Fire Mage AOE design

Classes Mage
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Does anyone else feel that Fire Mage AOE needs a serious look? I’m not talking primarily about numbers. Numbers vary from patch to patch. Nor am I talking about our numbers during Combustion burns, when a properly managed ignite reaches absurd levels of damage and causes the target group to melt.

No, I am talking about the trash pulls we encounter between combustion phases. Playing a fire mage during these phases is extremely unpleasant with a gulf between how it should be and how it actually is.

How it should be is that we would pick the biggest, baddest mob in a trash pack. We would begin our single target rotation on that mob. When we generate a hot streak, we would be spend that on a viable AOE option that would impact all the mobs around that target. Meanwhile, our ignite should be able to spread and dealing passive damage.

That’s how it should work in theory. In practice, ignite damage outside of combustion is pitiable, particularly as other classes (primarily melee) are able to apply consistent damage to lower health mobs meaning that they often die before ignite is able to apply any meaningful level of damage. And the Fire Mage AOE spell, Flamestrike, is perhaps the clunkiest spell to use in the Fire Mage Arsenal given it’s three second cast time and the need to use a targeting reticule to drop the damn thing. The current meta recommends hard casting Flamestrike, but it only does decent damage if you’ve taken the flame patch talent and if the tank doesn’t move the mobs out of the flame patch. Given the nature of affixes and the game’s desire to force us to continually move, this can be extremely frustrating to witness.

Many Fire Mages opt to not even use Flamestrike. They simply decide to take out the biggest add in the group and forego contributing to AOE beyond spreading ignite.

Now, Fire Mages don’t have to be brilliant at trash aoe. They don’t even have to be good. But it would be nice if Fire could offer more in aoe fights than what they do.

Flamestrike should be redesigned. At the very least, it should be instant cast and castable only with a hot streak so as to prevent this hard casting meta. At very most it would be nice if it were redesigned to deal substantial instant damage to a pack of mobs and be a worthy substitute for a pyroblast cast.

It would be nice to see some attention given to this often neglected part of the Fire Mage’s kit. Sometimes I think the sheer power of our combustion phase has completely unbalanced the class, ten seconds of glory being responsible for the lion’s share of our damage leaves the other one hundred and ten seconds feeling flat by comparison.

I would trade a good chunk of Combustion’s power for more consistency outside of it. I wonder who else would agree.

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Hardcasting flamestrike was a thing but only with flame patch and a fair bit of haste.

Atm, with good gear, you use ST rotation on the highest hp target as your mastery is so high your pyro ignite does more dmg than flamestrike and flamepatch.

We can’t do a ton of aoe dmg because we can do so much during combustion and it needs to be balanced.

Flame strike is getting a dmg buff in 9.0 though.

The idea of the spec is you use your instant casts on flamestrikes on packs, this does need some work to make it better than flamepatch spam.

The bigger problem is flamestrike can overwrite your ST ignite spread which they don’t seem to be interested in fixing.

As for dying stuff too quickly that’s a downside of ignite and any other dot spec but that’s the spec. You can always change spec if thats a problem.

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The issue is that this is not really a question of numbers, it’s a question of mechanics. And saying ‘you change specs’ doesn’t really solve the problem, the problem being that fire AOE outside of combustion is horrible to play and that combustion itself is such a dominant part of our rotation that it is actually detrimental to the spec’s design.

As I stated in the OP, I would happily trade some of the burst combustion offers in exchange for better sustain damage. It would immeasurably improve the feel and pace of the spec, and as a side note it would return Arcane to it’s rightful place as THE burst spec.

Flamestrike itself is simply a clunky, badly designed spell. While hardcasting it is viable strategy with enough haste, getting enough haste means it always has a chance of returning with each expansion. This should be fixed by making Flamestrike castable only with a hot streak proc, which would nix the possibility of it being hardcasted at all. It should deal meaningful damage when used to replace a pyroblast. Many Mages don’t bother to cast it, simply relying on spreading the ignite from a pyroblast cast instead.

Flamestrike, and Flame patch, need a good, hard, long look. A talent that is mandatory to make a spell work is a bad talent, particularly when a better style of gameplay is simply to ignore the spell in question and use another ability.

I believe the ideal should be as I described. We pick the biggest mob in a group, we DPS it, our sustain DPS is higher than it is now (with correspondingly higher ignites) and this is balanced against lower burst from combustion. Hot Streaks are spent on a Flame Strike cast that is actually worth casting.

It doesn’t have to be amazing damage. It doesn’t even have to be above average. It should be that we can face a pack of trash with confidence we can contrubute without having to rely on Combustion.

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That is the specs design although the changes in 9.0 will balance it out a little. If you don’t like it play a spec or a class that has more consistant dmg or build your toon in a way that allows you to do more consistant dmg.

It is not manditory, it’s not even used in the current meta. In other metas it is still a bad option if your tank is kiting or things are dying quickly.

That’s idea yes, I believe that’s what blizz are working towards. If your running a crit haste build that probably is still the best way to play.

From what we’ve seen of 9.0, crit haste will likely be what we are playing, with pyroclasm or kindling. Living bomb is also stronger with crit haste, along with the buff to flamestrike fire’s dungeon dmg should be more instant.

What would be nice was if flamestrike crits gave procs.

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I don’t regard ‘play something else’ as a valid counter-point. It communicates nothing beyond a higher tolerance for flaws we shouldn’t have to face. If you can tolerate the dog’s breakfast that is current Fire AOE design then I envy you, however that does not mean I cannot offer feedback that the current design is a dog’s breakfast and can be substantially improved.

In regards to Flame Patch being mandatory, that is a misreading of what I said. What I said was Flame Patch is mandatory to make the spell work, not that is mandatory per se. IF Flamestrike were a genuine choice as a part of the AOE rotation, Flame Patch would likely be needed so that the spell would actually do something. As it, Flamestrike WITHOUT flame patch is a terrible spell. As a parallel, Blizzard does not require Freezing Rain to be a good spell for Frost. Freezing Rain substantially improves Blizzard, but Blizzard is good by itself. Flamestrike is terrible without Flame Patch, and mediocre with it. There should be an expectation that all spells are at least at some baseline level of usability before a talent is taken, which is a bar Flamestrike fails to clear.

Fire AOE doesn’t have to be amazing. But it can be mechanically improved to be a better, more satisfying experience. That is what I am hoping for.

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Ok. I go again.

The current aoe rotation is ST which imo is great. It has it’s flaws but in progressive content it works very well.

ST rotation is better on packs now because we have an absolute ton of mastery, more than we have ever had before, ever. The more mastery you have the better your ST rotation is compared to flamestriking.

Flamestrike spam (as in casting it not just instant casts) only applies with flamepatch.

Part of fire’s design is that it does part of its damage in a 10 sec dot. This is bad on content you are overgeared for when stuff dies too quickly. If you don’t like this there is no point in playing fire, fire is not the spec for you.

In 9.0 our mastery will be low, very low. In 9.0 flame strike is getting buffed. We will be flamestriking on packs regardless of talents in that row which are all useful in different circumstances.

Also in 9.0 we will likely be working towards a more traditional crit build which will also increase how often we can flamestrike and the dmg of flamestrike.

You’re pursuing a problem that has been created by the current meta which is a baby of 3 different gearing systems smooshed together with some unique peices of gear. All of which will be useless in a few months.

Sorry if I wasn’t clearer earlier.

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I’ve said this quite a few times over the years.

But if Flamestrike contributed towards Hot-Streak, it would go a long way to making our AoE ‘rotation’ feel less clunky.

To clarify, When hitting (3 to 5?) targets with Flamestrike, you get heating up.

At the moment, using Hot-Streak on a Flamestrike, it feels like a waste, and to me, you just sort-of stall. You have to begin building up you Heating-ups again before you can continue your single-target rotation.

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just do
/cast [@cursor] flamestrike and you don’t get the reticule, cause yea that thing is horrible.

It most certainly does not, that is last patchs meta, current meta is no flamestrike outside of high amounts of mobs that die instantly.

I think you misunderstand something here. The reason many fire mages opt to not use flamestrike is because it’s a damage loss.
Using a pyroblast + ignite will be more damage on any number of targets with decent levels of mastery, that’s why you do it.

There’s also the thing with flamestriking eating ignite ticks, so you don’t wanna use it for 10-15 seconds after combustion, and with minute mage, you have combust for 1/2 to 2/3 packs, and those packs die so fast, that there are practically no time to use flamestrike.

You don’t have to conform to the meta you know, you can just not hardcast it, which is a fairly minor damage loss tbh, or you could just start playing the actual meta build.

That’s just a numbers game, lower our burst, up our consistent damage sure, but it just varies.
Last patch we had pretty decent damage outside of combust, but combust was also smaller than it is now, did you prefer that? I don’t know if i did tbh.

Play minute mage then.

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Did we? I don’t recall having that.

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Yh I was thinking that. Played frost in dungeons for most of the expac because fire was pants on aoe.

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Last patch if you stacked haste + vers, ran flamepatch, knew how to hardcast flamestrike and how to roll BM stacks while doing it, then yes you still had good damage outside of combust.

Looked back on some videos real quick just to check, and it wasn’t that uncommon to be top dps outside of combust if others weren’t popping CDs either.
I think we were definitely not above average outside of combust, but definitely average.

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Unless you had one of these tanks who’d run around the room just because they can. I remember a Waycrest ~12 (maybe 11 or 13?) run in one of the previous BfA seasons where the tank kept running around even though the affixes were something easy and not at all requiring the movement like tyrannical+volcanic+some third affix that deffo wasn’t sanguine. What he told me upon my mention of losing FP was “you should’ve just specced LB lol”.

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That happens, but what did you expect? no one knows what they are doing in low keys, especially not tanks, and if you’re playing at that level then you’re not min-maxing anyways, so why do you care about tuning?

Also equating having a tank that actively sabotages your damage, to mage having bad damage last patch, then i guess shaman had bad burst damage last patch, because the tank could move things out of their earthquake if he was dumb.

If you’re not equating them, then yea, if the tank actively sabotages your damage, your damage will suck, that is kind of a no brainer.
You can do that with every class pretty much, just some easier than others i guess.

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