I’m currently trying to return to my fire mage but I just can’t get the hang of it, the spec feels horrible outside of combustion, I can get 50k+ dps during 10 seconds then it drops to 10k for 2 minutes… and the AoE is also terrible.
Maybe it’s a rotation issue, maybe stats, or maybe both, so I’d like to know your opinion about the spec and current viable builds.
I tried to follow icyveins and wowhead guides, and I ran a lot of sims but my performance doesn’t match the results on sims. Just to give some numbers, ST sims around 17k and I’m doing like 11. AoE sims 32k and I’m doing 18k. And yes, the settings (potions, etc) are the same in game and sims.
Current meta is searing touch, RoP, flame on and pyroclasm. Stack crit and the rotation feels better too. Not the easiest spec to play, feels bad when you drop a RoP and you have to move out of it. You’ll want some wildfire traits too.
The aoe is good but it dependant on the mobs not moving. For aoe you want haste and mastery and flame patch talented (or for lots of mobs or priority target living bomb). I forget if the meta is fireballs, PF and FB to use all your procs on flamestrike or just hard cast flame strike and use PF and FB to build hot streaks. I do the later.
The burst is nice, but it in no way compensates for the utter garbage ST damage outside of Combustion. On top of that, if your burst is interrupted by an unavoidable mechanic, you might even end up behind the tank, it just makes the spec feels so much worse.
I usually find, that in the same gear, Fire is around 10-25% behind Arcane and Frost but then it can also be better or worse, depending on how blessed you are with RNGesus. I’m sitting on 40% crit right now, I don’t min-max or anything, but having situations where I have to spam Fireball 6 times to get it to crit, do not feel good, it’s damned tedious.
In AoE situations Fire can vary wildly, our AoE damage depends on what you pick on the 75 tier against the situation you actually encounter.
Flame Patch should be the go to talent since it deals the best damage on the average pack size of 3-5 mobs, however, it requires that the tank sits still, like with Necrotic this week, that is unlikely to happen.
Conflagration is the only one that increases single target DPS but its AoE is passive and kinda lackluster
Living Bomb deals huge damage on large mob packs (like Reaping), but on your average pull, it isn’t worth using.
The trouble is, that all 3 of these situations are likely to be encountered within the same instance. So you have to choose between a ST increase/passive AoE, no ST increase/static ground AoE or no ST increase/only large-scale AoE.
The talents really don’t gel together, it feels to me like one of them should just be baseline, or they should be tweaked, so that they either all have ST/AOE components or be solely AoE.
Your personal results might not match what your sims say because you’re playing incorrectly, and I am by default assuming that that’s the case (because most people play incorrectly).
I’m not saying fire is in a good position right now, but I’d also disagree that its dps is inconsistent, quite the contrary actually. My fire dps is really consistent given that I’m not playing with the hardcast pyroblast talent which is a little RNG.
Following by guides is nice and all, but the guides aren’t going to play for you. I think it honestly comes down to experience. Whenever I learn a new class, I know the basics and some advanced stuff within a day of adapting the rotation which is more than what some people who actually play that spec all the time know. During the next week, I perfect the rotation and cut out dumb mistakes, basically honing my muscle memory. And lastly for the remaining one month of adapting the spec I discover new ways of playing that weren’t obvious and that you couldn’t just google; this is when I master the spec. After that I’ve pretty much mastered said spec and can compete with anyone given the right gear. But if you can get even the basics down, then you’re better off than 50% of the people playing that spec.
Then you are not playing correctly either lol
except if you dont raid with fire at all, pyroclasm isnt really usable doing quests or in dungeons, enemies die too fast.
![:confused:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/confused.png?v=6" ":confused:")