We’ve had a few weeks to settle into the newly ‘reworked’ Fire mage; the meta is forming, sims are being refined, playstyles becoming apparent. This feels like an appropriate time to touch back on a few of the concerns that became apparent during PTR, and have rightfully proven to remain an issue now; as well as bringing up a few points of concern in the future.
Class Tree:
- Lackluster talents still lead to very defined pathing, with little variation. Throughput nodes compete versus utility and defensives, which is no competition: throughput always wins.
- Temporal Warp continues to plague the central node, forcing us into being tuned around a ~5 minute cooldown (reduced by SP).
- Time Anomaly remains a fairly weak, unpredictable and inconsistent choice with TW.
- Shifting power becomes increasingly awkward, leading to unintuitive optimizations.
- ‘Dead talents’ like the Improved Frost Nova, the Mirror Image choice node, and Rigid Ice.
Fire Tree:
- From The Ashes is, from a playstyle perspective, an even worse talent than before. It’s more logical than trying to sit on full charges of a spell, but the fact that PF isn’t guaranteed to crit makes it awkward in practice. It having a poor SP coeff makes it undesirable to press, and the fall from grace Mastery/Ignite cleave has experienced make this a very not great talent.
- Critical Mass and Flame On: Both of these are very identifiable Fire talents. They are two point nodes. The relative strength of a two point node versus the slew of one point nodes means we are frequently dropping one, or even both points, in these talents. The current tier set and playing Alexstraza’s Fury compound this, because we are casting very few fireballs, we don’t need as much critical strike chance for bad luck protection in filler.
- Living Bomb - woefully undertuned, my heart skip a beat when I saw the pvp modifier of 300%. Because that’s what this talent needs to exist. By extension Convection is also very weak
- Firefall - The opposite issue exists. This talent currently procs off both Fireball AND Pyroblast. With the sheer number of pyros we’re getting off, we drop meteors like candy. This makes this talent extremely strong, so strong in fact that for a single target build we are dumping two points into Living Bomb and Convection, not pressing living bomb a single time, just to get to firefall.
- If Living Bomb remains so lackluster, then its positioning should be adjusted. Move Conflagration to LB’s position, shift LB and Convection down to the right. Put firefall as a natural progression of meteor. So the talent would flow Meteor > Firefall > Deep Impact for the bottom right instead of Conflag > Meteor > DI.
- Deep Impact is deeply unimpressive, and a very boring capstone.
- Hyperthermia is still very RNG and goes against the very scripted methodical nature fire enjoys.
Talents aside, there are some playstyle concerns. There has been a massive influx of players to the Mage Discord experiencing various issues with targeting. This stems from the fact that Flamestrike is a reticle cast. Fuel the Fire is an excellent talent, I love it, it makes FS fun to play. It also makes FS a nightmare, because we are now casting north of 400 reticle casts throughout a dungeon between FS and meteor. For most players, freedom of mouse movement is important- it’s how we target, utilize mouse over spells like kick or spellsteal, decurse, and even for movement. When we are spending 70% of our time trying to keep our cursor centered on a pack, it is not fun, it is not a skill cap, it is just tedious. In previous iterations is was tolerable because the sheer volume of casts was lower. Reticle casts should be reserved for infrequent casts, like meteor, not rotational binds like FS.
Continuing the topic of FS: UI not interacting in any form with FS makes it a dead on arrival talent for a large percentage of your player base. Ignite cleave is dead, the rework dug that grave. The target caps to FS were needed, and healthy. With these caps implemented, there should be no reason UI can’t be a valid choice to interact with FS for a more defined burst window that organized teams can coordinate. That and UI is just pitifully undertuned. Remove the CDR effect, buff it to 100% damage, that’ll put it inline with SKB and provide a meaningful alternate damage profile. And when you’re looking at the tuning of fire, please. PLEASE. Avoid aura nerfing whenever feasible. SKB is the over performer, and UI gets punished. You baked pyroclasm into SKB, use that as your tuning knob.
The other major concern for fire is the lack of default User Interface support. With pyroclasm dead and gone, an excellent QOL option would be to use the previous pyroclasm texture alert for the Fury of the Sun King buff proc. Get 8 stacks, get the texture signaling you can activate SKB. Being reliant on WAs for core functionality creates artificial barriers to entry to the spec, and is bad design.
There are also some concerns to be said for the future, namely the loss of the T30 tier set. It is currently making Fire very fluid, we have an influx of resources in the form of PF that allow us to aggressively spend and convert during filler, buying us more freedom of movement and less hard casts. It’s very fun, it’s very in keeping with what people love from fire- because hardcasting is boring and instants are fun. And numerically, it’s just insane. When this goes, there is going to be a very large PF shaped gap in our toolkit.
Also, pls give back fire orbs from legion 