Not a fan of skb personally, fed up of cancelling casts in dungeons (quaking fresh in the memory doesn’t help). I prefer burstier builds with stronger combustions myself.
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I find the only problem with having much stronger combustions less often is how useless you feel when it’s on cooldown. Also all you can do for an AoE pull without Combust is cast flame strike anyway so you run into the exact same problem.
I personally prefer the consistency having a much more frequent but less bursty combusts.
But you do have much more frequent but less bursty combustions, that’s what SKB is for.
Hardcasting flamestrikes is an outdated method of playing, get over it and just build your skb at all times.
Its personal preference. I’m offended everytime a boss is pulled and people are out bursting my combustion dps, the peak of fire mage’s deeps is 2 and a half mins into a fight now 
I was spoiled in bfa
Cataclysm had 2/2 Talent that made Flamestrike instant. Also Talented Blastwave added Flamestrike explosion for free. Modern Mage design is stagnant and unfun. Its either op or zero damage.
Is that actually the case right now? Do you just throw out fireballs on AoE packs to build up your SKB bust?
No. You Fireblast for Flamestrike and when one target is almost 30% you crit it with Scorch 2 times and then cast instant Flame. Its clunky still. Giving Flamestrike high cast speed from start was just stupid. If they wanted Hot Streak to interact with Flamestrike the mechanic was not well tought of through and trough. It feels like Hot Streaks should stack 1-3 times.
Yeah, I’ve always done that if there’s sub-30% mobs in the pack. But if there are none, am I supposed to fireball and fish for hot streaks like I would on ST or do I hardcast flamestrike?
I think you just hardcast Flamestrike on 3 or more targets, if you are out from all other ways to proc Hot Streak! Remember you have mana bar so spamming Arcane Explosion is there for you too. You can even Combust and spam AE the whole duration in some cases.
I wish we still had Cone Of Cold and Blizzard. They went too much into spec fantasy and didn’t ever get them right.
I always thought so as well and that is what I did since Legion, yet Zommoros suggest that has changed with SKB. So, I am a little confused.
I guess we have to wait until beta version of Talents. Currently almost every Mage is giving huge red flag towards devs and they are absolutely dead silent.
It has changed, currently you should hardcast flamestrike only as your last resort and if you don’t need to take advantage of kindling to get a combustion back asap.
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Thanks, that’s good to know. I was playing the old way for the entirety of s3 and this season which probably costed me quite a bit of performance. :x
In my opinion flamestrike should work the same way it does for pyroblast, the flamestrike crit, should give hot streak.
Using strike only really is worth it for big aoe pulls. Also, pyro rotation at the moment feels more satisfying for the reason that pyro also procs streak.
If you started a big AoE pull without a prepared combustion you already made a mistake that is unrecoverable.
But that wasn’t the point.
The point was that i would like if flamestrike also applied hot streak on critical, so you can have a rotation similar to pyroblast in heavy aoe.
Right now you basically do fireball blast, and strike, and repeat, i would like it if it was fireball, blast, strike, and if strike crits you can do blast immediately and cast strike again.
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I think Ilyon meant using flamestrike in general, in their previous post. Not specifically hardcasting it.
Additions / notes to the feedback:
General tree:
- All 3 point talents should be reduced to 1-2 points (without reducing the effect, some talents like Flow of Time even need buffs) with new talents addition to spend freed points. Most of them are both too limiting for build variety and do not have powerful enough effect to justify the 3 point cost.
- Frigid Ice and Improved Frost Nova should be removed / redesigned. Both of them are weak and 2 point investments to make things worse. First one could just make Frost Nova unbreakable by damage for first X seconds and be a 1 point node. Second should be baked into baseline Frost Nova again (for those who do not know, they nerfed Frost Nova base duration from 8s to 6s and make us pick these 2s for 2 talent points, wth)
- Rune of Power position should be swapped with Remove Curse choice node to make it more accessible. Remove Curse should be also directly connected with Rune of Power choice node after the swap, so it could be taken when needed without necessity to take Spellsteal or Slow. If possible, I and many other Mages would prefer RoP being entirely removed alongside Incanter’s Flow and Mage abilities buffed to compensate.
- Shimmer / Ice Floes node should be much more accessible.
- Reduplication / Reabsorption should be buffed and procced when Mirror Images are destroyed for whatever reason, not only via direct damage.
- Mass Polymorph should be replaced by Improved Counterspell that silences the target. They even try to do something similar with datamined talent Powerful Impact that casts Supernova when CS is used, but that iteration is bad - Supernova will break breakable CC on enemies around the target, so blanket silence is just better. As for Mass Polymorph, it is the worse version of Ring of Frost (melee range and heals affected targets) and I have doubts that many people would miss it being gone. It is also long overdue for Mages to get some unbreakable CC - Blizzard’s fear of giving it to Mages is quite outdated, especially in Dragonflight, where even MM Hunters get two of these.
- Accumulative Shielding should be replaced by Triune Ward. Without TW, Mages would get demolished by purge comps / classes, especially since Arcane Surge is both dispellable and leaves Arcane Mage without mana.
- Ice Nova root should be buffed to 3-4 seconds. With 2s duration and being on GCD, it is not reliable enough.
- Dragon’s Breath CD should be reduced to 30s. This would bring it in line with Priest upgraded Psychic Scream, which has similar CD, but longer duration compensated by dealing no damage.
- Shifting Power should get conduit and castable on the move effects baseline or via separate upgrade talent - without them it is much worse. It also should be moved to the right, accessible without necessity to take Frost CC talents and Deep Freeze stun should replace it as a capstone Frost talent.
- Meteor should be changed from splitting damage to either full damage to all targets or at least gradual damage decrease, like dealing 90% of damage to 2 targets, 80% to 3 etc. This would make it more viable as an AoE ability, as currently it is one of the worst Mage ones.
Fire Mage tree:
- They should return Blazing Soul (or Cauterizing Blink heal if they do not want to have 2 talents with similar effects). It is an important part of Fire Mage survivability and should either be kept or properly compensated if taken away. It could be put right under Pyroblast to keep it accessible and allow to get 8 points invested without necessity to take Flamestrike for single-target damage builds.
- Searing Touch damage increase should be baked into Scorch baseline - this would bring its damage to other specs damage while moving abilities level and it should be so.
- Living Bomb damage should be buffed - currently even Arcane Explosion is better against small number of targets. If needed, increase its CD to compensate.
- Pyromaniac should be swapped with Pyroclasm. This would put decently synergizing SKB and Pyroclasm close to each other and decently synergizing Pyromaniac and Fire Frenzy close to each other.
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Fixed that for you.
The little joke aside, I agree with your points. All that being implemented would make the mage tree way better than it is right now. If they do not do something to the talents to make them more appealing, I think I will just reroll to evoker once the prepatch goes live.
As i said before, the problem with rune of power are 2, and they are quite a big problem.
1: It’s really not that interesting in terms of gameplay, it’s just a standard do more damage buff
2: as long as fire and arcane are so burst oriented, there will never be another choice that can be on par, unless they design a totally new talent.
So it either becomes baseline, or should be removed, i would like removed more, because it goes against mobility, and doesn’t really bring much to the table in terms of gameplay.