Frostfire Mage Interview with Portal Para Dalaran - Frost & Fire Hero Talent Tree

09.02.2024 - 13:29 / wowhead.com

Portal para Dalaran interviewed combat design leads Jade Martin and Rodney Pare about the upcoming Frostfire Hero Talent tree.

New Hero Talent Reveals — Priest, Hunter, Druid, Mage

Hero Talent Tree Layout

Full Interview

Interview Highlights

Below you'll find highlights from the interview, organized by topic. Watch the full interview for more details on them.

Design Choices and Tuning

• Frostfire Mastery are two separate buffs, one for each school. You're not supposed cast a lot of Fire spells while Frost specced and vice-versa to get your stacks of Frost or Fire Mastery. There are other tools within the Frostfire Hero Talent tree that helps you with accumulating stacks of both Frostfire Mastery buffs without needing to dip too deep into casting spells of your other school.

• The goal with the Frostfire Hero Talent is to work seamlessly with both Frost and Fire specs, even with the massive differences between Frost and Fire Mage's Mastery. As an example, when playing as a Frostfire Fire Mage, Frostfire Bolt will accumulate Ignite, and the same will occur with Frost Mage and Icicles.
  Another example mentioned: Frostfire Bolt should work the exact way that Frostbolt does when it comes to Shatter effects.
• If you test this in the future and that's not the case, send feedback so it is fixed as soon as possible!

• The slight differences between Frost and Fire versions of Frostfire Hero Talents are due to balance concerns — Frost doesn't have as much access to Fire spells as Fire does to Frost spells, as an example. Numbers are still being figured out, but they want it to be different between Frost and Fire Mages to ensure they're equally balanced. The numbers we're seeing on the early Frostfire Talent Tree mockup are very early and bound to change.
  There are no current plans to increase spell access to the other spec — No extra Frost spells will be accessible for Fire and vice-versa. Right now, the focus is to make Hero Talents as polished as possible in preparation for more public testing.

The Frostfire Tree incorporates many of the ideas iterated in the past by the devs, but no ideas are ever added in the first iteration. An example of this in the Frostfire Talent mockup is Isothermic Core: They originally wanted a Frostfire version of Comet Storm/Meteor, but iteration made it feel like it was just tacked onto the tree and didn't make much sense, so Isothermic Core is the compromise they reached to implement that idea in some way.

Hero Talents and Feedback

• Hero Talents should not feel like they're there to complicate your rotation. They should feel seamless while adding extra flavor to your favorite spec!
• They are also attempting to avoid the same effect that the new talent trees had in Dragonflight, of