Feedback: Mage Updates

[Lanfear-tichondrius]

I’ve had some time to sit down and play the three specs. I realize that they are all three going to be going through some talent changes coming up, so this will be posted knowing of future changes coming. The main one I know best is fire, so I’ll lead off with that.

Sunfury

I cannot stress enough how absolutely amazing this hero tree is. Its theme and execution is incredible. It feels incredible to press combustion and get the phoenix. The cool factor is off the charts.

• Spellfire Spheres - I’m hoping the animation for these is a work in progress as they look a little janky now especially when going to 4 or 5.
• Orb generation out of combat feels a little slow at 50 seconds per orb. this is 2.5 minutes to generate 3 out of combat between pulls. On some raid encounters this might be a little irritating waiting. Something like one every 20 seconds would be a lot more palatable.
• The spell damage for each orb feels a little bad to be honest. A little juice in between cooldowns isn’t bad, but losing that when going in to cooldowns feels a little counterintuitive. I would rather you GET this spellpower increase for the duration of the phoenix as it uses the orbs in your cooldowns.
• Arcane Phoenix spell selection. With very low sample size it appears the phoenix has an equal chance of using greater pyro, meteor, and arcane surge. This might be a frustrating source of RNG, but I’m kind of ok with the chaos.
• Burden of power is really invisible to me. It feels very passive and forgettable. Lining it up with sun king’s blessing is probably not something you can reliably do on purpose.
• Gravity lapse. This spell is thematically SO cool. I would like it if the animation raised the target off the ground more noticeably however. As it is the enemies are only lifted off the ground what seems like an inch.
• The other part is it will undoubtedly feel kind of bad to lose blast wave and have no way to talent back in to it if you play sunfury. I would like an option to play sunfury that does not have me replacing blast wave while also not polluting my pool of exceptional spells for pve purposes
• Glorious Incandescence is an absolutely amazing spell. Timing the mini meteor with fireblast and combustion is satisfying visually and gameplay wise. I would like to see the fireblast charges be more reactive to the animation however. I see the meteors land and I don’t get the fireblast refund immediately with the impact.
• Sunfury execution feels kind of weak from the outside looking in. This one is hard to comment on without seeing the upcoming fire changes, but at first glance I don’t feel 5% more health for scorch execute really feels epic. I would want some effect tacked on for the 30% baseline instead.
• Rondurmancy. Unfortunately with the extremely heavy cooldown reduction with fire this is an entirely dead and unusable node. If the upcoming fire changes include HEAVY removal of cooldown reduction this will be different, but generating 5 orbs is oppressively difficult without extremely fortunate crit strings. Even getting THREE orbs ready for combustion with both sun kings and unleashed inferno is inconsistent. In combat orb generation for fire mage feels sluggish, and I would like to see this solved honestly with a reduction to cooldown reduction with the spec. More on this later.
• Memory of Al’ar. This feels incredible. I would like the animation of hyperthermia to be made more visible. On retail I use loud bangs to indicate hyperthermia when I play unleashed inferno. Going to alpha without my weak auras has made it entirely impossible to use the talent because its SO hard to see. I would add this to the buffs at your feet in the default UI. The actual hero talent though feels GREAT. I love it.
• This hero tree honestly feels like it was made for unleashed inferno. It pairs and flows with it so well that it’s hard to not choose unleashed inferno with it.
• Sunkings blessing works with sunfury, but you have annoying collisions between wanting to hard cast pyroblast and having the post phoenix hyperthermia.
• Greater Pyroblast is not whitelisted for combustion auto crit from the phoenix.
• Currently running out of mana. I’m assuming this will be fixed haha.
• Currently the phoenix randomly targets spells. I would like this if if simply copied my target.

Frostfire

The theme of this hero tree is also really strong. It’s not quite as cool as sunfury to me, but that’s more because sunfury is unbeatably amazing. Here’s some feedback on it.

• Frostfire mastery flows really well on fire entirely because the meteor interaction with excess frost. I do like that this is forcing us to take meteor as I’m a big fan of meteor honestly.
• Frostfire bolt animation is more like FROSTfire. The frost is very evident but the fire is too muted imo. I would like to see more red present in this to balance it out more. The casting animation on your hands is cool though.
• The choice node for cooldown reduction feels really imbalanced for the fire side of things. I don’t feel like this node is impactful.
• Isothermic core CARRIES the visuals of this hero tree. The combo is incredible and satisfying.
• The excess frost and fire mechanics in this tree are really solid. You feel rewarded for going up to 8 stacks with a small payoff. Very satisfying.
• Activating combust giving Flash Freezeburn is really really solid. I love being able to time this proc to extend the buffs.
• This spec flows incredibly well with sun kings blessing. It pairs extremely well with the feel of it.

General Fire Mage Feedback and Hopes

• We have to lead off with this ladies and gentlemen. I would like to see fire return to being a burst spec or at least given the option to burst. The uptime on combustion has made it feel like a damage stance rather than a cooldown when I can achieve 60-62% uptime with the tier 30 set.
• Frostfire works really well with sun king’s blessing. Sunfury work really well with Unleashed inferno. I really hope the dominance of sun king’s blessing doesn’t continue in to its 6th consecutive tier force choosing one of the hero trees
• Unleashed inferno IS the answer to the the most important points above. This talent struggled to see the light of day because sun king’s blessing was TOO strong. I played more unleashed inferno than anyone, and I even admit that its handicapping my performance…that feels bad. I would like to see the cooldown reduction heavily nerfed or removed from unleashed inferno and the damage boost buffed to compensate. Combustion is the ultimate iconic burst cooldown, and it hasn’t felt awesome in a very long time because of cooldown reduction and sun king’s blessing watering it down. For reference, UI was about 8% behind SKB in damage, and the peak burst of UI was only a paltry 10% higher than SKB. It’s simply undercooked.
• Cooldown reduction in fire right now is a little out of control. It is actually difficult to always get three orbs for sunfury let alone FIVE without holding combustion for a LONG time. I think sun king’s blessing is a good place to have a one minute combustion with cooldown reduction, but I would like the counterpoint of unleashed inferno to balance it out. An uptime combustion skb spec vs a heavy focused burst no cooldown reduction unleashed inferno. This balance would drive some very fun choice and variety if it were actively balanced and maintained.
• I would love player castable pve greater pyroblast

I have a LOT more thoughts on fire, but I want to wait until the changes hit to spend time on this. I just wanted to highlight those points as MAJOR focuses for fire this alpha from my point of view no matter what happens with upcoming changes.

TLDR: Sunfury is amazing, frostfire is cool, give fire mage burst options again, balance UI fully to match SKB.

[Lanfear-tichondrius]

I’ll wait for more arcane changes to come in before commenting on the hero trees, but I wanted to talk arcane soul. After arcane surge runs out with sunfury, you gain arcane soul for people who dont know. The graphics on this spell are absolutely stunning, and I am going to legitimately play more arcane in TWW because of the job the blizzard did with this spell. One of the visually coolest things I’ve seen added to mage in many many years.

[Lanfear-tichondrius]

Posting this for frost on behalf of Manather

Cauterize being limited to one spec severely limits frost and arcane’s viability in high end m+ as the go to spec (fire being preferred every tier this expansion as this being a main reason).

Frost’s roots are problematic:

• requiring ccable enemies massively complicates frosts aoe rotation requiring significant pre-knowledge of encounters for a gain of up to 20% dps in aoe. This often complicates frost’s balancing in addition to its confusing rotation.
• the roots often hinder group play: by preventing knockbacks/knockups or rooting enemies in sanguine.

Ideally a necessary talent would be available somewhere that makes roots that hit 3+ enemies apply winters chill for 1s (their minimum duration and the reason we root anyway in aoe) as well as changing the root to a strong slow. This could function similarly to WW’s tiger palm dash choice node.

[Kaivax]

Hello Mages!

We have a lot of Fire Mage changes hitting the Alpha today, and we want to take some time to go over what changes were made and why. As mentioned in our update post last week, we have a few goals that span all mage specializations. These are:

• Allow you to acquire each specialization’s core gameplay with less talent point investment.
• Simplify rotational complexity.
• Provide new nodes that can help you adapt your damage profile to better match a given encounter’s demands.
• Provide competitive choice nodes that let you opt-out of complex gameplay.

Since we’re talking about Fire only, we can get a bit more granular:

Fire’s AOE
The biggest issue we were looking to address with this iteration was giving you more ways to adjust your talents and rotation to better suit different profiles, which goes hand-in-hand with increasing the effectiveness and excitement of Flamestrike, Phoenix Flames, and Living Bomb. We’re excited to see what Fire Mages can cook up with the new talents. Our goal with these changes is to push Ignite-spreading out of the default playstyle in higher forms of content, especially above 3 targets-- but retain and add talent support for it so its still exciting to utilize when it makes sense.

Sun King’s Blessing
Sun King’s Blessing is a powerful and exciting capstone that Fire Mage players have been utilizing heavily for quite a while. We like the Sun King’s Blessing / Unleashed Inferno capstone choice node, but recognize that Unleashed Inferno still has some gaps to close, particularly in AOE.

By increasing the stack requirement of Sun King’s Blessing to 10 and increasing Unleashed Inferno’s effectiveness in AOE, we’re hoping that the two talents can better coexist as a meaningful choice when going into an encounter.

Maintenance Buffs
Fire’s array of maintenance buffs has been a sore spot in Dragonflight, and its something we’re looking to address moving forward-- especially given the addition of the Aberrus tier set as talents in the Fire tree.

Firemind is our first removal, but we’re also being sensitive to the fact that Firemind didn’t require you to play around it very much, so its removal might not be doing much to simplify the landscape of Fire’s maintenance buffs.

We’re also simplifying Improved Scorch’s damage amplification effect to be less punishing when its dropped, but also allowing it to be opt-in complexity. Fire Mages who want increased execute damage without the addition of another maintenance buff should look towards Down in Flames, a new choice node against Improved Scorch.

Feel the Burn is on our radar, but its output is impactful enough that it serves as a great way to express skill for Fire Mages who have mastered its gameplay. New talents along with effects from the Frostfire and Sunfury trees are increasing player’s access to Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames, so keeping Feel the Burn up should be easier than ever before.

That’s all for this update. We’re excited to read all of your feedback on the new Fire talents!

[Lanfear-tichondrius]

I’m gunna take some time to digest this lol, but I needed to post this. they changed the graphic for sunfury to use the ashes of alar model and the sunfury orbs are gorgeous. Absolute bang up job on the fire mage graphics this is the home run of home runs. WOW.

[Preheat-illidan]

Love the intent here. New visuals for Sunfury are amazing, too! Unfortunately the bird doesn’t seem to be doing damage right now due to some bug, except with Meteor. It can’t even kill a critter on its own. It will be hard to test Sunfury until this is sorted out.

Overall I like the concepts on these talents but I think it may be a bit overdesigned, especially in the capstone area. There are also a lot of little bugs / issues that will make testing it hard until fixes come.

Fire’s AOE

The biggest issue we were looking to address with this iteration was giving you more ways to adjust your talents and rotation to better suit different profiles, which goes hand-in-hand with increasing the effectiveness and excitement of Flamestrike, Phoenix Flames, and Living Bomb.

The intent here is good but living bomb its damage is abysmally low. Even with 7 talents buffing it, the damage is only 3% of breakdown. Needs massive tuning or else that whole right side is completely dead.

Flamestrike damage talent is a nice alternative to Flame patch, and I’m happy to see it included in UI! Love the idea of no longer needing tanks to stand in the flame patch to deal decent damage.

Sun King’s Blessing

We like the Sun King’s Blessing / Unleashed Inferno capstone choice node, but recognize that Unleashed Inferno still has some gaps to close, particularly in AOE.

The damage gap here is till pretty big. SKB isnt just dominant in AOE, it is also way ahead in Single Target. We are talking >10%. This change won’t address that much.

Maintenance Buffs

Fire’s array of maintenance buffs has been a sore spot in Dragonflight, and its something we’re looking to address moving forward-- especially given the addition of the Aberrus tier set as talents in the Fire tree.

This is a great goal, but even after these changes we are still tracking more things in the War Within than live.

Firemind is our first removal, but we’re also being sensitive to the fact that Firemind didn’t require you to play around it very much, so its removal might not be doing much to simplify the landscape of Fire’s maintenance buffs.

The assumption here is correct. We don’t really track this talent so nothing really changes here. We aren’t really moving much towards the goal of removing maintenance buffs here, but either way its probably a good change since it was a passive buff we didn’t pay attention too.

We’re also simplifying Improved Scorch’s damage amplification effect to be less punishing when its dropped, but also allowing it to be opt-in complexity.

The alternative for scorch seems nice but with so much of our damage coming from other sources with Hero talents, I don’t see it beating a damage taken increase on the target. Improved scorch would probably need some filter on it for that to work out.

Feel the Burn is on our radar, but its output is impactful enough that it serves as a great way to express skill for Fire Mages who have mastered its gameplay. New talents along with effects from the Frostfire and Sunfury trees are increasing player’s access to Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames, so keeping Feel the Burn up should be easier than ever before.

Its so much easier but mainly due to increased value on Phoenix Flames. New Phoenix Reborn or From the Ashes feels kind of required with the frequency of PF needed to make hero talents work. This is probably fine, but it will restrict freedom with talents a little.

Will need some time with these talents to really feel them out but at least the intent seems good! Also, please remove TA and tune the damage around not having it. This capstone being a defensive option (maybe choice node with Cold snap vs Caut?) would make a lot more sense. Right now you are pitting a damage talent against defensives, this is a non choice and playing TA feels bad.

[Lanfear-tichondrius]

@Preheat-illidan

The intent here is good but living bomb its damage is abysmally low. Even with 7 talents buffing it, the damage is only 3% of breakdown. Needs massive tuning or else that whole right side is completely dead.

So my initial impression of the tree as I play it is that this is an INCREDIBLY important point. Living bomb must be tuned to be competitive damage. If it is, this tree has a LOT of choice. If living bomb is bad, then this tree is going to be suffocatingly simplified and restrictive to choice.

@Preheat-illidan

The damage gap here is till pretty big. SKB isnt just dominant in AOE, it is also way ahead in Single Target. We are talking >10%. This change won’t address that much.

I’m actually of the opinion that this change will be enough to bridge the gap. It was 8% on st on retail, and increasing 2 stacks for skb might be enough…we’ll have to see in time though. The bigger deal to me here is that Blizzard chose to nerf skb uptime rather than buff unleashed inferno. I think this was the right move. This will inevitably push combust uptime DOWN which means a shift towards burst. I like the direction, and I’ll wait on the numbers.

@Preheat-illidan

The assumption here is correct. We don’t really track this talent so nothing really changes here. We aren’t really moving much towards the goal of removing maintenance buffs here, but either way its probably a good change since it was a passive buff we didn’t pay attention too.

Yeah I agree. The amount of things to track is still high. I actually think with the new phoenix flames/living bomb interactions it actually went up lol. People who have played this spec for years won’t blink, but it would be a nightmare for new players. The combination of Spontaneous Combustion, Phoenix flames talents, Sunfury, and TA leads to an ABSURD amount of resources lol. You almost don’t have to hard cast anymore.

@Preheat-illidan

Also, please remove TA and tune the damage around not having it.

If they removed TA and compensated with NOTHING at all just straight removed it from the tree and left a blank hole…it would be celebrated. The reason for this is the randomness of this talent is wildly imbalanced between the specs and is not really often satisfying. It feels decent on fire mage, but on arcane it feels awful. Frost is ok…but again it doesn’t feel good its jarring. I would like something more regular and predictable, or I would like the proc to be restricted to resource generation.

[Lanfear-tichondrius]

Alright I spent a bunch of time on sunfury fire. Here the things i found:

Unleashed Inferno vs SKB

• We were able to do some simming on retail for the 10 stack skb (nerfed from 8), and it appears that this largely balances the two talents pretty solidly. Really strong change here imo!

Fire Mage Burst

• With the emergence of unleashed inferno, the reduction in uptime on combust with skb, sunfury, explosivo, and a huge fevered incantation buff fire is truly becoming burstier. I love this direction. I also think having a living bomb proc like crazy during combust is a fun, satisfying, and unique way to add burst without a boring percent damage increase or something.

Lit Fuse and Living Bomb

• Explosivo is currently broken. While in combust, the lit fuse buff doesn’t show up on your buff bar, and every cast of phoenix flames just auto applies living on your target without any interaction with hot streak. I’m assuming this just isn’t fully implemented yet. I do like the idea of this talent as it could provide a fun burst option and incentivize alternating fireblast and pf in combust.
• I like the idea of living bomb, but this is going to seriously need tuning. I tried playing around living bomb as hard as humanly possible, and it simply just does no damage at the moment haha. I’m not really sure what niche or target count we want it to be effective at? Do we envision this only in mass aoe? 5 targets? Is this supposed to have some place in single target if we invest hard enough? With three single target or low target talents in a row I’m imagining that there is supposed to be SOME single target focus here.
• I would like blast zone if living bomb was properly tuned. This talent is going to hinge on tuning.

Flamestrike

• Flamestrike is in a horrible place. With the tree tilting harder towards living bomb, charring embers/phoenix reborn value has skyrocketed, and flamestrike has no interaction with them. In addition, pyroblast/ignite/living bomb are exciting and fast paced, but flamestrike is DREADFULLY slow paced and boring.
• Mark of the firelord and ashen feather are dangerous talents for balance. Flamestrike and ignite are eternally at war, and empowering ignite more is a very dangerous game. This will need a lot of attention when tuning. Right now it feels like flamestrike is a major loser in the preferred aoe space.
• Majesty of the phoenix simply feels way way way too weak for a capstone. I think this talent would be nice if it made flamestrike more fast paced/more impactful. The cast time reduction is forgettable, and the flat 20% damage increase is entirely invisible. What about this talent causing the next 2 flamestrikes to apply living bomb to up to 5 targets?
• Majesty of the phoenix and firefall should swap places. A flamestrike talent is tied closely to phoenix reborn…a talent it doesnt work with. Firefall has strong synergy with the Phoenix reborn talent and would make WAY more sense there.

User Interface and Buff Tracking

• Lit fuse is very difficult to track without weak auras (one)
• Charring embers is very difficult to track without weak auras (two)
• Phoenix Reborn is very difficult to track without weak auras (three)
• Feel the burn is very difficult to track without weak auras (four)
• Improved Scorch is very difficult to track without weak auras (five)
• Burden of Power is very difficult to track without weak auras (six)
• Glorious Incandescence is very difficult to track without weak auras (seven)
• Spellfire orb progress is very difficult to track without weak auras (eight)
• That’s eight things I need to track up from four-ish on retail. This would be nine if I was playing SKB. We went the wrong way lol.
• Not only do we have to track 8 or 9 auras, we also have to have our eyes at our feet, on the nameplate of the target, and searching our buffs bar to play this without weak auras. I unfortunately do not have three eyes lol.
• Thank you for the hyperthermia graphic! Excellent clear addition.

Sunfury

• The phoenix is randomly attacking anything in range. I would hope the intent here once fully implemented is for it to target my target.
• Sunfury orbs stack to 3 passively out of combat, but does not go to 5 if you talent in to Rondurmancy. This really cuts value out of the talent on pull.
• The 50 second recharge rate on orbs out of combat to me is too high. 60 seconds between prog pulls is common, and this would likely interfere with raid. 2.5 minutes is too long to generate the three orbs you will want on every pull. 20 seconds per orb for a total of 60 seconds recharge is the sweet spot in my mind for this.
• You can cast combust out of combat to generate your 4th and 5th orb…probably something we should prevent or set the orbs to 3 on combat start if that’s the intent.
• Gravity lapse is really awesome, but I’d like the option to keep blast wave on sunfury if I skip gravity lapse because I want the knock. You can do this, but you pollute the phoenixes exceptional spell pool with crowd control spells.
• It appears gravity lapse now lifts the targets further off the ground? Either way it looks a LOT better than it did week one, or I am crazy and this is always how its been.
• I struggle to get to 5 arcane orbs ever with Rondurmancy. Orb generation is just a tad too slow to ever utilize this talent.

Time Anomaly

• I would really like to see another pass at this spell. I really don’t find it satisfying. The randomness of the procs don’t provide me a satisfying type of randomness. The procs are also so short that its stressful constantly reacting to them. I do like variety and randomness, but this spell feels out of place and unfun. Pyromaniac and Hyperthermia are FUN rng…time anomaly is just unfun rng.

General Thoughts

• Controlled destruction seems out of place entirely and incredibly weak.
• From the ashes feels really really bad in a tree that has incentivized casting phoenix flames so much when its competition makes phoenix flames crit. I would maybe update this talent’s design to interact with new talents and not just mastery.
• I’m unreasonably excited for pyromaniac. I can’t wait to try it.
• Deep impact seems to be a little boring to me. It’s hard to take this talent compared to something like living bomb unless its just tuned higher.
• Spontaneous Combustion is quite fun to play. It kills the downtime in front of combust in a satisfying way.

[Lanfear-tichondrius]

I had some more time to sit down with Sunfury and Frostfire last night, and I was able to get some more opinions to share.

Phoenix Flames Economy

I really like the effort to give this spell purpose, but I think we went too far. In the base fire mage kit, we accomplished this with the addition of Lit Fuse/Living Bomb. Assuming this is tuned to be more worthwhile long term, this would give phoenix flames an obvious and permanent niche with fire mage.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is we doubled down on giving phoenix flames a purpose through the hero trees. With sunfury, we are using a phoenix flames every 6 hot streaks to call down the mini meteors for exceptionally valuable fireblast cooldown reduction while frostfire uses phoenix flames to consume excess frost for meteor cooldown reduction. The dual purpose of phoenix flames between the base tree and the hero trees leaves us incredibly starved for charges given its longer cooldown.

Is the tree broken now? No it’s not actually. We are able to choose Charring Embers and Phoenix Reborn to give us a very healthy amount of phoenix flames to satisfy both the base tree Lit Fuse and the hero trees Excess Frost/Glorious Incandescence.

So again, what’s the problem?

The problem is we have seven capstones, and the solution to the phoenix flames economy nearly requires you to choose charring embers and phoenix reborn. It it very difficult to spec in to some of the other capstones because you are extremely starved for resources.

Which would I choose to keep between lit fuse and the hero talents? Because hero talents are supposed to be evergreen, I think it is a dangerous precedent to bake phoenix flame’s purpose in to hero talents. If you decide to expand that system in the future by adding more and more hero trees, you will be at a major risk of needing to have some phoenix flame purpose in every tree you make. I think it is a much healthier space to be to tune lit fuse/living bomb to be impactful and keep phoenix flames in this space. I would like it if the current phoenix flames interaction in the hero talents was removed and baked in to something more passive to the spec’s rotation.

TLDR: Phoenix Flames gained too many uses in the rework. i think one of those uses should be removed to promote talent diversity.

The Explosivo Catch 22

I think that this talent is incredibly interesting in that it provides a very unique take on burst, but it has a very serious flaw that leads to tragic collisions in fire gameplay. Explosivo is currently bugged and non functional on alpha (phoenix flames applies it every press in single target, in aoe it simply doesn’t proc), so this is more of a theory crafting space than anything. I want to provide two diverging paths for this feedback: one if explosivo procs a ton and one where it procs less.

• A lot of procs: In this case, explosivo will basically proc every single hot streak you consume. In this world when living bomb is tuned to do an appropriate amount of damage this will feel INCREDIBLE. The problem is that if it procs every hot streak and does significant damage, you will never have the time and space to utilize fire blasts. This is more pronounced in the unleashed inferno/sunfury style when you only have a limited combustion window and your phoenix flames spam drops meteors which reduce the cd on the fire blast charges that…haven’t been used yet.

• The procs are made more rare: In this case, explosivo will proc a lot less to allow room for fire blast to be pressed and the rest of the rotation to breath. The problem here is that by doing this, you will only have maybe one or two opportunities to press it, and this talent will feel like wasted space…a whole talent point for 1 living bomb every minute?

I think that the activation condition on lit fuse for the purposes of explosivo should be changed. I think that during combustion only, pyro blast/flamestrike should consume lit fuse procs when explosivo is talented. This would allow you to properly tune and balance the proc rate of this without causing undue disruption to the game play loop.

This affects unleashes inferno in that you simply cant utilize the cramming of sunfury mini meteors in to combustion and reduces the number of pyroblasts/hot streaks you consume…which leads to less sunfury orbs and less cool down reduction on future combusts

This affects sun kings blessing in that it reduces the number of pyros you can pump out leading to less uptime on combustion.

If Explosivo is tied to phoenix flames, you cannot balance this talent to be worthwhile. It will either be toxic to the rotation or so unimpactful that it will be ignored because it does no damage.

Ignite vs Flamestrike

I think that blizzard did a great job of balancing ignite and flamesrike on retail. The meta fire mages pretty much exclusively use ignite cleave, but flamestrike is in a LOT better place than most people know it is. The vast majority of fire mages should be playing a hybrid build that allows you to flex between ignite and flamestrike at will.

I really fear that the balance blizzard struck here is in serious danger on alpha. the absolute POWER of ignite right now is insane. On single target it is approaching BFA levels of damage balance. With the addition of Ashen feather, Mark of the Firelord, Controlled Destruction, and the ease of access to Master of Flame, it is going to be incredibly difficult to justify flamestrike in my opinion outside of something like mass bursty aoe. Mass bursty aoe is an extremely rare damage profile to encounter in the current game design.

Also in choosing to flamesrtike, you are forgoing cooldown reduction from Kindling. I would like to see flamestrike added to kindling.

Feel the Burn

This talent is in its death throes. It’s impact is incredibly small and its trending more and more towards a passive maintenance buff. I think it provided a very valuable maintenance loop that fire mage desperately needed for many years, but the addition of frostfire mastery and orbs from sunfury has made this talent have no home anymore. I would like it if this talent was changed from blaster master design to infernal cascade.

The intent would be to change it from a meaningless passive 3 stack of mastery that is SO ignorable and small that it feels pointless to a stacking fire damage done buff that is only usable during combustion. This would make the talent almost completely passive with a few tricks to get it up to max stacks quickly while making it feel impactful again. It would shift more damage in to combustion where feel the burn is already mostly focused to while relieving one of the maintenance buffs we have to juggle. It would also continue to shift the profile of fire back to burst which is a direction most every fire mage on the planet loves.

Frostfire Fire Mage (FFFire)

I was finally able to pull my attention off of sunfury (absolute banger tree if I ever lose this phoenix I’m going to be unreasonably upset ) and I spent a few hours playing frostfire.

• The gameplay loop of Frostfire mastery leading to excess frost and fire is excellent. It interacts with my rotation and gameplay in a very satisfying way. i feel rewarded for hitting 8 stacks of frost and fire, and it really holds my attention long term as a flatter damage profile.
• Frostfire empowerment proc rate needs to be nerfed slightly. Whenever you get a proc, the gameplay loop becomes: Meteor on cd → phoenix flames → pyroblast → fire blast → pyro blast. This seems innocent enough, but you also have to do this game play loop when meteor lands and when pressing your major cooldown, AND when you get your guaranteed proc from pressing your major CD. Once I got used to the frequency of this happening and started gaming the timers, I could achieve a ludicrously high uptime on maximum stacks of frostfire mastery. I don’t think it needs to be tuned down much at all, but the frequency is just a little TOO high right now. I would like to see more stacks required for excess frost/fire, but also a longer timer on when the buff resets.
• SKB is in trouble. I have intentionally put this feedback positioned right after the above paragraph because we all thought SKB would pair better with FFFire. It does not. in between all of those frostfire empowerment game loops is the need to hard cast a pyro to activate SKB. This leads to frequent and frustrating collisions in the rotation where I have to choose to either munch frostfire empowerment gameplay loop procs or SKB stacks. I often find myself annoyed when SKB hits 10 stacks because its disrupting the frostfire gameplay loop. If the frostfire loop were tuned back a bit in frequency this would resolve itself.
• Lit Fuse works better with FFFire because you have a more regular infusion of phoenix flames.
• Deep impact is actually a very fun talent with FFFire. Someone on altered time pointed out the build where you minimize meteor cooldown and simply spam it as often as possible. This is a very fun gameplay loop leading to a lot of satisfying meteor + comet storm presses. Meteor + Comet Storm is the highlight of the hero tree.

Living Bomb

I think we should look at the square root target scaling if we are going to target cap the spread.

[Kaivax]

Hello Mages!

We have some Arcane Mage changes hitting the War Within Alpha today, and we want to go over them here. As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we have goals that span all mage specializations.

These are:

• Allow you to acquire each specialization’s core gameplay with less talent point investment.
• Simplify rotational complexity.
• Provide new nodes that can help you adapt your damage profile to better match a given encounter’s demands.
• Provide competitive choice nodes that let you opt-out of complex gameplay.

Today we’re talking about Arcane, so let’s dive into the specifics.

Radiant Spark
Arcane Mage has long had the reputation of being one of the most complicated and skill expressive specializations in World of Warcraft. A large contributing factor to this is the way in which Radiant Spark asks you to optimize your rotation. Radiant Spark’s damage bonus was so substantial and so dramatically punished you for using Arcane Missiles, that you had to go about your big burn in a very scripted fashion. With the introduction of Shifting Power, Arcane Mage gained access to mini-burns that can also utilize Radiant Spark, but to facilitate optimal usage of the spell those also had to be very scripted-- and worse yet-- your mini burn script was different than your big burn script.

All of that to say, we don’t think that the exciting and challenging part of Arcane should be the memorization of a large script. Arcane’s burn gameplay should support and be enhanced by the mechanics and talents you have, not circumvent them. We feel confident that the removal of Radiant Spark in its current fashion is the right path forward to achieve that goal.

The soul of Radiant Spark will live on, however, through a new talent: Magi’s Spark. Magi’s Spark accomplishes a similar goal to Radiant Spark by making Touch of the Magi more of an exciting moment, but it now rewards you for utilizing each of your core rotational Arcane spells.

Opt-In Complexity
We’re interested in preserving Arcane’s legacy as a skill-expressive specialization, but we must also recognize that there is a considerable population of Arcane Mage players who engage with the specialization for its visual identity and fantasy-- less so for the challenging gameplay. As Arcane Mage currently stands, it does not support simpler playstyles and thus, less informed Arcane Mages will produce very middling results.

Similar to other trees across the game, the Arcane Mage tree is getting some choice nodes and supporting talents that are meant to provide meaningful throughput while offsetting some of the specialization’s inherent complexity-- and maybe letting you remove a button or two off of your action bars along the way.

As with Fire Mage, we plan on tuning the more “challenging” talents to be the most competitive choices, but we will be making sure the gap between a complex talent and its simpler alternative is small enough that you don’t feel like you’re making a huge mistake by opting out of the complexity.

Arcane Missiles
Arcane Missile’s damage and excitement was difficult to balance alongside its accessibility. If Arcane Missiles ever became too powerful, it would dominate Arcane’s rotation and become its highest priority in all situations. By restricting access to Arcane Missiles to only be castable when you have Clearcasting, it enables us to increase its damage and expand its range of effects in a more healthy way without compromising the rest of your rotation.

Clearcasting Effects
We’ve observed that there has been some frustration around effects that key into consuming Clearcasting since there can rarely be long streaks where players won’t get a proc. We’re watching the discussion around these effects, and are being sensitive to the frustration these effects might cause. Sunfury and Spellslinger both grant increased access to Clearcasting, which should smooth out the rate at which you receive Clearcasting and quell some of that frustration, but if this still ends up being a large point of frustration, expect us to take action on it.

Complexity
Increasing the approachability of Arcane Mage was a big pillar of this talent tree redesign, and we hope that those of you who have been intimidated by Arcane’s complexity in the past will give the specialization another shot once you have access to these changes.

As we gather feedback and continue to iterate on these changes, keep in mind that our goal moving forward is to move the skill expression of Arcane Mage into lining various buffs and effects up in preparation for your burn. Mastering the new talents and effects, and ensuring you’re managing these in a proper fashion to best utilize them during Touch of the Magi will be the differentiating factor between good and great Arcane Mages. Expect future changes to support this vision.

That’s all for this update. We’re excited to read your feedback on this new iteration of Arcane Mage!

[Dorovon-illidan]

Frost Mage Feedback

In addition to the Arcane changes above, today’s build also had some changes to Frost Mage.

@Linxy

Frost

• New Talent: Death’s Chill – While Icy Veins is active, damaging an enemy with Frostbolt increases spell damage by 1%.
• Fractured Frost has been redesigned – While Icy Veins is active, your Frostbolts hit up to 2 additional targets. Now a 1-point talent.
• Hailstones is now a 1-point talent.
• Fractured Frost and Freezing Winds have swapped places in the talent tree.
• Cold Front and Coldest Snap have swapped places in the talent tree.

Removal of Some Two-Point Nodes

Overall these changes are great. In general, two-point nodes usually aren’t very exciting and having more points to spend elsewhere makes the tree better. In particular, Frost will be able to more reliably balance its builds between single target and AoE with the extra points. Currently in Dragonflight, it is often difficult to justify changing your raid build even when there is some cleave in an encounter.

These changes could potentially go even further, as selecting Splintering Cold and either Wintertide or Snowstorm is required to path through the tree and those nodes aren’t particularly interesting with two points either.

Deathborne Playstyle

I think these changes are better than what was in the tree before. Glacial Spike is a fun talent, but there are a lot of players who are really looking for a more passive alternative and this gives them an option to play something else. Unfortunately, Deathborne and Death’s Fathom were quite problematic at the end of Shadowlands. In single target situations these talents are mostly fine because they are probably tuned such that ignoring everything else and spamming Frostbolts is not optimal, but there are likely to be issues in AoE situations.

These new talents are very similar to the build in Shadowlands that utilized Deathborne, Cold Front, and Death’s Fathom. In AoE situations with this build, it was optimal to ignore Ice Lance, Blizzard, and Flurry. This left the best rotation during Deathborne to consist of Frostbolt and Frozen Orb only. This is not a very compelling rotation and ideally something should be done to ensure that more spells stay in the rotation. Blizzard in particular potentially falling out of the rotation on AoE is not very intuitive and makes several AoE talents useless. One possible solution would be to adjust the triggering spells for Cold Front and potentially Death’s Chill so that using more spells than just Frostbolt is encouraged and another solution would be to adjust Cold Front procs to do something else that isn’t as strong against a lot of targets.

Additionally, it’s worth mentioning that Cold Front is pretty awkward to play with as it stands. Simply the fact that it launches a Frozen Orb in the direction you are facing is problematic if you aren’t closely monitoring your stacks and it also doesn’t work well with complex terrain. I think the node would be more appealing if the proc were to work more reliably or if it procced something other than Frozen Orb.

Snowstorm

Prior to these announced changes, the three nodes in the Frost tree that really needed attention were Snowstorm, Fractured Frost, and Cold Front. These changes help with Fractured Frost and Cold Front, but Snowstorm is still overshadowed by and has poor synergy with Coldest Snap. Ideally, this node should be replaced with something new.

Lack of Choice

I think it’s worth specifically pointing out that as it stands, Frost Mages don’t have a lot of choice in the tree. When spending the first 20 points, the only real options to consider after spending the obvious 19 points in Dragonflight are Frozen Touch, Ice Caller, and sometimes Deep Shatter. Frostbite and Subzero are situationally good, but they are hardly popular. In situations with a lot of AoE, Ice Caller is the obvious choice and in situations without AoE, Frozen Touch is the obvious choice. Adding even one new talent node to consider with these early points would greatly improve the design of the tree.

Closing Thoughts

Lastly, the Mage specialization trees as a whole do look much better with these changes and I’m happy to see continued iteration on the class.

[Lanfear-tichondrius]

One small note for fire is that I would probably update the tooltip on controlled destruction. It currently reads:

• Damaging a target with pyroblast increases the damage it receives from ignite by 2%

I called this talent extremely weak before because I didn’t know that was 2% stacking. This is a really cool and interesting addition to ignite that allows strong tuning capability. The recent reduction to 1% per pyro and capping it out much lower that the previous 99% at what appears to be 25% on alpha is also a good change allowing it to ramp up to maximum value in a reasonable amount of time.

Some other points, some reiterated:

• living bomb tuned well is the most important aspect of this tree. The damage profile and build possibilities hinge entirely on living bomb being a featured part of the spec in the next expansion.
• I tried playing Unleashed inferno fire mage without Spontaneous Combustion or Phoenix Reborn, and the spec simply does not function; you are constantly at zero or 1 phoenix flame charges. At least one of these two talents is required to make use of living bomb and the hero tree function of phoenix flames. It is good that we have the talent options to fix this already in the tree, but it overly requires you to take these for basic functionality. I had to ignore all phoenix flames uses outside of combustion to make it somewhat viable, but combustion has a 1 minute cooldown while phoenix flames recharge time baseline for all 3 stacks is in excess of the combustion cooldown… I think we need more phoenix flames charges baseline, or the uses for phoenix flames need to be dialed back. Alternatively, the cooldown on phoenix flames should be greatly reduced. When sunfury uses a phoenix flames every 6 hot streaks and the cooldown of phoenix flames is significantly in excess of 6 hot streaks, you basically ignore a lot of the hero tree outside of combust unless you force pick these talents. I will say though that this is better on frostfire than it is on unleashed inferno because frostfire has phoenix flames CDR.
• Charring embers and phoenix reborn are too punishing. If you go dry on phoenix flames and charring embers drops off of your target, it can take 30 seconds to recover from this error because you need 1 charge to get phoenix reborn back via charring embers, and THEN you need a second charge of phoenix flames to use phoenix reborn. Phoenix reborn should simply grant 2 additional charges instead of refunding uses. This is way too punishing of a talent otherwise when its basically a required choice in all builds in all target counts in all content.

[Arittamordio-sargeras]

Frost Feedback : After playing around with the specs using both Frostfire and Spellslinger.

The overall changes of some of the talents are nice, but there are still some problematic talents that are DOA and the new ones work against the new hero system.

Fractured frost and Death’s Chill

The new perk while offering some variety on options especially in an AOE setting. They feel REALLY counter intuitive to frosts kit as well as they do not work well with the hero talents being added in. Both Spellslinger and Frostfire want you to use your procs and spells to consume things like Excessive frost/fire or Winterchill to generate splinters. The new talents are heavily build around just using frost bolt it feel like your are either forced into spamming FB during your entire Icy veins to get high buffs to then use those spells. This feels counter to wanting to use your cds to get them on cooldown sooner. And if you are spamming FB to build up things you are not interacting with your hero talents either since you don’t want to waste gcd’s on flurry or ice lance. It not very clear on what the players should do along with their hero talents. And given that you stated you want to make rotations not feel more hectic or confusing this is doing the exact opposite and without any real good indication on which you should do or prioritize, new players to the class or specs may struggle.

There also if you decide to continue down this route will have to be a change to how death chill works, frostfire bolt replaces frost bolt when cast. And it does not work with fractured frost. This instantly devalues both perks in an AOE situation which is where they would be their strongest.

Now looking at the build options for AOE the talent offers some choices. However the same issues of no interplay with the new hero talents is already putting up some big red flags for these. Further more it again promotes frost bolt spamming which does not interact with anything within the spec. No interaction with FoF or Winterchill. Even trying to make a build where you would ACTUALLY use cold front you cant because their isn’t enough points to do it without losing out on things you still really want.

Some Ideas for changes

I think first and foremost there needs to be some changes on how deaths chill and fractured frost works with other elements of the frost kit. They are dedicated to your filler spell which goes against frosts proc generation and usage.

I think Cold Front should be changed from flurry to Ice Lances (Or have both) and Death’s chill feels like it should be Frost bolt , Ice lance and flurry.

Next id remove Deep Shatter and Snow storm. And possibly change winter tide and/or Splintering Cold into a 1 point talent. The first two talents are just eating up space, While the other 2 are just a lot for what little they bring.

Then I’d move Freezing Rain to where Snow Storm currently is, and Freezing Wind where Deep Shatter currently is.

Lastly Id move cold Front up to where Freezing Rain currently is. And add 1 new Talent above Coldest snap which would be 1 point and would basically be Glacial Fragments from Shadowlands.

This would drastically make the AoE rotation feel more fluid as a lot of the kit works with each other rather then against. Each FoF is building to a new orb. And the use of Ice lance while a blizzard is down is going to allow for more AoE options.

For single target the simple changes to Death’s Chill lets you gain power from still doing your rotation and doesn’t make you feel like you have to choose if you should use your flurry or ice lance to consume your excessive frost or fire or winter’s chill for splinters.

I feel like these are reasonable and will overall improve the experience of the spec and allow for the hero talents to work with the build rather then against it as it currently is.

[Lanfear-tichondrius]

For the phoenix flames issue, I think adding cooldown reduction to glorious incandescence on top of the fire blast cooldown reduction would go a LONG way to fixing the problem with requiring the two charring embers talents for sunfury. After gaining more comfort with frostfire fire, Excess fire providing 10 seconds of cooldown reduction really carries that hero tree’s ability to have enough phoenix flames to operate. Getting 2.5 seconds of cooldown reduction per meteor (10 seconds per use total) on phoenix flames with glorious incandescence would absolutely free up the choice available for sunfury. If the hero tree requires more use of phoenix flames, I think the tree should provide the means to support that extra use.

Here is the talent tree that feels like the minimum for sunfury:

• 8DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAiIkIJiEKJpEhUCSaSCAAAAAAA

To me, fire’s ire is potentially one place you could free up two talent points for use in hyperthermia/meteor, but It feels very difficult to venture in to the living bomb side of the tree because of those 2 talent points in charring embers. I feel like my choice is heavily restricted in terms of my ability to design the talent tree to fit the encounter when I have potentially only a single talent point to play around with at the bottom of the tree.

Also as another question…is the living bomb from excess fire supposed to scale with living bomb talents?

[Mathamazhen-wyrmrest-accord]

I wanted to throw down some quick feedback from the past few weeks of Alpha, based on some of my observations with Fire.

Phoenix Flames was always a button that was pretty awkward to hit, and has had a lot of work done to make it more appealing in this version of Fire. I’d argue it’s almost too appealing at this point. A large number of interactions rely on PF usage, which means that a lot of the support talents for PF are now overvalued. In practice, it doesn’t feel bad, but as Lan stated above it’s pretty hard to make a workable build without the support. An additional tuning point I wanted to mention for it, would be to do something about From the Ashes. With how the tree is now, taking it over Alexstraza’s Fury is pretty bad from a gameplay feel. I think this would be a good talent to rework to be the lynchpin of a Phoenix Flames lite build for Fire. Playing with it as-is let me have a mostly functional rotation with minimal PF, but the tree really is lacking any way to not have overreliance on the button.

One of the stated goals of the rework is to make AoE outside of Ignite to be more appealing. Living Bomb support feels good, even if it does take quite a few points to get all of, but it relies pretty heavily on being tuned well. And, while it’s nice it doesn’t have another bind to take up, having another interaction tied to Phoenix Flames is, as stated, a bit much at times. Flamestrike was another thing mentioned at being wanted to be more desirable, but even with the bits of quality of life it has on this new tree, it still doesn’t feel that great to play. It doesn’t have the same travel time interactions that Pyroblast has so it can be awkward to play around, and it feels like it lacks impact. Ignite spread is a playstyle pretty unique to Fire,while Living Bomb is iconic and fun to watch. Meanwhile, the mass AoE Flamestrike provides is not particularly unique or engaging, to me at least. And, even if it were to be reworked to be more like a finisher… Meteor comfortably fulfills that fantasy. I’d like to see either additional functionality added to Flamestrike to make it more appealing, or for some philosophy shift on what it’s for, exactly.

Scorch, in the current design of the tree, feels like an oddity. I love having Scorch. I never want to not have Scorch. With how low impact and how few interactions it has, I can see a world where you grab Firestarter or Lit Fuse and just ignore it forever unless it’s aggressively tuned. Scorch is great for execute usually, but now with the removal of the original Controlled Destruction, we’re even less execute focused despite some attractive flip talents. I’d love to see Scorch given a bit more love or even for the button itself to be baseline.

These two aren’t spec specific, but I wanted to bring them up. It’s great that Temporal Warp has been axed, but I’d love to see Time Anomaly reworked to be something a bit less random. Right now it functions as what is effectively an odd chimera of Memory of Lucid Dreams and Vision of Perfection, and the combined effects with RNG on RNG can create some frustrating friction and variance for all three specs. I’d personally love to see it toned down into just random resource regen or something.

[Lanfear-tichondrius]

I’ve had some time to digest and play with the new fire changes, and I just wanted to say that with these changes, it’s the first time since BFA and masterful corruption fire mage where I’ve hit combustion and just felt awesome. You guys were able to put the cool back in to combust in a major way. It’s extremely bursty now, and the graphical impact of hitting combustion is unparalleled especially in aoe with flamestrike and living bomb. To me this week’s notes really really really brought the spec in to an incredible place. Pressing combustion is absolutely an addicting adrenaline rush again.

I have a few things to give feedback on, but I’m approaching a place where the negatives feel more like nitpicks than serious problems.

Transferring Phoenix Flames to Fire Blast

This was a brilliant change and shift in direction. By removing the sunfury and lit fuse uses of phoenix flames, I feel that a lot of problems got resolved all in one swoop.

• Buff tracking got easier as both Glorious Incandescence and lit fuse became more rotational. This eased a lot of the buff tracking need while still having a small skill expression moment in lining up a Glorious Incandescence proc to coincide with combustion so you can get 2 waves of meteors landing to start combustion.
• Combustion feels GREAT. I no longer need to interrupt my rotational flow in combust to consume sunfury or lit fuse procs. They simply happen while maximizing my hot streak usage. This simplified the play greatly.
• Explosivo and lit fuse now can be consumed immediately without worrying about phoenix flame economy. Living bomb now feels exciting rather than annoying because you no longer have to interrupt your rotation to consume the buff.
• I found myself exploring so many more combinations of talents in the tree only taking phoenix flames talents because I wanted to for the spell and not because I felt required to.
• I was actually able to opt out of phoenix flames entirely except the initial point if I wanted to which freed up an incredible amount of choice in the tree. Even opted out, I found that phoenix flames was a good and comfortable filler during combustion while I waited for Glorious Incandescence meteors to fall.

Flamestrike

• The addition of flamestrike to kindling was a very positive move in the right direction. I feel like flamestrike now has a place in the filler rotation where I’m not trolling my cooldown reduction, and it feels rewarding and fun to press. I had barely talented flamestrike before tonight, and post addition to kindling I have been playing around with a ton of combinations all with flamestrike. Great simple change.
• I would like to see flamestrike added to the spells that can cycle phoenix reborn. It’s a bit weird right now having phoenix reborn be so disconnected from flamestrike. I find myself stopping flamestrike as a filler to pyroblast in order to get the phoenix reborn buff back for combustion.
• Maybe majesty of the phoenix could also make flamestrike apply charring embers given that flamestrike is at a disadvantage in terms of generating phoenix reborn buffs?
• Lining up phoenix reborn with combustion using unleashed inferno leading to a rotation of phoenix flames → 2xflamestrike repeat is pretty satisfying if majesty of the phoenix is tuned to be worth it.
• The number of nodes necessary to fully empower flamestrike is really low which is GREAT. It allows me to grab full power aoe with minimal investment leading to a LARGE variety of build options and damage profiles.

Unleashed Inferno

• Actively tuning up unleashed inferno I think was a great move. Once we get weak auras rolling I think the combination of frostfire empowerment procs and phoenix reborn would have buffed skb to be too far ahead of unleashed inferno again. 60% feels like a really nice middle ground between the talents where both will be played.
• This talent brings the BURST now, and I love it. The 60 second combustion timings feel very good and well paced while also retaining an incredible amount of burstiness.

Living Bomb

• I’m seeing about 15% of my damage in living bomb now in both single target and aoe after the 100% buff. I think that this is a MUCH better place to be. I have no idea if 15% is too much or too little, but this feels dramatically better than what we had before. It finally has substance to it.
• The visuals on 5 bombs going off is incredible. I love it.

Some random minor issues and thoughts

• Sunfury arcane phoenix is still targeting very randomly. I would like it to follow my target so minor throw away adds don’t soak greater pyroblasts
• Greater pyroblasts do literal zero damage
• Flame Accelerant buff is consumed by hot streaks
• Out of combat sunfury orb generation is a bit too slow
• I am running in to mana problems at 34% haste after 2 minutes of combat
• We are forced out of blast wave with no way to talent back in to it in PVE with sunfury
• Absolutely can’t wait for pyromaniac to be implemented. Excited to try it out.

Overall

I think it’s pretty clear from this latest feedback how I feel. I think fire mage has been designed to a place now that meets the stated goals of the alpha with style. There is choice in the tree, multiple play styles are interesting and available, BURST IS BACK IN A BIG WAY making combustion feel powerful, buff tracking has been alleviated slightly, and the visual aspect of the class is 11/10.

[Poram-area-52]

Sharing this feedback on behalf of a frosty friend:

Frost Feedback

Let me preface this feedback by summarizing the current state of Frost. The gameplay is the best it’s been in a long time, possibly ever. The 10.1.5 rework was a major success: figuring out how to efficiently shatter Glacial Spikes is a fun minigame; the Coldest Snap combo is satisfying and makes the AoE rotation more engaging; mastery is useful without being oppressive to active talents. Current set bonuses also add to this by making the Glacial Spike minigame relevant in AoE. There are still a couple of pain points, such as the reliance on freeze effects in AoE (really frustrating during Sanguine and Raging weeks), but they’re relatively minor.

However, while the gameplay is great, the talent tree doesn’t really accomplish what it’s meant to. The choices are limited, pathing is annoying, there are many dead talents, etc. Some of these problems were identified in the original post.

Spells with High Point Investment

Frost has many spells that are incomplete until you spend 2 or more talent points. The best example here is Flurry. Without Shatter, Brain Freeze and Perpetual Winter, the spell feels quite non-functional and certainly doesn’t support the core gameplay. Another two spells that come to mind are Blizzard (requires Ice Caller) and Ice Lance (requires Fingers of Frost or Flurry).

The end result is that a lot of these talents feel like padding. Fingers of Frost especially is quite surprising, given that Hot Streak and Clearcasting are already baseline.

Lack of Choice

The way the tree is set up forces too many talent points, leaving not enough free points for any interesting choice. The biggest offender here is the second talent tier. You have two core talents to unlock: Icy Veins and Splitting Ice. Picking Icy Veins requires 4 talent points and the only choice here is Wintertide vs Snowstorm. Similarly, unlocking the path to Splitting Ice requires another 3-4 talent points with the choice being Splintering Cold vs Subzero. However, since Subzero is extremely situational, you’ll almost always spend 4 points. Snowstorm is in a similar position, leaving Wintertide as the default choice. After these 8 points, you need to spend a point on Perpetual Winter and any reasonable build will also spend a point on Comet Storm. This leaves us with only 2 talent points that can be freely spent.

The main issue with the second tier is that the core talents are mostly at the bottom of the tier, hidden behind two-point nodes. This tier has too many two-point nodes in general and could use some point reduction and a few new talents. Third tier also has some issues, but more on that below.

Dead Talents

Frost currently has 4 talents that are never picked: Fractured Frost, Cold Front, Splintering Ray, and Snowstorm. The first two received some updates in alpha, which leaves us with Splintering Ray and Snowstorm. Splintering Ray could be made relevant with a simple number tuning, though whether adding Ray of Frost to the AoE rotation is a good idea isn’t clear. Snowstorm, on the other hand, has been supplanted by Coldest Snap, which makes Cone of Cold relevant in a neater, more satisfying way. The talents also don’t combine very well, since reaching full stacks happens before the 45 sec cooldown elapses.

Glacial Spike Alternative and Deathborne

As was identified in the original post, the talent tree lacks a viable lower complexity option to Glacial Spike. However, the choice of the Deathborne playstyle worries me greatly. The combination of Deathborne, Death’s Fathom and Cold Front legendaries (all of which are available in the new tree in some form) resulted in some of the most degenerate playstyle Frost has experienced recently. The interaction of these three effects was so overpowering that it removed everything but Frostbolt and Frozen Orb from the AoE rotation.

Frost has finally reached a point where core abilities aren’t always at the risk of being dropped from the rotation. Re-adding the Deathborne playstyle would be a massive regression. I realize that any alternative to Glacial Spike needs to fulfill a couple of specific requirements so that it doesn’t immediately slot into the current Glacial Spike gameplay, but turning your filler spell into a massive self-buff as well as an AoE tool (via Cold Front) is very oppressive to the rest of the kit.

Historically, Frost didn’t have many viable playstyles that weren’t either reliant on infinite Icy Veins or dropped core spells from the rotation. However, Deathborne isn’t the only different playstyle. One short lived build that was nonetheless very enjoyable was the Packed Ice build that appeared in the middle of Battle for Azeroth. The Packed Ice azerite trait turned Frozen Orb into a major single target and cleave cooldown via the massive increase to Ice Lance damage.

Time Anomaly

Removing Temporal Warp is an excellent change, but Time Anomaly isn’t without issues. Personally, I think a utility capstone would work better in its place, but if Time Anomaly remains in the tree, it will require some adjustments. Since the talent already uses the deck-of-cards RNG, there are limits on the bad luck. However, these failsafes are useless if the values of the three different procs are so lopsided. The Time Warp proc is very strong. Icy Veins is somewhat weaker, mostly because it’s missing the Water Elemental portion. And then there’s the Fingers of Frost proc, which is virtually worthless. This is the main reason why the talent can be so frustrating. A streak of Fingers of Frost procs feels like you’re missing a talent.

Arcane and Fire versions of this talent have a similar issue, although of lower severity.

[Poram-area-52]

And this is from me!

Arcane Rework

The rework has some positive things and there are some negative things. With that said, Arcane on Alpha is incomplete but still has some fun things going on and I hope that my feedback below won’t be perceived as me being dissatisfied with the attention, I just believe there are some large issues with the rework so far that I do not believe support the stated goals. All of my feedback below assumes a few things, first and foremost, that the rework is not complete, Cackling Energy, Improved Arcane Missiles, and Prodigious Savant will be 1-point talent nodes, and there is still time to make changes to really support the intention behind this design.

Per the post from Kaivax above: Allow you to acquire each specialization's core gameplay with less talent point investment. Arcane’s tree feels desperate for additional talent points. Not only does the trees structure reduce the ability for Arcane players to take any utility points besides the small sacrifice in damage to choose Slipstream over Mana Adept, but the core gameplay of having Arcane Barrage cleave is dangerously difficult to access with its point being much more competitive than in the current tree. But perhaps most importantly to this point, Wizened Wit completely replaces Presence of Mind in any situation due to being a solid throughput increase while Presence of Mind gives utility primarily, and that is if you even have the point for it, since now it is no longer a gate to the extremely strong Siphon Storm ability. A lot of the problems here are simply caused by pitting utility nodes against throughput nodes, Arcane is currently the only Mage tree that has this issue and it feels awful, Slipstream, Chrono Shift, Presence of Mind, and Supernova all need to just be baked into the spec or other talent nodes so that they are staples in the Arcane toolkit, the same is true for Arcane Barrage cleave.

Simplifying rotational complexity, and Opt-In Complexity, I love Magi’s Spark. It preserves the legacy of Radiant Spark and of Arcane being a skill expressive specialization. However, Nether Munitions has some gross implications, most chiefly, this currently does not trigger if you fail, this should really auto-trigger as failing Magi’s Spark already comes at a cost of not benefitting from it’s damage increase. Nether Munitions is compounding that punishment which failure can just be a result of not getting a Clearcasting proc for a period of time and completely out of the players hands as it is a completely random proc still. Furthermore, Nether Munitions has heavy incentives on proccing Magi’s Brand as soon as possible to stack the damage modifier this could make opting out of Magi’s Brand and into Improved Touch of the Magi a much harder alternative to consider. A final note here as well, Magi’s Brand is unbearable to play in AOE, casting an Arcane Blast is just an awful feeling spell when there are multiple targets in play and Leydrinker does nothing to resolve that.

Aether Attunement, Arcane Battery, Time Loop, and Leydrinker, all do indeed provide avenues for adapting damage profiles, however they add a ton to track and pay attention to for optimal practice. This is added to what is already a difficult spec for people to play and I think this is going to be a recipe for people continuing to believe Arcane is an unapproachably difficult spec to play. Leydrinker has no real purpose for existing, we have a spell that consumes Nether Precision and is very satisfying to hit and should be our goto for cleave; embracing Arcane Barrage is a ton of fun and I think Arcane players in general would prefer we went more in the direction of Arcane Soul from Sunfury rather than Equipoise from BFA. Additionally, Arcane Blast has no animation and isn’t a super enjoyable button to hit even when it does notable damage. Lastly on the subject of these stacking buff talents. People voted for the season 3 set bonus because we enjoyed cleaving Arcane Missiles, no one likes Arcane Battery, having to spam Arcane Explosion constantly in dungeons and prepull environments is awful and this is a major quality of life issue for the spec currently. I can’t scream this enough: NO ONE LIKES ARCANE BATTERY.

Arcane Missiles and Clearcasting

Arcane Missiles is best as a proc only spell and I applaud this change back to the Legion variant of only casting it with a Clearcasting proc. However, this also opens up some problems with the spec as it currently exists. Clearcasting and Arcane Missiles have a ton of bugs, some I have reported on Alpha, some have been reported in the SimC github. These need fixes immediately as the fact that Arcane Missiles worked without a proc was the only reason they were tolerable at times. Please have someone fix this bug, it has been a sore point for players since Arcane Explosion was added to benefit from Clearcasting: https://github.com/SimCMinMax/WoW-BugTracker/issues/1078.

Removing the talent Reverberation has had the intended impact of raising Clearcasting procs in AOE, the same is true for Spellslinger’s Splinterstorm and Sunfury’s Arcane Soul. I am still unsure as to whether it is enough. Losing reverberation is also not without a cost, the AOE rotation, specifically for Spellslinger, is much slower paced without Orb Barrage procs and it doesn’t really feel good. This does not hold for Sunfury as Glorious Incandescence effect helps tremendously with the pacing of our AOE rotation, it would be nice if Spellslinger had something similar in place to help with Orb Barrage/Clearcasting dry spells.

Other Noteworthy Issues

With the removal of Radiant Spark and Nether Tempest, there arises a new issue. Arcane Echo is fairly dependent on these abilities to generate frequent procs during Touch of the Magi windows and while Arcane Phoenix generates some additional Echo procs via Meteor and Arcane Surge, it is not in the same ballpark as in Dragonflight. Given the amount of Arcane Splinters you generate as Spellslinger, it seems like adding echo to this would be a lot of fun, but perhaps too much as well.

Orb Barrage is currently nearly as random as you can get with a proc chance. Some form of bad luck protection would be a huge quality of life increase for when this spell has bad luck streaks. Currently this has some rather major implications for Arcane’s viability in the high end key scene in that Arcane can’t really promise to be consistent damage on planned routes.

Talent nodes that are ineffective like Rule of Threes and Concentration are still left to linger likely continuing to have near-zero pick rates due to their negative interaction with Clearcasting. Mana spend reducers are not beneficial for Arcane like they were when Clearcasting proc’d from any source of damage instead of from mana spent - this change also contributes to us spamming Arcane Explosion out of combat.

To echo my frosty friend’s feedback above, removing Temporal Warp was a great move, Time anomaly should definitely go with it. If it’s to stay with us in the future, it would be extremely nice to have a way to anticipate procs, getting Arcane Surge or Time Warp procs when you just cast Arcane Barrage and are casting a 0-charge Arcane Blast is a terrible feeling. It essentially feels like you are missing a talent when the procs are not able to be leveraged properly.

Finally on this list, Arcane Explosion needs an avenue to be used at range. Some fights and encounters simply do not allow range dps to be close to melee, this is easily one of the most requested things in the Altered Time discord for Arcane. While it is interesting to have ranged specs that play differently in AOE, I think the community finds this to be a turn off for the specialization.

Suggestions

• Remove Rule of Threes and Concentration so people aren’t accidentally selecting talents that are pretty unlikely to provide much, if any, throughput.

• Swap Chrono Shift and Mana Adept, we should be able to need to pick a utility to get to Touch of the Magi. Chrono Shift is part of Arcane’s identity and should not be so difficult to obtain. This would also give a balanced alternative to Slipstream.

• Rethink Arcane Battery, Time Loop, and Leydrinker, these are just simply not going to be fun. People don’t want to spam Arcane Explosion out of combat and we don’t care about Arcane Blast cleaving, we just wanted cleaving missiles.

• Munitions should auto-proc even if you fail Magi’s Spark. Then again, replacing Munitions with a talent that auto applies Nether Tempest when you use Touch of the Magi would also be nice in my opinion.

• Orb Barrage should auto-proc if there have been 12 charges expended without a proc.

• Remove Time Anomaly and replace with choice node between Cauterize, Prismatic Barrier, and Cold Snap. Having a lack of defensive parity between mage specs sucks for balance and representation and more often than not this is the cited reason for why people prefer Fire in high end content.

• Consider changing Clearcasting to proc off of damage done from our spells or on casts instead of from Mana spent.

• Create a Havoc-like spell for Arcane Explosion that duplicates the area of effect on a targeted ally, but not the damage of the spell so you’re not incentivized to stack them.

• This has no real gameplay implications but I would also like to formally request that you change the Splinter animations for Spellslinger to be more distinguished in how they travel and look, currently they just blend into Icicles/Arcane Missiles.

I understand that this is a lot of change that I am suggesting, obviously I don’t expect all, or any really, to happen. However I hope that the intention behind these changes that I would make are able to be expressed. Arcane players want access to our identity spells: Presence of Mind, Chrono Shift and Slipstream, rapid-firing Arcane Missiles, hard hitting Arcane Barrages, huge burst of damage that pull threat off seasoned tanks, and our shades of blue, pink, and purple in every animation. These are the things that make Arcane what it is for me and are what I would like to see available to us before we get into the middle of our spec tree.

To end this on a sweeter note, I would like to just garble out all the things I LOVE: Arcane Familiar’s new model, the Energized Familiar talent, removing Nether Tempest and Radiant Spark was good but I hope that you do something with Nether Tempest still, Sunfury is super cool but I also hope for purple Spellfire Spheres but also they are still super cool, Burden of Power and Glorious Incandescence are super fun to use, never having to worry about overcapping haste because of Temporal Warp, never having to worry about using my Time Warp at the wrong time because of Temporal Warp, never having to begrudgingly not use Time Warp because of my group’s strategy (because of Temporal Warp), and Magi’s Spark’s animation is also terrific. I’ll stop here because this could go on for a bit. Thank you for reading my feedback!

[Poram-area-52]

One more from my firey friend:

Fire Rework

This rework is a massive step in the correct direction. Throughout Dragonflight our build options have been very cookie cutter, with little variance even between AOE and ST. While there will always be a ‘meta’ build, I think that the reworked tree provides plenty of opportunity for experimentation and meta shifts with better tuning knobs compared to just Ignite vs Flamestrike.

Maintenance Buffs

The culling of Firemind is no great loss, as Kaivax said we’ve never tracked it in any meaningful way; and the changes to Improved Scorch are an excellent start for the stated intent. The issue that is becoming apparent is that alongside these minor reductions, we’ve gained a large handful of buffs and procs to track. The Abberus tier set alone has three buffs you’re going to need to track- Maintaining Charred Embers, spending Phoenix Reborn procs, ensuring you don’t over cap by reaching 20 Calefaction stacks before spending those Reborn procs. It is a very involved set of talents for just two points. Flame Accelerant has survived the pruning, albeit in an altered form. While this change to it is preferable to the live version, it being consumed by Hot Streak spells and to a lesser extent Fireball makes me believe it is not a very viable talent outside of niche uses like PvP.
Feel the Burn is the buff I am least happy to see survive. With the changes in the 10.1.5 rework to include Pheonix Flames in applying and maintaining the debuff, it has become extremely passive in many ways. It’s not impossible to maintain this buff for over 90% of a fight on live, and this will likely be even easier to accomplish with the additional CDR introduced via this rework. When this is completely passive, it’s boring; and when it’s not and you need to work for it a five second buff is tedious at best. It being a Mastery buff is also problematic in that it’s an additional tuning knob that needs to be considered when balancing Ignite vs Flamestrike/Living Bomb, and can drive down the value of Mastery on gear when it’s tuned poorly, but I would love to see this talent reworked to follow in Infernal Cascade’s footsteps rather than Blaster Master. Infernal Cascade being restricted to combustion had a lot less opportunities for degeneracy.

Cooldown Reduction

Since the initial Dragonflight talent system, Fire Mage has been inundated with various ways of both reducing Combustion’s cooldown and increasing our resource generation. In Shadowlands, Kindling and Pyroclasm were essentially a choice node with massive rotational impacts- Do you want more frequent combusts, or less frequent more impactful combusts. With the loss of this choice, Kindling has become a mandatory selection- as indicated by it’s position in the talent tree. This results in a very up-timey spec with no opportunity to adapt- we either hit the boss or we’re punished for it. Added on top of that are our resource modifications like Fervent Flickering, Fiery Rush, Spontaneous Combustion, and now the Abberus Tier set. On top of that, we have additional modifiers coming in our Hero Talents such as Glorious Incandescence. While these can create a very fun and involved playstyle, it creates a confusing priority system for new fire mages who feel like they’re juggling the entire circus to prevent over capping a resource. I think these talents are the perfect opportunity to create choice nodes, such as Kindling vs. Pyroclasm.87
With Shifting Power also coming into play, our cooldown cycles end up very awkward. We ballpark combust every 54 seconds with Unleashed Inferno, or just over a minute for Sun King’s Blessing. This makes finding fun and impactful trinkets difficult for fire- nothing ever seems to align correctly. Very passive stat sticks or fire and forget trinkets like Belo’relos become preferred because they don’t need to interact with our kit in any meaningful way.

AoE: Where is my cursor?

I completely understand the reasoning behind trying to reign in ignite as a competitive playstyle; it’s a very powerful damage profile as we’ve seen the last few seasons. My primary concern is that the alternative Flamestrike and the reworked Living Bomb passive effects all but require you to use an [@cursor] macro to function correctly. Not doing so is a damage loss, and doing so means that your cursor is held captive the entirety of your rotation. Reticle casts should be reserved for ‘skill shot’ spells such as meteor, that happen far less frequently. In current design, with Fuel the Fire allowing us to chain Flamestrike in the same manner as Pyroblast means that during combat you can’t easily mouseover your teammate and decurse them, you can’t mouseover Polymorph the Incorporeal between your damage globals. It’s a very toxic relationship we have with our mouse and when you’re casting 450 of these spells throughout a dungeon, it just gets very old very quickly.

Time Anomaly

I’m basically echoing the post above in regards to this- I am very happy Temporal Warp is gone, but leaving Time Anomaly in it’s place introduces a new set of headaches that personally I would just prefer to be without. The parity between the specs aside, for Fire specifically it the only non-problematic proc is the Fireblast refund. The Time Warp proc can push you over haste thresholds, breaking interactions revolving around scorch. The combustion proc largely goes to waste because we’re already locked into a cast half the time it procs and we have little time to react to it. I would very much like to see this replaced with a utility or defensive choice node- it would be the perfect opportunity to place Cauterize into the class tree making it available for the other specs, with a choice against other more active defensive nodes.

Overall I am very enthusiastic about the rework and the coming Hero Talents, I just worry about the number of additional buff tracking and additional sources of CDR. I would love to see some of these CDR nodes specifically reworked to choice nodes to further lean into the burst vs throughput idea that SKB and Unleashed Inferno provide. Thank you for your work thus far, and I look forward to what is to come.

[Lanfear-tichondrius]

Some thoughts on the new updates to fire mage. These feel like very minor things once again.

Sunfury

• Sunfury orb generation has slowed dramatically with the change to orb consumption. I cannot generate even 2 orbs at high haste anymore. I am honestly not sure what the point of the 5 orb talent is. There is no world where I could generate that many. I feel as if I want to fill my orbs up and then combust, but after the latest update i cannot even get 3 orbs to fill up. This feels bad.
• The orb change really hurt burst this week. Gathering all of my orbs and unleashing all of them was extremely fun, but struggling to get my orbs and only having one per combust going in leaves sunfury fire a lot weaker in terms of burst profile. It’s still MUCH burstier than retail/live, but it was a big hit
• The change to the phoenix using smaller meteor and meteorites was really good in my opinion. The visual satisfaction of the absolute meteor shower landing on the target is extremely satisfying
• Targeting of the phoenix works great
• The phoenix currently seems to favor spawning behind the character model. I would like it if it spawned in front of or to the side of the character model as weak aura UI elements are commonly placed where the phoenix seems to prefer spawning. The phoenix looks great, and I want it’s visibility to be maximized to me
• Gravity Lapse is in a really really really weird design space. Behind the scenes it appears to have been changed to a root and not a stun. It now roots 3 enemies replacing an ability that interrupts significantly more than 3 enemies. I’m not sure the point of ever taking gravity lapse intentionally
• Gravity lapse replaces supernova now which is an optional talent. By taking gravity lapse we would be losing dragons breath to take supernova. We would then lose supernova to take a worse version of supernova.

Fire Tree Changes

• Majesty of the phoenix placement is now going to make it a real staple of flamestrike/aoe builds I feel. Much more appropriately placed now
• The removal of surging blaze hurt the use of flamestrike as a filler in that its extremely sluggish now. This can be helped with majesty of the phoenix and phoenix reborn, but flamestrike does not interact with phoenix reborn. It will take 7-8 targets before flamestrike will out cooldown reduce fireball and pyroblast because of the longer flamestrike cast time.
• Fevered Incantation and Fire’s Ire feel like talent point sinks near the bottom of the tree…but they provide combust burst so they do feel impactful. To gain choice at the bottom of the tree I often find myself sacrificing Fire’s Ire. I think making these one pointers would absolutely open up the tree a bunch, but they do provide combust value which is satisfying.
• Deep impact feels dead in an unleashed inferno build, but in a sun kings blessing build with frostfire It still holds major potential value given the cooldown reduction of frostfire on meteor
• Further emphasis visually in the tree that SKB/UI should always be taken would be a good change for fire mages who are new. Distinguishing it as a center point visually even more would be a nice change.
• I’d like to see charring embers/phoenix reborn nerfed. 6% damage for 1 talent point is insane when fevered incantation and fire’s ire take 2 points for less.
• Charring embers/phoenix reborn are not fun talents to me in a world where you don’t need them to chain sun kings blessings together. I feel like you’ll take this talent too much for it’s intent because it may be overtuned.
• Charring embers add a significant tax on buff tracking without adding value to fire’s rotation. I would like their buff tracking to be mitigated as they are big offenders.

Living Bomb

• Living bomb damage feels meaningful and impactful now. It’s exciting to see procs
• The visuals of Blast zone are top tier. that many living bombs going off is supremely satisfying
• Explosivo doesn’t seem to be proccing as much as I’d hope. It feels like the guaranteed one when I pop combust is the only one I really regularly notice. I would like it if it were coded to be every other hot streak as a guarantee rather than a 40% RNG chance. It’s really hard to understand the value of this talent as is, and it’s positioning suggests it should be powerful when it’s competition is firefall, meteor, fiery rush, charring embers, ashen feather, and pyromaniac.

Bugs

• Pyromaniac has a 100% proc chance and it contributes to hot streak currently
• The arcane phoenix appears to not crit at all? Is this a bug?

Overall I really am happy with where fire is. Things can of course always be better, but fire is landing in a truly blessed place next expansion.