I’ll start with the oldest ones first, started in 2022 with the launch of Dragonflight:
- Improved Scorch amplification is completely excluded from Ignite calculation, which makes no sense whatsoever.
To set up an example for this, lets say that:
A Pyroblast hits for 100 damage, produces a 30 damage Ignite tick.
A Pyroblast amplified by Improved Scorch will hit for 114 damage, and still produce a 30 damage Ignite tick (???) - The exact same problem is found in Molten Fury, which basically means our execute talents are only half-effective for no apparent reason.
- Controlled Destruction: a talent that reads as if it should absolutely be a exclusively single target amplification to ignite has been coded in since it’s inception as some reverse mastery buff, which means that you can spread an amplified ignite from the target on which you stacked Controlled Destruction on.
Now, onto our main cancerous growth of today: the Living Bomb.
This one started with the Living Bomb rework, at the War Within launch.
Without going into too much detail, I’ll try to sum up the damage it is causing.
It occupies 8 talent nodes, EIGHT!!!
I can’t overstate how incredibly stupid it turns out investing 8 nodes into a fully passive damage proc and having to drop immense QoL and actual gameplay enhancing nodes elsewhere (if we even could do it, more on that later).
Out of those 8 nodes, two were pretty much dead since inception, namely Sparking Cinders and Convection. Both are unimaginably poorly tuned and have never been looked at after release.
- Convection, which is supposed to justify taking any combination of Bomb for a single target situation is just beyond laughable considering the baseline tuning of Living Bomb. For example, devoting ALL 8 points into it and bomb will never reach 2% (???) of our total single target dps.
- Sparkling Cinders also suffers from incredibly off-putting tuning, was never looked at.
The rest of the nodes (namely investing 7, not counting Sparkling Cinders since we would never ever take that), would make sense if not for the abhorrent tuning issues with living bomb overall. It is supposed to be good in mass AoE, but it’s not, the funnel provided by off-target explosions should justify the loss of other single target talent drops, but it does not.
And thus, especially with the latest set of rebalance of Ignite/Pyroblast/Flamestrike powers respecitvely, we have arrived at a point where we can’t justify picking a single Living Bomb talent in any PvE scenario in the game, effectively making that part of the tree dead.