Can someone explain to me why the fire spec is the only one in the game with a mastery that used to be baseline and part of their specs as a passive (talent which was always specced into) which is heavily downscaled in power to what it used to be (40% of crit damage turned into a dot)?
Every other class and spec in the game has a completely unique mastery mechanic. Fire is the only spec which had nothing new invented for it. Just a passive which got turned into a stat.
Basically we got something taken away from us, got converted into a stat which got downscaled in power, and blizzard dared to call it a “new mechanic”
Most masteries are a joke. We keep on ending up in situations with borrowed power where mastery just runs out of control, NoIL frost in bfa for example. They might as well just bin them at this point.
You mean completely unique, like:
Increases poison and bleed damage by X% ?
Increases finishing move damage by X% ?
Increases Holy damage done by X% ?..
Most of masteries are simple like that, and those that aren’t (Ignite or Deep Wounds also) are repurposed talents that were preserved in some way. I’d say that for damage dealers, the only interesting outlier is Windwalker (Abilities deal X% more damage when they are not a repeat of the previous ability), and maybe Icicles for Frost Mage, because you can change your interaction with it through Glacial Spike.
That’s long gone history since introduction of Mastery, so not really a new thing, though. Like starting an argument by dredging up stuff from 10 years ago.