As the title says the fire mage is for in a weird place and this is pretty much why.
I was dowing a WOTLK for lvling and i was dowing low DPS on all trash mobs (couse i didnt want to pop my big cooldowns)
We reached the first boss and i popped them. (Mirror image and combustion.
Wich made me proc pyro blast 6 times in a row.
And i did most dps on the boss.
When we were dowing trash mobs i was lowest dps again and at a boss i am dowing high dps.
I thought fire mage had the better AOE spells is it just me ore is fire mage weird.
Concidering its low lvl and fire mage has insane single target burst when they have there cds up i can see why, but without cds, you might aswell be throwimg matches at the boss
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While low lvl stuff is mostly irrelevant i kinda agree, its weird how fire is doing so low aoe damage when i would imagine a fire mage (in any game) being one of the best aoe specs since heat radiates. Fire has combustion, but not much else.
In legion fire mage was good for aoe and single target.
Currently its fairly mediocre at single target and crap at AOE.
Versatility is actually good for it in pve, which makes no sense at all, but does work.
And you can forget hardcast pyro, its super boring rotation or go home.
It feels to me like Fire single target can be fixed pretty easily with a crit/damage increase, but for AoE it seems like there’s a lot more factors at play.
Flamestrike’s damage just feels too low, I mean for me in my 409 Fire set, it does 4631 damage on a 3.6 second cast, that’s only slightly more than a single Arcane Explosion (4370 damage) in the same gear, which is instant cast. Whilst we do have Hot Streak, its uptime is relatively low during AoE situations since Flamestrike doesn’t keep it rolling like Pyroblast does.
Then you’ve got Ignite, nice in concept - every attack deal extra damage over time, but in practice getting an extra 20% (normal) - 40% (Hot Streak) over 9 seconds it just too long. A lot of Ignite’s damage is never actually realised as it just stops when the target dies, so on shorter lived mobs and on non-fortified weeks a large chunk of our potential damage is effectively non-existent.
Aside from that, our sole AoE talent row is somewhat lacking: -
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Flame Patch - provides an extra ground-based DoT effect equivalent to just under 85% of the initial Flamestrike over 8 seconds. This runs into 2 issues, the first is that, much like Ignite its damage isn’t fully realised if the target dies and the second is that if the target moves out of the area the damage is negated.
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Conflagration - passive but low damage and low proc chance, requires Ignite/Conflagration to be on the target, does little to nothing on short-lived enemies since they are likely to die within a couple of Ignite ticks
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Living Bomb - the best and worst of the lot, an AoE ability that’s so terrible it’s a waste of a GCD on 90% of pulls. However, it scales ridiculously well with enemy numbers like during Reaping, but when S3 comes around I see this becoming a dead talent.
Other talent’s can enhance our AoE but usually at a detriment to our ST output: -
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Phoenix Flames - can be pretty good for burst AoE, especially for the extra Hot Streak procs, but throughout a dungeon the loss of ST target damage from losing Flame On may not be worthwhile.
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Meteor - for me at least, 2nd best compared to Pyroclasm on ST. The initial strike has its damage split evenly in amongst the targets, not exactly great for AoE. The ground DoT effect only deals ~15% more than a single Flamestrike on a 45 second CD but suffers from exactly the same problems as Flame Patch, in terms of moving enemies.
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Alexstrazsa’s Fury - Guaranteed Dragon’s Breath crit and causes it to contribute to Hot Streak. The only time it was worth taking was in Legion with Darkcli’s Diadem, even then it was the worst legendary, instantly replaced by most others. It doesn’t remotely compete with either of the other talents in its row.
We also don’t have any azerite traits that directly increase our AoE output, there is Trailing Embers but using Hot Streak on Pyroblast during AoE is a dps loss, even with the trait and ignoring the positioning requirement.
Suggestions: -
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Ignite - decreased duration, perhaps not down to the original 4 seconds, but maybe 6 seconds?
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Ground-based AoE (Meteor/Flame Patch) - have it apply a DoT effect to anyone who steps in the area, being reapplied at full duration until the effect ends or the target leaves the area.
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Baseline Phoenix Flames with an increase CD, replace the talent with the Phoenix Reborn artifact trait.
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Alexstrasza’s Fury - incorporate the effect of Darkcli’s Diadem into the talent, Improve its damage or reduce its CD
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Conflagration - Remove the single target component, increase its proc chance and have targets that die with Ignite on them explode for a portion of the remaining Ignite.
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Living Bomb - EITHER revert to one of its several prior incarnations OR increase it’s damage significantly, allowing it to be used on lower target pulls, whilst either target capping it or having diminishing returns per targets over X amount.
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Add azerite traits that interact with Ignite or Flamestrike
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One more to the list, for our Aoe ‘rotation’
- Flamestrike grants heating up when it hits at least (3?) Targets.
It honestly just feels… Clunky to even use as an AoE Ability, It feels more worthwhile just hurling Pyro’s at the beefiest mob in the pack and letting Ignite do the work.
- Edit: And having Dragon’s breath not break on Ignite (Or Fire DoT’s in general!)
Love it! My personal favourite would be to revert to one of the old Living Bomb versions, where it granted a Heating Up/Hot Streak proc upon explosion.
Dragon’s Breath doesn’t break on Ignite, it hasn’t done so for some time. It does however break from effects that Ignite triggers, such as trinket procs and azerite traits.
Fire sucks for packs atm which is totally anti-lore. Try levelling as arcane for huge dmg in dungeons. It’s really op levelling.
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Ahah! My mistake!
Though i do run Living bomb quite often, maybe the DoT from that breaks it?
Or like you said, some random Azerite trait does it.
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