Currently Fireball 3 has one use; Run up to player in PvP, fireball 3 in their face as opening to take significant damage with first strike.
I am pretty sure Fireball 3 was not intended as a surprise fun explosion in someones face.
I was thinking that maybe if there is a way to make fireball 3 a bit more viable as part of a rotation it could be usable… but how?
There are currently 2 problems:
The speed; Fireball 3 moves too slow to use effectively in a PvE or PvP situation (apart from exploding over someones face).
The damage to cast speed ratio; fireball 2 is significantly higher damage to cast speed ratio meaning that overall… damage per second from a fireball 3 is much lower than a fireball 2.
Does anyone have any suggestions to solving these 2 problems?
So i know the idea of a spell cap is highly despised among most mages, but hear me out.
If a spell cap was added then fire 3 would be useful because you wouldn’t be able to pump out a bunch of fire 2s in the time it would’ve taken you to cast a fire 3.
Like you said casting fire 2 as fast as you can does more damage than casting fire 3 as fast as you can, but if how fast you could cast spells was capped then you could reach a speed of fire 3 that would do more damage than fire 2 at the spell cap.
If this spell cap is put in the right place then mage would keep it’s rewarding feel, even tho there would be a cap it would be near impossible to reach with the high level spells.
This would also make the mage balancing a lot easier to do.
Some ‘magic recharge time’ could act as a cap and then the meta would be making sure you cast as soon as your magic recharge time is ready to go again. If that is the case though, some more emphasis on perfect casting would be beneficial too to really differentiate between mediocre mage-ing and highly practiced mage-ing.
That would definitely leave a space for fireball 3 to become the most powerful spell and maybe even frostbolt 3 as well.
Am I right that Fireball 3 is actually the only spell where no “shortcut” exists?
If it is the hardest spell to cast it definitely should be the strongest then imho!
Its slow speed is actually its best quality atm…if you chain cast a fireball 3 and fireball 2 (just for example) at the right distance they actually hit the target at about the same time allowing you to open the fight with an essentially free nuke.
I do agree that its weird that fireball 3 has a small or non-existent utility.