This is probably going to fall on deaf ears, but I’ll take a shot because playing the underdog spec is going to get old in about 2 weeks (and has probably gotten old for a lot of players already). This isn’t meant to discuss hard numbers so much as it is about where the numbers come from, how they make things a headache for the developers, and how we could move them around to make them both better in practice and easier to manage. This is not intended to make Fire Mage a top spec, just something that isn’t at risk of being snubbed/excluded purely for being what it is.
Everyone knows Fire has some major issues on a systemic level, decisions made from the past based on ballooned gear levels that create objectively silly numerical situations. Pyroblast does no damage but has an enormous cast time, to counteract the fact that we are constantly removing the cast time. This would be fine, but it’s the payoff to a Hot Streak, and yet doesn’t have much more impact than the Fire Blast or Phoenix Flames we used to guarantee the proc. Fireball (or Frostfire Bolt, depending) should honestly do more than a Pyroblast because they have to be hard-cast, and yet they don’t for… reasons? Frostfire Bolt can do more, but it’s also instant in that situation. Scorch becomes as strong as a Fireball in Execute situations with a shorter cast time, but Fireball isn’t very good, so this still doesn’t amount to much. What do all of these spells have in common? They get a gargantuan buff (when specced) during Combustion, which is honestly the biggest offender of the Fire Mage design core right now.
We are a crit class that is entirely incentivized to avoid stacking crit, so when we’re outside of Combustion, our entire toolkit feels awful. You can get a talent to make Crit apply to Mastery during Combustion, but it’s a choice and only at 70% effectiveness. This should be baseline and 100%, so that people can fill that stat gap without feeling like garbage. Combustion has further talents that boost cooldown recovery, as well as give us essentially another 60% damage bonus (Unleased Inferno) on top of it all, and this too needs to be rightly slapped down from the talent tree and redistributed as a baseline boost to our non-CD burst window (I would hope to Pyroblast specifically, which is very weak when compared to say… Ice Lance). Combustion on its own is a satisfying CD to use; it doesn’t need a mountain of additional support piled on, and is definitely hurting the design space overall, and creating situations of extreme gear dependency where these burst windows become increasingly impactful over time.
After that, it’s our Mastery that needs to be looked at. Ignite cannot crit; it’s an uninspired boost to damage that applies to essentially facet of our damage. It’s bad because the game is fast right now, and that damage is back-loaded. Back-loaded damage in general is a polarizing concept, one that works well numerically in drawn out fights and isn’t felt at all on pulls when there’s no time for setup and payoff. What’s more, it can be spread with Fire Blast. This creates a scenario where a massive, but slow single target resource can be moved to additional targets, which is too powerful in the situations it’s good, and mediocre or nonexistent elsewhere. That in itself explains the current state of much of Fire Mage’s balancing, with enormous potential being used as an excuse to hobble literally anything that works well upfront, and then a further round of ‘tuning’ that takes that enormous potential and tones it down so that it’s only really noticeable in the Combustion burst window. This would be further helped by redistributing the 60% Damage Combustion talent (Unleashed Inferno) to a more baseline effect, but at the end of the day either Ignite needs to no longer be spreadable so that the rest of our AoE abilities can be improved, or (and I think this would be much better) they simply redesign Living Bomb into a front-loaded ignite spread effect, creating an explosion on Fire Blast that hits all nearby targets based on the current Ignite, with the right-side talents now improving this effect (more targets affected, higher ignite adaptation, maybe even a chance to refund fire blasts based on the amount of targets hit, etc).
These changes, I believe, would open up the design space to work on metrics that are less swingy and more controllable. Our burst windows wouldn’t be so wild that stacking around them becomes a balancing nightmare if damage was moved away from Combustion, preferably into Pyroblast. Of course, this doesn’t do much to talk about some other inherent issues with Fire Mage, like Flamestrike (actually okay if specced into, not good though, and really should just be a targeted explosion around a specific enemy instead of an AoE we place). Many of the changes allow for major numerical buffs that the build needs overall, specifically taking the enormous potential of Combustion and spreading it around, which could be done generously to solve many problems all-at-once. I don’t think anyone playing Fire is demanding to be the best spec in the game, just well enough to play it, as much of what it does is very enjoyable mechanically, and the high APM playstyle suits a certain type of player.