It is my opinion that pyromancy is broken, weak, and possibly the worst mage spec in the basin. If you take any amount of time looking at the skill, you'll notice a trend. Almost every skill only has a "chance" of landing an affliction. example:

Ashfall: chance of black lung
firerain: chance of stun
incinerate: chance of severed limbs
heatstroke: chance of slickness
fireproof: chance of avoiding fire damage
flamering: chance of a backlash of fire damage and a further "chance" of lighting them ablaze after the first chance. rare drop of the loot table I guess?

Geomancers do not have this issue, neither should we.

Also, what is up with Mirage? Pyromancers, the "offensive" mage spec only gets 10 effects compared to Halli's 13. One of them is an illusion that is only good for hiding from scry? Why not something useful, like hiding all allies from the WHO list whilst in the demesne?

Firewalls. Useless. They are a mass produced version of a skill that every elementalist has with no added functionality. Are you serious? Geomesne walls stop you from leaving the room. Aeromancer walls stop you from leaving the room. Firewalls... add easy to cure ablaze? Please either make it useful by adding something to it or replace it with another effect.

Which brings me to my next point. Salamanders. Ability to randomly afflict with blindness, dizziness, or ablaze. I believe there are at least two other demesne effects that also cause ablaze... However, ablaze doesn't stack. No matter how much they get hit with ablaze, it will only ever do 1 burn level per tic of demesne. Wow. That means that if salamanders' random aff lands on ablaze, the effect just did absolutely nothing.

Add all that to the fact that these afflictions aren't even that great of a combination and you have a pretty weak sauce demesne. From what I've seen, the weakest in the basin.

All this has been kept quiet because pyromancy is so broken and messed up that no real fighters have stuck around to try and fix it all. That is going to change. I don't know how pyromancy has gotten to be so weak, though I am assuming opposing envoys have something to do with it. =.=

Discuss. Flamers will hopefully be avoided by my "chance" to be immune to fire.

Not to discredit your complaint, but
Quick comment: There's certain imbalances when comparing all the mage guilds. It's too cold, and I'm too tired to list them all at this time.

This will be fun.



Most of these are not 'chance of'. Ashfall, maybe. Firerain causes stun variable based on burn level. Incinerate has an auxiliary amputate effect based on its primary function (Damage + burst burn levels), heartstroke will cause slickness, fireproof/flamering are just tacked on to bolster the argument.



Sure, I guess.



Mirage is being understated. If it works as I remember it working, it conceals the room name and (I'm unsure on this next part) in-game map. Combine this with ashfall/smokehaze to conceal the exits, and a Pyromancer's demesne can be blinding to most navigation systems.

And if you really want to compare demesne effects (I like this part) you'll have to consider the Aero demesne effects that don't really do anything:

- Swiftwind (-.15s on next bal/eq use)
- Illwind (+.15s on next bal/eq use)
- Twister (standard anti-air/trees)
- Airnet (functionally cancels out twister with its redundancy)

So we're still 10-10 or 9-10 or 11-10 or whatever we're at if we're really keeping track.



Geomense walls stop you from leaving the room. Aeromancer walls stop you from leaving the room maybe 15% of the time. But yes, Firewalls is a useless skill.



Salamanders is a really 'meh' effect, I'll agree. And while ablaze doesn't stack, a skill that inflict ablaze also inflicts burn levels. Burn levels will stack. You can't rely on your demesne to do it for you, but it can happen - so no, ablaze isn't totally invalidated on Salamanders.



How much have you experimented, really? Have you seen Munsia fight at all? Consider:

- Locking a dendroxin/calcise/senso dagger
- Shieldstunning (this is pretty much your main weapon)
- TK psychicfist to help with limb breaks
- Beast spit senso/calcise/dendroxin to help with limb breaks

Mix in some incineration and eventually you'll run most people dry.



It hasn't at all been 'kept quiet' and has been complained about since the Kalin Clique ruled the city. The main person at the head of the drive to fix it would probably be Akui, but her request for a special report was turned down by the administration.

Nor is it so much that 'opposing envoys' (Hi, that's me now!) having something to do with it. Aeromancy got away with a lot of buffs, that much was clear. Nerfs were leveled at Pyromancers by everyone (not unexpected, considering how compressed burn levels used to be, and passive amputate is always a terrible idea) and when it came time to respond... the envoy could not due to some sort of IRL issue that prevented him from logging into the game. As I understand it (this being the player perspective of the story, so definitely skewed) attempts to replace him were met with silence, and the incomplete and unfinished Pyromancer report was submitted against Gaudi's will. And so here we are.

Pyromancy has some issues, but it is by no means a useless spec. It still provides area control, an offense that you have to provide only initial input for, and if nothing else, still cointains the boulderblast-clone and other standard Mage-spec fair.

The issues I identified with Pyromancy are either a 'general' issue or skill-specific. A lot of people came to me as Champ asking me what the hell we were supposed to do, and the things that I explained were sort of close to what Furien put up there. If I had been envoy, my general intention for Pyromancy reports was to redirect the spec, skill-by-skill in to a tempo sort of setup. It starts slow, but it snowballs if you let it get a leg up on you. It needs to ditch the 'all out offense' idea for sure, as while Fire is stereotypically super-offensive (and it matches Gaudiguch's confrontational attitude), it is not conducive to PK in a game where everybody else has lots of defense options to cut you short.. and you have none to do the same.

Salamanders is a crap skill, but to call ablaze a bad affliction in Pyro demense is just fool-hardy. Firewalls needs to do something more (I had ideas here), and random aspects need to be removed from the demesne to make it reliable (Ashfall is the culprit here). I also had the idea to make progressive levels of burn do something besides 'sit there', something to support the Pyromancer direction, but I never really fleshed out the idea.

Thematically, it would be cool if increasing burn levels could delay the effect of salves, but I'm pretty sure having a stacking affliction that hinders its own cure is a horrible idea for balance.

It didn't work too bad in Imperian, where you could use a toxin that had a chance of making eaten herbs do nothing.. that was cured by an herb. It was frustrating, but then again, we had tree + purge blood (cured a toxic affliction at random on your diag table) + class passive curing.

Thinking on it here, it may be a kinda bad idea with the rate of affliction being so very high.

Worst Class Ever.

But seriously, there are other classes which are in far dire situations than pyros. It could use buffs, but what guild doesn't. Plus you guys are mages who have psionics, you'll live.

I don't know about that. The fact alone that you need so many salve cures means you cannot quickly (as in, almost instantly) cure all the demesne will do to you. Add in some stun and curing hindering and it can get ugly. I may not have the best burn curing myself (never bothered to see what can be improved in terms of priorities, for instance), but I know that Munsia got me into cremate range almost exclusively by shieldstunning and letting the demesne do its job. Something that stacks as nicely can be found in no other demesne except possibly aero demesne for herb cures. The number of salve cures also means that it is a very strong support for other classes that can deal additional salve afflictions in group combat, like warriors or monks.

For even more discussion, how about the cremation instakill? If it fails, it still takes the 5 power away and equilibrium. Aeromancer skill costs 0 power until it 100% is guaranteed to kill them.

No, I haven't seen Munsia fight. Probably because Munsia is in realms for maybe 2 hours every day or less, and isn't very active during that time.

If you want to talk about aeromancer's useless effects, consider the fact that I'd gladly take the two equilibrium ones from you. They would stack nicely with burn levels.

Oh yeah, a pyromesne is "blinding to navigation" eh? Yeah, it's too bad there are no punishments for navigating it anyways. You can just walk right out of the pyromesne at any time you want to.

I see you agreeing with a few points, I expect cooperation and your ideas when it comes time to change those skills FOR THE BETTER.

Doesn't cremation still do something when it fails?

Many conditional instas take the power even if they fail. Absolve, wrack, mind-/heartburst, execute, toadcurse as a pseudo-insta. Some don't, but then, I think that stacking burn levels is easier (their curing harder/slower) than stacking coils.

The only skill that every Mage-spec does not have and costs power in Aeromancy is Cloudcoils. Pyromancers have Incinerate, and Cremation and I do not think you'd be using the latter unless you're sure you can get the kill. Power is still going to be used for the Tertiary skill, so I don't think it's safe to say that an Aeromancer won't be using a good deal of power.

Sure, take 'em. I doubt they'll really make any significant difference and I doubt they'll 'stack' at all with burn levels. And the Aeromancy instakill is overplayed. People assumed on release (hell, even I did before I got it myself) that it was Thornlash++ when it doesn't work that way at all. Supposedly it makes herb balance negligibly slower, but multiple Aeromancers can't coil the same person - the spell can only be cast in a meld by the demesne's melder. It's impossible to build up. If you somehow actually got to 6 coils you should have been dead long before that.

And that last point... well. I could say 'it's your skillset and thus not my problem', which is true, but I'm sure someone will call me a bully for saying it in the first place. I am not obligated to give you ideas to fix your skillset, as I'm not a fountain of creativity (beyond this one ridiculous Solstice piece I did in rhyme, but whatever) and I am not convinced that Pyromancers are as inviable as people say they are. Are the circumstances of their viability rather outlier when you look at, say, Munsia's strategy? Sure. The costs to make it work are fairly high. I don't think it should be that high, but I don't think Pyromancers are a hopeless case. Responding with hostility to foreign envoys is generally counterproductive - if anything my interests are served in buffing Pyromancers, as it would make the Gaudiguch vs. Hallifax conflicts more balanced and challenging.

All of that said, I understand Raahl and Lyria were throwing around some interesting possibilities for new Pyromancy additions. I don't agree with all of their implementations, but it's progress. If this thread was supposed to be serving a purpose beyond 'Agh Pyromancy SUCKS' it looks like you guys already have the ideas flowing.

No, cremate takes 5 power and equilibrium and does absolutely nothing if it fails.

This discussion is really just to start a discussion. I don't really care what people think about me, as long as they are discussing pyromancy it is for the benefit of everyone, myself included. It needs to be talked about.

I imagine an envoy who isn't trying to make pyros geos 2 would help.

Lol mangle if not amputate report.

The Aeromancy instakill is absolute garbage, for the record. To use it you'd have to have someone locked down so thoroughly you could have killed them another way three times over.

I don't think I've ever fought a Pyromancer who didn't just lean hard and long on the shieldstun button.

I'm not sure there are any Pyros out there really using the class to its fullest.

At the very least, we should move to have the wording on the heatstroke description changed. currently:

This can be cast in a single burning location or throughout your demesne. By raising the temperature, your enemies MAY suffer from excessive sweating.

That is misleading wording, when it in fact does afflict every time.

This thread is amusing.