I don’t think I have found a single person that likes SKB in my circles despite myself kind of enjoying it. I don’t see anything in the talents or current toolkit that replaces SKB at all currently. There’d have to be some buffs or a crazy capstone that makes SKB obsolete. I do think it needs changing, it’s been like this for too long but I struggle to think of what replaces it. What sucks about it, is that you have to pick it and there’s no alternative.
In TWW that will change. SKB is getting slightly nerfed and UI is getting buffed. Also UI will be hands down the better option if you pick the Sunfury hero tree.
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Well you don’t HAVE to pick anything. But yes, other capstones like Unleashed Inferno and Hyperthermia have less throughput than SKB at the moment.
The caveat there is that SKB has to be played correctly for that to be true. If you can’t consistently get the hard cast off then you would actually do better personal DPS taking something else. Might not get you into cutting edge Mythic guilds that way, but if that’s not a goal then it really doesn’t matter as much as people like to pretend.
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That remains to be seen. A lot of tuning can happen between now and launch, and even afterward. And we have no idea what sorts of set bonuses we’ll see.
Don’t get me wrong, if UI becomes the “hands down” better option then cool. Just saying it’s too early to know.
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Sure but the difference between SKB and UI is one of higher uptime vs lower cooldown on Combustion and the Sunfury phoenix only triggers when you use Combustion (not when you gain it via a proc), therefore UI is better any way you cut it. Even Preheat said so in his Alpha analysis. Of course things can still change between now and then but I doubt it because the devs themselves have flagged SKB as problematic (because it’s too strong) and wanting to rein it in.
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All fair points. And you’re probably right that they will hold their line on reining in SKB. But then as you yourself have pointed out many times, they say stuff that doesn’t always come to fruition.
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All good for Sunfury, but I’m sure plenty of us Fire Mages (and frost mages) enjoy the though of Frostfire more.
Personally I’ve always loved the idea of Frostfire.
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Yeah I’m all in for Sunfury / UI. Frostfire seems more hectic and using Meteor in Combust for ST just feels awkward. Give me that effortless bird.
Only all the time! 
True. But the way I approach it is that if I want to play Frostfire I would play Frost and if I want to play Sunfury I would play Fire. They each seem to complement the other really well. Unfortunately, I typically play Arcane which means that yet again I am sol. 
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Ripperoni, Fire for me and occasionally Frost for PvP.
Well one can hope for Fire that Frostfire can be more appealing and not have Frostfire only be good for frost like it was in prior expansions.
But I think all of us mages can appreciate Sunfury’s “Merely A Setback” talent name.
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Only thing kind of funny about Sunfury is that if you actually want to keep Blast Wave (for say an AoE stop in M+) your bird is just going to machine gun out CCs for absolutely no reason lol
I loathed SKB + Pyroclasm back in Shadowlands but I actually like it in DF. Shorter cast time + consolidated both talents made it actually pretty good with the only downside being the constant Combustion uptime watering down its overall power.
Yeah that really is an odd choice node as is the replacement of Blast Wave. They’re both CCs but totally different ones and Blast Wave can be significantly modified in the class tree too. Shows a complete lack of insight on the inner workings of the class and how every design choice they make seems to be made in a vacuum. It would be a shocking revelation if we didn’t already know that was the status quo over there, lol. There has been a lot of feedback on this so hopefully it gets looked at and changed before it hits the live servers.
I am interested in the “low apm” option they mentioned in the rework. My poor wrists and hands are getting older and I absolutely adore fire. Its my favorite flavor of mage, and Kaelthas was my favorite character in wc3. Even have a variant of his name for my own.
But being in the top 5 highest apm specs for so long is wearing me out. I wanna get that down to under 60 apm without losing a ton of throughput. I dont care at all if im not first on meters but I do care if im doing as much as tanks.
If they nail that would be absolutely thrilled.
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But doesn’t skb synergize with kindling? It might be more a matter of personal preference if your combustion uptime is high enough, because combustion gives more crits, which means lower combustion cd if you take kindling.
With the nerf to SKB it’s a wash. You’re looking at about the same amount of CDR either way but with much less effort if you opt in for UI.
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