Hi! Just making a post to discuss blaze wizard bugs and weaknesses, with suggestions to how to fix most of them.
The overall weakness of bw is our lack of support coupled with very low damage output, making bw a "meme" support class that not many want in a bossing party. I would rather want Nexon to help fix one (or both!!) of these.
Bugs:
1) Flashfire (2nd job skill) is buggy, especially during server lag; sometimes, I put it down and try to teleport it but instead a new one forms in my current spot, with the original one gone.
2) Savage flame fox:
a) Sometimes the orbs disappear into thin if the skills active but the mobs are killed from other skills; this greatly reduces our mobbing efficiency.
b) Orbs have poor coding and sometimes chase a single mob (out of many) into a corner and disappear since no other mobs are in the corner.
Potential fix: Have the orbs stay out longer so that they don't immediately disappear if no mobs are nearby.
Weaknesses:
1) Burning conduit:
Problems:
a) Having it immobile with no vertical range makes it hard for parties to stay on it; it's very bad compared to battle mages' aura, where party member just need to be around them instead of being in a fixed position.
b) In case of lucid, if platform that has conduit on it breaks, then conduit disappears with full cooldown; this is difficult for blaze wizards to support during p2 lucid.
c) +1AS, +60% dmg is a bit lacking compared to other class's support (kanna/BaM/pally/bishop) and how hard it is to even be on conduit during bossing parties
Solutions:
1. Make it like an aura instead so that blaze wizards can situate themselves around the party members -> this would fix a,b
(I understand that KMS recent changes make it so that if conduit forcefully disappears, some cd is refunded; I would rather still prefer my suggestion since KMS solution doesn't solve problem a)
2. Give IED or make +% fd or something to conduit; currently it gives far too little compared to the difficulty in having to place party in it for endgame bosses.
2) Flame Barrier
Problem(s):
a) Absolutely useless after lvl 200; The skills says "damage intake: -50%", but this is only for touch damage from mobs; it doesn't affect %hp dmg from bosses so no one uses this 4th job skill ever.
Solution:
a) Make it like a shield so it can tank %hp dmg from bosses; even throw in a resist status effect in there as long as flame barrier is up would be nice
3) Fires of Creation
Problem(s):
a) Absolutely useless pre-lvl 200. There is no point in having fox/lion mode before lvl 200 (unless bossing but everyone's going to rush to lvl 200 for legion) since that only matters after lvl 200. This skill's main contribution is savage flame, with ied being second.
Solution(s):
a) Make savage flame 4th job skill along with fires of creation so that bw can have decent mobbing pre-200. Currently, mobbing pre-200 for bw is very bad so this skill would be very useful pre-200.
4) Ignition (Major)
Problem(s):
a) This skill looks and sounds cool given description, but its damage contribution is TERRIBLE, if not NON-EXISTENT. Hyper skills or boost nodes to increase this dmg doesn't even do much, and ignition's only role is to apply stacks for savage flame at this point.
Solution:
a) Make it have more dmg.. or just get rid of the hyper and boost node and replace it with something more useful for bossing/mobbing, since this clearly aint it chief.
5) Flame orbital (Major)
Problem(s)
a) Server-sided: I appreciate Nexon's efforts to make this skill less ping-dependent, but because it is still server-side, this will always be an issue with balls not coming out if lagged.
b) Low damage: One of the hyper skills for bw (that we unfortunately need) is increasing lines of orbital flame in exchange for damage: -90%p. Like why though? All other classes' hyper skills don't come with strings attached, and this -90%p is pretty major to our overall damage.
Solution:
1. Modify or even replace orbital flame as our main mobbing skill: this skill just had so many problems in the past and I would rather have a new skill at this point rather than bandaid it with fixes that don't work.
2. Fix the hyper skill to not have -90%p; like why???? we're already bottom 5 of dps charts..
These are just some of my thoughts; please contribute below or disagree with some of my statements
Thanks
Comments
Also would love some damage buffs from 5th job skills if removing the % deduction from hyper and buffing ignition isn't enough ^_^
Another thing would be to be able to act out of up-jump. With the KMS changes now, most classes get an up-jump and can act out of it (via tp or another jump). BW lacks that capability, and this is significant in many bosses for survivability. An additional jump in general or after up-jump would be very appreciated.
1) Overall weakness of BW: The weakness of BW is not that we lack damage output and lack support. It's that we lack a number of basic quality of life features that can facilitate our support, so we end up often being relegated to filling the role of a damage dealing class because our party cannot take advantage of our support. This is also a product of boss design. From there, we lack the single target damage to even match other supports, let alone damage-focused classes.
Supporting power restrictions: BW has one of the highest supporting capabilities in the game from Elemental Resistance Reduction through Ignition and the insane power boost provided by Burning Conduit (60% damage, +1 AS, 100% uptime). However, Burning Conduit is an extremely situational buff to offset its incredible power, which makes it less consistent than other buffs of similar strength. In higher level bosses, the fact that Burning Conduit has an extremely restricted zone that provides no defensive options at all means that party members will rarely be able to afford to benefit from it, between all the movement necessary to evade boss attacks. (Compare to the range of BaM's auras, Kanna's Domain, or the defensive options provided by Bishop's Benediction and Mihile's Shield of Light)
I do agree that BW does have a number of useless skills:
Flame Barrier - Never has a use.
Ignition - Other than being the mechanism for stacking Savage Flame, which is annoying, and applying the Elemental Resistance Reduction debuff, this skill is underwhelming
Cygnus Maelstrom - Niche mobbing utility that is rarely worth using.
However, Fires of Creation is not one of them. That said, the distinction between Fox/Lion is nonexistent until Savage Flame is acquired in 5th job.
2) Solutions:
As mentioned above, Blaze Wizard's core weaknesses are a lack of QoL features and single-target damage. To that end, I suggest the following solutions:
Actual balance changes:
1) Remove the -90%p damage from the hyper skill Orbital Flame - Split Attack. This may not seem like much, but as Orbital Flame currently constitutes a majority of Blaze Wizard's damage, and its damage ratio is extremely low at base, this single change actually increases BW's overall final damage-per-minute by roughly 10%, placing it more in line with other classes both in damage charts and matching the fact that every other class has this hyper with no drawbacks.
2) Rework Cygnus Maelstrom to be a class bind. Now it's a useful skill.
3) Change Fires of Creation to summon both the Fox and the Lion, and rework Savage Flame so that it always deals both the Lion explosion and generates the foxfires, and no longer changes damage based on stacks. The skill may need some damage numbers tweaks to remain balanced.
4) Change Flame Barrier to a 2-second invincibility frame that doesn't deal damage when it ends, and adjust its cooldown to something appropriate for that. Maybe 70 seconds, to match Mercedes' Water Barrier in post-Destiny update.
Quality of Life adjustments:
5) Change Savage Flame - Fox's projectiles to have increased target acquisition time, to match other classes.
6) Change Savage Flame - Lion and Orbital Flame's hitboxes so that they can actually hit bosses that teleport directly on top of you (similar to the Marksman change in the Destiny update)
7) Change Greater Flame Elemental into a 100% uptime passive or a toggle, like every other Cygnus Knight has. This way the buff doesn't expire while we keydown other skills.
More changes that would make me happy but may be going too far:
a) Remove the two Ignition hyper skills Reinforce and Mass Explosion and put in hyper skills that buff Burning Conduit instead. I suggest a 10s cooldown reduction and having Flashfire automatically generate a 2nd conduit (while still only allowing players to benefit from at most 1 conduit at a time).
b) Adjustments to Elemental Shift or Fire Walk so that Blaze Wizard can up-jump and then jump sideways while in the air. At this point, every other class can move sideways once after leaping into the air, but not Cygnus Knights.
c) Give Blaze Wizards temporary Dark Sight while under the effects of Fire Walk. You might say wait, that's crazy, Dark Sight is a thief thing, and Night Walkers appropriately have it!... Yeah, and teleports are a mage thing, but in the Destiny update every mage that could teleport got an up-jump and Blaze Wizards never got anything. Plus, Explorer Archers stole our Flashfire, and at least it makes a little bit of sense that we could learn Dark Sight by watching our fellow Cygnus Knights the NWs.