Mage Must-Haves for Midnight: Cooldown Management, Talent Diversity & Spell Tuning

The response to the initial release of Midnight Fire Mage was met with a strong reaction from the community. Changes to talents and the overall design of Fire Mage were great but the gameplay was lacking. Many players felt that the Midnight streamlining of specs had hit Fire too hard. Fire was already a lean spec to begin with so there wasn’t much to cut. After some small tweaks, I’m happy to report that Fire is in a much better place now. That being said, there is always room for improvement.

Top 5 Midnight Wishlist

Wishlist
1.	Bug Fixes and Cooldown Manager Tweaks
2.	Standardized Travel Time
3.	More Capstone Competition
4.	Another Active Ability
5.	Proper Resource Beyond Mana

Bug Fixes and Cooldown Manager Tweaks
The removal of most combat addons in Midnight will have a huge effect on how most players receive and interpret information. The Cooldown Manager is meant to fill this void, but the current implementation is a bit lacking. Buffs like Heat Shimmer should absolutely be trackable. Speaking of buffs, Fired Up is currently bugged and not overlapping. The first stack determines the duration of the buff and all stacks are lost once it expires. To play optimally, we will likely cancelaura it leading into Combustion to increase uptime. This absolutely needs fixing.

Standardized Travel Time
Fire Mage gameplay, especially in Combustion, is very fast paced and reactive. Distance to your target means increases the travel time of your spells and sometimes leading to waiting for a Hot Streak. This is one of the reasons why you sometimes find yourself accidently hardcasting. The easy solution is to just fight closer and stay moving during Combustion, but it doesn’t always work. If you have ever played played Fire Mage during a boss with a large model (Dimensius for example), you know exactly what I’m talking about. Lowering the maximum travel time for Fire Spells would go a long way to fix this issue.

Dreaming Big
Fire Mages had most of their wishes come true in Midnight. Pyroblast hits hard, Combustion is no longer tied to constant uptime, the big burst is back. Scorch has returned and Combustion gameplay is solid. Gameplay outside of Combustion is feeling a lot less Fireball-centric but could still something more. It’s a longshot, but having a proper resource to spend or another ability to use specifically outside of Combustion could help keep things interesting. A resource that you build during Combustion could be used to fuel a new ability, or it could just be a returning favorite like old Living Bomb or the Darckli’s Dragonfire Diadem effect on Dragon’s Breath.