I’ve been playing wow consistently since Legion, I’d given up in wod before that and came back. Recently I found myself not wanting to log in. This has happened in the past and I usually get my weekly chores done and I start enjoying the game again by the end of the week. This time feels different, its been two weeks and I’ve told my raid leaders that I don’t want my spot. I just want to give some feedback on why I think I’m so bummed out with the game right now.
Fire in Raids
I’m a fire mage, I don’t mind switching to other specs when they are op or fire is bad, I can live with it. On the overall meters in raid fire is fine, I have no problem with the tuning. The problem fire has is in the important moments of prog, I feel like I’m being carried through mechanics. I have tried to play fire on bosses this tier and every time we fail a damage check mechanic on an add or a phase I fell guilty and switch to arcane and we don’t fail it again! This version of Arcane is quite boring though, I miss spellslinger.
Switching to Adds
I think the war against fire’s burst has gone too far, its been a slow war for sure but been going on since that BFA season. One of the reasons I fell in love with fire was the instant burst. A lot of the most important damage in raid is change and kill an add as quick as you can. Fire is so bad at this! Firstly a lot of our damage is in a 10 second dot, a lot of these mobs have to die faster than this. Secondly, we are in combustion so much that we have no burst just downtime where we do no damage. Lastly and most importantly is the controlled destruction talent. God I hate this talent, it’s a nerf pretending to be a talent. Feels so bad on progress when you can’t start doing your full damage till you reach 50 stacks.
The Curse of CDR
Fire has no control over combustions timings and that is a big problem for progress raiding. Any burn phases we just have to hope that combustion is up and there is no consistency in timings because of procs. I appreciate the changes mad to reduce the rng of the CDR but when the rng is tied into so much cdr any rng is just bad. I played versions of frost mage and shadow priest with cdr and they both seemed to end in failure. CDR just doesn’t work with modern progress raiding. It’s not even like we can hold onto combustion for a bit to line it up with mechanics because our boss damage just tanks.
The Power of Arcane
First, let me say I have no problem with Arcane being the best mage spec, it went a long time being the survival hunter of mage. The problem I have with it is that is does everything fire does but better (except mass aoe but that doesn’t come up in raid). Arcane’s single target is better than Fire’s. Arcane’s Cleave is better than Fire’s. And when you put that together you add in their funnel, that’s when playing fire is trolling your raid.
Mythic+
Mythic plus isn’t as bad as raid. If my group doesn’t have funnel from another source then I’ll play Arcane, the m+ gameplay makes Arcane’s boring rotation. That being said…
Arcane Tempo + Mana Cascade + Tier
I don’t know how intentional this was, it may have been a way to nerf opening burst in the same way Controlled Destruction for fire is. In mythic+ this feels so awful. The different in haste and the way the spec feels between a flat opener and when you have tempo and cascade running is painful. In raid it’s just a pain on the opener and if your lucky you have bloodlust or power infusion to compensate. In mythic+ it’s a constant problem. You are completely dependant on your tank and healer (stopping to drink) on whether you keep arcane tempo up going into the next pack. Either you get angry at your tank for allowing it to drop off or you pull the next pack and they are angry at you for pulling. Fire used to have a similar problem with sun king blessing and you doubled the buff time.
The Dungeon Tuning
Mythic Plus is in a weird spot where doing keys as a ranged dps feels so easy until you get to the point where every cast or ‘shot’ is life threatening. It makes weekly keys dull and pushing uninviting. Tazavesh hard mode has been great this season. You have a huge pool of staff these days, It would be amazing if m0s all were hard modes, heroics were m0 difficulty and normals became hc at max level. Then you can go back to making M+ about the time. This means that dps actually matters and us dps don’t just get carried through every key. Also would make keeping those maintenance buffs up easier!
In Summary:
- Fire need some changes to contribute more in raids. In fact the spec tree probably needs a once over, the whole middle of tree is all living bomb talents or no living bomb talents.
- Please delete the CDR. It doesn’t work. We could have Sun Kings Fury and no CDR since I know you don’t like the bug 2m burst. We could have a talent to reduce combustion to 1 minute and make it last longer to make us less bursty. We could have some new talents and abilities that mean we can do some damage outside combustion.
- Arcane is too good at everything. Maybe make them choose between funnel and ST power or cleave?
- Powerful stackable maintenance buffs are too punishing especially in M+ where you don’t have control over them.
- Mythic Plus was so much more fun as dps when the timers mattered. Hard mode dungeons and resilient keys give the perfect platform to bring back tight timers and make incoming damage less spikey.