3 sec CD Pyro, please rethink this change

10/18/2012 08:07 PMPosted by Metuo

This is pretty much going to kill the fun aspect of the spec as well as its DPS.

Fun is a nebulous thing. It's fun to blow up your enemies with extreme prejudice, but that's not very fun for your enemies. I'm not going to address fun, but I did want to address the dps concern, specifically with PvE in mind.

The bottom line is that this change won’t have an appreciable effect on the dps of Fire Mages in PvE. I’ll explain:

During your normal rotation, any time you naturally get back to back Pyroblasts, you can delay a Pyroblast by one global cooldown with no loss, since you'll still get the same total amount of Pyros. In fact, the only time it should have a real impact is when using Presence of Mind or Alter Time. Even in those cases, there still will likely not be a loss in Pyroblasts, since delaying a Presence of Mind by a global cooldown is unlikely to change how many casts of Presence of Mind you use during a fight.

What could be impacted, at least for now, is Combustion; getting 4-6 Pyroblasts in a row just before you use Combustion would create a larger than normal Ignite, thus increasing Combustion damage.

However, the change coming to Combustion in 5.1 makes any increase in Ignite size worth twice as much as before, so doing 4-6 Pyroblasts in 8-12 global cooldowns (instead of in 4-6 as before) will increase your Combustion size by roughly the same amount. So, the net result is a roughly zero change to your overall PvE dps, but it does mean that rotations would need to be altered to compensate a bit, by putting an additional Fireball or Inferno Blast between each Pyro that would have been back to back before.

I noticed that some players were also concerned about their PvE burst. PvP burst will be significantly affected, which was the intention of the change; too much damage was being delivered within a few global cooldowns. (As an aside, burst damage in PvP is something that we'll continue to address, but I digress) In PvE, burst usually refers to damage delivered within a significantly longer time frame, a 10-20 second window or even longer. The change to Pyroblast will reduce damage in a 5 second window, true, but in PvE that damage is spread out over the next 5 seconds, but will also interact with Combustion to deliver equivalent dps. The total damage in a 10-20sec window will be roughly unchanged.

10/19/2012 09:44 AMPosted by Hyperactive

so your confirming that the Pyroblast cooldown WILLL affect the Pyroblast! proc AND the pyroblast spell?

There's no distinction between Hotstreak and 'normal' Pyroblasts. That changed with 5.0.5.

If ignite is refreshed, then remaining ignite damage is done on the next tick.

Not exactly. The remaining ignite damage is spread out over the next 3 ticks. This chains, so a Pyroblast's damage gets spread out over many ticks, weighted more toward the first ones. The net result is that when you Pyroblast, your Ignite damage tick damage spikes upward, then gradually goes down over each tick. So, the several Pyroblasts earlier in your rotation matter less than the ones you strike with just before your Combustion, but they still matter.

10/19/2012 05:11 PMPosted by Paihn

Daxx, the 3s cd on pyroblast is too ackward, it affects the flow on both pve and pvp which largely contributes to the fun factor of any class

Due to the effects of haste, it should actually be 2.5 in practice.

I've read the posts in the thread, and a lot of the feedback will take some time to digest. We'll review it carefully.