Fire has always been a bursty spec with combustion, a 2 minutes CD. it was very strong until kindling and SKB.
cooldown reduction from kindling and the SKB makes it so we have a very high uptime on combust, and that’s a problem. why ?
to balance that we had to keep ignite damage and combust in general weak to offset the super high uptime on combustion granted by kindling and SKB.
Fix: remove either kindling or SKB (i prefer SKB removed) and balance ignite/combust’s damage to compensate, that way combustion feels impactful when used.
Thanks for reading let me know what you think.
13 Likes
I’d rather they make SKB share a node with [Kindling] instead, then revert the Shadowlands nerf to [Kindling] which was 1.5s CDR and buff SKB to compensate.
3 Likes
I like this. Short of modifying the timers on it and making it work more like the disc priest buff for Penance, it’s in a horrible state for a full-blown talent. Absolutely awful. But at least making it optional and competitive with said option would mean you could just drop it if you don’t like it.
Tbh even combust at 2 min CD is bad game design from PVP perspective.
Too many eggs in 1 basket kind of thing. Most class have personal defensives that survive it and Fire is garbage outside of it…
Would have to be strong enough to kill through defensives, or be a cata style ignite dot.
Or alternatively its insanely strong but fire has impactful sustain outside of it and its pure 2 min cd with no CDR to balance it out.
BFA/SL saw it reach insane output with plenty of CDR and fire remained public enemy #1 until we got nerfed into the ground.
Fire suffers from having no good mini go’s outside of combust. Meteor is the most trash garbage 45 minute CD to ever grace gameplay when you compare it to most 45+ cds or even 30 cds fire lacks any sort of mini go that makes it threatening.
Arcane atleast has TOTM + POM these days for a respectable go outside cds.
Frost just pumps huge dmg but they used to have icicle pooling and comet/ice nova with it and even ebonbolt in legion.
Fire literally has no 30 second, 45 second or 1 minute or 1.5 CD to use outside combust to burst or threaten a lethal kill while most classes have this.
Combust is the tip of iceberg when it comes to fire problems. Which has been the case for awhile. Fire has gotten by with atrocious talent design and poor tuning by having nuclear levels of damage stuffed into combust and now they that they took it away its all there for everyone to see.
Granted this is a PVE originated post but PVE/PVP walk hand in hand together for mage and changes affect both sides of it and design on both ends atm is poor as heck
2 Likes
This is a good point. I don’t see an issue with having multiple damage profiles in the game but maybe they should change it so combustion only guarantees heating up/hot streak for the duration instead of also increasing crit chance. They’d have to up the general damage profile to compensate but as it is you’re stacking too many benefits into a short window. Fire will suffer immensely in PvP due to this design as well.
Ya fire is one of worst designed PVP specs in game
Its entire profile is around combust which any class can survive with personals and has worst sustained pressure in game.
It only succeeds when it has enough damage crammed into combust and external modifiers like Infernal Cascade or BFA Master blaster, or corruption level cheese stats to kill through defensives and global people or like corruption cheese spam gpyros with no cd.
The spec itself is poorly designed has no mini go’s, talents are crazy levels of undertuned.
On paper the entire spec looks solid. Ideally talents tuned would be great. Living bomb for huge damage, stack mastery for big ignite burn, stuff like conflag flare up for even more insane cleave. Flame patch, more living bomb procs from eruption. Meteor for enormous cleave
If it was a warlock spec it would be s+++ tier and be nerfed plenty to bring it inline. But cus its a mage spec nothing is tuned right or does anything useful. If warlocks had meteor it would be a non damage split and massive aoe nuke + stun lol
Our mastery scaling in PVP is awful too to even stack it to 20% requires sacrificing so much haste your basically useless at that point.
Like i said on paper everything on fire looks really solid but zero actual tuning is done to ability and zero effort into making it flow or interact with its mastery in a well designed way.
We’ve had all of BFA/SL with everything being propped up by combust and as much damage as they could cram in it despite everyone rioting for nerfs on it from PVP side lol.
Fire mage rep is in the gutter now and zero chance of getting a ret level rework this expansion. Don’t even think they will bother with it next expansion given the level of neglect shown to all 3 mage specs and base talent tree. Its almost like they want you to reroll off class
You know, [Hyperthermia] could be redesigned to fill that role. Imagine if it said:
→ [Hyperthermia]: Your next 3~5 [Pyroblast] or [Flamestrike] casts in the next 10 seconds are instant and guaranteed critical strikes. 45 seconds cooldown.
3 Likes
Would be an ok in that regard. Pyroblast damage in general is just pretty low so it wouldn’t feel like much of a CD besides it also being purgeable.
Ideally pyroblast damage would be much higher and meteor would be baseline/useful giving you a nice pair together on a mini go with that suggestion.
Hypothermia is dumb and should be scrapped. We already have combustion to throw lots of insta crit pyros. Its too similar.
SKB should be made baseline. Its always going to be too good and thus impossible to have a talent build that doesnt require it.
Id like to see living bomb move into hypothermias place and actually be strong again.
Idk why blizzard never learns and puts two talents like skb and hypothermia at the bottom. They fill the same niche. One will always be better and the other useless. The bottom of our tree is all flavors of burst damage.
To have real choice they need to be entirely different damage profile niches, or utility decisions. The overall spec game play, combustion & skb, should just be baseline.
The way pve is designed means controlled burst is always better than sustained dmg or rng damage.
The only time in recent memory I remember making signifciant choices on builds was legion. DB helm & alextras fury for burst aoe, ring/SKB for ST, and sometimes the chest that have you a huge sheild when you blinked.
Well yeah, that’s more on the tuning side for [Pyroblast] at least.
My idea of what [Meteor] should be may be a bit controversial for WoW PvP, but I see [Meteor] as the ultimate mage spell. What I’d do with it would be make it a ~2s cast time and keep the delayed impact but make it hit super hard on a 1min or 1.5min cooldown. Like literally the hardest hitting ability in the entire game with a bigger area, no split damage and no flame patch, just big bada boom.
If I could redesign Fire capstones, I’d put SKB in a choice node with [Kindling], [Pyroclasm] would take SKB’s place and get buffed to 300% like in Legion, affect [Flamestrike] as well and possibly reduce cast time by 20~30% (actually reducing both baseline cast times might be better, like 3.5s and 3s respectively), [Hyperthermia] would be a choice node with [Fiery Rush] and [Meteor] would take old [Hyperthermia]'s place.
It’d be a nice filler cd if not for the horribly designed random chance to proc and it’d be a lot better if we could choose when to use it instead.
Nah, that’d be bad design making it baseline. It should be a choice, which is why I say that having it share a node with [Kindling] is better. It’d need to be buffed of course and maybe even return [Kindling] to its previous 1.5s cdr, since it won’t be a default “choice” and won’t be picked along with [Kindling] anymore. Since both deal with [Combustion] uptime in their own way, I think it’s fitting and it’s also the only way I can think of that won’t make it mandatory without nerfing it.
I was thinking like SKB giving 8s [Combustion] up from 6s and [Kindling] going back to 1.5s cdr. It might be a bit biased of course, but I’d increase baseline [Combustion] duration to 14~15s too to both talents would feel better to take.
1 Like
EVERY thing is on the tuning side for fire not just pyroblast haha. Unironically meteor should be something close to that. Even on a 45 second CD it should be pretty respectable for a damage split cd and the burn dmg.
Its so awful no one bothers to take it. Another ability now permadead.
Pyroclasm would be great if the cast wasn’t a baseline 4.5. Feels very vanilla
Seriously though, [Meteor] makes me sad and even the Diablo 4 version is pretty depressing. It’s supposed to be the strongest spell in most RPG games or at least one of the strongest ones.
Yeah, which is why I say either lower both [Pyroblast] and [Flamestrike] base cast times by 1s each or add a cast time reduction to [Pyrocalsm]. The former is preferable though because 4.5s is absurd no matter how you look at it.
Ya look at warlock soul fire cast time to be comparable and its scaling + dmg
vs
Pyroblast
even in the biggest possible meme environment of random battlegrounds or epic battlegrounds you would be entirely useless trying to play tempered flames + pyroclasm and spamming pyroblast and thats an environment where you could actually get away with turreting them eternally with flamecannon lol
Agree with meteror. Its a cool spell.
Id love a version thats like a 2.5s channel where you can keeping aiming / redirecting it in a shrinking possible impact area until it hits. The class fantasy of focusing on calling in some huge fireball of death is cool.
The problem is that they cant make any single big hitter ability like that cuz then mythic guilds would end up stacking mages to trivialize any mechanic that requires huge burst in a small window.
I think blizz would have a better time with balance if they spec had only 1 core rotation to it and the talents all supported that, instead of trying to allow for entirely different play styles. Thats why I think skb should be base line.
MB on not being clear but my post is solely about PVE, they can probably fix that by tweaking the pvp talents.
that’s the biggest problem wow class design has, balancing the game too much around top PVE guilds who clear the mythic raid super fast anyway.
Problem with that is a very high uptime on combust, which in turns means they have to keep combust not as strong to compensate it’s very high uptime, the point of my post is to remove SKB at least, and buff combust. i’d rather 50% strong combust uptime that is impactful in an M+ than 80% weak combust uptime.
1 Like
They already do that, just with other classes. And I’m not saying [Meteor] should be hitting for 1M or something like that, just that it really should be the hardest hitting ability in the game, with a long enough cooldown to warrant that power, so anything from 45s to 1.5min is fair game. Do have in mind that the cast time + delayed impact are also supposed to be factored in there, since they are drawbacks to the caster and it should be a slowish descending meteor for extra dramatic effect.
Destro is just a edgy fire mage. Better in every way.
Mages should be chunking people like destro does with how little survival we have.
Ignite needs a rework, living bomb needs a buff.
They can’t figure out a solid way for ignite to spread as they keep changing it.
Combust should be good but it doesnt for 3 reasons;
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It happens so often with PvE talents it doesn’t feel special
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The crits don’t crit for anything
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All your damage is tied to it
Bring back pre legion fire
1 Like
Just reroll, no one plays mage anymore for a reason.