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.
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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.
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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.
