It seems my comments on not needing to watch ignites for the sake of Combustion are now invalid. It's a neat change. I'd like it if its damage component was guaranteed to be critical for the concerns of ignite's short duration. Will suggest it on beta forums once this becomes more than datamined information.

Hot streak is chance on singular crit, guarantee on consecutive crit. Still double RNG either way, but at least we have increased the sources of RNG. This tightens the rotation a tiny bit, being less permissive of late reactions to procs. The single hot streak will have to be used during the flight time of the spell following the proc spell, else you could munch it with the consecutive one. More paying attention, more chances to proc our favorite buff. All good in my opinion.

I wonder how the Living Bomb limit will be enforced. If we cast a 4th will we recieve an error message? Will it remove our first? Does the spell gray out? Is this true of Combusting a Living Bomb? I don't really like restrictions, but I can see why it could be necessary.

Was really expecting to see Pyromaniac disappear. I'm confident that it is there to help on cleave fights. As we know even if you can find 3 sources for Living Bomb it may not be worthwhile to do so - we probably all would have liked to tab around on Lich King or the Iron Council, but Blizzard is capable of throttling us due to necessity. Even with Pyromaniac active you would probably not gain the damage with 10% haste that you lose on a focus target in two globals. One global might do it by the way of Impact, but then the mobs are close together and it probably is a cleave fight where everybody is doing the same. Where it will be up most often is AoE, though as a haste buff it will be of minimal benefit with our myriad of instants, and living bomb thus far not being affected by haste.

Well, today's build settled my fears about Hot Streak. This is a much more graceful change than the one that I had proposed.

I would still like to see an additional active element in the Fire rotation, however.

Kalgan from the Beta Mage thread:

The Hot Streak tooltips on MMO-Champion do not mention this but that doesn't necessarily mean much. This would mean we could have a timeline like:

T+0.0 - Fireball cast complete, start next
T+0.1 - Fireball crits, starts ignite
T+2.5 - Fireball cast complete, cast Combustion which crits, causing Hot Streak
T+2.6 - Fireball hits

Where as long as combustions effect doesn't have a travel time, we should be able to generate Hot Streaks with the ability easily.



I've been putzing around with some simple thoughts on making something similar since Combustion was announced in its DoT combining form. The only difference I had from your basic design was also having a method for estimating the targets time remaining alive based on incoming DPS so you wouldn't pop it at 6 seconds left to live if there could be another target to follow that could take it. Not a hugely important difference but one worth considering in the design phase of such a thing.



Fireblasts relative damage output to Fireball is deplorably low even at early spell power levels. Obviously things can change and tweaks can be added, but under current mechanics I wouldn't support using it for anything other than impact spreading DoTs, which conveniently we could do with a Combustion caused hot streak proc, Combustion->HSPyro->Impact FBl.

This is how I understood it as well but apparently it is not the case

Hitting only up to 3 targets on explosion is really lame. Does SoC for demo hit only 3 targets ? Not that i recall... On a Aoe scenario with clumped targets, using more than 3-4 LB wouldn't be that much useful cause they would explode and need refreshing before you could cast the Flamestrike-Blastwave-Dragon breath sequence entirely.

Removing the ability to spam LB on more than 3 target, i could live with it since we now have other very interesting aoe tools but removing the explosion damage after the third hit is just stupid. In a pack of 9 targets, will the LB explosion hit the ones with lowest life ? Each target will do a /rand and it will pick the 3 lowest ?

---

On using Pyroblast as the Combustion enabling spell, there is something we haven't thought before, i think. When i cast Pyroblast, it's usually right after a fireball (FB1 crit, FB2 crit, FB3 is being cast, i notice hot streak proc, FB3 launch, Pyro launch 0,1secs after). I would have activated Combustion while the Fireball and the pyroblast were mid-air, thus ending with the Fireball activating Combustion mechanic and not Pyroblast as it would land right after the FB.

The only way to use Pyroblast for activating Combustion in a real combat situation would be right after a refresh of Living Bomb, Flamestrike or after a Scorch.

One thing is still possible though, it would be to have the Combustion dot merging to happen 0,5 secs after the Fireball hit, allowing then the pyroblast dot and ignite (in case it crits) to be taken in account. I recall seeing two spells in the database but can't seem to find them again.

As you said, pity that the MMO-Champ tooltips say that hot streak is only procced by Fireball, Frostfire Bolt, Scorch, or Fire Blast.

However, given enough range, haste and reaction speed, you may be able to do a similar thing with Scorch or Fireblast, as they are both instant-hit.

Interestingly, I can't seem to find that +60% scorch crit talent anymore, but Fireblast apparently has a talent that increases it's crit chance by 4000%...

The scorch crit chance talent disappeared a while ago, Imp Fireblast is 4/8% currently with a range increase.



edit: To answer the below, it never has.

There was a period where the *graphic* for the orb had tendrils touching everything around it, but it only actually did damage to one target. It never has actually done AoE damage, and all the posts from Blizzard have been consistent with it being intended to be a single target at a time spell only.

The quote from GC that seems to have created the belief that it is meant to be AoE really doesn't say that it is:

It just means its able to pass by one target and start hitting another if you are creative in how you aim it. You aren't 'being awesome' if you hit more than one target with a spell that is always intended to be used on more than one target.

A short test I've done courtesy of free scorch indicates a ~42.5% chance for Hot Streak without the Improved talent, namely 174 scorch crits were cast and 74 Hot Streak procs recorded. I basically stood in one place and spam casted scorch, without using any other spell including Pyroblast (improved talent wasn't taken).

I'll do some more tests with the Improved Hot Streak, also Ignite is still bugged even in such simple conditions when there is no flight time to consider, by bugged I mean sometimes the damage isn't calculated properly i.e. it gets swallowed somehow related to when it's going to tick and when the crit happens.

Out of curiosity, how did you record the number of procs? Did this method of testing either cancel the buff or count refresh events as well as proc events?

They did mention not wanting glyphs to change rotations. Other than that, it could be a decent solution to make FFB more useful again. If it had a Mind Blast-like cooldown it would also not mess up frost too much because the chance of getting two Brain Freeze procs in, say, 6 seconds is quite low (don't really have time do to the math, but it's not relevant anyway).

I agree with you, it did in fact settle the fears about the hotstreak talent which we all enjoy. But you are right about the fire rotations. I still fear it is still the same rotation on a single as WOTLK with the addition of the fire orb. I currently enjoy the build for massive aoe damage, but fear for the uses of many of the talents on a single target.