And we’ve arrived at the most dreaded point of all the crying about the firebird. The set is terrible, before with the nerf in the values it was still good, but the removal of the pet interaction simply ended any possibility of playing with it. “But playing based on skill channeling is boring”, beloveds, if you want fun ask for buff in Vyr and Tal Rasha. Firebird is not fun, is just functional. I’m furious that a season where all characters manage to rift 150, even a Wiz with the nerf in values, people are complaining to the point where this nerf blows his mind and murders the entire building.
Please re-nerf and re-interact with pets. Or better forget the set and buff another
When Firebird was reworked in 2.7.0, it took awhile in the PTR for the mirror images interaction to be discovered (after channeling spells were removed). And guess what? People were still playing it, were still excited about it, and still performing well. This was all before MI was known. When MI was discovered, many argued it was a bug and were sure it would be patched.
Here’s a video from that time : https://youtu.be/jiuHwcWTt_U
There’s a ton more, just search ptr firebird 2.7.0.
The Mirror Images interaction was bad for the set, and it’s not what it was balanced around.
self-cast Explosive Blast
First option is bad because we can’t channel and proc with blades at the same time. And what makes it even worse is 1sec delay before the Deathwish start to work. We have to stop using blades then start channeling Desintergration and after 1 second we get our buff but while channelling of course there’s no Combustion procs. So Deathwish is useless in this version.
The second option allows channeling but the proc rate is terrible. It is very slow. Hence the low damage.
When FB was reworked the best interaction he had was with 6 tal rasha 4 FB (which they promptly ruled out by switching the effects of 4/6 FB) it was then that the MI version was born. As for the players being excited, of course it was something new to test. There’s nothing to test today, just a really bad build
PS: 6 TR 4 FB was the most fun build I have ever played.
Console players can enjoy corner-stacking, manually cast Twisters, because the whirlwinds won’t disappear and manually casting won’t interrupt channeling, so Deathwish is a thing. And that rules on console, it even outmatches Mirrorbird. Only PC players are punished by this moronic nerf.
Ppl just need to find a new build. Any non channeling fire skill procs it right? Do weapon modifiers work? Maybe try fire twister, fire orb, explosive blast, meteors, I dunno.
My point is to compare with other characters, everyone does r150 except Wiz. For example, WD gets R150 in 3~4min with -3k paragon, a Wiz with 10k paragon suffers to make r130.
By the way, shouldn’t hydra not work with FB since they are pets?
The key to strong Firebird builds is triggering Combustion fast/often enough. Or triggering it while channeling under the effect of Deathwish. Thus, using spenders is a futile effort. we cannot spam them fast enough. Not to mention most can’t even proc FB6 since they apply DoTs (good example would be Blizzard, Apocalypse) or count as pets like Hydra and got axed along Images. Everything else is way too slow to make things work. We’d need some crazy figures/mechanics to get a decent build together.
Now, if you want to make a spender do the job, there’s a thing that could work… manual Explosive Blast - under the assumption that they allow Wand of Woh extra blasts to trigger Combustion in the next patch.
Yes, that nerf is big. It was enough to reduce the bonus from 6 sets from 5000 to 3500 … and it wouldn’t be that big.
I tested it with that hydr, because I have more damage with it. Than if I go without her.
holding disintegrate down and pressing the spender at the same time doesn’t carry over? It seems like it should have a second or two grace period so you can stay channeled. Maybe that’s a way to fix it. Just looking on paper there are a zillion fire skills and lots of weapon mods.
All spenders that work with Combustion proc interrupt channeling . Only Explosive Blast doesn’t. But I said above - it is slow and if you proc Combustion slowly your damage is low. You need to proc it fast.
unruned Hydra… — I’m not quite sure what’s going on with this one. I’m seeing numbers that are way too high for normal hydra damage, even with all the buffs I can get from magistrate, serpent sparker and deathwish. At the same time, the explosions (if it’s explosions) do roughly maybe 1/100th of sparkflint explosions (still in 100B range, but nowhere near 10+T of familiar)
