Fire Mage needs just a tad more class flavor

Rename Frostbolt to Molten Slag, use a different spell and sound effect.

Rename Frost Nova to Fiery Chains (or something else fitting) and have it use a new spell effect and sound effect to match.

Rename Ring of Frost to Ring of Fire (queue Johnny Cash memes) and change spell effects and sound to match. Maybe add some negligible amounts of damage of time to it for flavor (fire burns).

I feel that Fire Mage could benefit from this quick change. I could literally do this over the course of a few hours if given the tools to do so.

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I feel that doing this would confuse people. If the spell is essentially the same, then it’s easier to understand what things do when they all have the same appropriate name. There’s also the issue of schools of magic. It would be weird that interrupting molten slag would lock out frost spells.

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There’s a lot of talk about nerfing fire mages in PvP. I think taking the same lock out vulnerability that other specs have is a good compromise.

This game is pretty brain dead when it comes to memorizing the few amount of spells you have, I don’t think it will cause issue. Flavor and class authenticity > pandering to lowest common denominator.

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I think this might be the most awesome idea I’ve heard this week. Burn, burn, burn, as the flames get higher!

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I’d start with reworking the 25 talent row. It looks like it was intended to be the blink/mobility row for all specs, but we have Blast Wave and fire/frost’s barrier talents diluting its focus.

I’d swap Blazing Soul and frenetic speed’s positions to help focus the 25 row as the mobility row and the 40 row as the survivability/control row. I would also replace Ring of Frost with Blast Wave, because a knockback spell does not belong in the mobility row, and it makes more sense being in the 40 row. I’d also have Blast Wave replace Frost Nova when selected as it is also a control AoE spell which radiates from the caster.

To replace the empty slot in the 25 row, I’d re-add the Blink Draenor leveling perk which was a 2-sec sprint after blinking. Then the mobility row will be complete.

To add parity between fire and frost/arcane’s cc toolkit, the disorient effect from Dragon’s Breath could also be moved to a talent which replaces Ice Ward, although I’m not really a fan of stripping down classes and forcing them to take talents to gain back abilities they already had.

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Mage is the class. What you’re describing is doing away with class flavor to put more emphasis on spec flavor. This is contrary to the changes Blizz made leading up to SL so I doubt this would happen any time soon.

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What changes? Giving us spells we hardly use or situationally use? Change the names and the effects and bring the class fantasy to its apex.

Why would my pyromancer/fire mage be using frost spells? Why would an arcane mage be dabbling in fire? You want an archmage, multi-magic spell class? Ask them to make a 4th Archmage spec in the spirit of old school mages from vanilla WoW.

Because having basic proficiency in multiple spell schools is smart and gives you something to press if you get locked out of your main school.

If Frost Nova became a Fire spell when you were specced into Fire, and some melee locks you out of the Fire school, you would really miss the ability to use Frost Nova.

2 Likes

Which I would much rather prefer as a soft PvP nerf to fire mages rather then Blizzard gutting this class in PvP.

Others and myself included already KNOW that. It’s a trade off, but you can soften that blow with some beneficial talent tweaks like Bignfat suggested two posts above.

If it isn’t sarcasm, aren’t Mages just Fire/Frost-Ice/Arcane magic? To the best of my knowledge, Shamans control water with their magic categories being Earth/Fire/Death magic.

That could be cool with Frost getting a choice between water or ice (like Destruction warlocks with felfire or regular fire).

Oh, I didn’t realize that this was about nerfing Fire. An easier fix is to just have interrupts lockout all schools for everyone, instead of just making all spells have the same school depending on the spec.

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If that’s the case, there’s an easy fix that would accomplish the PvP nerf while not compromising their PvE performance. Change combustion.

Suggested change:

  • Combustion
    • Your next 6 Pyroblasts, Flame Strikes, or Meteors cause X% larger ignites.

Of course this would require a change to the Sun King’s Blessing legendary:

  • Current:
    • After consuming 12 Hot Streaks, your next non-instant Pyroblast cast within 15 sec grants you Combustion for 5 sec.
  • New:
    • After consuming 12 Hot Streaks, your next non-instant Pyroblast cast within 15 sec grants you 3 stacks of Combustion.

What this change accomplishes:

  • Makes other talents in the final row viable, restoring choice instead of locking in Kindling.
  • Makes the other talents in the 35 row viable, and adds a fun combo with Alexstraza’s Fury and Pyroclasm.
  • Makes the other talents in the 15 row viable as the Combustion burst is now spread over a larger period of time instead of being tightly concentrated into the Rune of Power window.
  • Concentrates Phoenix Flame’s role back into an AoE spell.
  • The removal of the free crit during combustion restores movement parity between Fire and the other 2 mage specs and restores value to Crit rating.
  • Adds more “tuning knobs” for Blizzard. They can adjust combustion by changing the cooldown, number of stacks it grants, and the ignite boost.

Just remove Ring of Frost from fire and arcane; it was a frost-only spell when it came out to begin with. I insist that Triune Ward is the real problem and should be removed from the game.

I know that balance is not done around 1v1; but fire is not OP at all on its own.

Do you know how awful is getting kicked in your main school of magic having nothing else to do. Casters already have to deal with mutliple interrupts in pvp.

Like imagine being unable to cast poly when locked on frost/fire and viceversa.

I have a holy priest and other casters as characters. Lockouts should be on diminishing returns, but I much prefer this class get more flavor.

The specs can get more flavor without losing baseline spells common to the class. The change / removal of Ring of Frost from arcane and fire sounds good to me and makes sense since its a poweful frost ability.

But things like poly, frost nova, fire blast, frostbolt, AE; they should be kept as they are right now.

Meanwhile locks have 0 common dmg spells in thier 3 specs. Shadow bolt exists in both demo/aff but aff never casts it. Being locked to 1 school is not new either as aff is. Mage 100% needs to be pruned as it’s the outlier in regards to utility and survivability atm.

Pruned to? This expac we only got AB, fireblast and frostbolt baseline for all specs. As frost, I only cast FB and AB in niche scenarios. They are not part of our rotation. Many specs got the same.

Stop asking for mage nerfs and ask warlocks to be buffed/changed. I play warlock fyi, but only demo.

Destro has two schools of magic, demo has shadow and shadowflame (we had fire spells in that past, ie: soulfire). Only affliction has one school of magic but almost everything on their kit is instant.

I dont play affli so this may be a noob question: why Affli would cast shadowbolt when it could be replaced by the soulspell (I forgot its name) that can be channeled, looks cooler and makes more sense than shadowbolt.

You didn’t read wat I wrote did you ?