Fire Mage: Perception versus Reality

[mrgreenthump]

Doesn't seem too bad to me. I don't understand how any of that could possibly translate to a 30% loss in DPS. Sounds like good old nerd rage to me.

The bracers alone are a 10% up currently on Live, and with 200% on PTR that turned into a DPS loss. Also a really big part of Mage damage comes from Combustion and RoP timings, which both got sizable nerfs. Furthermore crit got nerfed, which has a huge impact on Mage substained DPS.

[Bloodmagix]

This has been posted a few time but this quote is exactly how I feel about my mage.

Completely agree with you and nearly everything on that post as well.

[Bugg]

Perception from a non-mage caster: fire mages do a lot more damage than me in a +10 mythic dungeon both on st and mt.

[CptEgo]

The bracers alone are a 10% up currently on Live, and with 200% on PTR that turned into a DPS loss. Also a really big part of Mage damage comes from Combustion and RoP timings, which both got sizable nerfs. Furthermore crit got nerfed, which has a huge impact on Mage substained DPS.

Let's hope they just want to tune down burst damage and pull up sustained damage alittle. The changes aren't finished.

[jaakkeli]

Perception from a non-mage caster: fire mages do a lot more damage than me in a +10 mythic dungeon both on st and mt.

In other words mages have good aoe and stackable cooldowns that make their single target look good on really short dungeon boss fights. Try entering a raid where fights last longer and you'll see those fire mages drop to near the bottom of the list.

See all the mages hoping for nerfs to cooldowns and boosts to sustained damage. Personally if I was in charge of mage class design I'd remove cooldown stacking by making Combustion a talent on the same row as Rune of Power (which would also solve the problem of the crappy RoP mechanic being mandatory) but I doubt that's going to happen.

[Deleted]

Perception from a non-mage caster: fire mages do a lot more damage than me in a +10 mythic dungeon both on st and mt.

I love the people writing shit with 0 arguments and data.

Mythic 10 dungeons, top 10: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/9#keystone=10

- ¿How many fire mages on top 10?
- Of these, ¿how many are in the first position in damage?
- Checking this data, ¿are firemages OP in m+ respect other classes?

Thx for read.

[mrgreenthump]

Let's hope they just want to tune down burst damage and pull up sustained damage alittle. The changes aren't finished.

That's exactly what they are doing.. Or should be doing. Just them not nerfing Living Bomb scaling is weird as hell.

[CptEgo]

That's exactly what they are doing.. Or should be doing. Just them not nerfing Living Bomb scaling is weird as hell.

Yea Living Bomb is out of control

[Deleted]

Blizzard: Calm down, we are definitely going to buff Firemage abilities to compensate our crazy 30% damage nerf !111
A bit later:
7.1.5. patch notes: Firemages got brand new shield that looks red!!!1111111oneoneeleven. And that's all, folks, we hope you like our "compensation".
...

Blizard to unholy dks (who are bottom of every mythic raid boss): ...... silence....

Oh you crazy fire magii

[Loreld]

How about you fucking wait for all the ptr patch notes instead of just whining ahead of time?

[Deleted]

Then you don't understand how fire mage works.

He's Cpt Ego. He's above proper analysis.

[CptEgo]

He's Cpt Ego. He's above proper analysis.

If life has taught me anything it's been to not overreact

[Eyliria]

The main changes that contribute to the said 30% nerf are: Combustion converting 50% crit to mastery instead of 100%, Rune of Power giving 40% increased damage instead of 50%, and the loss of 5% flat crit from Molten armor. Bracers are nerfed from 300% to 200% (maybe 250%). We also lose Ice Flows, hurting our mobile dps.

It also looked like Critical mass was losing the 10% increased crit chance for Fireball, Pyro, and Scorch, but it looks like it's simply increasing our crit chance from all sources by 10% (1.1), which looks to be a buff.

Incorrect. It's increasing our critical strike rating from all sources by 10%.

+10% crit rating is not * 1.1 to our crit chance.

Our crit chance, even with this, is going DOWN on the PTR atm (because they nerfed the conversion from crit rating to crit %). I have 65% sheet crit on live. It's 63% on the PTR.

I effectively went from 71.5% crit chance on FB/PB/SCORCH to 63%. That's a huge reduction.

[Joryy]

Perspective from a warlock:

This change is designed to reduce your dependence on crit, and reign in the ridiculousness of combustion burst. Do you like being unable to equip items that don't have crit on them, regardless of how many item levels? Do you like all your damage being clustered into a 15 second window? Even you guys have to recognize that combustion + living bomb's aoe burst is too good (quadratic, lol).

Blizzard isn't just going to nerf you by 20% and call it good. Not even shamans get that kind of treatment anymore. Wait till you see the counterbalance buffs before you start all the 'woe is me' hamlet stuff. Maybe you'll like the less-bursty fire too.

[BiggestNoob]

Perspective from a warlock:

This change is designed to reduce your dependence on crit, and reign in the ridiculousness of combustion burst. Do you like being unable to equip items that don't have crit on them, regardless of how many item levels? Do you like all your damage being clustered into a 15 second window? Even you guys have to recognize that combustion + living bomb's aoe burst is too good (quadratic, lol).

Blizzard isn't just going to nerf you by 20% and call it good. Not even shamans get that kind of treatment anymore. Wait till you see the counterbalance buffs before you start all the 'woe is me' hamlet stuff. Maybe you'll like the less-bursty fire too.

Combustion burst is not much higher than the burst of many specs, and fire is only dependent on crit because it scales like shit with every other stat. A huge chunk of the fire mage burst comes from sinew because it crits + RoP. As soon as I got one even at 870 breaking 1 million was easy, before that 850-900k was all I could manage, and many specs can do that much or more.

These changes won't fix anything -- they'll end up making fire worse and the scaling problems will still be there.

[Joryy]

they'll end up making fire worse and the scaling problems will still be there.

There is no evidence of what the rest of the changes are, so how you can you predict the outcome? Right now, all you have is angry cynicism.

This thread is supposed to be about perception vs reality. The talent/legendary/balance pass isn't even half finished yet, so predictions about how unfair life is going to be for fire are purely perception. Reality hasn't come yet. Try to lay off the fatalism.

[genzic8787]

the very sad thing ive seen is that yes fire mages are good in afew areas.. mob pulls when we stack our CD's and some trinket abuse but in many areas we dont slay.. i recently joined a mythic raid grp and yes i struggle to be in the top 10 most fights (in my heroic guild always top 3) in the bigger picture in mythic raiding with mythic geared team mates fire mages are not doing great.. the nerf seem very harsh to a class that can exploit and burn a mob of 10+ mobs.. seems really sad for sure to hear that another nerf is coming our way.. frost and arc might be the only way to go sadly ive just hit rank 33 on my weapon and hate the idea of throwing that all away

[Purpleisbetter]

We still need to have the whole picture before making any drastic decision.

It can be a good change or even worse then we thought. Tuning did not happen yet and we still need if there will be any further mechanical change.

Devs probably don't have a clue yet about Icy Floes and what to do with it. It might look like nothing, but it has severe impact on Pyro tuning (Legendary wrist), Evocation and even on the dreadful Norgannon feet.

[BiggestNoob]

There is no evidence of what the rest of the changes are, so how you can you predict the outcome? Right now, all you have is angry cynicism.

This thread is supposed to be about perception vs reality. The talent/legendary/balance pass isn't even half finished yet, so predictions about how unfair life is going to be for fire are purely perception. Reality hasn't come yet. Try to lay off the fatalism.

Because math isn't hard, and they're not going to suddenly make spell interactions a thing. They're removing crit synergy and the only thing they've claimed they'll do is "increase damage to compensate" which doesn't fix the scaling problems.

Just for giggles, our mastery is incredibly weak, even on cleave. At the end of a 12-14 million burst window, it's ticking for just over 300k. That's with an effective 17000 rating for me and the fact that HS makes Pyro get twice the benefit from mastery. So that means all that pyro damage is effectively benefiting from 34000 mastery rating and it's ending up being worth ~2.7 million damage from 10 seconds, or 270k DPS. I don't know many specs in this game where if you handed them 34000 of a secondary that is ostensibly good that they would gain less than 8 damage per rating point. Look at the scaling factors out of simcraft for different specs. There's a reason ignite does basically 0 damage outside of Combustion.

They're not fixing this. Fire will scale worse after this change. Right now we at least have the benefit of Combustion giving us absolutely disgusting levels of stats so we can actually do some damage.

[MashTactics]

I don't understand how any of that could possibly translate to a 30% loss in DPS.

And I don't understand trigonometry, which is why you won't find me planning flight paths for rocket launches at NASA.

Which begs the question of what you're doing in here.