For the love of god…blizz…we know you are aware of the state or fire mage due to the HUGEEEEE unnecessary nerf then trying to fix the mess up by pretty consistent buffs but these buffs are next to nothing, you started the xpac with a high emphasis on living bomb, then nerfed it into the ground leaving the entirety of the right side of the talent tree utterly useless forcing us into the left side with a highly disruptive spell (hypothermia), LB needs a significant buff, even 25% of 0 is still 0, even after 9/17 buff it is averaging 1-3% of damage on 1-4 mob pulls, and 4-7% on 5+ mobs, for a 5-7 talent investment that is absolutely not worth it, but do we have an alternative? No. we have next to no diversity in our tree, are almost completely forced into certain choices while also having I would guess 5-8 talents that are completely worthless, this is a significant amount of our talents, fire had a huge rework and yet it is in the worst spot its ever been in, the entire tree needs not only a second look but almost another rework in my opinion, our rotation is fairly poor, the entire play style changed, class fantasy, severely diminished, damage, worst in game, cant get accepted into groups, our progression is near impossible even with incentivized solo gearing content, we are a detriment as a whole in almost every way… wow crendor made a video 10+ years ago about shamans needing to gear, utilize, and play at an ungodly high level just to be on par if not still lower than everyone else who does their job but better…fire is worse than that rn, please please please do something, anything, take it seriously, do not let this be an entire xpac with a class being utterly unplayable, the whole point of postings and announcments made is to balance classes to encourage playing what you want, what you enjoy, and yet the disparity is beyond horrible, we all know there will be a meta, I do not expect us to be top tier, or even optimal, but being allowed to play should be a basic ability we have…
EDIT: LB Proc chance is also a huge problem, down 11% from latest nerf with lots of the LB talents being incredibly low proc chances and dps increases are again abysmal for the amount of investments needed to get them. Also both meteor and flame strike in sunfury are insanely disruptive, slow, and feel awful to play especially with our entire playstyle revolving around combustion windows, again reiterating the point of bottlenecking certain play styles but then nerfing them into the ground making them unplayable, to beat a dead horse I truly believe that almot a bottom up evaluation is needed, freedom to experiment and have multiple play styles is needed, class fantasy needs a BIG improvement, all around viability needs big increases, ignite should probably be able to crit, our secondary stat is the WHOLE spec and yet mastery looks good in the description, its debatably our worst stat, crit chance is not good at all either, its basically entirely haste which feels awful to have to exclusively get especially with the different effeciency limits per 5 or 10%, please seriously look at the spec and hero talents as a whole to bring back even the option to play the game in which we love and pay for…
Last point, according to both wowhead on top of looking at gearing options myself, things like our trinks feel again very bad, very subpar compared to the impact they have on other classes, the solution is obviously not to change or adjust trinkets just for us, but it speaks to the need of adjustments that do effect us since these are next to filler options for us and have to be able to stand on our own feet.
I have been playing fire mage for a solid 20yrs and it has NEVER been this bad. I remember the days of pulling out the big gun pyro to destroy stuff… npc’s just laugh at us now 