I’ll start with the oldest ones first, started in 2022 with the launch of Dragonflight:
- Improved Scorch amplification is completely excluded from Ignite calculation, which makes no sense whatsoever.
To set up an example for this, lets say that:
A Pyroblast hits for 100 damage, produces a 30 damage Ignite tick.
A Pyroblast amplified by Improved Scorch will hit for 114 damage, and still produce a 30 damage Ignite tick (???)
- The exact same problem is found in Molten Fury, which basically means our execute talents are only half-effective for no apparent reason.
- Controlled Destruction: a talent that reads as if it should absolutely be a exclusively single target amplification to ignite has been coded in since it’s inception as some reverse mastery buff, which means that you can spread an amplified ignite from the target on which you stacked Controlled Destruction on.
Now, onto our main cancerous growth of today: the Living Bomb.
This one started with the Living Bomb rework, at the War Within launch.
Without going into too much detail, I’ll try to sum up the damage it is causing.
It occupies 8 talent nodes, EIGHT!!!
I can’t overstate how incredibly stupid it turns out investing 8 nodes into a fully passive damage proc and having to drop immense QoL and actual gameplay enhancing nodes elsewhere (if we even could do it, more on that later).
Out of those 8 nodes, two were pretty much dead since inception, namely Sparking Cinders and Convection. Both are unimaginably poorly tuned and have never been looked at after release.
- Convection, which is supposed to justify taking any combination of Bomb for a single target situation is just beyond laughable considering the baseline tuning of Living Bomb. For example, devoting ALL 8 points into it and bomb will never reach 2% (???) of our total single target dps.
- Sparkling Cinders also suffers from incredibly off-putting tuning, was never looked at.
The rest of the nodes (namely investing 7, not counting Sparkling Cinders since we would never ever take that), would make sense if not for the abhorrent tuning issues with living bomb overall. It is supposed to be good in mass AoE, but it’s not, the funnel provided by off-target explosions should justify the loss of other single target talent drops, but it does not.
And thus, especially with the latest set of rebalance of Ignite/Pyroblast/Flamestrike powers respectively, we have arrived at a point where we can’t justify picking a single Living Bomb talent in any PvE scenario in the game, effectively making that part of the tree dead.
7 Likes
Just tacking onto this, the obsession with CDR for fire mage is getting tiring. For many years any time the developers wanted to add something fun for fire they would default to an influx of fireblast charges, and it was really fun. That was just added to the tree baseline, and now the devs seem to have swapped from fireblast charges to CDR.
This has made what was once the premier burst spec in the game into something that basically has no burst damage at all. I am literally losing to tanks during bloodlust on mass aoe. It feels really bad and kills the enjoyment/fantasy of combustion honestly.
Combustion used to feel so powerful, but were now in a place where it’s forgettable. Having people in comms during m+ where things were getting dicey go “oh he has combust well be fine” felt really good…nowadays its just a maintenance buff you optimize entirely for uptime. There’s no decision making process for timing it…and that sucks.
3 Likes
- Ignite: 7 talents have interact somehow with it in various boring ways. Not extremely crazy since Ignite is the mastery after all. Whether I like the mastery or not (I do not) is a different matter.
Ignite being such a focal point of Fire is sapping the feeling of power in all other direct damage abilities that the player actually casts themselves. Ignite is taking up DPS “real estate” basically in Fire’s damage profile because Ignite is such a large chunk of it. Pyroblast doing less than a quarter of the damage of a Frost Mage Glacial Spike feels extremely gross. Pyroblast being machine gun casted as well doesn’t help this issue because it needs to be tuned down in order to be a machine gun for balance purposes. I’d personally take fewer Pyroblast cast quantity for bigger numbers/damage per cast. Make it a talent choice if you must. Machine gun Pyros, or Big Pyros. It would be more interesting and game changing than SEVEN Ignite talent interactions.
- Combustion: 11 talents that interact with it (not counting Combustion itself, and including 2 choice nodes) that interact or change how it feels and works with CDR (Unleashed Inferno/Kindling). CDR on major cooldowns should be a no-no in my honest opinion if the cooldown is SO overwhelmingly important to damage protentional like Combustion is… And just to highlight something, Frost spec’s talents interact with Icy Veins in 5 talents not including Icy Veins the spell itself.
An example in other classes to show why CDR on big CDs sucks! Marksmanship Hunters have a choice node with a talent called “Calling the Shots”. It was recently changed from a node that decreased the cooldown of Trueshot by 2 seconds every time you consumed Spotter’s Mark, to a node that just decreased Trueshots cooldown by a flat 30 seconds. Much healthier direction that I actually think they are realizing themselves. So, I hope if Fire does get a rework, something like this occurs for Combustion.
- Living Bomb: As already highlighed by OP has 8 talent interactions. An ability that is so egregiously undertuned as it is, needs two handfuls of talents selected to even slightly make it viable. And even then, it ISN’T. They made Living Bomb into a passive ability with Lit Fuse. I don’t personally love this direction because I found Living Bomb to be fun to press myself. I liked the control. Now you barely notice it happening because it’s passive and also does no damage.
Other than that, why are Meteor and Flamestrike still ground reticle targeted spells? Can we please have an @target choice node for these like other classes? Thanks for reading!!!
1 Like