Still no Fire Nerfs and Frost Gets a New Mastery. Further updates at p22

[voltaa]

I think the simplest fix to fire is to not allow Combustion to get extra ticks from haste, it may sound hateful for some people cause ye it kinda does crap on burst a bit, but the biggest problem with fire is that spell.

Going from 10 (no haste proc and no glyph) to 64 (5036 haste / berserking / bloodlust / meta gem / raid haste / glyph) just throws that one ability in absoloutely insane territory for balancing and that change really wouldnt hit low geared fire mages that hard, but ye im idd looking forward to the number pass.

Not 100% if its 5036 or 5043 haste you guys go for, you will ofc know better than me.

I actually do sympathise with mages a tiny bit because of how much damage is actually crammed into that 1 spell, it makes it effectively impossible to nerf your co efficients very much becuse where most other specs have much less potential damage there min is actually a lot higher and i dont think that can be fixed while combustion has the effect it currently does.

While limiting how haste interacts with combustion may seem to fix the problem, that isn't the issue we actually ran into, because we are able to get to mastery points that outweigh the benefits of an extra tick, which the point we are currently at, so it doesn't matter how many ticks we do, since our ticks hit for 150-300k in the first place. The only real way to fix combustion is to completely overhaul the spell, while I think it is one of the coolest spells in the game due to how unique and dynamic of a cooldown it is, it just doesn't work as it scales too well too quickly with too many factors

[Deleted]

While limiting how haste interacts with combustion may seem to fix the problem, that isn't the issue we actually ran into, because we are able to get to mastery points that outweigh the benefits of an extra tick, which the point we are currently at, so it doesn't matter how many ticks we do, since our ticks hit for 150-300k in the first place. The only real way to fix combustion is to completely overhaul the spell, while I think it is one of the coolest spells in the game due to how unique and dynamic of a cooldown it is, it just doesn't work as it scales too well too quickly with too many factors

As true as that is the one thing it scales to well with above all else is temp haste buffs (thats not just combustion with that problem imo), having dots snapshot stats that powerful is always going to cause problems, but if you think from a really simple math Pov.

Combustion is 'Supposed to' do 50% of ignite damage per tick per second.

Combustion does at best over 150% of ignite damage per second per tick.

Scaling issues like the above should flat out not exist in the game

Ye ofc mastery buffs it aswell, but its the snapshotting from troll zerking / meta gem / time warp that causes the big scaling problems.

So if i look at both ends of the scale, the first with absoloutely no crits and only fireball ignite and the second with pyro bombing hell.

1 - 40k ignite, no haste, 20k combustion, 20 ticks, so we get 400k damage so 20k dps for 20 seconds, seems pretty simple (although quite weak)

2 - 300k ignite, full haste procs (zerking / meta / lust / raid haste / 5036 breakpoint), 150k combustion, 64 ticks, so you get 9.6 million damage in 20 seconds so 480k dps for 20 seconds (completely fucken absurd)

The above are extreme examples only used to prove a point, but now lets say that combustion didnt get scaling from temp haste procs the damage would become a lot more managable.

3 - 300k ignite, no haste buffs, 150k combustion, 20 ticks, so 3 million damage and 150k dps

If blizzard could find some way to make sure that combustions low end is a hell of a lot more managable then that would be a great starting point for the spec imo.

[reflection]

Sorry that I missed it, but did they actually revert all the changes to Fire on the PTR meaning that Fire will stay the same in 5.4 as it is now?

[Delath]

Here we go:

•Combustion Instantly deals 1,040 Fire damage and stuns the target for 3 sec. If the target is currently affected by your Ignite, it also burns the target for additional damage equal to half 20% of the damage per tick of the Ignite every 1 sec for 10 sec. When cast, resets the cooldown of your Inferno Blast ability. Mage - Fire Spec. 10% of Base Mana. 40 yd range. Instant. 45 sec cooldown.

[Zenny]

Cut by 60%? Ouch.

Edit: Think the thread title needs to change.

[Erolian]

Nice killing blow on lesser geared fire mages

[aycheff]

one second they'll leave us alone next we get a nerf. This tug-o-war

[Deleted]

RIP low ilvl Fire Mages, nevr 4get.

[Methnor]

I guess this is why Ghostcrawler didn't foresee a problem with fire mages scaling out of control in t16.

[Valanna]

So their solution is to make Combustion worse in BiS T16 than BiS T15? ok

I think this might be over the top, Combustion will be completely useless for low geared fire and it might overnerf high tier raiding mages. Maybe they'll buff mastery to compensate.

[IsrafaelMage]

Maybe they will compensate it by buffing base damage and scaling of both FB and pyro.. That will lower both RNG and skill ceiling as well

[fusionz]

fire has no tools to handle aoe besides combustion once every 1.5min and now even that is nerfed to the ground.
with most of soo fights having aoe will fire really be our most viable spec?

on a side note its funny seeing all lock specs and rogues getting buffed.

edit: im lmao at ppl here that think they will compensate us

[Methnor]

It may be time to go Frost. Arcane still isn't in a good spot this tier due to all the movement, even with the Rune of Power QoL improvement.

[Erolian]

Oh well I was hoping I'd have a reason to bust out frost or arcane other than my own want to play them I just didn't want them to destroy other people's fun to do it

[Deleted]

It would be easier to just remove combustion, this expansion is a f*cking joke with mage changes

[Vakna]

So at best we'll be getting like what, 100k crits/50k ticks? And unless every single Pyro crits it will barely even tickle.

Bit crap for a 2 min cd spell, barely worth putting in the extra effort to build up to it.

[Arag]

Well we will get more mastery/crit/haste so it wont hurt high end raiding mages. But for low ilvl mages it's just massacre.

Well in tbc combustion was buff like 10 dps or smth like that.

[Superfly3176]

fire has no tools to handle aoe besides combustion once every 1.5min and now even that is nerfed to the ground.
with most of soo fights having aoe will fire really be our most viable spec?

on a side note its funny seeing all lock specs and rogues getting buffed.

It is funny because fire mages have been obliterating damage meters. The main changes to warlocks are to affliction and destro. Destro needed help very badly, it sucks on anything single target.

The major outlier is demonology and uvls. Uvls is getting nerfed to the ground and I'm curious to see where demo ends up without it when warlocks have to worry about crit again and can't just go haste/mastery.

[Kanariya]

Sigh they really want all mages to play Frost.

[Deleted]

Assuming 0 Haste, so 20 ticks of Combustion.
Assuming no Combustion ticks crit.

Pre-nerf:
300K Ignite, 150K Combustion ticks, total Combustion Damage: 3M

Post-nerf:
300K Ignite, 60K Combustion ticks, total Combustion Damage: 1.2M

60% nerf to an ability that does ~15% of our damage in ST situations; ergo overall nerf of ~5% give or take.

Not game-changing, probably brings Fire ~ in line I guess.