Soft-capping still means it gains damage past 8 targets, just not as much. And Living bomb was hardly why fire AoE was so strong, it just scaled really well with big pulls.
Here, take a look, this is my character with flamestrike build at 3-5-10 targets, look at the dramatic jump in damage (Had to break all the links cause cant post them on the forums, sorry)
3T: https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/cHPtiRqvFu4KAStJfGLTkG
5T: https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/optomNyx8qUV8vDLVxdpaC
10T: https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/fYfbVjKfx4u2AxwRYJ1nVg
Compare this to a spec like arcane, which peaks at a specific target count (5T) and falls off sharply past that:
Yea but this goes for every spec that is soft capped.
Arms is soft capped, balance is completely uncapped, but they have dots, havoc is mostly soft capped, bm hunter is soft capped, frost mage is soft capped.
It was tuned really really well, most of the specs you’ve just described are also doing bonkers damage in M+ right now.
That is part of the complaint in my original post, fire with Sun King’s Blessing has no niche, it doesn’t excel at anything in particular, and is wholly reliant on tuning.
Right now flamestrike tuning is good, so at a high enough target count it does a lot of damage. Before, flamestrike tuning was OP, so it did more damage than everything else and got nerfed 4 times to get to where it is now.
On keys where pull counts are low, you can mitigate low target weakness by instead speccing into a hybrid ignite build: B8DArSxcnei16P8xFL3rzzOyRSCJFNkQSaCcgkQEJhkAAAAAAAAAkkkEJJUSUkESSSSAAAASD
Otherwise if the pulls are consistently large, flamestrike again scales well on higher target counts.
It can keep blasting flamestrike when other classes have to fill with other abilities? I dunno, I’ve been maining fire most the last decade but it seems so far behind frost in overalls in keys at my level, I’ve given up and switched to frost. Even switched to Arcane in raid… it’s not actually much better on ST but the difference with cleave is sad. Arcane is kinda what fire used to be, scared to play it in dungeons though cos im afraid those arcane orbs are gonna pull everything
I have to Up this thread in the name of some many on the Altered Time community. Frost and Fire damage needs to be buffed in single target. Also, it’s almost insulting that NONE of the mage specs has received not ONE buff / nerf / ANYTHING. It’s like we don’t exist.
They wanted to nerf the aug-spriest-mage combo desperately, so they overnerfed mage even though Aug was the problem. Our main problem atm is actually single target though which is simply disastrous, check Volcoross Mythic 95% logs. All 3 mage specs are ROCK BOTTOM. ALL THREE !
Unfortunatly noone at Blizzard is going to read this. Balance overall is ridicolous and it seems like they dont care at all. very frustating if you are playing monk and mage…