Fire Mage Overview
Class Changes
Here are the Fire Mage changes on the Patch 12.1 PTR.
Developers’ notes: Our goal with these changes is to shift the relative value of Fire’s steady-state damage versus Combustion window burst. It is important that time spent outside of Combustion remains meaningful and impactful to your overall performance.
Pyroblast damage increased by 15%.
Flamestrike damage increased by 15%.
Apex Talent: Fired Up (Rank 1) now grants 2% increased Fire damage for 8 seconds (was 4% for 12 seconds).
Apex Talent: Fired Up (Rank 2) now increases Fire damage by 5%/10% (was 3%/6%).
Apex Talent: Fired Up (Rank 3) chance to occur during Combustion has been slightly reduced.
Developers’ notes: We’re making some adjustments to Mage defensives with the goal of improving Mage survivability as a whole and slightly reducing the power of Glacial Bulwark.
New Talent: Improved Warding – Damage taken from area of effect attacks reduced by 4%.
Temporal Realignment has been updated – Now immediately heals 20% of your health and heals an additional 30% over 6 seconds.
Blizzard has stated that their goal with these changes is to shift some damage away from Combustion and move it to the filler rotation. It's exciting to hear that Pyroblast and Flamestrike are getting buffed, but the bulk of these changes are hard to fully understand without seeing actual data. Buffing Pyroblast means also buffing Combustion, since the bulk of our casts happen during the cooldown. That being said, our Apex talent Fired Up is notoriously difficult to model in sims and the wording here is pretty vague. If we take Blizzard at their word, the end result of shifting damage into filler should be a nerf to Combustion burst, assuming tuning is similar to live. If tuning is meant to increase for Fire, it's possible this shift in damage is overtaken by higher baseline damage. Mage defensives also got a pass, but with Fire, it remains mostly the same.
Fire's biggest weakness is still that it has no real answer to spread-cleave. Recently it has been outclassed in stacked cleave by Arcane, but the power of Combustion and convenient 1 minute cooldown has carried the spec on fights like L'ura. If Combustion burst is lowered, it's not really clear what Fire has going for it over its peers. Frost effortlessly locking down the spread-cleave niche makes the case for Arcane and Fire a tough one, but which spec performs best for Mage will come down to fight specifics and overall tuning.
Aside from impacts to tuning and performance, there is also the gameplay conversation. Fire gameplay in Midnight is very similar to the War Within, albeit watered down. If you enjoyed that gameplay, you probably enjoy Fire now. These changes are unlikely to have a big effect on Fire's gameplay.
Tier Set
Fire's Season 2 tier set has also been revealed.
2-Set Bonus: Pyroclasm causes Flamestrike and Pyroblast to always critically strike.
4-Set Bonus: Pyroclasm reduces the cast time of Flamestrike and Pyroblast by 20% and its damage bonus is increased by 20%.
This tier bonus revolves around Pyroclasm, a talent that hasn't really seen a lot of play in Midnight. Having this tier set revolve around Pyroclasm is an interesting choice. If you are unfamiliar with Pyroclasm, the basic idea is that you can spend procs on hard-cast Pyroblasts that hit really hard. The proc rate is mostly random, but can be forced with talents like Sunfury's Sunfury Execution. With us losing our Season 1 tier set and gaining this new one, expect to cast fewer Fire Blasts and to spend more time standing still to greed a cast.
One issue that many players have with Pyroclasm gameplay is that stopping your rotation to hard-cast a Pyroblast feels overly disruptive. This is further compounded by the fact that our Apex talents, and Fired Up heavily incentivizes casting more spells. The tier bonus tries to address this by lowering the cast time, but 20% is not enough to make the spell proc feel good to spend unless the damage is heavily increased. The tier set also further reinforces Fire's lack of Crit scaling, since Pyroblasts cast with Pyroclasm will always Critically Strike. It will likely still be worthwhile to hard-cast mid Combustion, but it would be nice if the 2p did something to increase the damage if you were already going to Crit.
Overall, this set is novel but with the current tuning, the gameplay will likely be worse with it. My recommendation is to give the 2p some additional scaling based on your preexisting Crit chance and to make the cast speed significantly faster with a proc. For the proc to not feel disruptive, something similar to a 'Global Cooldown' cast speed would be best. The impact this set will have on Frostfire vs Sunfury could also be a problem for Frostfire since it generates less Hot Streaks, so it might also be good to make some other change to Frostfire to help it be competitive in 12.1.
