DF is going to be the fourth expansion in a row where fire mages do 99% of their damage during combustion and are completly impotent outside of it. Which leads to all sorts of weird interactions, like crit somehow being a bad stat for what is supposed to be a crit spec, because outside of combustion nothing matters.
Are we ever going to get an actually healthy fire spec again that doesn’t completely revolve around combustion?
If this is the 4th expansion in a row where the spec revolves around combustion maybe, just maybe its intentional.
And when you make a statement like it being unhealthy, the dev’s disagree.
If they really think that then I’d love to know why, and what exactly they are hoping to achieve, because it’s resulted in a very weird spec which is becoming progressivly more and more dysfunctional due to the arms-race between the min-maxers pushing combustion to new absurd heights & the designers nerfing random parts of the spec to try and keep them in check.
Which resulted in several issues like;
The actually viable builds are heavily limited, as everything that doesn’t interact with combustion is just bad.
The stat priority is completly screwed up at this point with crit being the single worst stat, despite fire mages mechanicly revolving around crits. It’s not even a matter of crit only being usefull to a softcap, like how frost works, it’s just a flat out bad stat at this point despite the core mechanic of the spec revolving around it.
The spec is relies on spells/talents/items that only work properly when combined with combustion, but are awkwardly designed at best, outside of it (e.g. the mechagon bracers, power rune, feel the burn, the nightfae ability)
And the playstyle itself becomes very awkward whenever you’re in a situation where you can’t use combustion efficiently (questing being the most obvious scenario where fire just doesn’t work, but this also happens in the occasional boss-fight or m+ segment).
What exactly is the intended design behind the spec at this point that a spec with these kind of problems is viewed as healthy?
You call them problems, I call them features. 
There is nothing unhealthy behind a high risk-reward playstyle.
Dude they just brought out massive talent trees so you can set it up how you like. Pyro builds with firestarter are great for questing, first hit on mobs does most their health. Also on what occasional boss fight or m+ segment is burst dps bad? Other specs had been crying out for burst dps to be accepted into keys like spriest and feral.
Also also the reason crit is bad is because we get a ton for free in talents (was base) and a stacking crit buff to fireball. They fixed fire being crit reliant, being crit reliant was a problem.
Also also also nf ability was great because of the short cd fireblast and pf. Feel the burn works both in and out of combustion. Mecha bracers were good for 2min builds (or 1min) but aren’t being used much with the current skb build.
Last time Combustion was fun was in Cata. Fire should be about 1 target nukes, 1 target dots or multitarget dots.
I mean, you can excuse literally anything with that line of argument.
High risk-reward is fine in principle. But there are limits, and when the reward you’re talking about is 90% of your damage, it starts to get a bit silly, especially when there isn’t any alternative option.
A tree that doesn’t contain a single coherent build that doesn’t heavily feature combustion. Hell, most of the talents in the third tier interact heavily with combustion. It’s not even that the alternatives aren’t viable, there isn’t even a genuine alternative build like how frost mages have icy veins & glacial spike builds, or frost dk’s have breath v.s. obliteration builds. Every single build focusses heavily on combustion.
So fire mages have to play a one-button spec for questing now? That’s not exactly great. Plus that approach falls apart the moment you fight any elites or named mobs.
I never said burst DPS was inherently bad, though modern WoW does seem to trend a bit too much towards everything being burst. But that’s a seperate discussion.
What I said was that fire can be awkward to play depending on the encounter design. For example, add-based bosses, where the adds die too quickly for combustion to shine, and the big resulting ignite to do its work, never feel fun as fire (this is also the main issue with M+, especially on tyranical weeks, unless you do extremely high keys). Similarly, bosses with frequent & inconveniently timed interuptions (phase changes, target switching, forced movment mechanics that require you to move large distances or break LoS, etc.) tend to be increadibly annoying as fire, more so than other specs, because they end up interupting the flow of combustions & CDR, and getting back into the proper rythm once interupted is generally an issue since you (usually) won’t be able to rely on things like firestarter halfway into a fight.
Then why not just change the entire proc system? Start by changing it to just 2 crits, instead of 2 crits in a row, and you probably fix the entire problem.
Instead now we have a “crit spec” which doesn’t want crit on its gear, yet still somehow has a 50%+ crit rate.
Also, being crit based was never really the issue. It worked fine in MoP & Legion when we had enough crit to proc things reliably. It worked fine in Cata when 1 crit could be enough. The only reason it didn’t work in SL & BFA is because 1) we never got enough crit to actually make heating up work properly and 2) since the min-maxers kept pushing combustion, everything was balanced around the assumption that players min-max combustion and consequently other builds haven’t been even remotely viable since BFA.
It is a rather badly designed ability because it’s literally just a wonky form CDR. For combustion it could be replaced by a flat CDR value and nothing would be lost. For fireblast & PF it’s 1 entire extra charge once a minute, at the cost of doing basicly nothing for 4 seconds since often you won’t be in range for the AoE to hit anything.
Just giving PF, fireblast & combustion a slightly lower CD would achieve basicly the same. but without a weird channeled melee AoE attached to it. It’d still be boring, but at least it wouldn’t be so weird.
Feel the burn (and it’s previous incarnations) are specificly designed around use during combustion, the duration is too short & the effect of 1 stack too small to amount to anything of significance, whereas during combustion it’s basicly a 24% damage increase for the entire duration. Which is a rather massive increase to an already massive dps CD.
isnt that the job of a mage? crowd control,survivability and high single target pressure?
if you want a sustained dmg tank-mage go warlock.
at least in pvp.
i dont play pve.
I mean at this point fire mage is in combustion like 60% of the time or more, there is a point where it’s no longer burst damage, and it’s just sustain.
I think it’s fine, i like combustion rotation.
While fires design sure has flaws.
It has been consistently the best specc in the game at the same time, its not dysfunctional, its simply another type of playstyle.
Its fine for fires strengths be different to another class, as its important the classes playstyle exists for the audience its catered to.
To complaints surrounding soloing / questing. Thats why mage has 3 speccs, utilise them to tbeir individual strengths.
Numericly it’s been good yes. But that doesn’t mean it’s well designed. Just that the min-maxers keep finding enough damage multipliers to stack for combustion to scale to absurd heights and outscale everything else in the game.
Utilizing the individual strengths of specs used to mean things like “spec 1 is slightly better at AoE, spec 2 is at single target”, not “spec 1 only works while raiding, use spec 2 for questing.”. Making entire specs only work in specific content is just awefull design.
Id argue just because you dont agree with its design doesnt mean its badly designed either.
There are a audience of the game that loves how fire mage works, and tearing it out removes a playstyle from the game.
We have a fire mage without combustion, destruction warlock. That will be the results realistically.
But thats incorrect the class excels in both m+ and raids, the word your looking for.
Is hard to master, and punishing when done incorrectly. Fire works in all content, however fire requires good timings and dungeon / pull knowledge to pull off.
It works if the player is good at it.
You lack imagination sir!
I count 4 meaningful ones.
We spend most our time in combustion atm though.
Common problem with alot of dps but imo ita more fun and rewarding to build up your dps.
Fire actually deals with this quite well as downtime lets you combust get off cd. Did you play frost this expac? If we can keep our buffs going on the bridge phases in Sylvanas we can do it anywhere.
That sounds awful. Btw crit isn’t a bad stat, it’s just usually worse than the other stats. You do want some crit on your gear. If they balance flamestrike/patch so we play that in m+, the living bomb procs love crit.
O I see. You don’t know what your talking about… k. It worked fine. There was actually a 100% crit build at the end of bfa ya know.
Yeah, thats why they dont do that. Do you even play this game?
Feel free to show me one that doesn’t rely heavily on combustion. The closest I’ve seen so far is the one-button pyro build, but that was nerfed before the prepatch.
The only ones that don’t work nicely with combustion are Hyperthermia & pyromaniac, as they’ll lead to proc munching.
For the others;
5 Explicitly interact with combustion.
1 (fevered incantation) Only reaches, and maintains, it’s maximum potential during combustion.
1 (Pyroclasm) Is mainly usefull because of how it interacts with one of the combustion talents (SKB).
And the remaining talents are relativly neutral.
So out of 12 talent nodes, 7 talents heavily favour combustion, 3 are neutral, and 2 don’t favour combustion. How is the third tier not heavily favouring combustion?
While that is at least better than it was during BFA, it just adds the problem that it’s rather weird design to be spending most of your time in what’s supposed to be your CD (and yes, the infinite icy veins build has that problem too).
If you wanne go the route of high uptime, then give us something similar to the frost DK combo of frozen pillar + enduring strength + icecap + a second major CD to be our “real” CD.
Plus, it still doesn’t fix the other issues I mentioned.
Flamestrike & living bomb definitly need some love. Incendairy eruptions is fun mechanicly. But neither spell has been balanced properly in ages.
Yes, at the very end of BFA it worked again, when corruption broke basicly everything.
For most of the expansion though it had the same overreliance on combustion you see now.
The icy vein build has some very similar issues. But there are 2 major differences;
First of at least frost has different builds in theory. Now the alternatives are usually significantly worse, but at least stuff like the glacial spike build actually exists.
Secondly, and most importantly, the difference between a perfect icy vein build & a suboptimal build isnt as extreme as when comparing a perfect combustion build. This is because the icy veins build fundamentally still plays the same. Just with more haste. Essentially the only difference is that 30% haste. Which is significant, but nowhere near as large a difference as the whole combustion combo v.s. your “regular” rotation.
Also, explicit downtime is fine, more or less… The issue comes when you get rapid switches with little downtime (e.g. an add-phase with a continuous stream of weak adds, or phases that don’t last long enough to comfortably use combustion + the resulting ignite). Need to fight multiple mediocre enemies in quick succesion (e.g. the menagerie in streets of tzavesh can be rather weird on fortified weeks as the individual “bosses” die too quickly) Or when you need to bridge an awkward gap before the next burst phase (e.g. an add phase that’s just too short to use & reset combustion, but long enough that not using combustion is boring)
if you find anything dying too quickly you are playing at the wrong level
Wow really.
Your spec’s buff is actually where you damage comes from?
Who would’ve thought that!
Lmao seriously?
Wildfire you only take for the increased ignite dmg because the crit does nothing. Master of flame is better outside of combustion because your pressing fireblast so often it doesnt make much difference if it’s hitting 4 or 8 targets after a few seconds. Pyroclasm has been around for 2 expac before SKB… oddly enough was called sun kings something in legion and gave fire more dmg outside of conbustion. Fevered Incantation is strong in combustion but also works well with fire frenzy hence it being above it.
At the start of bfa we were stacking wildfire azerite traits and it was very much a basic 2min rotation with pretty even dmg. Then someone figured out weaving BM. Blizz didn’t intend for fire to go the way it did in bfa, hence the horrible nerf to ignite coming into SL.
Just 30% haste eh?
If the adds are dying fast then it really doesn’t matter does it. Team game.
Imagine a heavy hitting slow casting ability. Pyro.
Now imagine bieing able to instant cast it. Hot streak.
Now imagine tools to ensure you GARUANTEED to get these Hot streaks. Combustion, Fire blast.
Also…
I littarly only know how to play Fire mage like 50-60% correctly, I pug everything randomly and never speak with tanks what so ever.
YET I am constantly top (or near warlocks lmao) DPS wise at the end off the dungeon.
Fire needs half a brain, that’s all.
Combustion has way too much “uptime” to be “high-risk”. If you mess up your combustion no worries, 20 sec’s later you have it again.
If you mess up your Tyrant as demon WL, you are going to wait 2 minutes for your DPS output to return.