There have been several hotfixes applied to address certain issues with Hot Streak. Please retest this issue and let me know if you're still experiencing issues.

Also, please do not presume that your issue is more important than any other issue on this forum. Just because your thread does not get a blue post does not mean that it has not been read and is not being addressed already.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> [Bug]Living Bomb no longer proccing Hotstreak

It still does not say if LB dot crits are supposed to proc HS or not.

Ah well, that was somewhat expected, were they to ask me which I prefered LB being used on multiple targets or the DOT proccing HS I would have made the same choice as they did.

It allows us to do something we couldn't before and makes us very good on multi mob fights, we will be lagging a bit behind on patchwerk type fights.

Honestly, I don't mind the changes. However, the reason as to why we got there is quite simply inexcusable. Heres a repost with highlight to the relevant parts

So let me get this straight.

Blizzard agrees upon multi-target LB and LB-ticks-proccing-HS both being a-ok for mages. If it wasn't OK, it wouldn't have been in the patch, unless that was an unintentional bug. Which it isn't, as you can see from the above blue post, not to mention the previous blue post confirming that it was in fact intended to behave that way (proof: see end of post). So we have 2 blue posts confirming that both mechanics at the same time are ok and intended.

Now, after the code has been agreed upon, the changes are made on the code and made it to the live patch. Then the patch goes live, and a bug is found (fireball/ffb ticks breaks HS). The fix to that bug is to revert entirely the new functionality ?

What kind of bugfixing is that?

From a philosophical standpoint I have a hard time accepting this. I cannot dare imagine how my users would react if I told them that the shiny new feature I just put in the software that saves them 30 minute of work per day had a bug in it, and that I decided to remove the feature entirely in order to fix a bug in it. (Yes, I am a software developer). It has got nothing to do whether or not the move is correct or not -- theres a proper time to make changes, and allowing bug to have an impact on class balancing strikes me as beyond anything acceptable. Why put the new feature in only to remove it later, since clearly bug or not it would have been deemed as too good ?

The ironic part here is that I would have fully understood the move had there not been any blue post going through in detail how things came to be. Its mostly because the root problem was 'fixed' with a blatant disregard to collateral damage (to fix fireball/ffb ticks resetting HS, you just remove entirely the new functionality). Personally I see it as an invitation to stop reporting bugs, since hey, bug fixing means class changes ?
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World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Confirmation on LivingBomb tics procing HS

Wow. Just wow. It's frustrating enough that they took away something that made our class a lot of fun to play, and in all honesty, did not make us overpowered on single target at all. But then to find out that the change came about out of sheer laziness on blizzards part is even worse.

Was there even any analysis done to the scenario where you keep living bomb up on enough targets to have a hot streak at any given time, ie you spam lb/pyro without or with little dead time?

I can see how it was deemed too powerful in mass pvp where you would have plenty of targets to lb and then just spam someone down with hot streaks, that can't have been fun for the recipient, although I find it strange they would all of a sudden consider class balance in mass pvp scenarios.

I'm quite sure your single target dps would go down if you were to resort to such a tactic, putting up lbs on trivial mobs unless the explosions hit the primary target, would be interesting with some numbers on this though.

How about a pure aoe scenario, did we suddenly become "Kings of AoE"?

In most pure AoE scenarios we are still limited by the mob needing to stay alive for a full 12 seconds to explode. This makes it hard to compete with AoE dps from the likes of DKs and Warriors. However (Hot Streak procs or no) multi-target LB is undeniably a good thing for our AoE and makes us more competitive in some situations where we previously were not.

I just don't understand how they can justify nerfing our single target DPS for more aoe?

Manly, I think you misinterpreted the blue post there:

Ignore the next line - the post is badly put together and that line isn't really relevant - then you get:

I think what was meant was that Development Team Member X implemented "Hot Streak from LB ticks" and without either of them communicating Development Team Member Y implemented "Multi-target LB". This combination was then decided to be too powerful (presumably mainly in PVP) so they dealt with it by removing Developer X's work.

To put it another way:

It seems to me that they're suggesting that they "okayed" both changes independently but not as a whole. In combination they decided they were too powerful so removed one of them.

I'm not offering an opinion on whether this was a good decision or an ideal development cycle but I'm fairly certain that's what the blue was getting at with their post and the hotfix was not mainly due to the FB/FFB dot bug. I think the change would have been made had the FFB/FB dot bug never existed and it was a helpful side effect that it fixed the bug as well.

I have just about enough faith in humanity (Blizzard) to still believe that they wouldn't remove functionality just because it's easier to fix a bug that way. This may be naive.

See I'm rather more cynical about how this reversion came about. The reason I questioned the coding practices at Blizzard in my earlier post was because there were apparently two separate attempts to fix the HS bug: one was to stop all DoTs from affecting HS at all and the other was to stop non crits from "Frostfire Bolt" and "Fireball" from resetting the HS counter. Consider the blue explanation: a "data error" was introduced that caused the two spells with DoTs that produced undesirable HS behaviour to get borked with regard to HS. No other Fire spell/DoT got borked. The two spells were borked in a unique and special way to boot: what spell increments the HS counter on a crit, but doesn't reset the counter on a non-crit? No spell ever displayed this behaviour before. That's some accidental data error.

Anyway, after this debacle, it seems to me that Blizzard has concluded that they just can't get this to work properly (they NEVER got HS working as described in the 3.2 patch notes on PTR, after all), and reverted back to the original HS code.

This might make sense if both changes had indeed as said in that post been introduced on the PTR "around the same time." However, the multi-target Living Bomb was applied very early on the PTR, confirmed as an intended change by Ghostcrawler on June 29th. Over a month later, the addition of allowing Living Bomb ticks critting to proc Hot Streak was made, and also confirmed as intended by the same developer on July 30th.

They weren't just okayed separately, Ghostcrawler was aware of both changes and they were made a month apart, with the clear knowledge that both were active at once (Ghostcrawler's second post was in reply to a question mentioning both changes).

My primary issue with all of this is that it still leaves us in the lurch as far as single-target DPS goes.

The new Living Bomb changes make us mind-bogglingly good for a number of fights right now. Mages on fights like Mimiron and Yogg0 (<- holy shit here) are insane, and even when LB can't be outright abused, if it's hitting multiple targets we're still in excellent shape (see: Kologarn, Jormungars, et al). But when that aspect is removed, i.e. single target fights, we go back to being somewhat mediocre and depending heavily on crit RNG.

I'd much prefer a more balanced approach that didn't make us so-so for some fights and completely out of whack on others. I think the "bugged" version of HS that allowed it to proc from crit>noncrit>crit would be a positive change to cut out of the randomness. And although I love the fact that with multi-target LB we actually have a quality spammable instant, I would not be surprised in the slightest if it ended up getting nerfed.