This is, of course, now a eulogy. Because it's been nerfed due to being "overpowered", without any specification of what was overpowered (since mages still weren't #1, much less blowing people away, even with the hotstreak portion.) But it still deserves to be posted because, well, this was a brilliant change.
Summary for the non-mages: Mages cast scorch every 30 seconds, keep Living Bomb on the target which is a 12 second dot, and then use Fireball as a filler spell. After two consecutive crits of Fireball, Scorch, or the final explosion of Living Bomb, mages gain Hot Streak, a buff that allows a single pyroblast to be instant-cast.
On the 3.2 PTR, they added Living Bomb ticks (which go off every 3 seconds) to the list of spells that could interact with hotstreak. This means that a hit of a living bomb tick will reset our crit counter, and a crit will add to it.
The living bomb change was minor boost in dps -- about 3-5%. The thing is, the world doesn't just come down to DPS.
The brilliance (and I don't use that word lightly) of the living bomb change was that it solved multiple mage problems in one fell swoop and gave them a fairly minor, but needed, dps boost in the process.
- It gave mages mobility/target switching
- It reduced the heavy RNG of mage DPS
- It created more skill-based differentiation
- It can't get out of control
Details after the cut for those who want more explanations:
Read more posts by Kyth
Read rest of Article
StratFu
