Hey there i decided i going to try learn to play mage, its been a class ive tried to main several times, but resulted on boosting then giving it because i cant achieve tank level dps.
So i have a few questions regarding what im susposed to be doing.
When it says hardcasting flamestrike on 3 or more targets, do i cast it once to put flame patch down and only hardcast to keep uptime on flame patch.
Or do i cast it back to back for aslong as ths fights above 3.
Should i use flamestrike during a combustion, or should i again be only using it for flame patch and then using pheonix flames for cleave.
Which holds higher priority when considering when to use combustion, Large pulls or cleave/ST??
And:
And am i better off as arcane in a lower key PUg and if so what sorta level should i be considering fire at.
I don’t know where I read it but AFAIK Flame Patch stacks, so you cannot cast too many Flamestrikes.
To my knowledge, fire mages are meta for their single target damage, so while combusting on AoE will look more impressive on the meters, combusting on single target might shave more seconds off the timer. Of course, that’s assuming a meta comp to begin with - might be you’re in fact the best AoE the group has.
I think as you get better at fire, you’ll find you can spend a lot of time in Combustion because with SKB and Kindling it’s a gift that keeps on giving, so you might just press it generally anytime you believe it will last at least as long as the pull and that you won’t need it immediately on the next one.
my dps is currently insanely low.
260, with 2 piece so far, only doing 5k Overall DPS At end of M+ Runs and no real spikes in DPS Bursts either.
Hard casting flamestrike? Since when?
Fire excels at higher keys with larger pulls in general.
But it does well at basically everything.
Frost is good at st, and burst aoe, but not to the level of fire, especially burst aoe, st damage for frost is very good.
Arcane is in the middle, all three are good specs, but i would say fire and arcane take the cake over frost.
this one, flame patch stacks
but do consider that this is only a dps increase if all targets are hit by flamestrike, and they stay in flame patch for the entire duration. you will also have a longer cooldown on combustion, because flamestrike doesn’t interact with kindling.
you should, and it comes down to the target count: with flame patch talented on 3+ targets, and without flame patch on 6+ targets
shouldn’t look at this blindly though, because in m+ situations you often have a priority target. it may be more valuable for you to ST combust some important target instead (even if your dps ends up being lower)
play whatever you enjoy, but probably not
its what the WoWhead guide said, also was a recommendation to another poster who asked regarding how to do DPS With mage,
i do enjoy fire, just was curious as my dps currently is so bad its not funny lol, I had a healer in my group doing 9k DPS overall while i was managing only 5k so was looking at a fix lol.
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That’s weird i would have to see exactly what they said, because as far as i know you should basically never hard cast pyro or flamestrike.
I think they just mean the one that you do before you pull a big pack. But never during a rotation, you should never hard cast when you are in the middle of doing your normal rotation.
What do you mean? The normal aoe rotation as far as i know is fireball crit or scorch crit, blast and flamestrike, i never really heard about hard casting flamestrike, just like how you don’t really hard cast pyroblast unless you have the talent, or leggo.
fire mages have been hardcasting flamestrike since bfa, so i guess you haven’t been paying attention
the BIS Legendary requires u to hardcast pyro every 8 hot streaks.
says:
with flame patch
with hotstreak, at 2 or more targets replace pyroblast with flame strike
during combustion if 3 or more targets replace pyroblast with flame strike
if three or more targets are present hard cast flamestrike outside CDs
I found this on icy veins.
Basically it says that if you have flame patch you will indeed want to hard cast strike if you have more than 3 targets outside of combustion.
That’s a bit weird honestly, haven’t been playing fire for some time, but i don’t know if i like the sound of that a lot.
Glad you were here to give advice then.
Have a look on youtube for Azsuna’s dungeon walkthroughs. Not sure if any are up to date but he talks over them and explains his decisions and stuff, really useful.
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It’s not about what you like or not, it’s about objective numbers, simulations and effectiveness…
Yea, he’s very good, although i didn’t really see him hard cast flamestrike a lot of times, but that was partially because he has combustion up many times.
My idea about fire mage was stuck in legion, i never thought that you would hard cast flamestrike in some situations since it kinda goes against the whole idea of fire, which is making pyro insta cast by using your procs correctly.
I watched him do a +21 and he seems to use it quite abit haha. Primarily in combusts, although he said in grimrail he uses it less as its unfriendly in the dungeon to do so in some areas.
Yes, but not the hard casts, the insta casts in combustion.
There were a few pulls i saw him hardcasting it. But yes he spends alot of time in Combustion. I suck at using the lengedary it seems. Forget it all the time. Prolly not a addon which tells me when it hits 8
Yea, but not that many casts. Only a few.
You should use a weakaura for the leggo.
Excelling at fire relies a lot on your combustion and how you utilize it. I think I do not have to say but you use a different rotation for single target than what you use for AoE.
That said I only have experience of the spec pre-SKS use, but I played around with this leggo and I have to say it favors single target more than AoE.
That said I would recommend getting the 4 set, since it changes the flow of the spec quite noticeably, expecially if you make full use out of the legendary.
I think wowhead has a basic rotation up for both single target and AoE. You should peak up to around 25K on 3 targets (tested it on the three target dummies in Ardenweald) without timewarp up (for me, in my current gear level.)
Basically, combustion is everything, that is where the bulk of your damage is going to come from, and outside of it your damage will be pretty meh. Also keep in mind that in low keys, especially if it is not fortified, most enemies will just melt halfway through your combustion if you have any form of semi-decent DPS in the group.
Failing to keep Infernal Cascade up during your combustion will show on your numbers as well.