Fire
- Flamestrike damage reduced by 10%.
- Flame Patch (Talent) damage reduced by 10%.
- Kindling (Talent) cooldown reduction for Combustion reduced to 1 second (was 1.5 seconds).
- Infernal Cascade (Conduit) Fire damage bonus reduced by 20%.
On the whole, the class tuning seems pretty sparse so far. Mage seems to have the biggest changes so far. As someone who does not play mage but was considering making an alt, how do you see these changes affecting their place in the meta?
I get the impression that these are scaling nerfs. An additional conduit slot and conduit ilvl increases are coming, so that pretty much negates the aoe and IC nerfs. Time will tell how the kindling nerf will work. Presumably secondary stats will scale to the point where it won’t really matter, but who knows.
It will be a decent single target nerf, on less heavy movement fights frost will likely out perform it especially if there are good conduit/other changes that benefit frost or arcane over fire. But its not unplayable. This does massively hurt their mythic+ value though but it really depends if you can still combust every other pack with this kindling change.
Did you see the changes to frostbolt in PVP though? I wonder if these two changes will stack multiplicatively
Which changes?, I don’t see anything you mention in wowhead. I only see the Ice wall talent, deep shatter nerf and burst of cold buff.
Look at the 9.1 PTR forum on this website it has the notes.
Here is the frost PvP ones:
Massive frost bolt buff in PvP
Frost
And from the data mining Ice Wall is:
Thank you!, then it’s an overall buff.
Yep, nerf the good spec so all specs suck equally.
Did frost just get a Mei Wall? Lol
Everyone begged for fire nerfs, now they have them.
Guess what, they didn’t buff anything else either.
Bottom of the barrel we stay. Time to retire the mage.
Lol mages thinking they will be bottom tier you never played wow right?
What I don’t get is how boomkin still hasn’t been touched.
Right? One of the safest classes to play if you like playing any of the specs. Don’t get it.
Boomkins are nerfed in 9.1 tho.
Oh really? Nice.
Damn… I really didn’t want to be right. 
Called it though. 
God bless! 
Would have just preferred they cap our flame strike aoe since normal groups aren’t pulling 30 mobs on top of each other.
Not really. Mostly because it isn’t the nerf we’ve been asking for. The issue with Fire wasn’t so much that it was super strong (I mean, it was somewhat broken being top M+ and Raid spec but then so are half the classes… looking at your Aff/Druids). What Blizzard needed to do was AoE cap all the specs and make adjustments to everyone’s damage to adjust it so that the specs are somewhat competitive.
We currently have 2 specs that are bottom tier, and one spec that is top tier partly because of broken AoE caps.
Yep, these nerfs hurt the average player far more than the MDI players. Once again Blizzard fails to balance the game around the 99% of players and chooses to focus on that 1%. Terrible designers.
No they’re not bottom tier.
They are middle pack, which is very different from being bottom tier.
And still Mage will always be, like every expansion this game offered, top tier. Maybe 1 spec will be meh, or 2 but there will always be at least 1 on the top.
Fire mage is way overtuned, these nerfs were neccesary and it will just put fire mage alongside the rest of the mortal classes, I even think this nerf will not even touch Fire Mage priority in a push group, because besides the insane dmg it brings it also has insane and unique utility.