze a Beast before he spits you at the start of a fight. If he follows through he'll have to wait 15 more seconds for the next spit and if he stuns off the bat he won't be doing that for 30 more seconds. If he waits to spit then he's doing poor damage for the first 7 seconds of the fight.

Ring of Fire is extremely helpful at rank 1 just for fire and forget creeping, but it does have good damage later on if you're fighting multiple opponents, and Inspiriational Flame is fantastic.

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Good point on the RoF with frost nova. I'm still thinking that Fire nova is more than enough for creeps, though.

Plus RoF is very, very wasteful for towers. Moving in to RoF a tower and the creeps is effective, but you do take some hits to pull that off, generally.

Fireball is much more effective, cheaper, and safer for towers.

Frost nova is the bees knees Freezing the enemy and them have the option to run away or chase them is awesome and usually incites panic in the enemy. I hate that the deep freeze pulls all the debuffs away, for not a whole lot of damage (scale wise).

Let me see if I can come up with a good build that revamps the hybrid theory. A lot of stuff does not actually work, like going from ice to fire mode and using anything but FB. That .5 second change over is enough to let the enemy run out of range.

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You've gotta have a lot of mana to farm creeps with Fire Nova and it also means your burst damage won't necessarily be ready when you want it to be.

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This is the build I use that is basicly Fire TB plus Frost Nova.

1.Circle of Fire

2. Fireball 1

3. Fire Aura 1

4. Fireball 2

5. Fire Aura 2.

6. Frost Nova 1

7. Fireball 3

8. Fire Aura 3.

9. Fire Nova 1

10. Fire Ball 2

11. Frost Nova 2

12. Fire Nova 2

13. Whatever you want.

14. Save.

15. Frost Nova 3. Fire Nova 3.

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What is the low down on inspirational flame? I've read before that it's always on once you get it, you don't actually have to be in a RoF or anything. Just in fire mode.

True?

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Ring of Fire is best used for timing it with taking out towers and creeps as they run in, especially early game before tower HP is bought. The rest of the time its just used to level and maybe get a little HP down quickly in a fight that is close.

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Quoting Cind3rs,

reply 8

What is the low down on inspirational flame? I've read before that it's always on once you get it, you don't actually have to be in a RoF or anything. Just in fire mode.

True?

Correct. The end result is that you're pretty much set on mana with a single helm. I feel it help TB out quite a bit late game because it lets you bring your health up to par with the DGs who had been more durable than you all game.

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Haha! Bite my tongue, the first time I tried to skip RoF for a modified build, I got faced off with a minion build Erebus. Spent half the game trying to get back RoF, lol.

RoF + Frost Nova is nice, but very limited against the Horn of Battle. It does keep him scared of commiting his creeps, though

I still just hate RoF, it's great for a short period of time, then it's outdated and the later levels of it do not scale well at all. Something with that long of a cast time, with that long of a damage period, which costs almost as much as it damages... grrr. I wish the higher levels of it got a buff, maybe 2000 dmg of 10 secs, something that could actually kill high level minions.

BotS doesn't cut it, imho. Having a low MP amount means you can only cast a few things, even if you recharge your MP. Need the mana boosts from the items to be able to string together some abilities. Staff of Renewal or Swift Anklet are the viables, imho. I'm looking into other ideas, though. BotF is ok, but to be honest, it's not worthwhile since you don't stand toe to toe with the enemy, you hit and run, wear him down.

Anyone have favor item ideas?

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I still just hae RoF, it's great for a short period of time, then it's outdated and the later levels of it do not scale well at all. Something with that long of a cast time, with that long of a damage period, which costs almost as much as it damages... grrr.

It's 800 mana for 1500 damage, I'm not sure what you mean by it costing almost as much as it damages.

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1500 against a normal giant = 60 hp left if im not wrong . how is that useless late game ? i mean, you're doing 1500 * X amount of minions hurt for only 800 mp . that's always good if you ask me . instead of just thinking about killing other players, switch roles every now and then . despite that short period of time before more minions respawn, killing enemy minions can sometimes help you to win your battle .

cloak of night is good for generals . instead of waiting for him to decide on whether he should commit his creeps, decide for him. teleport in with cloak of night, freeze and start burning and run out let him waste his horn if he wants to . you've already done your damage, he negated it but it has to cool down .

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The beauty of the TB design is he has more good abilities than you can chose in 1 build. I still love BotS and Ice Rain. Grab a Plenor and you can refill mana with every Ice Rain. And do it from a safe distance. Working on a corner tower, wait for the creep wave, trigger BotS, nail em both, then switch forms and fireball, with no damage taken. Chasing a retreating DG in ice mode (because you can run and fire there), drop a killing ice rain on him when he's low enough. Because of the safer distance, I usually choose the Ice Rain over fire nova. Seems like BotS and TB were made for each other.

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Good point Mikhail, but here's 2 thoughts:

-BotS is great, but you still need a helmet to boost your base mana amount high enough to use a high level ability chain. Doing a dmg nuke on someone will drain you dry and using BotS in the middle of a fight can really go badly, plus you lose some distance on chasing them, thus never getting in range again

-Going ice to fire makes you lose distance on a retreating enemy. In most games I've played, if I draw them in and nuke their ass once... they won't fall for it again. Soon as I hit them with the first of the chain, they retreat back. Which can be good.

Hmmm.. maybe I'm just to worried about kills. Yeah, this is probably my problem these days, lol.

And finally, RoF is still not what I want in an ability. I keep trying it, but even at 1200 or 1500 dmg over 10 secs... TB isn't a tank, and I'm usually having to harrass, not stand and fight for 10 secs. A good UB or Oak will chew my ass up quick. Using TB is all about keeping distances, until you're up there. RoF is good for creeping, tanking against poor players, but that's about it. Rain of Ice is my new fav

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Deep Freeze works great on 45 second cd favor items. It makes you treat it like a 7 second Silence, or there are terrible consequences.

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Quoting Cind3rs,

reply 15

Good point Mikhail, but here's 2 thoughts:

-BotS is great, but you still need a helmet to boost your base mana amount high enough to use a high level ability chain. Doing a dmg nuke on someone will drain you dry and using BotS in the middle of a fight can really go badly, plus you lose some distance on chasing them, thus never getting in range again

-Going ice to fire makes you lose distance on a retreating enemy. In most games I've played, if I draw them in and nuke their ass once... they won't fall for it again. Soon as I hit them with the first of the chain, they retreat back. Which can be good.

Hmmm.. maybe I'm just to worried about kills. Yeah, this is probably my problem these days, lol.

And finally, RoF is still not what I want in an ability. I keep trying it, but even at 1200 or 1500 dmg over 10 secs... TB isn't a tank, and I'm usually having to harrass, not stand and fight for 10 secs. A good UB or Oak will chew my ass up quick. Using TB is all about keeping distances, until you're up there. RoF is good for creeping, tanking against poor players, but that's about it. Rain of Ice is my new fav

Fire TB is all about taking out large numbers of creeps, clearing paths for your creeps in the process, taking out towers and assisting in kills. That's it.

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I think for Fire TB, only 1 fire nova enough. its enough to fly priests away. ANd rest, i will get frost nova to escape

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Quoting TB_MasteR,

reply 18

I think for Fire TB, only 1 fire nova enough. its enough to fly priests away. ANd rest, i will get frost nova to escape

If your opponents get cats before you do, Nova 2 is very useful. Especially if you can sneak up midway and catch opposing minions before they make the turn towards the lanes on Cataract.

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Actually even if you are tb fire player,, I think you should get rain of ice always

and that is what I used to do.. anyway tb you have plenty of mana (you will and you have to have)

So .. i don't just get fire nova more than 1

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I've never used anything on ICE TB when using Fire TB build, beyond a normal attack at the beginning. I supposed one of these days I may decide to try an ICE TB build, but if it aint broke why fix it?

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