Dunno ive always sucked at fire, struggle to do much dps with it at all haha. Saying that ive never rly played it for a long period of time. I generally go through stages of maining one for a month then leaving the class so could be why
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Honestly I just looked up a guide on how the combustion rotation should look and thatâs all you need to know. Add in a WA to track your sun king stackâs for mini combust and done.
Took me about 1 or 2 days to fully learn and play it, itâs so simple 
Theyâre still explicitly designed around combustion. They may not be well designed, but it is still designed explicitly around it and included in the power budget for that talent.
Sure, originally it was for outside combustion. But the synergy with SKB makes it so in the current talent tree youâd never want to take only one of the two. Which makes it a core part of the current combustion builds.
Unless Hyperthermia has considerably better proc rate than the firestorm legendary (or the old tier set that inspired it) had itâs main use is still going to be during combustion.
And for clarity. Iâm not saying that these talents are purely usefull in a combustion build. Iâm saying that theyâre at they are significantly better in a combustion build than they are in a build that doesnât maximize combustion.
When compared to the 40% damage from RoP, 100% crit from combustion, 12% mastery from feel the burn, 5-10% mastery from combustion crit conversion, the reduced CD for fire blasts and PF from fiery rush, the complete switch to instant casts while combustion is going, only casting pyroblast which does like double the damage of your fireball filler, & every pyroblast having guaranteed double mastery.
Yeah, 30% haste isnât anywhere near as impressive a buff compared to all of that stacked together. Some of those buffs individually are already a comparable or even bigger dps increase than icy vein, let alone when you stack them like that.
Sure, the boss is still dead, the issue is that itâs terribly boring to stand around waiting for a phase (or in the case of something like aonar, nearly the entire boss fight) to end because you canât do anything particularly usefull or interesting.
Itâs apple and oranges. 30% is almost the difference between bl and no bl.
Eonar wasnât like that on progress, farm. No one liked eonar on farm.
My point is that the combustion combo is more like a 300% dps increase for its duration, whereas icy veins is a 30% increase.
Hence, frost is at least still functional if you screw up icy veins, even if you are now underperforming by a significant margin. Fire just falls apart.
I donât think Iâve ever heared anyone claim Eonar was particularly fun, farm or progression. And dps classes that needed their targets to live a certain minimum time to actually do their rotations properly, such as fire mages, hated it by far the most as the fight just didnât work for their playstyle.
The only ones that maybe liked it were the classes with heavy front-loaded damage and a ton of movement, who could just rush to a portal, unload their combo and then rush to the next while their CD resets.
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Wait till you see arcane 
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On simulation, Haste comes up as the best stat to have. Both at level 60 ilvl=250 and at level 70 ilvl=340. Crit comes up as the worst stat to have.
The optimal setting at ilvl = 340 is hast : everything else = 2:1. For example if your budget at ilvl 340 is 6000 rating, youâd need 4000 haste and 2000 to everything else.
However the difference is ~3% worst to best (15900 DPS vs 16500 DPS), so it really does not matter, I think you can just wear any gear. Worst being all on crit, best being 4:2 favouring haste.
Edit: With slightly different talents Haste:Mastery becomes 1:1
In my experience Fire mage suffers from pull to pull while doing OK on boss, with mirror images and combustion. Somehow it falls behind and the issues are:
- Fire Blast and associated splash damage too low (a numbers problem)
- Fireball too slow. If you HAVE to cast Fireball because you have spent all your Fireblasts and all your Phoenix Flames, with little effect, so you resort to the only spell remaining, fire ball, way too slow cast, and get overtaken by other DPS, healers, and tanks easily.
Cata and MoP is where they should take inspiration from. Instead they make it all about legion combustion. Again! Lord have mercy.
Redesign current combustion and reinstate shatter to the class tree. The interaction between heating up and shatter makes fire so much fun. It´s insane that shatter isn´t class wide again.
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Dumbest comment of the year award nominee right here. So fun to do nothing outside of combustion.
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Shatter wonât work classwide unless you actually give fire (and arcane) ways to reliably trigger it. Which isnât going to happen as long as we have seperate specs.
Have you missed the class tree??? Ring of Frost, Frost Nova (x2 with talent), Cone of Cold Freeze, Ice Nova - that´s more than ever potentially. It worked perfectly fine during MoP and earlier with fewer potential freeze mechanics.
This is not primarily intended for dungeon/raids dps, but for open world and pvp.
Which all break instantly, are primarly intended as escape tools and using them as DPS-tools means sacrificing your ability to kite properly, they are also awkward to use offensively, as they mostly require you to put yourself in danger by going into melee, and combined they give a maximum of like 10 freezes per minute, which isnât even that frequent. Honestly I wouldnât be surprised that in between all of that itâs also a dps-loss compared to just doing your rotations properly.
Point being, itâs gimmicky at best within a fire or arcane build.
For something like shatter to be relevant for say fire weâd need a build that has say frostfirebolt & talents like frostbite, at minimum.
Itâd still not being particularly great for high-end raiding or anything, but at least then itâd be more than just a gimmick.
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Having shatter is not about dps rotations in dungeons/raids. Geez. It´s for pvp/open world where your freeze mechanics can be utilized in both a defensive and offensive manner.
Just make it a choice node with overflowing energy (which replaced it).
Defensivly shatter adds nothing.
Offensivly itâs gimmicky at best for fire & arcane, even in pvp/open world, like I just pointed out.
If you want shatter to be relevant, in any type of content, youâll need to have fullfledged frost-fire (or frost-arcane) builds. And thatâs simply not going to happen with the modern talent system.
You are not the one to decide what´s gimmicky. Shatter gimmicky⌠a spell/mechanic that has existed since vanilla WoW. How is quaranteed crits against frozen targets in any way gimmicky? Do tell. I always found shatter incredibly satisfying. No matter the spec.
You know what I would call gimmicky - if that term can be applied to WoW? Current combustion. Everything revolves around it. Redesign it and fire would have more use for shatter as well.
You must have missed the talent system revamp. Almost all utility is shared between specs now, including a wealth of freeze mechanics.
Itâs gimmicky because of the way you apply it in frost and fire.
Like I literaly just explained.
In frost it works because you have fingers of frost, flurry, frostbite, and even glacial spike to regularly, and reliably apply freezes in a natural way just by using your normal spells. This allows a frost mage to use freeze-based effects in a natural way as it doesnât need to rely on utility spells. Freeze-based effects are be incorporated in its core-design.
As a fire or arcane mage, it is not. The only way you can freeze enemies is by blowing through your utility spells, which also requires weird actions, like run into melee to freeze enemies. Because of this, freeze-based effects cannot be incorporated into its core-design, and thus they end up being gimmicky at best.
Hence the difference.
Redesigning combustion, while definitly needed, will do absolutly nothing to make shatter any more usefull as freeze effects still wonât be naturally incorporated into your core rotation. Itâd still have the exact same problems described earlier.
I mean ice nova is ranged, does a fair bit of dmg and is on a short cd.
I think there was technical issues with it or pvp balancing problems, it wasnât removed from the class tree because it wasnât liked. Maybe it would cause problems in m+ where your arcane mage tells everyone to stop dps so it can shatter its arcane surge.
Shatter pyroclasms would be fun though 
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You are flat out wrong. Give it a rest. Not like you need to go out of your way to get close to people. Hint* melee need to get close to hit you⌠and Ice Nova and Ring of Frost are ranged. Shatter is great.
Combining spells for greater effect is what makes wow pvp exciting. Also having spells serve dual purpose of attack and defense makes it more dynamic. Old Alter Time was praised for this. Shatter fits perfectly. The anticipation of a big crit (or two) incoming is one of the best feelings in wow imo. Would be nice to get Deep Freeze back as well for even more oumph.
But oh no! It´s a gimmick! LOL Don´t take it then if you feel that way. That´s the beauty of the talent trees. Don´t like don´t pick it.
Not so sure about that. I know Xaryu suggested to make it frost only. I usually agree with him, but not here. Also saw some mentions of it on the forums. Removing shatter from mage tree is the worst decision in the development of the trees. There has been mostly good iteration, but this one sticks out as a disappointing one.
Like I said, make it a choice node with overflowing power, which replaced shatter. Everyone happy.