MM can be a top performer… if all the people playing FoTM specs are bad. In my experience, most of them are. Fire’s (lack of) balance in top-end content is still definitely of concern. I think I tried to play it, felt dirty, and put my (other) mage back to being Frost.
I have some sad news for you, friend.
Is it about Ol’ Yeller? I am almost done with the book, so don’t spoil anything for me. I want to read about the happy ending.
I have an Ele Shaman alt and I was amazed to see them getting – what I believe works out to – a slight nerf to ST damage with the nerf to Lava Burst (and buff to Earth Shock).
Like, if you want spenders to be more impactful you can just buff Maelstrom generation or Earth Shock’s damage by itself. You don’t need to nerf Lava Burst, you can just buff them. It’s not like Elemental is tearing up the damage charts. Such a weird change.
I’m grateful for the AoE changes but those ST changes are a real head scratcher.
Ok I just want to point this out but frost is actually a better single target sim a frost fully geared can top around 7200 where as a fire can only get to 6800 dps so in theory frost should be better… it’s not though because frost requires you to essentially sit still the whole time fire is really good at being able to move during and Just sit still for the combust that on top of guaranteed crits when an enemy is 30 percent and cauterize makes them the better spec to mythic prog with but you guys missed something really big that happened to fire… fire did get nerfed pretty bad and that’s off one ability and it’s name is fire blast… fire blast is now a six second CD instead of four which leads me to believe it’s gonna lose quite a bit of dps off it.
Are you talking about the venthyr class ability? That’s actually a buff since it reduces fire blast’s cooldown by 6 seconds every time it procs. So that’s 12 seconds off cooldown during combustion, which is pretty nice. Makes venthyr compete with night fae a little bit more. Fire blast is a 12 second cooldown that gets reduced to 10 seconds with flame on. With haste, fire blast’s cooldown can be reduced even further (e.g., down to 8 seconds at ~800 haste, which is my theoretically cap for fire mages)
I’m not sure how this legendary helps for M+. Having to use 1.5-3 sconds (1.5 with counterspell, 3 with arcane explosion) to set up this legendary for a 1.74% increase in DPS may not be worth it. Fevered incantation probably still wins here.
For raiding, I defer to this per boss breakdown:
Change Mage to all DPS on the logs for an overall perspective. I know my analysis is handwavy, but know what? At least I’m citing the logs to get a fair idea of how the spec is doing. Truth is, these nerf posts are not good. We don’t even know how this legendary, with the additional set up is going to pan out for most players.
PVP: Stop using PVP to nerf PVE.
Rinse & repeat.
I think that was a kneejerk comment (from preheat?) that needed more time to be proven right or not. General opinion on the Mage Discord is that we’re switching to DC in 9.0.5 if nothing changes. DC is an 11.6% increase on single target in sims while FI is 8.14% with the PTR numbers. It already simmed very slightly higher than FI in single target before, but no one used it because it was worse on AOE.
Blizzard made the change because it seems that they didn’t do any math at all for the 9.0.5 legendary changes. They just looked at what legendaries were seeing no use and buffed them, and that happened to include one that was already very close to FI overall.
Why do we, or Blizzard, care about the MDI so much though?
The vast majority of M+ doesn’t have to play that way. But people seem to take this crap out of the MDI and act like it’s the only way to do a +2.
It’s obnoxious.
This thread disappoints me. Such a good title… such a misleading thread
I’m going to level a fire mage and pretend to love playing a caster so the class will be nerfed. Choose the druid.
Interesting.
So it’ll be a buff to non-combustion ST damage and you’ll have to add frost bolt to your bar and rotation …
Blizzard tuning meeting:
“So Convoke might need some tuning. And people are complaining about Frost Mage being too low. What should we do to address these concerns?”
brings out dart board, throws darts
“Let’s see… landed on… buff Fire Mage and nerf Ele Shaman!”
“Brilliant!”
It’s a buff to combustion damage too, a larger buff than fully stacked FI now. It’s a 20% crit damage buff, not a 20% crit chance buff.
And lets ignore Arcane even though it has been dead last the past 2 expansions and started of low this expansion and now dead last in normal (well was for awhile now 2nd to last) and 2nd to last in heroic (although as of today 4th from last).
Frost got 2 buffs ASAP now Fire? Would be nice to see Arcane getting something for once.
time to lvl my druid from 50, inc nerf!
Not an intentional buff to fire. It’s just your regularly scheduled Blizzard incompetence. They buffed a general Mage legendary that was seeing no use, and Blizzard probably did so with no idea that the legendary was absolute trash for Frost and Arcane, but already a close 2nd for Fire. So they ended up giving Fire a 3% buff on accident.
Basically the same way they just nerfed Windwalker Monks by fixing a bug and not balancing after that, thereby taking away a chunk of damage. The bug needed fixed, but they needed to fix the damage loss, too.
Yeah I see that now.
What’re the preferred stats? Haste/Vers or Haste/Mastery? Wrist>Ring?
Since I have no problem admitting I was wrong, I apologize to those I said were responding to click bait. Looks like this is legit a buff to fire. Speaking as someone who would rather play frost or arcane, I feel you.