Can Pyroclasm Function more like Glacial Spike?

Hotstreak fishing is part of the class and part of the fun, but at the start of an expansion when stats will be so low, the only gameplay element of the spec we have will be quite few and far between.

The nice thing about frost is you have Brain freeze - flurry procs, which you react to similar to reacting to hot streak by adding two spells other than your filler for reactive gameplay, and the nice thing about glacial spike is you’re constantly working up towards a big hit in your rotation. Thus the gameplay stays engaging because it has some rng with the BF-flury proc, but the goal of a hard hitter.

Frost took the original Vanilla fire fantasy - the HUGE hit coming from pyro blast or POM+Pyro, which is kinda sad, but Pyroclasm seems like a good way to incorporate it back.

Instead of % chance on hotstreak consumption, what if every so many Fireballs, or every so many Fire blasts we predictably gain the buff to hardcast a huge hard hitting greater pyroblast the way we can hard cast a glacial spike?

If we gain a new button from the talent choice, like greater pyroblast or “Pyroclasm”, perhaps we can use the Hotstreak buff to guarantee its Crit similar to how we use brainfreeze-flurry to “guarantee” a Glacial spike Crit.

The benefits to this idea are:

  • Gives fire back its hard hitting fantasy
  • Adds more rotation depth to the class without adding more RNG
  • Is still in the spirit of what pyroclasm is currently going for.

Perhaps the spell could look something like this:

Pyroclasm
4 sec cast - 40 yrd range
Conjure a massive ball of fire to blast your target for (240% of Pyroblast damage) and can consume Hotstreak to add an additional 50% critical strike chance.

Requires:
having cast 10 direct damage fire spells?
5 Fireball casts?

***Fire doesn’t gain icicles as a counter the way frost does so this talent would have to add a stacking buff that at a certain number you could cast it.

Idk sound more engaging than the current stay of pyroclasm where I have no idea when the big hitter will show up which loses some engagement for me.

Edit:

***Imagine if the visual counter for this Pryoclasm rework was Flaming orbs like Kael’thas WC3/HOTS. Like how we count icicles for Glacial spike, Flame orbs could be a counter for when you can cast Pyroclasm. Maybe then every 3 pyroblast crits or every 3 fireball crits we gain access to Pyroclasm.

3 Likes

LOVE THIS IDEA DUDE… i brought this up in the arena forums around a year ago when people were really complaining hard about gpy… remove gpy from the game and add this in!!!

1 Like

I’ve always been a fire mage at heart, but BFA fire burned me pretty bad. While combustion is still fun, The frost mage rotation outside of cooldowns is much more engaging gameplay. I really hope blizz gives fire another pass before SL and perhaps considers something like this for the last talent row of fire. Would basically take pyroclasm from a rare/random proc to a predictable hard hitter that would add some more engagement and skill to fire without some massive rework like what the shadow priest and shamans got. Thanks for the enthusiasm and yeah I hope it happens too haha.

That is a wonderful idea! I’ve always liked Pyroclasm, but it never seemed to perform well or fit the playstyle of BFA fire. On the plus side, between the Legendaries, Pheonix Flames, and the minor tweaks fire has seen, we might see a lot of different playstyles emerge once Shadowlands goes live.

BFA fire burned me pretty bad.

To the pun-ishment corner with you.

Haha couldn’t help it. But yah I’d love to return to fire and working up towards a hard hitter could do it for me. Glacial spike is fun to use and I think Pyroclasm could add a similar Fun mage-related gameplay element to the rotation giving the spec some much needed depth.

pretty much the same thing. GPY has a cooldown now, so you can pretend gpy is your pyroclasm idea and keep meteor. Personally I’m sick of fire in pvp. I hope something else is viable.

I’m talking pve

no, its not. Gpy is a % hp based ability… Pyroclasm is not.

Pyroclasm’s proc rate feels too low or infrequent. wtb a glacial spike-like change =(

You still need to fish for procs to cast glacial spike.

Yah but 2 charges of winter’s chill has smoothed that out a ton. Plus you still have ebonbolt/frozen touch options. The current ptr frost with 2 charges of WC feels way better than BFA frost and I feel I’m waiting a lot less for procs to cast glacial spike.

Procs can be good/engaging - im not saying they’re bad, and I think pyroclasm benefiting from a hotstreak proc to guarantee crit could be fun gameplay. I hope they consider a change like this.