Hello, Firelord Cloelia here.
I am not a person who posts in forums, but the incoming changes to Fire Mage has forced my hand.
To clarify, I am NOT an Alpha-tester, but as a long time one trick of this spec, I like to think that I have a good understanding of what makes or breaks this spec. And as things stand right now Midnight will be the first time I won’t even touch Fire Mage.
When the War Within launched I really enjoyed the different play styles that where promoted by the different Hero Talents. Sunfury was all about combustion, big DPS and low CD. Whilst Frostfire gave me smaller combustion’s, but an even damage profile with multiple DPS windows thanks to SKB and meteor.
Both styles had problems, for example when playing Sunfury, there was no worse feeling than dying during combustion. All tools for lowering the CD where gone and you literally did less damage than the tank for 1.5 min. For Frostfire I think i just need to say this: buff managment and SKB.
Going into midnight, the devs have expressed their intention to simplify the game. And I am all for that. I agree that the game is over designed and things need to be toned down. One of the best changes is that Combustion now has a set CD of 60, 90 or 120 seconds. And of course, no more procs with SKB.
But somewhere along the way, I think that the devs lost the plot with what makes these Hero Talents different. Now I feel like we have two almost identical playstyles. Sure, the talents give different buffs and all, but the result is still that both trees press combust every 60 sec and have the same filler rotation. The only real difference being if you press meteor every 30 seconds or not.
My solution is to give sunfury a 60 second Combustion CD and Frostfire a 90 second CD.
At first glance this may look simple, but hear me out. I think this would make a ton of sense when looking at the different talents we have access to as Fire Mage.
As Frostfire, having less uptime on Combustion makes certain Talents, such as “Master of Flame” and “Frostfire Infusion” become more valuable. (The power lost from having less uptime on combustion would of course be gained back from a more powerful meteor as well) Combine this with “Molten Chill” and “Duality” and it just feels natural that Frostfire should lean more into an Ignite based build, further leaning into a more even DPS profile. In opposition to this, I feel like Sunfury then naturally should focus more on buffing its direct damage to get big burst during Combustions, further giving the different Hero Talents different identities. A problem with this is the positioning of Meteor nodes in the Fire Talent Tree, they are all locked behind “Flamestrike” and “Fuel the Fire”. As we know, an Ignite build dosn’t usually even press Flamestrike. This just makes a Frostfire ignite build feel bad.
Based off this, I am proposing a rework of the Fire Talent Tree. As of now, the tree is pretty much split up into Single Target (left side) and AOE (right side). My suggestion is to instead split it up into Ignite (left side) and “Direct Damage” (right side). I don’t have a fleshed out version of what this could look like, but changes would include:
- moving Meteor up so its not locked behind Flamestrike
- putting scorch and execute nodes on the right side of the tree
- moving “Inflame” and “Intensifying Flame” to the left
- moving “Conflagration” to the right
While on talents, the new “Burnout” is something I’ve been waiting for a long time, but the way it has been immplemented just feels.. off. The problem with ignite is that it dies with the enemy its applied to, leaving me feeling like a lot of damage just disapears. I have always wanted a kind off execute spell that blows upp all or part of my ignites in a burst, so that it feels like all of it dosn’t go to “waste”. I feel like this is somewhat what the devs wanted to achieve with this new talent, the problem is just that in reality it dosnt work that way at all. In a typical encounter, you press combustion at pull, and you wont get another one in that same encounter. Say that the fight is 40 seconds, with the new apex talents you might get 15 seconds of Combustion. In this case it dosnt matter if you have this talent or not, the end result is the same amount of damage, you just throw it out in a burstier way. What we really need is for this to be a spell, so that when the enemies are just about to die, only then do you blow up your ignites to not “waste” them. (I would call this spell Oxidize BTW)
Lastly, bring Scorch back! I dont need the extra damage buff or anything, I just dont want to press fireball for 45-75 seconds in between commbustions.
That pretty much sums up my feedback on Midnight Fire Mage. Thank you for reading!