7.1.5: Fire completely wrecked

[nocturnus]

Fact of the matter is (notice the word fact?) we're not topping the charts. There are about 7 other classes, that outrank us on most fights. This, with meaningless padding.

Remove mages with the ridiculously OP bracers from the equation and our rankings drop even further. Check damage done on the main target (the boss) and we drop even further.

So, to recapitulate: We're middle of the pack (at best) with the over-powered bracers and padding. Without, well, do I need say more? Every single piece of evidence shows this. Yet, developers are listening to a group of baddies, claiming we're too strong because - and I quote - "Every voice matters".

It's only the first PTR iteration of course. Let's hope for the best, but apparently, devs think we're too strong. Go figure.

[MasterHamster]

Who would've thought that the PTR would be used for testing, and evidently Blizzard wants to rethink Fire to some extent.

But nah, as usual the first batch of changes is negative = fuk dis shit im unsubs

When Blizzard pretty much ends up buffing your overall damage once they're done, will you learn from this decade old Sky-is-falling tripe?

[deadman1]

Who would've thought that the PTR would be used for testing, and evidently Blizzard wants to rethink Fire to some extent.

But nah, as usual the first batch of changes is negative = fuk dis shit im unsubs

When Blizzard pretty much ends up buffing your overall damage once they're done, will you learn from this decade old Sky-is-falling tripe?

Again I wish I had the faith in blizz to rework a spec mid expac and for it to come out in a decent place.

Any other xpac I wouldn't mind as much, but with legendaries and AP it's annoying.

[BiggestNoob]

Rethink what many consider to be a fun spec, instead of buffing mastery scaling or making it scale better with haste. Just fuck that shit all up.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Justfuckmyshitup/

End result: below average spec drops below tanks. "Perfect balance"!

When Blizzard pretty much ends up buffing your overall damage once they're done, will you learn from this decade old Sky-is-falling tripe?

It won't end up being buffed. If you understood the magnitude of buffs they would have to give it to compensate for what they've done, and that even so because we lose the ability to enter a high mastery state and will still be just as reliant on crit fire be doing less cleave/AoE (thus being significantly worse given frost/arcane do those things better), you'd maybe understand this.

It's already the worst spec, and nerfs of this magnitude will not be met with overbuffs to compensate. Moreover, that would completely contradict their last 5 months of patches. Blizzard wants people to stop playing fire. They nerfed a mediocre spec and buffed the other two specs for this reason. Completely changing this spec's playstyle mid expansion with artifact/legendaries being what they are after everyone has already started switching is not going to suddenly turn around and make fire good.

[Deleted]

Muhahaha! *laughs in Frost*

On a more serious note: If you take that metric you use here (which is one of many possibilities, with its own big shortcomings, and cherrypicked to make you look as weak as possible), you still should get nerfed. 9/24 is still top half. Middle is where the classes should meet. In addition, it's just a first pass. We'll have to wait and see how it develops. But the direction (i.e. nerfing fire by a little) seems to be a right one, because as said you're in the top half. And on a side note, my main (according to your metric right now at place ~15.8/24) gets nerfed, too, as are many other classes / specs. E.g. all agility classes lose 5% crit.

[athrun7189]

its the end of the world!

[BiggestNoob]

Muhahaha! *laughs in Frost*

On a more serious note: If you take that metric you use here (which is one of many possibilities, with its own big shortcomings, and cherrypicked to make you look as weak as possible), you still should get nerfed. 9/24 is still top half. Middle is where the classes should meet. In addition, it's just a first pass. We'll have to wait and see how it develops. But the direction (i.e. nerfing fire by a little) seems to be a right one, because as said you're in the top half. And on a side note, my main (according to your metric right now at place ~15.8/24) gets nerfed, too, as are many other classes / specs. E.g. all agility classes lose 5% crit.

It's already the worst spec. If you're arguing for fire nerfs, you should be asking for bigger nerfs for arcane/frost.

Without BiS legendaries fire is in the bottom half, it is below average. It's been that way since day 1. It was that way throughout beta too, after the meta gems and broken accessories were fixed and secondary scaling was nerfed. There was a time when fire/DH/spriest and other classes that could scale extremely well (or had StM) were doing stupid levels of damage. That was all fixed, and the meme that fire was OP persisted. People saw how shit fire was without gear early on in the expansion and then the few people who got bracers/ring were topping charts (because being more geared than 99% of people with BiS legendaries has no impact on that at all, swearsies) and then even they started to fall behind as everyone else caught up. Meanwhile people without those things were behind from day 1 and continue to be behind.

And then the meme came back alive because people see what fire can do given enough time to swing backloaded damage on huge M+ pulls which has 0 relevancy in raids (never has, never will). Everyone thought DH, WW, DKs would be super op op op op op op because they were doing so much frontloaded AoE in heroics and mythic dungeons. As soon as mobs had enough HP to survive for more than 5 seconds, mages and MMs skyrocketed past most other specs and suddenly the "fire is OP" meme was reborn like a fucking phoenix. Hint: MMs aren't considered OP and they're just as good if not better on every single fight as fire. INCREDIBLE THO RITE, FIRE IS OP!

Everyone who makes this retarded claim is below an 80 IQ. It's false. It was never true. Fire is shit, it was at no point in this expansion "overpowered" and it is currently behind both the other specs.

[deadman1]

Muhahaha! *laughs in Frost*

On a more serious note: If you take that metric you use here (which is one of many possibilities, with its own big shortcomings, and cherrypicked to make you look as weak as possible), you still should get nerfed. 9/24 is still top half. Middle is where the classes should meet. In addition, it's just a first pass. We'll have to wait and see how it develops. But the direction (i.e. nerfing fire by a little) seems to be a right one, because as said you're in the top half. And on a side note, my main (according to your metric right now at place ~15.8/24) gets nerfed, too, as are many other classes / specs. E.g. all agility classes lose 5% crit.

That isn't cherrypicked. It's literal facts from live parses, if you think that is "cherrypicked" then you have no idea what that means, nor do you know how to read logs.

Again, 9th isn't a place for nerfs. Things beneath it should be buffed.

PS - Fire lost 5% crit too. build a bridge.

[lukico]

We'd rather you didn't play Fire Mage ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-4u6gn1r4U ( maybe someone want to edit this )

[gallamann]

We all know this is coming.

What do we know... what we know is what is on the PTR, no more no less

Anything beyond that is speculation.

So what have we to draw upon to form our speculation?

You obviously either are privy to info none of us are; or are just one of those people that are always seeing the glass half full.

Myself, I look to the history Blizzard has shown us since Vanilla, they have a long and very solid track record of never getting balance right.

The best example for me was Legion Beta, any developer worth their paycheck would have needed one visit to Mage Class Hall to know that something was deeply and seriously flawed in mage spec balance. They went Live with it

Recently it was nerf Pyro by 6% when the real issue was and still is OP Legendary bracers. What sane developer crushes 97%+ of the specs base, instead of simply either adjusting proc rate on bracers or giving it an ICD?

The current one that we have is "we are balancing on mythic+ performance". What about all of us who don't participate in that content because the rewards for doing so are too RNG to warrant the effort.

So my speculation, we are bottom 1/3 DPS from 7.1.5 thru to 7.2, because they will need live data to prove Fire is bottom third DPS. Seen it too many times

[Deleted]

Yes when a 9th to 11th place DPS spec is nerfed into oblivion it's pretty bad.

Ha, jokes on me, i'm an Unholy DK, you cant win a whine war vs that.

[Deleted]

That isn't cherrypicked. It's literal facts from live parses, if you think that is "cherrypicked" then you have no idea what that means, nor do you know how to read logs.

As far as I understand, cherrypicking in this case is just taking one single possible metric to compare the overall dps of the classes, while ignoring others and possible shortcomings of that possibility, to support your own case. Imo that's exactly what's being done here by a few people. E.g. I could just post https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/10, which is another possibility with many shortcomings to compare classes and boil it down to a single number, and argue that fire is at number 3 and needs even bigger nerfs. Which would be stupid.
Fact is, every single one of those comparisons who try to put the overall class balance into a single number (e.g. 9/24) has its shortcomings. Many here just took the one where fire is possibly the lowest of all the more reasonable comparisons and base the discussion around it. For me, that's cherrypicking.

Again, 9th isn't a place for nerfs. Things beneath it should be buffed.

So everyone should be nerfed / buffed towards being a little higher than the current middle of the pack in your opinion. I have to say that it has its appeal, as buffs are certainly more fun than nerfs.

PS - Fire lost 5% crit too. build a bridge.

They took our crits! Let's build a wall.

-snip-

It is quite a huge leap to interpret into "The direction (i.e. nerfing fire by a little) seems to be the right one" that "Fire is OP". Classes can receive small adjustments like nerfs or buffs without being OP or being underpowered.

[deadman1]

Ha, jokes on me, i'm an Unholy DK, you cant win a whine war vs that.

I'm not trying to.

[BiggestNoob]

It is quite a huge leap to interpret into "The direction (i.e. nerfing fire by a little) seems to be the right one" that "Fire is OP". Classes can receive small adjustments like nerfs or buffs without being OP or being underpowered.

No, it's not.

Something needing nerfs implies that it's overperforming. Fire has not ever once in this expansion overperformed, on any fight. It was nerfed in spite of this due to a meme that has now resulted in the spec being gutted.

It's the worst of the 3 specs, so implying it needs a nerf at all is retarded if you're not asking for larger nerfs for the other 2. No spec that's below average needs nerfs. They need buffs.

[deadman1]

As far as I understand, cherrypicking in this case is just taking one single possible metric to compare the overall dps of the classes, while ignoring others and possible shortcomings of that possibility, to support your own case. Imo that's exactly what's being done here by a few people. E.g. I could just post https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/10, which is another possibility with many shortcomings to compare classes and boil it down to a single number, and argue that fire is at number 3 and needs even bigger nerfs. Which would be stupid.
Fact is, every single one of those comparisons who try to put the overall class balance into a single number (e.g. 9/24) has its shortcomings. Many here just took the one where fire is possibly the lowest of all the more reasonable comparisons and base the discussion around it. For me, that's cherrypicking.

Actually what you are doing is not understanding how to read logs. Overall data is meaningless, look at individual bosses and you'll more accurately understand what I'm talking about.

I'm not cherrypicking, I'm analyzing data.

So everyone should be nerfed / buffed towards being a little higher than the current middle of the pack in your opinion. I have to say that it has its appeal, as buffs are certainly more fun than nerfs.

Is this a joke? Serious question, I wan't a legitimate answer.

Yes I think DPS should be equal across the board so people can play what they want.

They took our crits! Let's build a wall.

I was making a point because you mentioned 5% crit loss. Since you clearly can't have a serious conversation, You are simply not worth responding to anymore. Have a nice day, life, whatever. I'm done with you and your lack of understanding of reality.

It is quite a huge leap to interpret into "The direction (i.e. nerfing fire by a little) seems to be the right one" that "Fire is OP". Classes can receive small adjustments like nerfs or buffs without being OP or being underpowered.

Why heavily modify and nerf a spec unless it's considered OP?

It definitely isn't OP.

[Fojos]

Who would've thought that the PTR would be used for testing, and evidently Blizzard wants to rethink Fire to some extent.

But nah, as usual the first batch of changes is negative = fuk dis shit im unsubs

When Blizzard pretty much ends up buffing your overall damage once they're done, will you learn from this decade old Sky-is-falling tripe?

It's obvious what they want to do, nerf.

[Alydael]

Truthfully, I am disappointed in this. Due to the whole artifact thing, it is difficult to switch specs. You need to grind out each spec's artifact power to power up their weapon. That makes it really time consuming to switch specs.

What I think Blizzard should do: Since they are changing some of the specs so much, they should refund the artifact power and let you apply it to an artifact of a different spec if you want to switch when the changes go live. One time only.

[Glorious Leader]

Truthfully, I am disappointed in this. Due to the whole artifact thing, it is difficult to switch specs. You need to grind out each spec's artifact power to power up their weapon. That makes it really time consuming to switch specs.

What I think Blizzard should do: Since they are changing some of the specs so much, they should refund the artifact power and let you apply it to an artifact of a different spec if you want to switch when the changes go live. One time only.

Thats a good idea. They refund talents after significant changes.

[deadman1]

Truthfully, I am disappointed in this. Due to the whole artifact thing, it is difficult to switch specs. You need to grind out each spec's artifact power to power up their weapon. That makes it really time consuming to switch specs.

What I think Blizzard should do: Since they are changing some of the specs so much, they should refund the artifact power and let you apply it to an artifact of a different spec if you want to switch when the changes go live. One time only.

Yeah it's a good idea.

Kind of like when they change cards in hearthstone, they allow you to trade them for full cost.

Legendaries are a different story though.

[Nokura]

Looking at simcraft and logfiles, fire was far from a top DPS spec. Scaling shows we are falling behind heavily come 900+ gear as it is. Yet, we get hit by the wrecking ball. Summary follows

NERF:
Fire Blast: one charge only
Flame on: +1 charge only
Icy flows: gone
Rune of Power: Down to +40% dmg
Combustion: Nerfed to 50% mastery increase

BUFF/ADDITIONS:
Frenetics speed: useless talent, or maybe not since icy flows are gone
Controlled Burn: rnd hot streaks instead of Flame on talent
Cauterise: base spell, okay, but id rather not have an anti-skill talent compensate major dps loss

Legendaries:
- Bracers made completely useless
- Waist might become the best legendary considering flame on is practically gone

So they take away the reactive elements and replacing it with more rnd procs. This will completely destruct current fire mage play style even though it was a great and fund class to play!

Why don't you wait until they have all the changes slated so you aren't just talking first iteration...talk about it in the PTR forums, give them feedback, this isn't the right avenue for this. It's also not the right time for it.