7.1.5 PTR Notes

[Eyliria]

I find it to be a fundamental flaw if the idea is for us to "grow" into the spec.

That's not very fun. The current iteration of the PTR has us at a roughly 100k dps loss (assuming you are just a tad over 400k on live right now). It's obvious that in this current state, Fire is dead for raiding until it supposedly grew into the higher ilvl gear.

After some more reading and fiddling with it, I am subscribing to Komma's view of the matter, that in order for them to fix Fire they are going to have to first break it, by completely obliterating the overly disproportionate desire for critical strike rating, and then tune the knobs appropriately.

My only concern is that is 7.1.5 is supposed to be here before the end of the year, they are running out of time for what is an expansion level overhaul of the class, thrown into a filler patch.

[Nalene]

Crippling PI and lowering fire mage crit chance doesn't mean fire mages will try to make up that DPS loss by stacking more haste or more mastery/alter their play style. It just means fire mages will still be required to stack crit, but just crit less and do less damage from their crits.

The spec cannot function without critical hits.

Fire's non critical hit damage is atrocious. An extra 25% spellpower to fireball will not change that.

We all see how abysmal fire dps is when spamming fireball and getting 2-3 non crits in a row. wooooo 1.7 sec cast to do 70k dmg. Meanwhile the rogue just hit for 1.1 million damage from envenom and another 200-300k white damage during that 1.7 seconds.

Improving secondary stats won't help either. it's just Blizz trying to soften the blow.

As others have mentioned, fire needs to be completely redesigned if Blizz isn't happy with the community stacking crit.

[pleblius]

It's been said already, but there's a reason crit is so valuable for Fire. As a basic list of what crit does:

1) Doubles damage done on spell casts. This is obvious, I know, but this initially gives crit around a 1:1 %crit_value:%damage_increase.
2) Allows us to cast Pyroblast, which is substantially more damage than Fireball. The more we crit, the more Pyros we cast.
3) Functions as Haste. Haste increases the amount you can cast at a 1%:1% ratio (to a limit). Crits allow us to cast Pyro as a GCD, which is about two times faster than a fireball cast (correct me if I'm wrong on that). We almost get more spell casts off per %crit than we do per %haste.
4) Functions as Mastery. See: Hot Streak doubling Ignite damage.

A slight bump to our SP scaling is not going to overcome a crit nerf.
It's the same thing we've seen every expansion yet: bandaid fixes to make fire viable when gear has low crit levels which are slowly rolled back patch after patch as gear gets better.

Edit:
When I first started playing in Alpha, I had assumed that Blizzard was okay with Fire being so bursty, because it was the only way the new Combustion made any sense. It seemed obvious to me that, when crit has so many versatile functions, our CD giving us 100% crit would be such a huge damage increase that our sustained DPS would necessarily have to suffer.
But I guess Blizzard didn't realize that? I'm really starting to question Blizzard's design foresight.

[Kintoun]

Don't miss the point of the changes (which we all want). Blizzard isn't trying to make other secondaries worth more than crit, they're trying to make INT worth more than crit. I'm sure all of us are still passing on higher ilevel items which should be upgrades. If Fire is still sim'ing well below live, we have to hope Blizzard will do another pass.

If everything is done correctly when 7.1.5 goes live, we will still take crit over other secondaries. But we'll be equipping gear we banked resulting in a higher ilevel. As intended.

So for people testing on PTR. Try equipping all that "bad" higher ilevel gear in our bank. Unfortunately without sims + pawn you'll need to eyeball the gear. But loosely speaking int > crit > haste == vers > mastery.

[Rydis]

that doesn't work.

how would you explain this then?

http://imgur.com/a/Qq3Gh" target="_blank

55 ilevels..still a downgrade. No amount int changing/balancing can fix this issue..when there isn't int on it. They need to work out all the secondaries.

[Purplefrost]

that doesn't work.

how would you explain this then?

http://imgur.com/a/Qq3Gh" target="_blank

55 ilevels..still a downgrade. No amount int changing/balancing can fix this issue..when there isn't int on it. They need to work out all the secondaries.

there is no int on rings you derp

[Majky]

there is no int on rings you derp

That is his point, right? The biggest problem is with rings/necks and adjusting secondaries does not solve this problem

[Maywtf]

Edit. Sorry I posted a trinket discussion post here, totally irrelevant.

From my point of view, Mage just looks "not ready" on the PTR. They have made some changes to test it out, and I'm pretty sure more are on the way. The 5% crit nerf hurts a lot, but we will have to see what impact tier bonuses from Nighthold have.

Mages have begged a lot to have and option to hide Felo'melorn orbs, and we got it.
Many of us asked for elemental shield, so there wouldn't be a Fire Mage with an Ice Barrier running around. This could be fixed with a single glyph (like DK anti magic shell was), but instead they made a different shield for each spec. I'm gonna sit tight and believe everything's gonna be alright.

[Mage]

It might do 5.5% in a sample of 1 boss fight, but it does much less than that given enough samples.

[Grraou]

So what do you guys hope for ? That before 7.1.5 goes live, we'll get a big boost to base spell dommage, so int goes up and our "no crit" dmg is somehow relevant ?
Went from 65% to 56% crit from live to ptr... Feels aweful.

I am kay: overall with the direction they are taking with mages. I can understand that our burst window with Combustion representing 80% of our overall dmg is not a viable gameplay (although I enjoyed it alot, a big combustion is so satisfying), so the nerf makes sense.
The point that led me to a lot of frustration recently, when gearing up, is that my equipped ilvl is 874, my bag ilvl is 886. Cause I can't just pass on those crits items, and it feels bad not to equip a +30ilvl item in some cases (not even talking about jewelries), just because there's no crit or the crit on it is not high enough. So it's a good rework imo.

What I'm afraid is that our overall dommage might not go up to what it is on live right now, and that the spec won't feel good. I mean, casting 2-3 fireball every single time in order to get a crit, it's definitely nowhere as fun as what it is right now on live. And having less hot streak means much less dommage from Ignite, so our cleave does get reduced heavly by all this as well..

Do you guys think they can make the spec still feel good after this kind of rework ?

[Liandry]

Given the slew of ridiculous changes - I felt like this is wildly appropriate for us right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=norTWysG-n4" target="_blank

[Eyliria]

One of my chief concerns is the gameplay aspect of the spec.
Sitting there spamming Fireball hoping for a crit is not fun or engaging.

Flame On does a good job at ensuring you almost always have a Fireblast ready to turn that Heating Up! into a Pyroblast!, but it does zero in terms of not having you stand there spamming a 1.7-1.8s spell for 7-8 seconds at a time, begging for a crit. (Yes, I'm taking Enhanced Pyrotechnics into consideration).

If they are going towards burying crit into the ground, it would make sense to me if they just baked into the spec the Nighthold 2pc for Fire, and buff Enhanced Pyrotechnics to 20% per failed Fireball crit, this way, assuming a 50% crit rate, we would almost never need to cast more than 3 fireballs in a row (50% on first try, 70% second, 90% on third, 4th would be guaranteed crit) - and it doesn't mess with the rest of the numbers all that much.

There are two ways they can kill Fire spec.

a) Non-viability
b) Making it very bland and boring.

I really don't want to be playing a spec that consists of MOSTLY just pushing Fireball and begging for a crit.
The spec just doesn't work unless we have a reliable stream of insta-pyros to shake things up. And I'm not talking about DPS numbers, I'm talking just the rotation here.

[Erosis]

Secondary stats have had their values nerfed. Jewelry items have been buffed to remain relevant for their ilvl. I have added this to baseline changes.

[Sosaria]

By the way things are going the only way Blizzard can somewhat fix the fire mage is either:

1. Retaining the rotation by giving us class specific crit buff for spells (aka, reversing the crit chance changes on molten armor etc etc and buffing it)

or

2. Giving us an enormous buff to filler spells to make up the crit loss (but seriously dulls gameplay)

[pleblius]

Honestly, something that would go a huge way towards reducing crit's value without directly nerfing the spec:

Return the ability to bank Heating Up with Hot Streak.


Right now, ignoring Fire Blast, we need to get two consecutive crits every single time in order to get another Hot Streak, meaning that the value of crit actually scales parabolically. If we can hold Heating Up, we'd only need one of our two spells (Fireball/Pyro) to crit to gain another Hot Streak. This would substantially help out our sustained DPS while only marginally affecting our burst, because during burst we don't take the time to Fireball to bank up HU, we just dump as many Pyros as we can.


This would fix almost every problem Blizzard has stated and allow them to tweak our spec without breaking anything.

[Kintoun]

By the way things are going the only way Blizzard can somewhat fix the fire mage is either:

1. Retaining the rotation by giving us class specific crit buff for spells (aka, reversing the crit chance changes on molten armor etc etc and buffing it)

or

2. Giving us an enormous buff to filler spells to make up the crit loss (but seriously dulls gameplay)

"Retaining the rotation"? "dulls gameplay"? Nothing has changed in our rotation on PTR. Only thing that should change when the dust settles is our gearing options and moving damage from our burst window into our non-burst window. If damage isn't the same after all this, we'll make our voices heard and hope for buffs.

[Eyliria]

By the way things are going the only way Blizzard can somewhat fix the fire mage is either:

1. Retaining the rotation by giving us class specific crit buff for spells (aka, reversing the crit chance changes on molten armor etc etc and buffing it)

or

2. Giving us an enormous buff to filler spells to make up the crit loss (but seriously dulls gameplay)

"Retaining the rotation"? "dulls gameplay"? Nothing has changed in our rotation on PTR. Only thing that should change when the dust settles is our gearing options and moving damage from our burst window into our non-burst window. If damage isn't the same after all this, we'll make our voices heard and hope for buffs.

I beg to differ, losing ~20% crit is a huge impact on pyroblast frequency, which makes you stand still doing nothing but fireballing more common, which dulls gameplay and breaks the rotation compared to live.

[nickseng]

You can take Cinderstorm and make the rotation less boring.

[Eyliria]

Funny that cinderstorm is probably worth taking another look since it also got a small buff. Considering the combustion nerf, in regards to M+/AoE scenarios, I wonder if cinderstorm would be clear cut winner for M+ where you can guarantee to hit all cinderstorms, some of them a lot more than once.

[magictricks]

Funny that cinderstorm is probably worth taking another look since it also got a small buff. Considering the combustion nerf, in regards to M+/AoE scenarios, I wonder if cinderstorm would be clear cut winner for M+ where you can guarantee to hit all cinderstorms, some of them a lot more than once.

The problem with cindersrtorm is that it pulls extra mobs and a good chunk of the time cannot be perfectly aimed (or even decently aimed), all in all cis is not worth the hassle as 1 mis-shot can lose you a chest.