7.1.5: Fire completely wrecked

[Armourboy]

After 12 years of playing this game, and the first 4-5 of that maining a Paladin, you'll have to excuse me for not having a ton of trust in their design decisions.

[Aktec]

Think its a bit silly to compare the numbers right now, if something is obviously out of line then it will be changed in a further iteration on the ptr. What I'm worried about is the icy floes changes, this spell is what makes mages fun for me right now, so if these changes do go live I would seriously consider changing to frost just to keep it.

[sosaria]

this_can't_be_real

Check out the PTR. It is very real.

While you're there, check out the Arcane spec. Coz that looks like the new fire spec (overpowered talent)

At the end of the tunnel, Blizzard made Arcane easier to play (no juggling with quickening) and gave it a massive dps boost. Not the end of the world for mages....

[Glorious Leader]

Sometimes I wonder if the designers of this game are like Negan and Lucille and they've just lined up specs that aren't in line and they're gonna crush them in.

[whisperingsage]

Please pay attention to all the Fire Blast changes.




In addition, with haste the Flame On change is a buff, even during the opener. You regen charges, and are able to fit 4 or even 5.

[sosaria]

Please pay attention to all the Fire Blast changes.




In addition, with haste the Flame On change is a buff, even during the opener. You regen charges, and are able to fit 4 or even 5.

They will need to buff the damage of Flame on or fireballs to make up the damage loss from the ROP and Combustion nerf.

Do they even know what they're doing with the secondary stat balance and have any idea HOW it will affect the new PTR changes when they're live? Or are they going to redo evverrrything again once they realise the secondary stat balance will either massively overpower the PTR fire spec; or destroy it again?

[TyrianFC]

They will need to buff the damage of Flame on or fireballs to make up the damage loss from the ROP and Combustion nerf.

We all know this is coming.

[whisperingsage]

They can't buff our sustain without buffing our burst. With Combustion and RoP nerfed, they can increase (un-nerf) the damage of pyro, as well as fireball. Now that we don't have Ice Flows, there's an actual reason to buff Scorch as well, which will also help the Koralon legendary.

[Windirmere]

So arcanes the way to go?

[Atherius]

So arcanes the way to go?

If this went live, arcane or frost. But it's not going live like this so just wait and see what the final numbers will be..

The thing I dislike the most is actually the removal of Ice Floes. Tryied not to use it during our raid yesterday and it was a big change, especially on Odyn.. I really hope they buff scorch since it still hits like a wet needle as well and also makes it affected by kindling. Would actually make the new talent useful..

[ssviolett]

They can't buff our sustain without buffing our burst. With Combustion and RoP nerfed, they can increase (un-nerf) the damage of pyro, as well as fireball. Now that we don't have Ice Flows, there's an actual reason to buff Scorch as well, which will also help the Koralon legendary.

Since we got like 30% damage reduction on PTR hardly Pyro nerf reversion can compensate this.

Btw, guys, who have access to PTR - I've heard that Dragon's Breath got nerfed too - 45 sec CD now - is it true? Because we are still missing final nail to our coffin.

[Deleted]

I didn't like in fire mage that in the burst phase I did around 800k dps and outside of burst I did 170k if I was lucky with crits. If their goal really is to smooth out this dps roller coaster then I'm happy.
This first iteration seems to address this problem. I think that our dps with these changes is way too low but they don't care about that now. First they want to flat out a bit the dps graph and when they are happy with it then they will fine tune the dps of the spells.
Icy flows I miss too. But to be honest it really seemed that fire mages had an arsenal of utility tools to use compared to other classes.

[Deleted]

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

FireBlast is still 2 charges and Flame One makes it 3 as others showed
Flame On is actually a buff because you can still get 4 fireblasts as before in a Combustion.

Because of the massive fire changes blizzard hasnt done any spellscaling tweaks for fire like Fireball and pyroblast.
In the end we get the following:
- Fire got less Quality of Life
- Ice Floes gone
- AOE dps nerfed
- DPS utility heavily in bursting, especially aoe (irrelevant for current raiding except helya but major in Mythic+)
- Slightly more sustained ST outside of combustion.

In the end quite big nerfs. I'm not sure i agree with changing dmg from combustion to more sustained it makes it less punishing to mess up. But is a path to homogenising specs. I'm also so scared at changes with fire Core now because we finally have a fun spec instead of a constant frustrating one in the past.
Core: (combustion, fire blast, phoenix, hotstreak system to pyro)

[sjuk]

Blizz specifically said mages are "mobile" and locks "tanky".

And now they remove IF?

Another thing that bothers me. Ofc they can't be true to their own words.

[nickseng]

Since we got like 30% damage reduction on PTR hardly Pyro nerf reversion can compensate this.

Btw, guys, who have access to PTR - I've heard that Dragon's Breath got nerfed too - 45 sec CD now - is it true? Because we are still missing final nail to our coffin.

Nah, i logged in specifically to test this out yesterday. Still 20 seconds, and hits really hard with the DB Helm.

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Blizz specifically said mages are "mobile" and locks "tanky".

And now they remove IF?

Another thing that bothers me. Ofc they can't be true to their own words.

FWIW, they said mages were *too* mobile, especially compared to the rest of the other ranged casters.

[nocturnus]

Welcome to warlock world, blizzard started this way with warlocks and we dont have a viable spec any longer. Wondering how bad the nerfs to frost and arcane will be after the fire spec nerf

We don't care. Shoo.

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Nah, i logged in specifically to test this out yesterday. Still 20 seconds, and hits really hard with the DB Helm.

- - - Updated - - -



FWIW, they said mages were *too* mobile, especially compared to the rest of the other ranged casters.

It's 45 seconds with the talent no one will take. (what's the point of always critting when your cooldown has more than doubled?)

[nickseng]

It's 45 seconds with the talent no one will take. (what's the point of always critting when your cooldown has more than doubled?)

I have you logged in to check? I have. It's still 20 seconds with the talent.

[Deleted]

Judgement day

[The Archmage]

I think the changes are interesting. And bold. To be honest, i did not expect Blizzard to make such impactful changes when at Blizzcon they called x.5 the "small patches", with mostly flavour changes and some tuning.

Flame On changes are OP: good for the spec, with the reduced cd it's gonna make even easier to constantly dish out those instant Pyros, but i feel like they failed their intended purpose of making talent changes to give people choice. With this iteration it becomes even more mandatory than its previous version.
Combustion change, all things considered, is another great one imho: the spec currently relies too much on its usage and on its cheesable mechanics (Sinew comes to mind here), while making the player feel completely worthless for the rest of the time. These changes mathematically ensure a retuning of the base damage coefficients, meaning the spec's damage will be more evenly redistributed.
Ice Floes removal hurts us, and expecially the spec i play (Arcane) due to absence of instant cast procs, but i think it was overdue: with proper usage every spec was able to CONSTANTLY cast, no matter what movement was involved or how often. When coupled with Shimmer (which means always, pretty much), movement mechanics have literally no impact whatsoever on the class performance, which is clearly not intended for a caster. My hope is that Blizzard realizes that this change WILL hurt our overall REAL damage output, even while maintaining SIMMED damage unchanged, and take action to balance things out. Finally, i am pretty disappointed by the proposed Ice Floes replacements on paper, but i'll wait to play the crap outta them before making a proper opinion.

[nocturnus]

I have you logged in to check? I have. It's still 20 seconds with the talent.

Just logged in to check and you're right! It's still 20 seconds, even with the talent.