I know the topic is done to death. Personally I didn’t really care about the Mirror Image playstyle that existed in the past 2 seasons. I do have a full set and did the meta setup as everyone else did but I didn’t enjoy it. However, I can see that the real issue is that people like the idea of using underused spells for great gains. Sometimes hidden gems are what make your experience even better.
So with that I would suggest that Mirror image be changed, either with a rune or base spell effect that allows some way to cast Disintegrate and allow it to keep up the combustion stacks from the Firebird set, as well as ignite enemies. It’s not allowed to proc the 6pc effect of Firebirds, but why not allow it to maintain max stacks once you get it there, then you cast the non-channeling spells to deal the maximum damage of the proc effect.
Mirror images do not last forever and cannot be relied upon to do all of your Disintegrate ignite and combustion damage, so you will be mostly doing it yourself, this just allows it to maintain those stacks along with ignite new enemies in your path. This keeps the Mirror Images in the Firebird setup. Not to mention seems cool to see 4-5 Disintegrates on screen at the same time.
This also continues to keep Deathwish out of the build, which seemed to be more of a problem to the overall power of the build.
Absolutely not. The problem is how badly FB6 was designed. A lot of us looked at the mechanics from the very start and said “Mirror Images working is a bug. It’ll get fixed.”
What fools we were. Blizzard doesn’t care. MI propped up FB6, and blizzard just kicked the stool out of underneath. It’s no wonder Wizards are now - officially- the worst class in the game in S25.
If they want to fix Firebirds, they should, but fix the broken mechanics.
Aggravated Wizdog personal note: It’s no wonder the 2nd D3 expansion was cancelled, they’ve redone FB like 4-5 times now and they STILL can’t make it work right.
Well the issue is that they used Disintegrate… but I guess they won’t change that anymore. We will likely be stuck with this. But they could easily improve FB even in this dysfunctional state, yes, even with Disintegrate at the core. The key items to look at would be Wand of Woh, Orb of Infinite Depth and, obviously, Deathwish… and maybe Hergbrash’s Bindings.
My general idea would be to have channeling skill place a mark on enemies you hit. This could be either a special mark or even Elemental Exposure. The idea would then be to use Explosive Blast as trigger skill for Firebird. I would allow Wand of Woh extra Blasts to trigger the set bonus, and have Explosive Blast’s radius and damage increased while also granting either the Chain Reaction or Short Fuse rune. We wouldn’t want these changes to only benefit in a Firebird build… but the main change would be an effect that detonates Explosive Blast on remote (= marked) targets. This could consume the mark, maybe. The mark could also be the “Ignited” effect from FB, but in that case it would mean to add the effect as part of the set itself - I would refrain from that, though because that would limit the ways to play Explosive Blast to the FB set which I would not deem a good solution.
Disintegrate igniting enemies is part of the part of the problem, but maybe not the biggest part. The awkwardness is the stack count. How you have to channel to maintain stack counts, but you can’t channel to proc the FB6. The conflict between the set bonuses is the real problem. If the set wants you to channel, but the set doesn’t want you to channel. The conflict isn’t fun, or interesting. It’s anti-synergistic.