Hello Mages!We have a lot of Fire Mage changes hitting the Alpha today, and we want to take some time to go over what changes were made and why. As mentioned in our update post last week, we have a few goals that span all mage specializations. These are:
- Allow you to acquire each specialization’s core gameplay with less talent point investment.
- Simplify rotational complexity.
- Provide new nodes that can help you adapt your damage profile to better match a given encounter’s demands.
- Provide competitive choice nodes that let you opt-out of complex gameplay.
Since we’re talking about Fire only, we can get a bit more granular:
Fire’s AOEThe biggest issue we were looking to address with this iteration was giving you more ways to adjust your talents and rotation to better suit different profiles, which goes hand-in-hand with increasing the effectiveness and excitement of Flamestrike, Phoenix Flames, and Living Bomb. We’re excited to see what Fire Mages can cook up with the new talents. Our goal with these changes is to push Ignite-spreading out of the default playstyle in higher forms of content, especially above 3 targets-- but retain and add talent support for it so its still exciting to utilize when it makes sense.
Sun King’s BlessingSun King’s Blessing is a powerful and exciting capstone that Fire Mage players have been utilizing heavily for quite a while. We like the Sun King’s Blessing / Unleashed Inferno capstone choice node, but recognize that Unleashed Inferno still has some gaps to close, particularly in AOE.By increasing the stack requirement of Sun King’s Blessing to 10 and increasing Unleashed Inferno’s effectiveness in AOE, we’re hoping that the two talents can better coexist as a meaningful choice when going into an encounter.
Maintenance BuffsFire’s array of maintenance buffs has been a sore spot in Dragonflight, and its something we’re looking to address moving forward-- especially given the addition of the Aberrus tier set as talents in the Fire tree.Firemind is our first removal, but we’re also being sensitive to the fact that Firemind didn’t require you to play around it very much, so its removal might not be doing much to simplify the landscape of Fire’s maintenance buffs.We’re also simplifying Improved Scorch’s damage amplification effect to be less punishing when its dropped, but also allowing it to be opt-in complexity. Fire Mages who want increased execute damage without the addition of another maintenance buff should look towards
Down in Flames, a new choice node against Improved Scorch.Feel the Burn is on our radar, but its output is impactful enough that it serves as a great way to express skill for Fire Mages who have mastered its gameplay. New talents along with effects from the Frostfire and Sunfury trees are increasing player’s access to Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames, so keeping Feel the Burn up should be easier than ever before.That’s all for this update. We’re excited to read all of your feedback on the new Fire talents!