/facepalm mage changes in 3.1 and set bonuses...Follow

Back when I was FFB specced, shooting my FFB at a scorched boss netted around 46% Crit Ratings in 10 Mans. Boomkin/Shaman and a Ret Paladin and that goes up to 52%. Combustion almost seems pointless at this point. Now, its one thing to be able to reach a high enough Crit Rating so that RNG doesn't have complete control over your DPS, but over 50% of your main Nukes landing as Crits almost defeats the concept of Critical Hits - unless you're under some zany circumstances.

I have switched to Arcane for a more controllable DPS output, and the rate at which I crit has come down drastically - but there are still FFB and Fire Mages out there with absolutely insane chances to Critical Hit.

Add in the fact that the new Ulduar stuff will theoretically boost Critical ratings ever further, and you can see a need to balance the stat.

That being said - I wholly do not agree with how they are going about it. Scorching may no longer be worth the time to cast - and considering the dependency on Crit for the FFB spec as a whole - they may very well be killing one of the only Viable Raiding Specs (one of the major benefits of FFB before was the Scorch.)

They either need to make Scorches effect stack much more quickly without the need for a Glyph, need to make the effect be applied with any Fire Spell, or need to add additional benefits to the effect or replace the effect entirely with something different. No one asked Scorched to be changed to a Crit Buff - Blizzard did that. How they now figure it was a bad idea and instead of coming up with an innovative way to change it or, hell, even back-tracking to it's old effect - they are very lazily nerfing its effect.

Expect to see a lot less FFB Mages out there - I'll tell you now.

101%.

this is the percentage of people who failed maths at my school.

Yeah, it went from worthless to mediocre!

the difference is that in a single shadowbolt they get the 5% debuff instead of us casting 5 times.

no matter what the molten armor glyph is a dps increase and worth taking. Come 3.1 for a fire/frostfire will be main nuke (fire/frostfire) + Living Bomb + Molten Armor.

I am still pretty much set on wearing 2 pc T8.5 for the first set bonus. I like the helm, gloves and shoulders. I don't like the rest. We'll see, being a collector, I will likely get them all for completion's sake.

I am going with FFB + Molten Armor + Living Bomb glyphs and only 1 point into Imp Scorch unless someone can think of a better place to put it. As it is, I needed 1 point in something to get to the rest of the tree.

It potentially will, as it will give you some of that crit back that you will be missing either from molten armor or 10%->5% thing. I don't think it will be worth glyphing for though as living bomb (from what I have read a week ago) is an actual dps increase.

I didn't see anyone post about this, but they've buffed both the redesigned MA and the redesigned MA Glyph.





From MMO-Champion.

Additional nifty-ness:



This certainly makes one feel a little better about the Imp Scorch change.