Gotta say reading the patch notes I was like: this is not horrible quite yet, but I definitely don’t like it.
The only changes where I have nothing bad to say are the spell slinger changes for frost and Winter chill not being used along with fingers of frost.
The frostfire changes were bordering on awful, changing excess proc from reaching max stacks to casting meteor or comet storm will likely mean a significant decrease in the proc rate of excess buffs and it also ruins the internal flow of frostfire itself, this is just bad.
The fire changes I also don’t like, what makes fire fun is exactly spending loads of hot streaks, luckily they didn’t seem to completely ruin the builder spender of hot streaks to the point where you cast fireball for 50% of the time, but this direction is definitely not something I am liking.
Overall no. Denied, this is bad, almost terrible frostfire and fire changes were especially terrible, the frost changes I’m somewhat ambivalent, I don’t really like the freezing wind changes but the rest is fine, although with the changes to fof and winter’s chill it should feel pretty much identical with the amount of ice lances you cast. The problem is how Winter chill us gonna be consumed, because it might result in some unintuitive or bad feeling priorities in the rotation.
Again as I said before I only really like the spell slinger changes, the rest I have some criticism. Gonna try it when I can, but yeah… Doesn’t look too good
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The Frostfire changes aren’t good if that’s all there is to it since it’ll reduce the amount of times we’ll be making use of the masteries by a whole lot.
The Fire changes were needed tbh, at least some of them. Fire was practically a BM Hunter at this point with very little casting happening. Too many resources mean our spenders hit for very little to compensate and that doesn’t really feel good. I do hope this isn’t the end of their tuning though, because 10% to PB and FS don’t look like it’ll be enough.
I’m kinda glad Freezing Winds is going away. I’ve been commenting how it trivializes FoF for some time now, so maybe this will help out with our proc munching problem. I just hope that, like Fire, there’s a lot more tuning to address these changes but Frost still really needs a major tree overhaul.
I personally like them as it simplifies the specs. Mage rotations have become overly complicated. Newer players can get chased away from the game for reasons like this. It has kept me from maining my mage for a few years now.
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It doesn’t though.
I’ll test this when I can, but I guarantee you it doesn’t have the effect you’re talking about.
It seems like a straight downgrade
Those Frost spellslinger changes look interesting to me, I wonder if blizzard is accounting for the talent where FoF hitting a frozen target increases its damage by 20%. The rotation could change to holding FoF for flurry to get the extra 20%. And since there’s a limited window when casting glacial spike during winter’s chill, it may mean only casting flurry after glacial spike. Otherwise you may not get off all your fingers of frost.
Also, if they’re giving us more splinters, are they not reducing the proc chance of frozen orb resets? Lordy that’s going to be a lot of frozen orbs.
Either way, very happy to see Blizzard buffed.
The more i think about these changes the more i think they are bad to be honest.
Aside the slinger and fof not consuming winter, and the changes to sunfury, there is literally nothing else i like.
Even the change to freezing winds is bad because it pushes frost to play slinger even more than before, which i don’t dislike slinger, but i also wanna play frostfire.
I don’t even understand the point about “giving more power to fof” Like wtf are they on about? Ice lance does anywhere from 20% to almost 40% of the damage if you don’t play glacial, how much more power does it need?
You cast it too frequently? Said who? You? Mr random developer who lately seems to change things on nothing more than a whim?
I like the frequent casts, especially with hailstones it feels very nice.
Also, the changes they made literally contradict the argument they are trying to make, if they wanted to make “fof more impactful” Then they wouldn’t have changed fof empowered ice lances to not consume winter’s chill. Keep in mind, i DON’T want them to reduce the frequency of casts of ice lance, this is just me pointing out that they literally go against their own arguments with the changes they made.
I wanted to see some fixes for arcane which we didn’t see, explosion is still bad, aethervision still overly favors arcane blast, and they didn’t do anything about that.
But as i said before, the fire and frostfire changes are the worst, the sunfury changes seem decent.
The fire notes confirmed that I won’t be touching mage for another major patch. They said the exact opposite of what I would have wanted it was kind of astounding to read
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I think they are trying to simplify the spec somewhat. I agree that it has become more complicated over the years. I feel like I stare at my WA more than the game field these days.
I tend to agree. It’s clear that they have repeatedly tried to simplify things and reduce the excessive buff and proc tracking (something which the game’s native UI isn’t even equipped to handle). While this interferes with the so called “skill expression” that a lot of high end and long time players pride themselves on it certainly makes the various specs more appealing and approachable especially for newer players.
The issue is that while the rotation has become simpler and the bloat of various things that need to be tracked has been reduced it has also had the unintended consequence of lowering DPS output which is a big problem. It’s fine for more complex builds to reward the player with higher DPS and for simpler ones to not be optimal but not to the current extend.
I’ve been playing since WotLK and I guess at some point I just got burned out on the overly complicated rotations. I started to not have as much fun as I felt I am just staring at my WA most of the time. I like the idea of the choice nodes for Warlock on things like rift and RoF. Now that seems like a solution that COULD satisfy both crowds.
The survey that went out a while back made it seem like they are trying to combat the over complication somewhat. This is just a solution to a problem that has been brewing for a while.
Putting Excess Frost underneath Excess Fire and further tethering FF Fire to Meteor just feels like such a strange design choice. While it’s true that right now it feels like a sisyphean exercise in trying to spend procs, gutting the resource economy to incentivize more Fireball/FF Bolt just sort of kills the fun of the spec (for both hero trees)and throws the rotation out of whack (eg why would anyone take Flame Accelerant now?)
Fire spent the majority of the tier being the actual worst dps in the game but the mobility of it kept people playing. To rip that away now so we play more like typical caster just seems odd to say the least…