The capstone in the class tree has to change. Randomness is not fun at all, it ruins arcane and since combustion is so important getting a random combustion can feel bad at times.
Correct me if Iām wrong, but Majesty of the Phoenix seems to be designed with the assumption that itāll be picked with everything else on that side of the tree, and you have to go through Charring Embers to get it. I know the impact on hard-casting Flamestrike isnāt spectacular, but isnāt the damage buff good enough?
Sorry, Iām genuinely asking because Iām pretty new to Fire mage.
20% for two Flamestrikes doesnāt sound too good to me and the cast time reduction is practically irrelevant.
Really not a fan of all these crapstones. Hyperthermia/TA just donāt lend themselves to a proper reaction/skill expression, and are just not fun to play around. Deep Impact remains absolutely terrible (questionable talent even if it didnāt split damage / become a damage loss if a second target happens to walk in.) 20% damage on the next two Flamestrikes is also quite weak. Realistically for an ST build I can only see UI/SKB, Phoenix Reborn, and maybe Firefall being at all viable.
Iāve said before that Phoenix Flames really needed a better niche going into the next expansion, and Iām glad itās getting some love, but this seems kinda overcorrected. It just seems to do way too many things. I worry this is going to devolve into comparing a bunch of weakauras and timers in deciding whether or not to use a precious charge.
Also kind of annoyed theyāre leaning heavily into Living Bomb again (stop trying to make it happen!) when itās so clearly a tuning nightmare.
That said, still insanely pumped for Sunfury lol
There is another issue.
1: meteor with skb and frostfire, too many of them, please do something about this, it feels pretty bad to just lose so many hot streaks due to having so many meteors. This negatively impacts the rotational flow, sure meteor is strong and it does something pretty cool with frostfire, but itās also anti synergistic, because a gcd that doesnāt give you hot streak during combustion just feels really bad. I already donāt like using gcds that donāt generate hot streak during combustion, and this will make it feel worse.
Or make it so meteor extends the duration of combustion by like 2 seconds, and keep the gcd. Actually, i really like this idea, if meteor extends combustion then the hot streak problem generation isnāt really an issue anymore.
2: phoenix flames crit should be baseline, re adjust the talents that modify it.
3: It would be nice if you could take both spont and improved combustion, spont is a great flow talent, but not having improved impacts crit scaling in a bad way, and you also lose 2 seconds of combustion.
- Remove the choice node for Ice Nova/Ring of Frost
- Remove the choice node for DB/Supernova
- Bring back Charred Embers or put the damage % debuff into something like Alexstraszaās Fury. Donāt just completely rip the talent out while removing the dps gain it provided. I get it, people donāt like maintenance (de)buffs for the most part. But, Iāll be damned if I just sit by and not say anything about a flat 4-5% dps loss.
- Not everyone wants Ignite to be our top damage. It feels terrible during lower keys, or just things that donāt live long. We need an option for impact damage to be top for Flame Strike and Pyroblast builds. Hell, Iād take a Fireball version of Frostās Frostbolt build just to give us more playstyle/build flexibility.
- We also need a ways to get hasted Pyroblasts/Flamestrikes
- I like SKB, but I donāt like the other options being so much weaker. Donāt make other capstones more attractive by nerfing SKB. Bring the other capstones up to SKBās level.
For low dungeons, Iām assuming with the new flamestrike talent plus living bomb modifiers, those will be the meat of our overall DMG. Could be wrong but I canāt imagine ignite will be able to shine below 8-10 keys.
Also Iām excited to see how much DMG flamestrike and living bomb can actually do in TWW.
Charred Embers being deleted is an awesome change. Donāt concern yourself with DPS yet as numbers tuning hasnāt even begun.
There are options for that. Surging Blaze, Flame Accelerant and Majesty of the Phoenix do just that.
With the amount of resources we will get with the hero trees, I believe the 10 stacks for activating SKB will barely be felt.
I agree with this post.
Fire in my opinion is way to punishing of a spec and equally geared my dev evoker pulls ahead in damage by a landslide and dev evoker is more relaxed and toned down compared to fire.
I love the look and playstyle of fire mage dont get me wrong but i just have a hard time sticking to fire, if you dont have combustion up, you do no damage and if you dont line up your fb properly you barely do damage.
Fire needs some work because as it stands, i just doesnt compete with specs like frost or devastation evoker.
Playing around with the latest iteration of the spec tree, a few thoughts:
A chunk of talents just seem pretty weak/annoying, and I canāt see much reason to pick them given how little juice weāre left with going into the capstones/pre-capstones:
- Firestarter: personally I just hate playing around this talent; I find it way more satisfying to send Combust ASAP vs. holding it for a bleh quasi-Combust above 90%. Will skip unless absolutely necessary.
- Majesty of the Phoenix/Surging Blaze: to me seems like this will boil down to how much we expect to be hard-casting, especially if not taking SKB. The damage boost is nice but otherwise a little meh.
- Flame Accelerant: also hate playing around this, and with the damage boost gone, will also skip unless necessary.
- Controlled Destruction: seems kinda weak this time around, barring raid progression / particularly long fights
- Heat Shimmer: also seems pretty weak, given that Scorch already does very little damage, even in execute, where weāre mostly just using it for the free heating up procs.
- Inflame: nice to have the option back, but not sure if it merits a point given other options available.
I do like the options in the in the last two rows, though youāre on a bit of a budget at this point. Burning Blood is a great little execute boost, giving you 20% with imp scorch. The PF talents will be great at getting Combust back up. Do wish we had one more talent here so we could swap in Firefall instead of taking e.g. the Meteor talents, which arenāt that fun in ST - would love for Fireās Ire to be a one-pointer so we could swap in Firefall while keeping the PF column and Burning Blood. Pyromaniac/Hyperthermia are still DOA, though the LB talents seem fun in mass AOE. (Not sure I can see taking them over PF/Meteor talents though.) Overall pretty good so far.
The fact that a fire mage has master exploiting missile timing to get double pyroblasts and JUMP DURING COMBUST to prevent hard casting pyroblast (because of the aforementioned missile travel speed) just to remain competitive is a jooooooooooooke, dude.
I like that Scorch baseline crits below 30% health now but can you revert it so the speed increase still happens at any health %? I donāt feel like itās OP to cast a less than optimal spell in my rotation in return for some utility. And the QoL it brings to the class when doing past content is greatly missed. Hope you take this into consideration, thanks!