Hmmm, nukes are looking less attractive.

In my experience, even con lieutenants tend to drop from an Aim + Build Up + Inferno combo, though some might survive if too many of the procs fail to trigger. On the other hand, trying to solo-nuke by leading with an opening attack is a BAD idea. A decent-size full spawn can eat you with its alpha by the time your nuke fires (none are very fast), especially if you had the misfortune of picking a set with a slow AoE, like Energy Blast, Radiation Blast or, heaven help you, Dual Pistols. I learned not to try to openly AoE spawns right quick.

To be a little more specific, Nukes deal a scale 6.0 damage, which is one of the highest damage scales in the game, possibly second only to Assassin's Strike at a total of 7.0 (within the context of powerset powers). And it's AoE. However, that 6.0 isn't guaranteed. You have a 3.0 scale damage mod that always triggers, which means that your nuke will always do slighly more damage than a snipe. You have another 1.5 scale damage component on a 75% chance proc and another 1.5 scale damage component on a 50% proc. Basically, your percentage chance to deal damage looks like this:

6.0 - 37.5%
4.5 - 50.0%
3.0 - 12.5%

In other words, your chance to deal just base guaranteed damage is small, but your chance to deal full damage is far from guaranteed. That's useful to keep in mind when talking about power damage.

*edit*
Wait, does Fiery Embrace proc on Judgement powers?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.