[FIRE] Legion Beta Megathread

[Lady Velvet]

Personally I hope Ignite is left off of PF. Keeps it unique rather than just another type of Pyroblast.

I really see it as unique even if it causes ignite. It's a fiery phoenix flying towards your opponents to burn them. That's pretty unique already.

I just can't resist a 500% of spell power PF ignite.

[pyrostorm9001]

I really see it as unique even if it causes ignite. It's a fiery phoenix flying towards your opponents to burn them. That's pretty unique already.

I just can't resist a 500% of spell power PF ignite.

What you are asking for (indirectly of course) is for them to nerf the spell power just to add ignite, assuming of course that 500% spell power is producing the desired damage for the spell.

[Imnick]

Phoenixbolt not applying Ignite does mean it has no mastery scaling but as it has such good intellect scaling that isn't really a problem.

[Deleted]

Crossing my fingers for PF Ignite!

Nope, no Ignite for PF after checking yesterday.

[Deleted]

Phoenixbolt not applying Ignite does mean it has no mastery scaling but as it has such good intellect scaling that isn't really a problem.

indeed, i think thats a good point to make it a useful spell for targetswitching and bursting down priority adds, where a lets say 350% int + ignite PF wouldn't tick long enough.

[pixelated senpai]

So say prepatch is here next monday, how would i use PF in a ST situation like M reaver or Zakuun?

[Deleted]

So... the lucky guys who got into beta:

How does fire play?
Is the rotation as bland as it looks?
Are the talents as terrible as they look?
Are the fire legendaries as bad as they look?

[Erolian]

So say prepatch is here next monday, how would i use PF in a ST situation like M reaver or Zakuun?

I was trying to bank at least 2 but hopefully 3 PF charges for Combustion single target and using excess charges on trinket procs or whatever in between. Seemed like the best way to use it because you could string together all instant or off GCD abilities during Combustion and likely get the maximum number of Pyroblasts out during it.

[pixelated senpai]

I was trying to bank at least 2 but hopefully 3 PF charges for Combustion single target and using excess charges on trinket procs or whatever in between. Seemed like the best way to use it because you could string together all instant or off GCD abilities during Combustion and likely get the maximum number of Pyroblasts out during it.

Ah ok, i figured it was going to be something like that.

- - - Updated - - -

So... the lucky guys who got into beta:

How does fire play?
Is the rotation as bland as it looks?
Are the talents as terrible as they look?
Are the fire legendaries as bad as they look?

I still dont understand when to use each level 100 talent and the level 90 talents could use some rework with LB and UM. With legendaries, every post i've seen regarding fire has been negative so hopefully they will get reworks.

[Rothex]

So say prepatch is here next monday, how would i use PF in a ST situation like M reaver or Zakuun?

Will we even be getting the Artifact weapons in the pre-patch? I assumed they were only available when Legion is released thus pre-patch HFC wouldn't involve Phoenix Flames.

[Imnick]

You won't have Phoenixbolt in the prepatch yeah.

[pixelated senpai]

Will we even be getting the Artifact weapons in the pre-patch? I assumed they were only available when Legion is released thus pre-patch HFC wouldn't involve Phoenix Flames.

I meant when Legion drops, but my question was for ST fights in general and those were the examples that came to mind since i do them weekly.

[Lady Velvet]

From the TC forum Celestalon has said that PH will indeed trigger ignite
"No, Phoenix's Flames will be able to trigger Ignite. Just a bug."

Praise the phoenix!

[pixelated senpai]

Got into beta today and tried Fire, at the starting gear is absolutely horrible and i have no intention of lvling it lol. Perhaps when we can make character copies the experience wont be as bad.

- - - Updated - - -

So... the lucky guys who got into beta:

How does fire play?
Is the rotation as bland as it looks?
Are the talents as terrible as they look?
Are the fire legendaries as bad as they look?

can confirm the rotation is a bit bland

[Deleted]

Can also confirm the rotation is very bland... the only mage spec that seems anyway fun/fast to play is frost, and that's because it's largely unchanged. Any changes they did make (such as loosing FF bolt, gaining that silly beam etc) are just making the spec worse, but still fun.

[Deleted]

So I actually got to play beta and I can say that the base rotation of Fire may be bland but I don't really mind it. What I do really mind is the talents. God they're awful.

In the lvl15 row, Pyromaniac feels like the unquestionably dominant choice. At least until we have so much crit that we no longer need additional Hot Streak procs from talents. With the changes to crit scaling (Early gear has more, but you won't get that much more from late gear. Which I personally love) I don't know if that will ever happen, tho.
Fire starter is just a stupid idea considering it gives us crit at a time where we'll definitely be using out crit CD (Combustion).
Conflagration may be worth it in AoE situations but like Cinderstorm (lvl100) I honestly don't know when to take it. Feels way too mathy.

Lvl30 talents, Shimmer and Cold Snap are actually good options but I don't see why anyone would EVER take Cauterize over those two options. It's basically a 7% health heal on death with a sprint attached to it. I don't see why I'd ever take this over Cold Snap, which heals for more and also makes me invulnerable for the process. The only benefit of Cauterize is staying mobile but I don't feel like that is enough.

The level 45 talent row looks okay. I just hope it gets tuned to a point where it's an actual option and not just "Rune of Power burst CD > all"

Level 60 talents I feel Controlled Burn is kind of useless. Between decent crit scaling on even early gear levels, Enhanced Pyrotechnics and Pyromaniac I don't really know if Controlled Burn is really worth it.

For now I have exclusively played with Flame On and think it's a solid talent.

edit: I played around with Controlled Burn a little now and ... maybe it's not so bad BUT:
1. When it procs I often find myself to use Inferno Blast into it, as I don't expect it to happen. When it procs it does "Heating up" for a fraction of a second and THEN procs into Hot Streak. The short "Heating Up" visual usually causes me to Infero Blast right into it.
2. It's oftentimes hard to tell if it procs at all. Did I get hot streak off of Pyromaniac or Controlled Burn here? It needs a visual or some audible cue, otherwise people won't even feel they have this talent. Not feeling if you actually have a talent is unsatisfactory and will lead to people not taking it.
3. It still competes with Flame On. Flame On GUARANTUEES that I get a Hot Streak from a Heating Up. Controlled Burn is a 10% chance for that to happen. Sure it's a passive vs. an active but... they basically do the same thing. One reliably, the other totally unreliable and at a really low rate.

I'm not sure about the 75 row. My initial thought was "Everyone is going to take Ice Floes anyways" but between being able to Blink (Shimmer) while casting and firing instants I'm not sure if it's THAT useful. Especially since hopefully there will be more end game this time than there was in WoD. Aka "Raiding won't be the only thing you do". For raiding, Ice Floes will unquestionably be the dominant choice but for questing, dungeons and PvP I can totally see people picking up Ring of Frost or Ice Ward (which is 2 Fnova Charges and NOT the old Ice Ward) instead.

On to level 90. Living Bomb feels every bit as awful as people predicted. Holy shit this ability feels bad now. Has a Cooldown for it's duration, automatically spreads on explosion, no way to manually spread it. This means that on an AoE pack it'll take just over 12 seconds (in the starting gear) for living bomb to spread and then for the spread LBs to explode. This feels like an eternity.
I have not tested Flame Patch yet, as there hasn't been an awful lot of "you'll be casting way more Flamestrikes instead of Pyroblasts for the next 30 minutes" situations yet and Unstable Magic at least gives me a minor boost on single targets (Flame Patch does NOTHING on single targets).
I haven't mathed out if Living Bomb is actually a DPS increase in single target situations (maybe even more than UM?) in which case it'd surely be worth taking but it just feels not so great for AoE situations now.

tl;dr: Living Bomb feels bad on AoE but may still be worth picking up anyways. UM is boring but at least doesn't need to be maintained and provides a single target dmg increase - even if small. Flame Patch is worthless on single target and only really worth it if you're going to flamestrike a lot and the mobs will stand still afterwards.

On to lvl 100. Kindling is okay if you're not going for Rune of Power. Otherwise it will fuck up your ability to align Combustion with RoP reliably. But it feels like a good enough talent. Let's hope that RoP doesn't become the mandatory, dominant choice.
Cinderstorm feels weird. I honestly don't know when I am supposed to take this. I mean it's obviously the AoE choice but I have no idea when it's worth to pick it up (again, I haven't mathed out anything). Will 3 mob pulls in mythic dungeons be enough to make this worthwhile? Or is it for large groups only? Is it worth casting on a single target boss?
Meteor is still Meteor.


Bottom line: Many problems here. Many talents are either useless or they at least are so subtle that it's not evident by just looking at them if they're wort taking. THIS IS A PROBLEM. If I need a math major or 3 hours of testing to find out if a talent is worth taking (at all - not even if it's the top choice) then it's a bad talent. Talents should be like "Wow that sounds cool, I wanna have this" and a lot of our talents don't do that (e.g. Conflagration).
Other talents, like Living Bomb, just feel bad to use. Again Talents should be like "Wow that's so cool, I want to take this!" The level 90 talent row fails completely here. Lvl90 is more like "Welp, I gotta take SOMETHING, right?". But there are also talents in other roles that fall short here (Cauterize and Controlled Burn).

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I haven't tested the Legendary items but I have seen compilation videos and the Fire Mage Legendaries are probably the worst out there.

Dragons Breath range is nice and all. But when it's shorter than all other spells, you cannot cast it when you stand at max range. So this is possibly not an option in certain raid encounters. Unless you want to walk up. Still one of the better ones.

Giving a Shield on Blink, on top of the Artifact talent that heals on blink ... on top of Blink already being our go-to defense (mostly movement in raids). Just what the shit? Throw all eggs in one basked and hope you don't waste too much defense when you blink?

Enhanced Pyrotechnics on Scorch? Why? Why would we ever want that? Scorch is total garbage and nobody would want to waste the Pyrotechnics buff on a scorch crit.

100% more damage on a hard cast Pyroblast?
This has potential. But why not halve the cast time of Pyroblast instead? I'm not sure (mathematically) if 100% damage on pyroblast offsets the long ass casting time in which we could possibly get 3 or 4 hot streak procs with fireballs or whatever. But again, this has potential. If the reward is worth it, I don't even mind the 4 second cast.

The "no CD and Debuff on Time Warp while solo" one is very cool for soloing. But obviously it's completely useless while in a group. So if you're planning on playing with your friends while questiong, doing dungeons or whatever, this one will be 100% useless. And that kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth when you remember that you're playing a multiplayer game.

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Scorch is super useless and unsatisfying. I'd much rather have back the old Scorch at the cost of beign castable while moving. The spell is a joke now. It has 75% of Fireballs casting time and does 30% of the damage. That's 3800 damage. I have 327.000 HP in the garbage starter gear. So Scorch is doing just over 1% of a player's health. Only ever good for fishing for crits in PvP I suppose. Personally I hate it.

I really miss Arcane intellect. After 11 years it feels really weird to not buff yourself when you ressurect/log in or whatever. It also feels weird wenn your buff bar is empty. Obviously I'll get used to it but for now: Ugh that feels awkward.

Combustion and the rotation that goes with it feels really really powerful. But I feel like I got that burst window pretty well nailed down after some 20 minutes of playing with it. Obviously not quite perfect yet, but close enough. After 20 minutes. This could potentially get boring quickly. But maybe not. Just some random thoughts/rambling.
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That's it for now. I'll add more if I stumble upon more. This is largely negative feedback. Consider it like this: If I haven't complained about it, it's okay or even cool. This is just about Fire Mage. There's lots more to say about questing and all, but this doesn't go in this thread.

If you have questions, I'd be glad to answer. But I won't math. If "This ability does the most damage" is the only reason to take it, it's probably shit.

I'll polish this post and keep it updated and I'll eventually post it in the beta mage feedback for Blizz to see. But I'm european so I doubt anyone will actually care. So if any of you is willing to post this on the US forums, hit me up and I'll hit you with the polished version.

[Deleted]

Got into beta today and tried Fire, at the starting gear is absolutely horrible and i have no intention of lvling it lol. Perhaps when we can make character copies the experience wont be as bad.

Yeah, fire gear is crap - mastery only. But you get some crit very fast with quests.

[Deleted]

Level 60 talents I feel Controlled Burn is kind of useless. Between decent crit scaling on even early gear levels, Enhanced Pyrotechnics and Pyromaniac I don't really know if Controlled Burn is really worth it.

For now I have exclusively played with Flame On and think it's a solid talent.

edit: I played around with Controlled Burn a little now and ... maybe it's not so bad BUT:
1. When it procs I often find myself to use Inferno Blast into it, as I don't expect it to happen. When it procs it does "Heating up" for a fraction of a second and THEN procs into Hot Streak. The short "Heating Up" visual usually causes me to Infero Blast right into it.
2. It's oftentimes hard to tell if it procs at all. Did I get hot streak off of Pyromaniac or Controlled Burn here? It needs a visual or some audible cue, otherwise people won't even feel they have this talent. Not feeling if you actually have a talent is unsatisfactory and will lead to people not taking it.
3. It still competes with Flame On. Flame On GUARANTUEES that I get a Hot Streak from a Heating Up. Controlled Burn is a 10% chance for that to happen. Sure it's a passive vs. an active but... they basically do the same thing. One reliably, the other totally unreliable and at a really low rate.

The graphical delay you describe makes Controlled Burn seem even more awful than initially predicted. If it is that easy to waste your Inferno Blast casting it, then the talent should be outright replaced I suppose. Combine that with its thematic redundancy with the lvl 15 talent, I really hope were not stuck with a complete dud of a talent for the entirety of Legion. There's always some sucky talents for every spec, but Fire seems to have them in overabundance.

How to do you feel about Blast Wave? From what I read it is pretty weak right now. It could be a matter of tuning it's damage, but I wish there was more synergy and interplay with the rest of the spells we have (same applies for the Nova talents of Frost and Arcane). At the least they could make its CC aspect a lot stronger and make it the soloing/PvP choice, rather than dead space on the talent panel.

On to level 90. Living Bomb feels every bit as awful as people predicted. Holy shit this ability feels bad now. Has a Cooldown for it's duration, automatically spreads on explosion, no way to manually spread it. This means that on an AoE pack it'll take just over 12 seconds (in the starting gear) for living bomb to spread and then for the spread LBs to explode. This feels like an eternity.
I have not tested Flame Patch yet, as there hasn't been an awful lot of "you'll be casting way more Flamestrikes instead of Pyroblasts for the next 30 minutes" situations yet and Unstable Magic at least gives me a minor boost on single targets (Flame Patch does NOTHING on single targets).
I haven't mathed out if Living Bomb is actually a DPS increase in single target situations (maybe even more than UM?) in which case it'd surely be worth taking but it just feels not so great for AoE situations now.

tl;dr: Living Bomb feels bad on AoE but may still be worth picking up anyways. UM is boring but at least doesn't need to be maintained and provides a single target dmg increase - even if small. Flame Patch is worthless on single target and only really worth it if you're going to flamestrike a lot and the mobs will stand still afterwards.

Living Bomb really needs more thought put into it. There absolutely needs to be a way to control its spreading, because Fire really seems to need more player action tied into it. There could be so much more added into it

Unstable Magic seems to be the to-go choice, which is really sad, as I hate that boring passive talent. I wish Living Bomb were a better choice for cleave (and maybe even single target) because it is not the most brainless passive option.

On to lvl 100. Kindling is okay if you're not going for Rune of Power. Otherwise it will fuck up your ability to align Combustion with RoP reliably. But it feels like a good enough talent. Let's hope that RoP doesn't become the mandatory, dominant choice.
Cinderstorm feels weird. I honestly don't know when I am supposed to take this. I mean it's obviously the AoE choice but I have no idea when it's worth to pick it up (again, I haven't mathed out anything). Will 3 mob pulls in mythic dungeons be enough to make this worthwhile? Or is it for large groups only? Is it worth casting on a single target boss?
Meteor is still Meteor.

The two charges of RoP should hopefully give us enough room to adapt to the shorter Combustion CD. Of course that assumes RoP becomes the to-go option, but given the nature of CD stacking, it likely will be.

I don't see Kindling not being the best option, but at least this is a more involved passive option. I have posted this before, but Meteor needs to get rid of the useless split damage mechanic and it needs to be the real AoE choice. I mean using an AoE reticle for a single target spell does not feel fun and it has been something Blizzard agrees on. I mean the removal of Prismatic Crystal and the change to Mark of Aluneth are enough proof.

Cinderstrom could be cool if it was a real single target nuke (to contrast meteor). It needs to be more user friendly I guess, but I like the idea of it playing off Ignite. I hope it receives more work, because having more actives and less passive being competative is what Fire mages really need.

Enhanced Pyrotechnics on Scorch? Why? Why would we ever want that? Scorch is total garbage and nobody would want to waste the Pyrotechnics buff on a scorch crit.

Scorch is super useless and unsatisfying. I'd much rather have back the old Scorch at the cost of beign castable while moving. The spell is a joke now. It has 75% of Fireballs casting time and does 30% of the damage. That's 3800 damage. I have 327.000 HP in the garbage starter gear. So Scorch is doing just over 1% of a player's health. Only ever good for fishing for crits in PvP I suppose. Personally I hate it.

Scorch certainly needs to have changes done to it, but I doubt anything would happen as both players and Blizzard simply consider that spell as a non-entity. I wish it were better, because casting on the run is one of the things that made fire so fun.

The artifact trait that requires us to cast 6 scorches on a row (Scorched Earth) is also completely worthless. I think it should change, but we never know how low mage changes are on Blizzard's priority list. We might as well have this trait copy the Draenor perk of extra movement speed on scorch cast, at least that would be useful in PvP and niche in PvE.


At the end of the day, any feedback that is posted on the beta forums is valuable and maybe someone viewing the EU forums can copy paste it on the US side.

[Deleted]

So here is my post on the EU beta forums. Feel free to copy to it to the US forums, but please leave me a message so I can follow it there

How to do you feel about Blast Wave? From what I read it is pretty weak right now. It could be a matter of tuning it's damage, but I wish there was more synergy and interplay with the rest of the spells we have (same applies for the Nova talents of Frost and Arcane). At the least they could make its CC aspect a lot stronger and make it the soloing/PvP choice, rather than dead space on the talent panel.

I haven't tried it yet. Thought I'd test out the new stuff first. So I cannot comment on whether or not it is weak right now. I will try it the next round of playing, though.

I absolutely agree with your views on the subject, though. The rest of your reply was also really sensible.


edit: I tried Blast Wave now. I cannot comment on the competitiveness of it's damage but to me it's certainly the way to go for questing for it's AoE slow alone. I still agree that this identity (questing/pvp utility) could be strengthened, but it's still okay for it even now.

[Komman]

According to wowhead: DB live: 86% spell power without major glyph (+100%); Legion 103.2% spell power.

There is a missing 150% multiplier that is a remnant of the hotfix applied during HFC. You need to multiply the result by (1 + 150%) = 250%. The current alpha DB (Haven't checked since beta launched) is doing 103.2% * 250% = 257.5% spellpower as damage.