Blizzard im sorry but you’ve failed with fire mage class design yet again. Living Bomb and Ignite are abilities that you guys cannot balance. You buff it or nerf it and it becomes either to powerful or too weak.
The class relies far tooo much on these abilities that you have struggled for years to balance. In dragonflight Living Bomb did no damage for 3 seasons and it got buffed by 400% and it became noticeable but nothing to brag about.
Living bomb and Ignite are just passive abilities that require no skill or anything and they are at the top of the damage profile for the class. They should be like consecration for paladin that does like 5% of the overall damage. It should not be doing 40% of the overall dps.
A fire mage should be about explosive bursty damage. Not damage over time like an affliction warlock. Dots should not be the main source of damage. Just do yourself a favor and remove living bomb and ignite from the game. Pointless boring passive abilities that cannot be balanced. I would much rather have AOE Pyroblasts or like a Solar Beam.
I’ll agree that Ignite has been somewhat of a failure since it became the Mastery. It worked OK in the ‘old days’ when it was just some extra passive damage on crits, but as soon as it became affected directly by secondary stats it started to get broken. Then Blizzard broke it some more by making it spread (admittedly, I really like the Ignite > Combustion mechanic from WoD but that doesn’t work now that M+ is the end game).
It became stupid when the AoE rotation for Fire was just to build a big ST ignite and spread it. Not sure I’d go so far as to remove it, but I’d probably just remove it from Mastery and stop it spreading and compensate Fire with better AoE.
As for LB. Again, it worked fine for over a decade. It actually felt great in WotLK to throw 3 LBs up, intertwine them with 2x instant Flamestrike and a Blizzard then repeat. That worked well all the way through to Legion (I think?) when again, they changed it. Suddenly it was spreading and had infinite targets and soft caps and blah blah blah. Boring.
They could fix it if they wanted though. Cap it to 3 unique targets again, tweak or remove the soft-cap on how many it can hit, remove the spreading (and of course remove the ignite component). Then buff it to make it worth spending the 3 GCDs, and as mentioned above, tweak the rest of Fire’s AoE kit to make it fun again. No more hardcasting FS, no more flame patch, no more ignite spreading.
No more Fire built around Ignite/Combustion and teams having to play entirely around the spec. No more Fire being either terrible because you lack very specific gear, or stupidly strong at high-end. Problem solved, everyone wins, everyone has fun playing Fire. But that makes too much sense. Better to just repeat what you’ve been doing for 10 years to keep “streamer X” or the sweaty MDI teams happy.
Yea I mean but they have just turned in passives today. There is no real set up or combos with them anymore. It just hurting the fire mage design because they are very hard abilities to balance with the rest of fire mages tool kit. Its like you said it become incontrollable with the addition of mastery and the AOE spreading.
They aren’t actually fun abilities that you click on and notice a meaningful effects either. I think they are the wrong abilities for them to be focusing on. I would much rather have AOE abilities that i click on.
Like on the Paladin rework they added more AOE by turning core single target abilities into AOE by selecting talents in the tree. Like judgment and blade of justice were single target abilities that do AOE now and it feels really good and is fun to play.
That why im saying they should stop wasting time on Living bomb and Ignite just get rid of them. Focus on core rotational abilities and give them AOE capabilities (not via ignite or living bomb). Imagine throwing 5 pyroblasts or AOE fire blasts or a frontal cone AOE solar beam ability that has a 40yd range
I think we can all agree that Living Bomb and Ignite dont actually provide any fun kind of gameplay. If they deleted both those abilities I don’t think anyone would miss them at all. I probably wouldn’t even notice lol
Also agree flamestrike should be instant and like a 20 second CD. Should also be combined with flame patch. It soo dumb that you have to spend a whole talent for flame patch.
Have to agree that the design direction is confusing at best. We now have two passive spread effects (both applied/spread via the same spell), two instant casts that always crit, and one major “cooldown” that we’re in 50%+ of the time. Our central AoE spell is still reticle/@cursor based despite being meant to be cast in very quick succession during Combust (why wouldn’t this get the @target option over e.g. Earthquake?), which feels very odd to play around…and in higher keys, we’re not even supposed to use it. Our only talented proc-based effect that’s supposed to be impactful (Hyperthermia) then does…basically the same thing as Combustion but is significantly worse. As a result we have no hard-hitting abilities (you’d really think Meteor would hit harder) and still have little to actively do outside of Combustion except chase Combustion back.
I dunno, this “rework” doesn’t entirely do it for me.
I just want fire mage spells to feel impactful again. Personally, I’d rather go explosion/concussive force with fire spells over passive ignite/burning damage. Hitting something with a Pyroblast should FEEL powerful and have big numbers associated with it. Same with Meteor. Give it some punch.
Idk but they really need to rethink the class design. Its just not fun and feels bad. Ive been playing it in the early access. Flamestrike feels pretty weak, combustion and meteor cd is tooo long. Simply put fire spec does no dps without combustion. Arcane and Frost are doing significantly more damage. Like its not even close. The talent tree is a hot mess.
Call me crazy but i would remove combustion, actually i’m tired of that playstyle where everything moves around just one cooldown and maintaining it constantly,
Playing cata classic just reminded me how much i miss the old fire mage with combustion just one big cd to use when you need a boost to your dps.
So, my idea is to have a talent node first or second row where you can choose between combustion or living bomb. Living bomb in that case would be similar to the old combust, the explosion will be based on the damaged done in the window that last the dot. Then SKB will change if you have LB and will be the old pyroclasm (the 300% dmg of a hard cast pyroblast).
So, in the end fire mage would have two main talent branches, one for the modern combustion and one for the old combustion that will be living bomb.
I dont mind having a big dam CD like combustion, but i do think it needs some changes. The meta right now is 1 minute cooldown for big gos. Realistically you want to be using combustion during mobs and boss fights. 2 minute CD for 10 second dps boost is not a good trade. It needs to be 1 minute CD for 20 seconds.
As for the ability itself I think they should remove the ignite buff and instead it should increase our crit by 100% and crit strike damage by like 20% or however much makes the spec be more bursty and competitive. Something cool to add to it would be giving pyroblast AOE cleave.
Tying ignite to all of our abilities is the root cause of why fire spells hit like a wet noodle. All of our abilities are doing passive splash AOE and its ruining the spec. Like pyroblast (st) and flamestrike (aoe) are doing about the same dps on training dummies. They cant increase the damage of abilities without making ignite be broken. Ignite needs to be removed from the game or it needs to be taken off mastery and just do a small burn effect that doesnt scale off how much damage our abilites do.
I think our mastery should be crit damage increase rather then ignite. this would be soo much more simple for them to balance. I also think phoenix flames needs to be increased 6 to 8 targets instead of 3 and give it like a 15 second CD. This would give fire a much more reliable AOE ability because flamestrike and living bomb is not it. If Flamestrike was at target ability that would be a different story cause the at cursor thing feels bad.
Ignite has been the core of Fire mage since day 1, in 2004. Why would you remove it?
I agree that it’s lackluster as a mastery, but if you look at Cataclysm Classic (where we have a different mastery) you’ll see how Fire there is nearly at peak design (just missing retail’s Fire Blast) and how well it worked there. Big direct damage, big damage over time, and unique AoE in the form of cleaving DoTs. Combustion there is an insanely strong cooldown, but we still have strong damage outside of Combustion, where here everything our entire damage profile is funneled into Combustion and we do nothing outside of it.
I do agree about Living Bomb however. It has been a disaster since Legion changed it, and it should be reverted to really any pre-Legion design.
My argument for removal of Ignite is because it poorly designed for the modern version of wow. I understand its been around for a long time in the game but in its current form it is very complex and hard for them to balance because it scales with and is tied to every single one of our abilities. If you buff any of our abilities to hit harder then that means ignite also hits harder. Not to mention all the damage modifiers it has in the talent tree.
Fire has been suffering from balancing issues since they introduced talent trees back into the game in dragonflight. The same thing is happing now that happened in the beginning of DF.
And revolving the entire spec around a passive dot is just lame. To me its just not fun and im sick the class revolving around ignite.
It’s really not hard to balance at all, and other specs also now have DoTs that deal additional passive damage from active abilities (Ret is a great example of this).
Ignite’s base mastery value is also very low, and it takes the most amount of mastery rating to scale in comparison to every single other mastery. It’s also simple for them to tone down those talent modifiers on whim if those end up being problematic.
Sounds like you need to play a different spec. Fire has always had Ignite. Ignite is not the problem. Removing it because you personally do not like it is nonsense.
Because combustion represents 75% of the damage, outside that cooldown fire mage is useless.
If you buff anything outside combustion the overall damage goes to the moon because you also buff combustion!
That is the main problem and will always be if the gameplay revolves around how much time can i have 100% crit