Is thermal relief needed for wire-bond process?
A lot of wire bonding uses gold wires (aluminium is popular too), gold has the nice property that you simply squash two gold parts together and they bond like chewing gum. No heat needed, because there's no heat, having thermal reliefs has no effect. Reliefs are only useful when you need to get a pad hot without having to heat the whole pcb or when there's some kind of mechanical compliance reason (mainly with BGAs). Personally I don't use reliefs much as I reflow most of my boards, but that's a personal choice