Hello, I’m Pyrha! A seasoned mage player since WoD and almost exclusively a fire player since Legion. and I wanted to share my concerns with some of the design and tuning woes this spec is facing, as well as touch a bit on the state of mage as a whole in 10.2.
I will attempt to keep this post as constructive as I can but make no mistake, the neglect this class has received is an incredibly disappointing sight, all the same, I will try to keep the front half of this post focused on the issues the spec and class faces exclusively, but Ill also take a minute to vent my frustrations about the approach to fire and how it’s actively damaged the spec over the years.
First, let’s touch on some good.
The rework we received in 10.1.5 really inspired hope as it was our first design update in over a year by that point and re-established a solid footing for a spec that was by that point absolutely woeful in its design.
Namely, some of the good changes were:
• The removal of pyroclasm and baking it into SKB was a pretty elegant fix just altogether to the excessive hardcasting fire had to do
• The removal of rune of power cannot be understated, that spell only ever brought problems to the class and being able to once again move around while doing damage was very welcome
• The talent tree cleanup and the removal of many 2 point nodes was well appreciated
• The reworking of flamestrike and it being brought to relevance was fantastic for M+
• Ignite being capped so that it has a niche in low count to permit for fire to possess both strong ST and strong AoE without the balance nightmare involved was…. a good attempt. It’s nice to at least see the stated intent was a good idea, however this is where the problems begin.
On that note, the issues fire currently faces post rework:
• Beginning with ignite, I just can’t wrap my head around why it is still coupled to mastery, we’re possibly the only spec in the game which has an entirely separate playstyle hinging exclusively on how much of a secondary we can stack. Even with the aforementioned changes, ignite still is effectively our only form of relevant cleave regardless of target count. If you want to use flamestrike in raid you’d be actively trolling because of the enormous ST loss.
The solution here is to completely decouple mastery from ignite, ignite needs to always be stronger than flamestrike at a low enough target count (Ideally 3T), and weaker at a high enough target count, and in turn give us just a generic, easy to balance mastery. “Hotstreak damage increased by X%” seems reasonable to me. And we already have ignite talents in the tree which can be taken to increase ignite damage to be better than flamestrike on let’s say, 5t. which seems like a sensible tradeoff for some ST loss.
• Second problem is with Feel the Burn, which is both boring to play around and un-impactful to track, the damage loss from dropping FtB is insignificant because it can be built back up immediately anyway and also isn’t nearly a substantial enough buff to care about losing. If you insist on making us play the minigame of juggling a buff, Infernal Cascade was a much much better implementation of that idea, a very powerful buff that necessitated you juggle between fireblasts and phoenix flames to permit it to be carried throughout the course of a combustion. What we have now is basically passively maintained for as long as you throw out a generator every GCD which is how the spec plays anyway.
• The Third issue lies with Phoenix Flames, which without the Aberrus tier set has gone back to being a miserable button to press. It needs one of two fixes, either bring back infernal cascade so phoenix flames can play the role of a buffer between fireblasts which allows you to maintain the buff for longer, or barring that, make Alextrasza’s Fury baseline so you don’t need to take a talent just for an otherwise dead core spell to be usable.
• Temporal Warp, this is an issue for all mage specs and one that’s frankly unforgivable at this point.
How can you sensibly tune us around a 5 minute cooldown that is only used when your group decides to use it. Any fight where lust isn’t used on pull is a fight where mage damage tanks. Just give us a temporal warp button, we’re adults, we know how to macro them together. And Temporal Anomaly is not an alternative, it is far too inconsistent and brings an unwelcome variation to performance from pull to pull. Either remove this choice node entirely and do not tune us around having two Time Warps, or just remove TA and give us Temporal Warp on it’s own key.
• Unleashed Inferno, I have very strong feelings about this talent and am frankly baffled with how hard its balance was blundered. Fire since legion has found its niche as a 2-minute burst spec, after Nyalotha, this has been reduced to 1-minute burst which was still very useful in raids like Nathria, and after the introduction of SKB as a legendary our profile has completely flattened into what’s basically a straight line. The niche of burst in Dragonflight has since been picked up by arcane which specializes in a decently powerful 90 second burst CD (78 seconds with shifting power), especially with double time warp.
What this effectively means for fire, is that unless it is significantly ahead tuning wise, there is practically no reason to choose it over arcane. Seeing as arcane brings effectively the same (or usually more) dps with a damage profile that can be useful for killing priority adds, damage amps, or downtime.
In response to this, Unleashed Inferno was announced, a wonderful response to the fire mage woes during the rework, a combustion that dealt significantly more damage at the cost of consistent DPS every minute or so! Our burst was back! Then someone at the dev team decided to gut its CDR by 50%, and buff its damage by 5%, which under any metric ever created would have obviously killed the talent. And killed the talent it did.
Even two buffs later Unleashed Inferno is in an unusable state, even with fights that do have priority adds, damage amps, and downtime, SKB is the only viable talent. There is zero reason to ever choose anything else and this makes fire’s damage profile flat with no option to opt out, and as a result it brings nothing to progression except a cheat death which has honestly always been fluff anyway seeing as mage has a very wide defensive toolkit.
Drop this god forsaken short leash on the spec that you’ve put on it since Nyalotha that has deemed that it’s not allowed to do significant burst damage. You cannot in good faith create specs like rogue and demon hunter in 10.2 and pretend like mage burst is the real enemy, please just grow up and let us enjoy our spec’s one strength that has since been neutered.
On the topic of tuning for 10.2, it doesn’t take much to see that, design aside, mage specs are also just floundering numerically in raid at the moment:
h ttps://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35/#dataset=95
And note this is before UHDK, Arms, and Ret Pallies receive their legendary axe, so imagine the disappointment when all three mage specs, which have no future recourse for increased power like a legendary, got absolutely nothing out of the patch except for a 20% self-damage buff to our best trinket while DH’s Rogues and BMs got very small nerfs (Though I understand more tuning to those specs is likely withstanding)
A lot of the time it feels like we as a community of players had to practically beg for anything to be done to our class, for feedback to be heard, and we thought the turning point of all those demands finally came through in the rework. But as feared the rework was a one and done deal, the class is back to being neglected, and it feels there’s not a single person on the balance team that plays this class for Blizzard to see the state it’s in and not think that it needs any help. For now, as usual, arcane is the only spec worth playing even if it’s also bad because it’s the only one with a favorable profile, and even then you bring just one for the intellect buff while the rest of the raid is stacked with DHs Rogues and Hunters.
I do apologize for the frustrated tone of this post, understand it comes from a place of love and dedication to a spec (Not even a class) that I have poured 7000 hours of my life into, I want to be able to play it without feeling like I’m actively harming my team or my performance, and I hope this write up reaches someone at Blizz who can sympathize with that.