7.1.5 PTR Notes

[Eyliria]

New notes are up for 7.1.5

Cliffnotes for FIRE:

Phoenix Flame scaling Now 330% spelldmg and 110% spelldmg on the splash (up from 300% and 100%) - +10% dmg overall
-5% Critical Chance Overall (Critical mass down to 10% crit, from 15%)
Fireball Spelldmg scaling up to 200%, up from 175% (+14.28% dmg overall)
Pyroblast scaling up to 420%, up from 376% (+11.5% dmg overall)
Fireblast scaling up to 160% spellpower, up from 140% (+14.28% dmg overall)
Cinderstorm up 65% spellpower, up from 58% (+12% dmg overall)
Flamestrike up 230% spellpower, up from 207% (+11.2% dmg overall)
Flame On now reduces the refresh on Fireblast by 2 seconds, down from 3.
Conflagration FlareUp damage up to 45% spellpower, from 40% (+12.5% overall)


So far, completely disappointing, and not from a purely numbers factor (This is barely a 10% improvement over last PTR patch - if that, because have to account for less Pyretic Incantation with the crit reduction), but because there is ZERO chance to secondaries here. Haste and Mastery are still entirely underwhelming... all they are doing is sending crit into the ground and making the others more appealing by comparison.

[bonermobile]

Scorch scaling 50% to 60% as well (20% buff).

[Fayolynn]

Pyretic Incantation is getting nerfed from 5% per stack to 2%. ( I don't remember if that was in the last build or not )

[Lahrast]

Pyretic Incantation is getting nerfed from 5% per stack to 2%. ( I don't remember if that was in the last build or not )

this one negates all buffs that the spellpower-coefficients gave, maybe even overshoots that.
scorch "buff" is laughable
the crit-nerf overall is maybe overdoing it a bit.. but we'll see i guess.

[Pluckles]

What do you guys think about the Sinew changes?

"Maddening Whispers Gain 10 stacks of Maddening Whispers. Your damaging spells transfer one Maddening Whisper to the target for 30 sec. This may only occur once every proccooldown sec. When all Whispers have been applied, each deals 0 Shadow damage. Instant. 2 min cooldown."

If I'm reading this right, does this mean that Maddening Whispers can only be procced on global cooldowns?

[Yelloweyedemon]

What do you guys think about the Sinew changes?

"Maddening Whispers Gain 10 stacks of Maddening Whispers. Your damaging spells transfer one Maddening Whisper to the target for 30 sec. This may only occur once every proccooldown sec. When all Whispers have been applied, each deals 0 Shadow damage. Instant. 2 min cooldown."

If I'm reading this right, does this mean that Maddening Whispers can only be procced on global cooldowns?

I think this is just a tooltip fix. WS had a .5s cooldown. They are adding that to the item's desc.

(I think)

also tldr from the notes, fire is even worse than the first build -.-

[Etazis]

So what are we now? AOE only spec? Doesnt fix the "problem" of doing great in mythic+ and doing average in raids. We still gona do dmg in mythic+ and we wont do any dmg in raid. Really dont know what's blizzard plans about fire, what they want to achieve. Seems like they fixing microscheme with a hammer.

[Eyliria]

Outside of combustion and RoP, I can barely break 200k single-target. At 875ilvl.

I have to give them Kudos that I actually want to use the Int trinkets I have now, that are 20-30ilvls higher than my crit stuff.

They managed to make fire worse than it was the first time. I now have zero-faith that they have any idea what they are trying to do.

[Jereko]

Going from 65% crit on Live (71% chance for Fireball and Pyroblast thanks to Critical Mass) to 54% on PTR just feels so wonderful...

Someone needs to explain to me why taking away all of our crit will make us value other stats instead. Is it just because if we stack haste, Blizz won't take it all from us?

[mlvnk]

Recalled Ion mentioned the reason secondary stats on jewellery scale less per ilevel currently is because they preloaded the secondary stats to allow certain build to perform better and more fluid (for example fire mage start off with higher crit% overall) at early expansion and scale less per ilevel and they didn't how it end up in live version as people found that higher ilevel jewellery may not be an upgrade. I wonder if the crit % adjustment has anything to do with this...and we have yet to c how much secondary stat are being adjusted on jewellery per ilevel in 7.1.5

[Darkwraith01]

This just feels wrong... outside of pure numbers (still many PTR changes to come), I feel Blizz is breaking (again...) the core gameplay of Fire. Even if they end up buffing our baseline spells, the fun of the spec will no longer be there.

Bursting into flames and having a short period of "explosive" damage is awesome, not from a numbers point of view, but from a gameplay point of view. Blizz is changing that towards a bad path, it will take the fun out of it.

Latest nerfs to crit are terrible, we had this problem over and over again since Cataclysm (when specs were born). Any nerf to crit means a HUGE nerf to fire gameplay, and if you are not a top end mythic raider, that means you will spend most of your time spamming fireballs and praying for that moment when you can actually use your core mechanics.

Terrible, just terrible. I don´t see a light at the end of this tunnel, will probably have to go Frost again.... (WoD all over again)

[tonytaponi]

Pyretic Incantation is getting nerfed from 5% per stack to 2%. ( I don't remember if that was in the last build or not )

Well, that decreases damage we deal at 5 stacks by 12%, almost the same percent as other fire spells buffed.

[iRyusa]

So they nerf Pyretic twice : less crit = less uptime + more chance to lose stack, and the bonus is now really low.

Wow. Does someone tried to go CS/Meteor now over Kindling to see how it does ?

[Makz]

Everyone complains Single target dps sucks, they go and buff AOE and nerf single target. They can double the coefficients on those spells and it wont be enough because Fire is meant to have very high crit rating. It is like the old elemental shamans Overload mastery, you just need to have it for the class to feel smooth to play.

Also is it me or was the PI change not in the notes? Considering the patch is coming out most likely on the 20th or 27th and how incredibly slow they are with builds and changes this is not good. In 2 weeks they came up with "lets bump coefficients a bit and gut the rest".

[Erosis]

The Pyretic Incantation nerf is on the PTR but not included in the notes. I have updated the original post to include all of the changes.

[Eyliria]

Hey Erosis, as long as you are updating the main post, could you also update the new Norgannon's effect?

You need to stay stationary for 8 seconds (up from 5) in order to gain the buff, and the buff starts counting down once you move.

Also, in case it wasn't obvious, you get as many spellcasts as you can fit within that 5 second window - not limited to a single spell.

[Smaiki]

The Pyretic Incantation nerf is on the PTR but not included in the notes. I have updated the original post to include all of the changes.

MMOC missed this, but it's in the wowhead notes.

[Erosis]

Hey Erosis, as long as you are updating the main post, could you also update the new Norgannon's effect?

You need to stay stationary for 8 seconds (up from 5) in order to gain the buff, and the buff starts counting down once you move.

Also, in case it wasn't obvious, you get as many spellcasts as you can fit within that 5 second window - not limited to a single spell.

I knew I was missing something. Thanks!

[DyLemma]

The new gloves would be broken w/ combustion on live. I can see why they want to nerf combustion but the spec as of now on PTR is gutted even more then it was last PTR. Not sure what's going on, still plenty of time left. We'll see.

[Purplefrost]

New notes are up for 7.1.5

Cliffnotes for FIRE:

Phoenix Flame scaling Now 330% spelldmg and 110% spelldmg on the splash (up from 300% and 100%) - +10% dmg overall
-5% Critical Chance Overall (Critical mass down to 10% crit, from 15%)
Fireball Spelldmg scaling up to 200%, up from 175% (+14.28% dmg overall)
Pyroblast scaling up to 420%, up from 376% (+11.5% dmg overall)
Fireblast scaling up to 160% spellpower, up from 140% (+14.28% dmg overall)
Cinderstorm up 65% spellpower, up from 58% (+12% dmg overall)
Flamestrike up 230% spellpower, up from 207% (+11.2% dmg overall)
Flame On now reduces the refresh on Fireblast by 2 seconds, down from 3.
Conflagration FlareUp damage up to 45% spellpower, from 40% (+12.5% overall)


So far, completely disappointing, and not from a purely numbers factor (This is barely a 10% improvement over last PTR patch - if that, because have to account for less Pyretic Incantation with the crit reduction), but because there is ZERO chance to secondaries here. Haste and Mastery are still entirely underwhelming... all they are doing is sending crit into the ground and making the others more appealing by comparison.

I think you're missing the scaling options here. yes our crit is nerfed again, but our base spell damage is getting a massive buff all around. as we get more spellpower through iLvl increase then our damage is gonna scale even harder than it would've before this change. sure our Tier 19 gear gives us useless crit and makes us crit starved for nighthold
to run the 4 set bonus, but nighthold is only 7.1.5. there is an entire 7.2 and beyond for fire to scale into the clouds. I am excited with these buffs to our base spell damage and see this as an extreme positive compared to everything that has been changed. also the cinderstorm buff is giving us a more realistic choice because we can probably hit only 5 of 6 cinders and have it be better than kindling instead of 6 cinders every single cast or bust.

Just think Tier 20 and the OP of the new legendary gloves
We should probably still be praying for Ice Floes to be reinstated, but I think that's not gonna happen unless they're planning on releasing one more ptr build before the patch.