I’m not sure why, but out of most specs in the game, I find fire mage really hard and complex to play.
What do you guys think? Are there easier builds out there? I look at the wowhead and icy veins guides and it makes me feel like I should be browsing job boards for heart surgeon jobs instead.
Any tips to improve, perhaps?
Fire mage is one of the specs, apart from affliction lock, ret pala, and maybe feral druid, that seriously needs to be reworked. Frost mages are fine. Arcane is too annoying for my taste with the periodic damage cooldown management from shadowlands, but I guess some people are apparently rly in love with it, but I don’t rly understand why they like it. Fire however is the type of spec, a new player is attracted to usually. Raiding seems to be perfectly fine tho, I only have a problem with how hard fire is for PVP and M+, not just bc I find it personally hard, bc I’m actually quite alright at fire mage, but I think it needs a rework to make the game healthier, since it’s the most iconic caster in the game, and it should feel modern. I think pressing Pyroblast should feel the exact same way as pressing Chaos Bolt.
yeah, its really hard to press a second key other than pyroblast, I just can’t get my head around pressing an additional key other than the one key I need to press.
I think you might be talking about raiding, and it’s not what I’m referring to.
I like pressing combustion. If you want the feel of pressing chaos bolt, go press chaos bolt. Fire mage doesn’t need a rework, it just needs some more spells and some talent tuning…
This is more of what I was talking about, from the Wowhead guide:
Fire Mage Opener Rotation
- Four seconds before pull: hardcast a Pyroblast. This will always crit due to Firestarter.
- Cast Fire Blast as soon as your pre-cast Pyroblast hits. During Firestarter (above 90%), Fireball and Pyroblast always crit, so you will always have either Heating Up or Hot Streak!
- Cast Pyroblast (with Hot Streak!)
- If Hyperthermia procs, rapidly cast Pyroblast during the buff.
- Fireball should be cast as a filler to generate Hot Streak!. Cast Pyroblast (with Hot Streak!).
- Cast Pyroblast then Fire Blast if Fire Blast charges are about to cap and maintain the Feel the Burn buff from Fire Blast. Try to refresh the buff as late as possible without dropping stacks.
- Alternate between Fireball, Pyroblast and Fire Blast, Pyroblast until Sun King’s Blessing is ready.
- With Sun King’s Blessing ready, Hardcast Pyroblast to activate Sun King’s Blessing
- Cast Combustion and Fire Blast before the Pyroblast hardcast finishes to generate Hot Streak!
- Cast Pyroblast (with Hot Streak!)
- Cast Phoenix Flames then Pyroblast if Fire Blast isn’t available or Feel the Burn buff has more than 3 seconds left
- Cast Fire Blast then Pyroblast if Fire Blast is available and Feel the Burn buff has less than 3 seconds left
- If Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames charges are spent, cast Scorch then Pyroblast
- When Rune of Power fades, cast it to maintain the buff. If Sun King’s Blessing is ready and Rune of Power has less than 2 seconds left, cast Rune of Power early.
- If Sun King’s Blessing is ready and Rune of Power will persist until the hardcast finishes, delay Rune of Power until after the Sun King’s Blessing hardcast
- Once Sun King’s Blessing is ready again (after 8 Hot Streak!s) during Combustion, Hardcast Pyroblast to activate it. This will extend Combustion.
- Use Shifting Power when Rune of Power is on cooldown and you have no Fire Blast charges
- Continue to alternate between Pyroblast (with Hot Streak!) and Fire Blast/ Phoenix Flames/ Scorch while maintaining Feel the Burn.
- If Combustion has less than a second left and you do not have Hot Streak! or time to finish a cast, use Ice Nova for a little extra damage with guaranteed crit
- After Combustion fades continue to main rotation
No Fire is not hard to play. It is just without 30% haste it feels a bit slow plus lacks abilities to use outside Combustion. The Combustion uptime depends directly on your haste and GCD time. Those fire mages that show nice numbers have very high Combustion uptime and can throw more pyros during the Combustion window.
Arcane is way harder to play but it does not depend on haste or feels slow, or lacks buttons to press. Some things I don’t like about Arcane are casting evocation on CDs, too long time in my opinion, and being interruptable during quaking affix is a disaster. Some spells could be combined like intellect buff could also include Arcane Familiar, ToM can be included in AS cast, and Nether Tempest can also be included in AS. Arcane needs more defensive abilities.
That does make it sound complicated but its not as bad as it looks. A bit of practise on the target dummy and you get the feel for it. Once the your used to it, the hardest part is getting your skb and pyroclasm timings right so you don’t waste any procs.
yeah, so, just delete all of that, spec into tempered flames and remove fireball from your bar.
Congratulations you now just press pyroblast and fireblast and compete with people.
There’s a lot of stuff to keep track off and over the course of 5 minutes your rotation will change based on which CDs are available and what procs you have. During double Alter Time I sometimes sincerely struggle to keep track of what’s going on in the pull for a few seconds because there’s so many decisions to be made just in my rotation, several times a second.
I’ve played Fire for long enough that the combustion rotation is ingrained in my muscle memory, but in DF I often find myself running out of Fireblast/Phoenix Flames charges because I have like 25 seconds of continuous combustion.
Between tracking Rune of Power, Combustion, Sun Kings, Pyroclasm, Feel the Burn, Fire Blast & Phoenix Flames stacks, Heating up procs and Ice Floes stacks that’s quite a cognitive load for JUST your rotation (obviously you also wanna know the CDs of your defensives, keep Barrier up, track unavoidable bursts of damage and use Alter Time/Ice Block/Invis/MI beforehand, track your AoE interrupt CDs [DB and BW] and be aware of when to use them)
All that in an M+ season with overwhelming amounts of sht thrown at players certainly pushes me to the limits of what my brain can muster and it’s quite exhausting to play.
Have you actually tried a Tempered Flames build?
It’s not competitive at all, especially when there’s any movement involved and the AoE is sorely lacking.
Even if it didn’t nerf Combustion by 40% I don’t think it would be competitive.
That sounds like a learn to play issue to be honest.
Sounds more like you’ve never actually played it to be honest.
I really wanted a Tempered Flames spec to work and I tried every which way to get it to do so, there is no talent setup for Tempered Flames that’s comparable with the Combustion alternative.
The ST damage is around 70-80% of what you’d get from playing Combustion Fire, it’s more affected by movement than regular Fire and the AoE damage is miles behind.
If someone is competing with you using Tempered Flames, they either outgear you or you’re just bad.
Thats what makes if fun! Also I think you meant time warp 
Arcane mage is complex.
And not in a good way.
Frost and fire are fine, but need some tweaks.
For example pyroclasm should reduce the cast of pyroblast to match that of scorch, and sun king’s blessing should be permanent, no 15 sec duration bs.
Just admit it, mage is the easiest class in the game, stop trying to make out that it isn’t
You have no idea what you are talking about.
Mage is the opposite of the easiest class in the game.
Frost is easy, but it’s about as easy as many of the other specs, meanwhile fire and especially arcane are difficult to play optimally.
Oops, yea. Bloodlust. And yea having like 30 seconds (entirely made up number dont math me) of continuous combustion and being able to launch several pyrocs before the first one procs are great moments just between that, dungeon mechanics and the 8 different things I need to constantly track to not scrrew up I’m seriously worried my brain won’t be able to keep up with any additional rotation/maintenance stuff Blizzard throws at fire/arcane mages in the future.
I personally find it the easiest to play but my playstyle is casual pvE and mainly pvp.
I find arcane too annoying on setups in the current iteration, and i don’t know why but I can’t get the frost rotation in my head (or maybe I just find the fish for ice lance procs dull.)
With fire I basically fish for an insta pyro, then combustion and burst. Burst seems to be simple……spam fire blast alongside insta pyro then switch to spamming phoenix with it but prioritise fire blast if it comes back. You’re just generating crits to get insta pyro which seems to be the whole point. I love the insta pyro capstone talent where you get 4-5 insta pyros in a row - its a one button spam fest.
My only tip as a low skill player is remembering to hit shifting power after your burst to get combustion back faster, and in pvp I take the talent where fireball brings combustion back faster too
……so lots of fireballing during non burst phase.
Precisely why I find it easiest in pvp though is because as I said Im a low skill player - the reason is ignite. If Im slow casting or hesitating making a button choice or whatever, Im still doing damage and building a nice DOT on the player. It compensates for my slow reflexes.
Cheers and gl
Sorry but that’s already wrong. You alternate to keep the short duration mastery buff up that is procced by Fire Blast. If you empty your Fire Blast stacks and then spam Pheonix Flames, that buff will likely fall off too soon. Depending on how much haste you have (BL) and how well stacked your Fire Blasts were when Combustion came up you might even be able to squeeze 2 Phoenix Flames+Pyroblast combos between 2 Fire Blasts without the buff falling off. These are the kind of decisions you have to constantly make in your rotation that make Fire rather complex - especially during double bloodlust when you’re playing with some 90% haste and able to Fire instant pyros so quickly the first might not have reached their goal by the time you launched the second.
You can set up a very simple to play choice of talents but that comes at a significant DPS loss. Playing with performance in mind, going for the top performing talent setup and then actually properly executing on it through plenty of RNG influences is not simple.
Leaving out Sun Kings procs in your rotation, Pyroclasm, Rune of Power, when to use procs, how to SKB stacks relative to the health of the pull, how to handle movement heavy fights with 4 second casts - listing a not really correct rotation and then saying it’s the simplest spec is maybe a bit misleading to people wanting to know if the spec is actually simple.
It’s not some iterations of Shadow Priest or current Arcane, but Fire has a lot going on in it’s rotation.