Wizard, thaumaturge : Rimefire Smolder issues, Directed Flames + dot cold powers don't work together

bifflinculte

Directed Flames is a great feat, but to make it efficient, you have to trigger smolder/rimefire smolder on targets as often as possible.
There are 3 ways to do that:

1) the Critical Conflagration class feature: every critical hit procs smolder. This mechanic works fine.

2) the Chilling Advantage feat: everytime you add chill, you should proc smolder. But in practice, when using a dot cold spell (Icy Terrain, Conduct of Ice or Ray of Frost), only the first tick will proc rimefire smolder.

3) the manual way: you add smolder on foes by using any fire power, then you cast a cold power in order to refresh smolder into rimefire smolder. Exactly as point 2, dot cold powers only proc rimefire smolder once.

However, each time rimefire smolder is refreshed, Glowing Flames is triggered (as it should be).
For example, if i cast Icy Terrain on a target affected by Smolder, Rimefire smolder will only be triggered once, while glowing flames will work fine and will get triggered 10 times, (see picture).



The rimefire smolder mechanics is broken since it doens't work with dot cold powers.

This bug is very annoying since it makes Critical Conflagration mandatory to trigger smolder efficiently when using Directed Flames. (Before the patch no one cared, since Conflagration also granted a sweet 10% critical severity bonus).

This bug also make Chilling Advantage and the manual smolder gameplay useless.

Thx for reading.

bifflinculte

I'd also like to precise that this malfunction of rimefire smolder already existed before last smolder patch.

jana

I don't know if the changes to the wizard have done this, but mine sure doesn't seem to deal as much damage as she was say a month or more ago. Ive watched videos where they said dont use critical conflagration and ones where they said dont use direct flames and it gets so confusing. Do you know how to change the feats-at the very bottom of powers. There is a button there for retraining feats and powers and I hit it the other day thinking I could change those feats and it had nothing to do with them, it was for going back to being an arcanist instead of a thaumaturge which I don't even want to do and I did nothing but I think I lost some ADs out of the deal.

bifflinculte

Conduct of Ice an Singularity don't proc smolder as often as before patch (in fact, COI don't proc smolder at all with Directed Flames on).
Use FTF and Immolation instead if you're running a Directed flames build (which is far better for aoe damage than Rimefire Weaving: more dps and AP gain).