Fire Mage feedback thread

In Development Midnight: Revelations Public Test Realm
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Unlike the class and Arcane reworks, Fire at least has some good to go along with the bad. If it were tuned better (more on this below) I think the rework would be hailed as mostly being successful, so I thought I’d start with the main positives:

The good: the role of combustion

Having Combustion be a proper burst cooldown again feels great, particularly with the ability to flex timings a bit by talenting in and out of Firestarter. Two minute BFA type burst was definitely silly, and minute mage burst hit just the right spot in terms of damage profile and combustion uptime. The Apex talent playing into Combustion but being implemented in a way to avoid uptime creep is a nice touch also.

The good: spec tree flexibility

In principle the spec tree allows us to branch out to different flavours/talents like Meteor vs Scorch, or Firestarter vs Molten fury, without compromising (much) our ability to do single target or AoE, which is nice. Ish, more on this later.

Obviously if we had just pros the spec would have a bit more than one fiftieth of the Frost raid parses and next to no participation in keys, so on to the stuff that needs looking at:

The bad: gameplay and button count

The removal of Phoenix Flames in Midnight was much criticized, and while nobody is sad to see that exact version of that button go because of how janky it was, it has left the spec feeling rather empty. This is true both inside Combustion (more on this later), but also outside of it - the spec just needs something more going on for it, and the spec tree doesn’t have enough of that. Heat Shimmer procs are too rare, as are Meteor casts (even with Blast Zone, which is too hard to talent into). In principle playing Sunfury Execution, Pyroclasm, Meteor and Blast Zone has a bit more going on, but the tuning just isn’t good enough and picking that route is just too restrictive. Fire has had plenty of these in the past, whether they be a Legion-era active (and strong) Living Bomb, or Legion-era Phoenix Flames (why has Strafing Run never made a comeback??), or Legion-era Dragon’s Breath (notice a trend?), or some combustion minigame a-la Infernal Cascade/Blaster Master…we just need a little more going on.

The bad: resource overflow

Getting good value out of Combustion historically required managing our crit generators like Fireblast and Phoenix Flames carefully. Since TWW however we have received more and more cooldown reduction on Fireblast, to the point where now it is optimal to enter Combustion without any charges, and to then basically just spam Fireblast and Pyro back to back. This much cdr also forces active abilities like Pyroclasm out of possible talent builds, because time spent doing stuff that isn’t consuming Fireblast is time spent not gaining value out of so many of our talents. Between Fiery Rush, Spontaneous Combustion, From the Ashes, the tier set, and the Apex talent, we could remove the first three and the spec would be better off, particularly if they were replaced with something worth actively playing around. This was a goal of the Midnight rework that was missed completely, and if anything it has worsened.

The bad: relative ability tuning

The relative tuning of our abilities is very, very off as well. Ignite is tuned to be extremely mediocre, and as a result the spec is about 30% behind say Frost in low (think 2-5) target cleave - and that’s when running cleave talents, which begin gaining damage from Flamestrike at as few as 3 targets. This is caused partially by Ignite being bad, and partially by Pyroblast itself being extremely mediocre - as a comparison, it currently does roughly twice the damage per execution time of a Frostfire Bolt, while back in Legion it was about 5 times that of a Fireball. Meteor is similarly undertuned (despite a ~1000% SP coefficient!). This was also a stated goal of the Midnight rework that has missed the mark completely. Beyond the impact on talent choices, this also means that optimizing the spec’s damage in raid involves delaying combustion in order to Flamestrike a bunch of adds. A spec just being a mass AoE merchant is just not enough for it to be fun or worth playing, you just never feel like you’re contributing meaningfully. Much of this feels like it’s caused by the devs being afraid of Ignite spread, but if it’s such a big problem why can’t we go back to tuning the talents designed to reign it in in the first place (more later)?

The bad: unfun, bad, or forgotten talents:

  • Mote of Flame: a 3% flat fire damage buff is the single most boring talent to have ever been introduced. This thing has no reason to exist other than to pad out the tree

  • Critical mass: this talent is not bad per se, but with Overflowing energies being buffed (which was very positive for the filler rotation, so it should stay) fire’s crit scaling is atrocious, and optimal gear involves having literally zero crit on it if possible. This scaling would easily be fixed by returning to a 1:1 crit: mastery conversion during Combustion

  • Controlled Destruction, Intensifying Flames: these aren’t bad talents per se (although CD makes target swapping annoying), but why are they not being used to tune Ignite properly as they were intended to, and instead the whole spec has to suffer the fear for our cleave to scale out of control? Also, IF contributing zero damage at 4 or more targets feels awful; it should just always deal damage to 3 and no more than 3 targets, no matter how many have Ignite on them.

  • Flame accelerant: this talent is just a one point tax for Pyroclasm, which makes that talent even more un-appealing

  • Burn it all vs slow burn: we do not need two talents that both passively increase the damage in combustion, pick one and stick with it

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The spec being undertuned is easily the worst part of it. Frostfire Fire still ignores Pyroblast during execute outside of Combustion and I have no idea how that’s not been addressed yet. Besides, the spec has so few spells right now that they need to be dealing a lot of damage since there’s not much else going on and Pyroblast even at a base 555.4% is still very weak.

Fire is in its most fun state when we can stack Haste + Crit for me, but we’ve got so many free crit talents like Overflowing Energy being buffed from 10% to 20%, Firestarter, Heatsink, Scald, etc., that not even Slow Burn and Burn it All can offset crit being our worst stat by a very wide margin. It’s so bad that we don’t even talent into Critical Mass at all.

I get it that these talents help alleviate the lack of crit (especially at the start of the expansion) that would make the rotation in its very simplified state very boring, but it’s at the heavy cost of making one of our secondary stats all but useless for us, or the Slow Burn/Burn it All choice node being undertuned.

I also agree with Fire needing one extra mechanic to better tie the entire spec together inside and outside of Combustion. Some extra to do instead of just mashing 1, 2, 1, 2 inside of Combustion for 20 seconds would be appreciated, and likely break the monotony of spamming Fireball until crit outside of it.

And I also want Meteor to be the big kaboom! It’s quite comical that even above 1000% sp coef, it feels grossly undertuned both in AoE and ST. Meteor is usually the most powerful spells in old RPGs, so I’d like to see that here as well. Yes Rico, kaboom.

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In my opinion Fire as a whole is in a great spot. I mentioned some of this in the Mage forum as well, but here are my thoughts and/or suggestions.

Controlled Destruction is a bit of an annoying talent. It creates a large ramp up for appropriate damage that weakens fire in any situation where you are not hitting a singular target for a long time. This includes target swaps, dungeons/trash, open world, delves and so on.

Fire is very weak outside of combust. I like the high-highs and low-lows. Our tuning is clearly low, and I don’t think it’s because our highs are not high enough. Our lows are too low. Again, being so weak out of combust hinders us in a lot of non-raiding style content (i.e. open world, delves and so on).

Additionally, our gameplay loop out of combust is a bit lacking. It would be great to add some sort of out-of-combust mechanic to engage with that will enhance both our out-of-combust damage and gameplay. Ideally, this would be something that is quick to execute, or chains well, to help Fire in open world/delves for damage and Raids/Dungeons for gameplay.

Similar to most ground-targeted AoEs, it would be great if you can add the option to cast at target to Meteor through a talent choice.

Tuning of Frostfire is weird, as it currently incentivizes Frostfire bolt in execute over Pyroblast. I suppose a simple buff to Pyroblast would help here.

Finally, a plea, let me disable the visual of spellfire spheres. Please.

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I think the ONLY problems with fire mage are the following.

  1. Our ignite is garbage in raid. You will always lose to splitting ice in raid scenarios, so why play fire mage to begin with?

  2. Outside our combustion we are sitting ducks with no damage. You will be outside of combustion for at least 20 seconds probably. In the meantime you are doing literally nothing. In contrast with arcane mage which has the chance to get clear casting, which does a lot of damage and keeps you competitive, fire mage has nothing of this sort. Maybe bring back hyperthermia, or SKB to account for the downtime and give us some flavor?

That’s it in my opinion.