Fire has Nova and can opt into double Nova or RoF like Frost can, but unlike Frost Fire can increase its movespeed via Scorch when it opts into the Frenetic Speed talent.
More importantly in realistic DPS scenarios the ability to burst everything down with uncapped AoE before one even needs to resort to kiting to survive far exceeds anything Frost can do in such a setup.
That all has nothing to do with why frost is aoe capped.
Fire is uncontrollable yet wonât spread until we tell it to, using a spell we shouldnât outside of Combustion⌠now Iâm sad
Could it because many of us have run keys where our damage is crap because the ads arenât kept in the stacking flame patch?
But sure. Nerf it all. Let the salty mages who play frost and arcane have their way so that rather than asking that their specs get improvements, they take the one mage spec thatâs viable in raids and keys and leave it that NO mages are functional.
Iâve lost the ability to feel sympathy for people that choose to stay frost or arcane. Why show solidarity when they donât?
So when Fire gets dumpstered in the next patch, how are you going to feel about having to switch to frost or arcane? Judging from this:
Theyâre probably going to balance based on perception rather than actually balance. So, get ready. I wonât be switching though.
Itâs important that other specs are competitive in an RPG. Ideally, everyone can do their part just by playing what they want to play and playing it well. Sometimes tiny things like uncapped AOE get in the way of that because of perception. There is no reason only a small subset of specs gets to scale their damage with the amount of trash pulled. It only makes people think they have to play x to succeed in y.
Edit:
I also want to add that there is actually reason to balance based on perception rather than actually balance. When you have a population of people such as those that play WoW where the majority are appeased by introducing these ups and downs in class/spec performance, it makes a lot of sense to just have this garbage where some classes are the undisputed top every other patch cycle. Itâs very stupid and entirely the fault of the majorityâs ignorant perceptions and lack of caring for truth.
Arcane would have to be God Tier before Iâd touch that dumpster fire. The mechanics in the spec now are a terrible mish mash of priorities and CDâs and the gameplay just felt awful the month I tried it. For arcane to be viable theyâd have to apply a significant buff to overcome the issues the spec has which have nothing to do with the damage it does (or doesnât do).
The differential would have to be significant for me to think about going Frost (and Venthyr ⌠ew) but if it meant bringing my best to my raid group Iâd consider it. I may be able to get over my aversion to Ravendreth once we have flying. Weâll see.
As I said in another thread, if frost werenât still just average DPS AND werent Venthyr Iâd be frost right now.
Without reworks to how the specs play, theyâre not going to jump the meters without some borrowed skill like a new legendary. Therefore the only way to make frost and arcane mages stop complaining will be to nerf fire and have all 3 specs in the dumpster or, at best, middle of the pack.
At that point Iâd just switch mains altogether. Thought about it a lot in BfA but having more fun playing my lock, priest, and druid now than my mage anyway so if my guild could recruit another mage for what would only be meager damage, an intel buff, and a mage table for the healers Iâd walk away from mage altogether.
I wouldnât mind playing frost, but I donât think theyâre going to butcher fire. A nerf to the uncapped aoe seems pretty reasonable. A change there doesnât really hurt us in anything else. I wouldnât even notice it in dungeons. I canât say Iâve ever been in a pug that was making pulls that large on purpose.
Same. I donât think the âuncapped AoEâ is the elephant in the room everyone thinks it is ⌠and again: it all depends on the ads being grouped together to begin with which, unless in a coordinated group with or without voice doesnât always happen.
Donât get me wrong. I think fire is still very good even when the tank is making one pull at the time, I just donât think itâs overpowered in that scenario.
I want old combust back where you snapshot the ignite and spread it with fire blast. That would really make everyone rage.
Generally speaking, AoE caps run counter the intent of having AoE in the first place. Donât add AoE if you donât want players to use their AoE in favorable conditionsâŚ
Personally, packs of 6 mobs should be tank-lethal if uncontrolled, and AoE should expect 6 mobs before becoming damage positive vis-a-vis single-target. Flamestrike, for example, is damage positive much earlier. If a skill is a âcleaveâ (not an AoE), then being damage positive sooner but hard capped is a completely reasonable design â unfortunately just not what the game has shown since AoE caps were added back. Either double down or get rid of it!
While pack variety and risk needs considerably increased, it simply wonât happen with random affixes being a norm in dungeon âtop contentâ â dead weeks would be a real problem. Mythic+, while a great system in ARPGs, creates a strange bedfellow for MMORPGs.
Thereâs a pacing problem â in combat, thereâs hardly time to type and itâs become a silent expectation that communication happens over voice instead. You are âlocked inâ to a dopamine thrill ride. Many players find that fun, and Iâm not trashing that per se, only that design philosophy hasnât kept up with the shift in player expectations.
In Legion, the combat gameplay loop drew closer to Diablo 3. Funneling, kiting, etc. became the norm, with maximizing damage payload to monsters with infinitely scaling health. It was certainly a calculated risk and seemed to be a successful bet. But at the conclusion of Legion and then subsequently BFA, the removal of that âI am a powerful Wizard/Warrior!â vibe was detrimental to the players who experienced it.
Which comes to removing AoE itself. In the face of debuff management (DoT classes), AoE cannot be removed without the rise of a new meta of uncapped AoEâDoT cleave. This has always been a style option and was extremely powerful on âcouncilâ fights (Coven in Legion). And the constant focus on capping AoEs may be why youâre seeing a nascent resurgence of these specs. Speaking of which, what is Fireâs way to spread damage? Directly? Or through its debuffs?
Seems like a personal problem.
The reality is Arcaneâs skill cap is extremely high. It shot up past Fire on mythic CN this week (thereâs a link in IV discussing this) but is dead last in Heroic. This just proves that point. People for some reason assume theyâre never making mistakes when they complain about a spec, which amazes me. 99% of the time, when you think something is âbadâ, youâre bad. Not saying this âyouâ in 2nd person, but 3rd.
Anyway, from the IV article:
âAnd then thereâs our look at Heroic, where Assassination is doing extremely well in the all percentiles chart, and we can clearly see the Arcane jump is very limited to the upper level of players, as itâs dead last here.â
Point being if the spec was mechanically flawed and just awful, nobody would be able to make it work. Yet, people are making it work. In the 95th percentile of CN Mythic it is 3rd, and in all percentiles it is 4th.
Wasnât that from like 2 arcane mage parses? And one of them came out and said he had to do over 400 pulls to get his positioning down to get that result?
Or is this a new article? UPDATE: Just read the article. Iâd be curious to see how many mages theyâre tracking there but weâre still talking about the players who make the absolute most of any spec they play so not surprising to see.
Skill cap and how a spec plays are not the same thing. Add all the mish mash of spells and conflicting gameplay mechanics you want and of course there will be a percentage of people that master it.
I was speaking about how chaotic the spec felt to play. I did not enjoy it. Congrats if you do lvl 10 hunter posting on an alt to make a point lol.
They just didnât want groups pulling entire wings into a boss room and blasting them all down. Seeing as the overwhelming majority of groups donât play that way, Iâm not sure why theyâd even bother capping it. Even strangerâŚwhy allow some specs to get around that? They must have known how the meta would end up.
I agree with you about their approach being a weird middle-of-the-road solution.
It has achieved none of the outcomes that they stated they wanted. It also doesnât work how they stated, with âcleaveâ specs doing more on small numbers of mobs, and âAOEâ specs doing more on large packs. Generally speaking, the strongest specs do more on all target numbers, or are so close to the cleave specs on small numbers that itâs irrelevant.
I disagree completely with you about going back to single target and CC design though. The game and players have simply moved on from that. There would simply be no way to tune a pack of 5 mobs to be challenging for players across the entire skill spectrum.
Back in BC, people thought it was the height of skill and gameplay to take a rogue and mage and sap 1 mob and sheep 1 mob and then kill the 3 mobs left, then kill the CCâd mobs.
That would absolutely bore anyone decent to tears now. Weâve had 16 years of practice. Itâs painful enough when we have to CC an inspiring mob out of a pack and then kill it on its own or combine it with another pack. Itâs not difficult - itâs slow and boring.
Like it or not, the skill determining factor is now pulling as big as you can. This adds more mechanics into pulls, and those mechanics (and damage intake) is how groups can increase speed and difficulty to their liking.
Iâm yet to see a convincing argument as to how to go pack to single pull style dungeons and still have infinitely scaling difficulty. Damage intake alone is not enough. Mechanics need to increase, which currently happens through both affixes and pull sizes.
I will also say though, that thereâs not much point continuing the discussion unless you post on a character that has evidence of doing relevant content. Not being a dbag, but otherwise youâre just talking about things you have no experience of.
We actually agree.
The âpackâ was not meant to be a recipe for each pull, only that âan overpullâ coerces reactionary CC and Burst to manage the overpull. Packs, generally speaking, are less than 5, and you donât see the âundesired behaviorâ in normal pullsâyou see it emerge from dynamic damage avoidance (AoE hard CCs, like Leg Sweep, in conjunction with AoE soft CCs, like Gorefiend and slows).
Well, thatâs certainly how the last paragraph reads. And frankly, is always a red herring.
Again though, we actually agree. And I donât think the skills required for funneling and maximizing damage in an ARPG are any less valuable than the cooperation in setting up, at least for some packs, with out-of-combat CCs.
See iâd draw the line and say out-of-combat CC is pretty much the bottom rung on the ladder in terms of skill. Itâs so incredibly basic and unengaging that I just donât think it should ever be a thing any more. It also slows the game way down, which the majority do not want anymore.
If theyâre going to design around hard CCâs (rather than just stuns) then at the very least it should have to be reactive. And it should be rewarding, not slow gameplay down.
WellâŚI think Iâll take the timer over the BC dungeon strategies. It was fun for the time, but itâs just so hard to scale difficulty if completion is the challenge and not the timer.
Thatâs where I think the mega dungeons try to strike the balance for completion, before converting to another timer.
Yeah, but even in those, completion is more or less a given. I donât know that Iâve ever been in a key that I just didnât think was possible to complete. Whether you can get 4 other people to stay in there for an hour is another thing lol.