It’s really good right now, if you have gear. It severely underperforms if you don’t. The problem with this is obvious, and anyone who actually played Fire from 70 can see it coming from a mile away now: Fire scales too well. 70-75 you’re playing the game on nightmare difficulty. Then it starts to get reasonable, and by 80 you feel you can actually accomplish stuff. A short (long) walk to ilvl 625+ and good itemization, and suddenly it’s the top spec.
What’s going to happen when Season 2 and new raid tiers come around, leading to even higher ilvl? How is Blizzard going to treat a class that scales obscenely well? They’re probably going to nerf the Hell out of it to compensate, making it even worse (possibly not even playable) for a fresh 70 starting the expac, and driving people to the bottom of the tier lists until they play arcane/frost long enough to get top end gear again.
Obviously, right now, we’ve got time. But I hope for Blizzard’s own sake they have people looking at what can be altered about a spec that scales so absurdly hard with stats to both bring it up on the lower ilvl curve, and also keep it from ballooning out of control with every content patch that raises the ilvl cap.
Best I can understand, too much of what we do is instant and based on managing CDs, to the point that Critical Strike is essentially a dead stat. It does nothing for Phoenix Flames, it does nothing for Fire Blast, it does very little during Combustion (if you have the talent that converts 75% of it to mastery), and no amount of it outside of a CD window seems to move the numbers enough to matter. This means that in a gearing situation where you find lots of items with crit as a secondary stat, you have a compounded problem of high ilvl for lower performance, which makes the low ilvl situation with the spec even worse.
The various things in Fire all scale too well, and have too much support. Everything in the talent tree cites either Ignite, Pyroblast, things that set up hot streak, or Combustion. If it doesn’t cite these things, it’s useless (Hi, Living Bomb). Even something like Firefall specifically rewards you for casting Pyroblast. The entire kit is built around removing the cast time of a single spell (Flamestrike too, if you’re in Mythic+).
I would love to see Blizzard sit down and look into what it would take to make Combustion into a CHOICE NODE, not necessarily to do it, but to show how absurdly everything in the tree is hinged around that single ability. And while we’re at it, do the capstones of SKB/Unleased Inferno need to exist in their current state? The further we’re pushed into investing in Combustion uptime, the harder it is to rein in our abilities. That it to say, our abilities cannot be strong on their own if something as pivotal as Combustion is up so often/so powerful, which is why Fire is cold garbage fishing for Hyperthermia (which is also basically just Combustion) procs outside of it. Nothing makes better light of this than the disparity of Sunfury and Frostfire, where Sunfury pulls wildly ahead because it better supports, you guessed it, Combustion. It creates counter-intuitive situations, where a talent like ‘Kindling’ makes it seem like we’re be better rewarded for investing in Critical Strike (to get Combustion up more quickly), but all simulation shows that just isn’t the case because of how easy it is to force crits independent of the stat.
I hate to say it, but Fire Blast + Phoenix Flames might be the most significant contributing factor to why Fire has gotten where it is. The fact that we have so many spells that crit automatically, and then have zero interaction with the crit stat, really set up for a bad situation. I don’t want them to go away though, because it’s FUN. I would love to see talents that make Critical Strike affect these though, or just baseline buffs. Why can’t Crit Chance affect how quickly Fire Blast recharges? Why can’t Phoenix Flames get extra Crit Damage based on our Crit Chance like some sort of Chaos Bolt cousin? Pulling desirability for stats into more areas helps a lot with ilvl and itemization issues, because it reduces those ‘optimal’ end-cases that create scaling issues. If Blizzard balances around us inevitably having some secondaries applying to a highly underperforming stat, then eliminating the presence of that stat creates a situation where your abilities are highly over-tuned, unless they balance entirely around us having 0 crit. Maybe they should just give us something that converts all of our crit into the other stats, and then balance around that?
Additionally, our Mastery is absurdly strong in a way that’s not fun visually; Pyroblast has a hilariously low hit number because of it, and it’s like that because Ignite is now a scaling metric. If we could go back to Ignite being a static effect, this would potentially help ilvl scaling woes by allowing ignite-focused talents to not have to worry about being fluctuating around secondary stat availability, and maybe open up something more interesting visually for Mastery (Critical Strike Damage? Hot Streak bonus damage? Combustion duration? Anything would be better.)
Anyway this was probably a useless rant even if you agreed with some of the points, because I don’t think Blizzard even reads the forums, so who cares? They have Warcraftlogs, RWF, and internal metrics to look at without context and make knee-jerk reactions to, and that doesn’t leave much time for reading conjecture posts.