7.1.5 PTR Notes

[Dacien]

There's no way they can just remove ice flows tho without adding additional movement options. Thats such an insane nerf.

They probably viewed it as somewhat downplaying the value of Scorch, and want people to use Scorch as their go-to movement dps ability.

Problem is of course, Scorch coughs out such disappointing dps. But that's what I think they had in mind.

[Reven]

Ice Floes might as well have been a baseline ability for the class since MoP for raiding purposes. Removing it really harms Fire and Arcane. Looking at the new lvl 75 talents across the three specs, all options are going to be useless for PvE. I really wonder if RoF and Ice Ward are some sort of sacred cows to Blizzard.

Another really bizarre change is the nerf of the Fire bracers to 200% bonus damage. Surely someone at Blizzard must recall that for the majority of the beta the legendary was at 200% damage and it was considered underwhelming. On PTR it is even worse than beta because there's no Ice Floes for Fire.

I know there are more tweaks to follow, but from the outset I am incredibly worried about Fire and the class in general. The changes removed too much essential functionality. The new Flame On is interesting and I like the PvP talent that makes Fire Blast have 3 charges. How it all works in raiding is another issue, but I don't find the competing talents on that row that appealing. While the new burst phase of Fire is about to change I really want to see Ice Floes return.

On a more positive note one change I sort of like is that Cauterize and Cold Snap became a baseline part of their specs. It offsets the loss of Greater Invisibility and allows for some individual tuning to each spell now that they are not intended to be shared across specs.

[Murm]

I was thinking they would nerf the bracers to 275% or something, but 200%? Come on, right now they are good but they don't seem particularly overpowered, and with the removal of ice floes it will make them completely useless. I pretty much cast ice floes before every hard cast pyro as it is because there are so few situations where you can reliably stand around for 4.5 seconds. I wouldn't be suprised if trying to hard cast pyros in raids and dungeons now resulted in an overall dps loss due to all the times you had to interrupt casting to avoid dmg. Even if you managed to hard cast every pyro from the proc (which would never happen), at 200% your dps is probably very minimally increased anyway. This is so much overkill.

[Kalthramis]

I am not a fan of these changes. Icey Floes is a huge nerf for pvp, and the last thing Blast Wave needed was a nerf. I guess we can focus on AoE now, though will probably still underperform against ww monks and veng dh's, and our single target will be even bigger trash. We were already underperforming compared to the other two specs; this is just piling on the salt.

7.1.5 was suppose to bring back class utility, and I was hoping we'd at least get Remove Curse back. Instead, our mobility has been butchered, and overall we seem to have lost out on damage and survivability. And in the pvp realm, we were already debatably the worst spec, with our big burst being our only saving grace; now even that is gone.

Thats not even mentioning the huge Bracers nerf.

I can only hope we get some serious changed before this patch goes out, or itll be time to change to specs until I hate, until I hate the whole class.

[DyLemma]

Sheeeeesh, I thought I've seen nerfs before but these...lol. No more ice block, ice floes, gutting our burst, which is pretty much all our damage to begin with and trashing the bracers that are keeping mages competitive atm. Sheeeeesh. No way most of this goes live. Fire would be obliterated. Seems they REALLY don't like the way fire plays right now because they are changing it, a lot.

It's a PTR, with a whole lot of balance changes. Doubt anything will stay final..at least I'd hope. Why are they all the sudden giving us more class fantasy when the expansion just came out? Replacing Ice Block all the of the sudden and ice floes being removed? Boy will the mage life be soooo different. Very odd. I hope they actually buff fire, because I think it's struggling atm, personally. Mages without bracers or helm are pretty much completely bottom of the charts. You can cheese ranks with the helm, bracers buffs fire to be balanced with the other specs. The spec honestly revolves around the bracers, so I'm glad they are nerfing it. But needs compensation.

[Zauberdings]

Guess you all forget that you got shimmer. For that pyro hardcast.

[hyper]

Guess you all forget that you got shimmer. For that pyro hardcast.

Shimmer doesn't let you stay in range of your ROP.

[kaywiz]

Surely there's no way fire gets released in this state, right?

[Komma]

Going to clean this thread up a bit to remove some low quality posts. We don't need another whine thread.

Pretty clear fire will need a retuning after this.

Yep. But I don't think we've seen all of the nerfs yet, because they still haven't fixed crit value as they mentioned in the interview. We'll probably only see the buffs after that.

Flame On Immediately grants 2 charges of Fire Blast Reduces the cooldown of Fire Blast by 3 seconds and increases the maximum number of charges by 1. Fire Mage - Level 60 Talent. Instant. 45 sec cooldown. 45 sec cooldown.

Might be better overall? But a combustion nerf.

Are you sure it is a Flame On nerf during Combustion? 9 second recharge means that at least 1 recharge will occur during Combustion, maybe 2 if you have high haste. This could mean more Fire Blasts during Combustion, not less.

[onizuka]

Did some minor ptr testing, was indeed getting 1 fblast recharge during combustion, which means that the burn phase remains unchanged, you just need to reshuffle the sequence a bit, which was no problem for me. No big 'mechanical' changes there.
Also worth noting that since this talent is now a passive it is actually a buff for anyone running kindling, since you won't have to reserve flame on cooldown anymore, just be smart about your fblast usage.

Mastery nerf to combust is where our dps is hurt, especially in low target cleave situation (which is already a problem on live).
I can't help but speculate that this change is directly affected by the new legendary they're introducing (6sec off combust cd on every pf use), which makes me chuckle a bit, because they keep making the same mistakes. This item is going to be pretty much mandatory, especially for someone like me, who only focuses on mythic+.

Ice floes removal is something I'm hoping they will get forced to back out of, you simply cannot get away with removing a talent 99,9% of fire mages are currently using.

Worth noting that we are losing 5% passive crit with molten armor removal, since it is currently providing 20%, whereas new critical mass will be giving 15%.
What should follow now is number tuning to pyro and fireball, so we are actually doing some damage outside of our burn phase. If they do that we will be in a comfortable spot, hopefully >.<

[Sosaria]

Are you sure it is a Flame On nerf during Combustion? 9 second recharge means that at least 1 recharge will occur during Combustion, maybe 2 if you have high haste. This could mean more Fire Blasts during Combustion, not less.

I don't think Flame On recharges the Fire Blast according to the notes.

Max would probably be 3 fire blasts instead of the usual 4.

[Myrxx]

Are you sure it is a Flame On nerf during Combustion? 9 second recharge means that at least 1 recharge will occur during Combustion, maybe 2 if you have high haste. This could mean more Fire Blasts during Combustion, not less.

I don't think Flame On recharges the Fire Blast according to the notes.

Max would probably be 3 fire blasts instead of the usual 4.

No, you can get 4. You have 3 charges of Fire Blast, and one recharges during Combustion.

[Kanariya]

Worth noting that we are losing 5% passive crit with molten armor removal, since it is currently providing 20%, whereas new critical mass will be giving 15%.

Critical Mass is also returning our "crit attunement" we had in Warlords, increasing the amount of crit we get from the stat by 10%. It looks like a bigger nerf than it really is, and seems to smooth out with gear. My Mage (852 - 12.2k Crit stat) has 59.87% Crit on Live now has 58.47% on the 7.1.5 PTR, which only comes to a loss of 1.4%. Out of all the nerfs, it's probably the smallest we've received in this patch.

[kaywiz]

Didn't they also say they wanted to make intellect a more desirable stat than crit as well? I don't think any of these changes accomplish that, so maybe we can expect more changes to come? Hopefully they're not finished and the fire doesn't end up in the dumpster.

[Dacien]

Are you sure it is a Flame On nerf during Combustion? 9 second recharge means that at least 1 recharge will occur during Combustion, maybe 2 if you have high haste. This could mean more Fire Blasts during Combustion, not less.

I don't think Flame On recharges the Fire Blast according to the notes.

Max would probably be 3 fire blasts instead of the usual 4.

No, you can get 4. You have 3 charges of Fire Blast, and one recharges during Combustion.

This is good news. Initial understanding was that the Flame On rework was salt in the wound to RoP and Combustion nerfs.

Number adjustments can actually save Fire at this point, Icy Floes aside. The only mechanical nerf holding Fire back is Icy Floes, everything else can be saved by number tuning, which as we all know, number tuning is much more likely to happen than mechanical changes.

[Jereko]

Critical Mass is also returning our "crit attunement" we had in Warlords, increasing the amount of crit we get from the stat by 10%. It looks like a bigger nerf than it really is, and seems to smooth out with gear. My Mage (852 - 12.2k Crit stat) has 59.87% Crit on Live now has 58.47% on the 7.1.5 PTR, which only comes to a loss of 1.4%. Out of all the nerfs, it's probably the smallest we've received in this patch.

The nerf to our Crit % is minimal, but the nerf to our actual chance to crit is substantially higher. Remember that the old Critical Mass gave a 1.1x modifier to Fireball, Scorch and Pyroblast.

I have 62% on live, which equates to a ~68% chance to crit with Fireball or Pyro. On PTR I have 60% crit, which equates to a 60% chance to crit with Fireball or Pyro. So we lose 20% crit, gain 15% crit and 10% additional Crit rating, which evens out, but lose the modifier.

[Dutchmagoz]

Initial thoughts:

- Pyroblast bracers got nerfed too hard. Still gotta do some math, but it may not even be worth using the proc anymore.

- they obviously want to reduce our burst and move us to a more healthy damage split, which isnt a bad thing, since it means fight mechanics won't punish us as hard.

- They either haven't added our actual sustain increases yet, or they considered fire OP. I'm hoping it's still coming, but right now all they did was nerf our burst (substantially). They can't just make combustion and rune of power a lot weaker, without giving us anything in return. The new flame on is a small sustain increase, but not even close to the damage taken away from our burst.

- I hope I'm misreading this, but did they remove the 1.1 multiplier on fireball/pyroblast? I realize they added back the 10% more from gear, but they also nerfed our initial crit. Looks like we lose about 1% sheet crit at current levels and 10% actual crit on our important spells. This is a huge nerf, which I imagine isn't actually the case, bit just comes across this way due to datamining. I can't access PTR until tomorrow, so if someone could confirm or disprove this it'd be appreciated. (Just fireball a dummy for 10 mins and upload the log & your character sheet crit%)

- Rip ice flows . They added some mobility back to scorch, but this is still a dps decrease no matter how you look at it.

- survivability: cauterize baseline, and the possibility to get pretty decent shielding isn't bad.

- Regarding fire blast usages during combustion, we went from 5 fire blasts to 4 fire blasts during combustion. (5 was possible on high haste, if you weren't doibg 5 already, you lose no fire blast usages during combustion)

Suggestions:

- Give us more sustained dps. A lot of our burst has been taken, which is fine, since it's unhealthy to do a huge portion of our dps in a very short period of time, but we need something in return. Our scaling has also been significantly reduced due to less crit modifiers and combustion scaling half as bad with crit now. Something has to be buffed in return. Make ignite possible to crit or something. (probably broken, but we need something significant, so just throwing out a random idea)

[Imaskar]

You can do 3-4 PF between combusts, so the new legendary can reduce combust cd for ~18 sec. This isn't that huge, considering with lower crit kindling would be of less value. We would get about 1.20 min combust cd. Would only look impressive with the old crit chance (~1min cd). And this is only IF we would get it. I myself still only have 1 legendary.

Alexstraza's wrath. Well, it would look good for m+ if it wouldn't mean loos of FO. M+ st dps is already too low, to sacrifice it even further? Tyrannicals are already a pain. Moreover, additional FBs from FO would mean more flamestrikes, resulting to more damage. It would be straight out dps loss in too many cases.

Blazing soul looks nice, but Shimmer without ice floes is mandatory.

Bad design is bad, blizz!

[Imaskar]

Can someone check if current 50k dps loss also occur for other classes and other specs? How is frost doing?

[Xenost]

Alexstraza's fury looks really good if you have darkli, you could use it like you would with PF or FB to generate PB during combu.

If they want to enforce us on using Scorch I think they need to give it some travel time, because it feels so clunky to use atm. (hmm, giving it travel time would make it bad during combu...I don't know how they could make scorch feel better)