Why is Fire considered to be the most skillful spec and why are Frost and Arcane players so looked down upon?

Classes Mage
1

I’m honestly sick of it. 3rd expansion in a row Fire is at the top while other specs are biting the dirt. However there’s something even worse. I see people acting REALLY toxic towards players of other specs. I see Arcane and Frost players getting hard flamed or laughed at cause they play “easy to play noob spec”. I see many Fire Mages acting like they’re better because they picked the “skillful” spec. I’ve even seen some people say that Arcane and Frost don’t deserve to be any good cause they are so easy to play compared to fire. Excuse me?

How exactly is Fire the “skillful” one again? You can cast while moving, you get tons of instant casts, your proc has a bad luck protection built in and you can force it with your spells. Meanwhile Arcane needs to sit in one place and cast only to deal less damage with spells than Fire with it’s instant casts, Clearcasting doesn’t have a bad luck protection if it doesn’t proc for a long time and we can’t force it like Fire can.

People laugh at Arcane “HURR DURR AOE ARCANE EXPLOSION SPAM” and call it braindead, meanwhile we need to not only set it up with ToTM>AM>Barrage>Orb>Barrage>Shifting Power>Orb>Barrage before going in for Arcane Explosion and Barrage spam and it’s all while having to be in melee range AND keep track of our Arcane Charges AND mana. Meanwhile Fire is hardcasting Flamestrike with Flame Patch talent safely from range and still outperforming Arcane. Is it honestly some kind of joke?

The only moment when Fire gets any hard is for whole 10 seconds during the Combustion but it’s not even like the most skillful thing ever. It’s all just muscle memory. There is like one specific order of buttons you need to press to maximize your damage and remember that nearly everything you cast is completely instant, you can run around like an idiot without being punished by any mechanics. I think you need to be REALLY talented to screw it up but for some reason people still claim that Arcane or Frost which need to deal with cast times, mana, RNG for procs and standing in one place are noob specs compared to Fire.

Fire does more damage than Frost and Arcane, all while being nearly fully mobile compared to them, having many instant casts, built in bad luck protection for it’s proc while still being able to force it through Fire Blast or Scorch and to top it off it’s also the only one to get instant hard AOE cc with Dragon Breath.

I don’t Fire and I don’t hate people who play it, you guys have right to enjoy whatever you want and that’s cool but this toxic mentality of so many people needs to stop.

5 Likes
2

Not true, in 7.1.5 fire mage got utterly gutted and didn’t become any good until Ny’alotha save for the occasional niche fight it had here and there.

Only below 30% mob HP. Other than that, you do actually need to hard-cast fireballs. Spamming scorch on a >30% HP target and saying you’re doing mobile dps is a little bit like spamming non-FoF ice lances or alternating fireblast/arcane barrage to achieve the same goal. In theory you dps while moving, but in practice not quite.

Mostly during combustion. With lucid dreams minor and the old phoenixes gone, you need to be careful about not over-spending your fireblasts between combusts so that you have them ready for the big nuke.

I’ll give you that one. The flame patch flamestrike hardcast rotation is rather simplistic. The only bit of depth in it is when you watch out for mob hp to execute cheese as getting the scorches out and converting them into hot streaks is faster than hard casting.

A shaman friend of mine said that the combustion opener is one of the trickiest in the game back in Legion, and I’ve seen from experience that people who reroll fire tend to struggle with it at first when I teach them.

No it’s not. The ST/AoE variations will differ, having infernal cascade changes it up, the spell order will depend on haste and your amount of fireblasts/PF available… it’s not just static. Attempts to castsequence macro the rotation prove unreliable in the long run for a reason.

Rune of power exists. You have to be mindful of positioning and ongoing mechanics regardless, even if the fact that you can move around a little bit makes things easier. But, as an example, anything that makes you move further than the range of your rune takes away the 40% dmg modifier for the time you’re away. That is impactful and will hinder a novice fire mage if they time things wrong.

I hope that explains the difficult parts behind fire rotation, even if I didn’t go very in-depth. It’s unfair to pretend the other two specs require 0 thought to play, but you cannot deny that frost specifically doesn’t have much to its rotation beyond the “press frostbolt for procs, use shiny buttons when they light up”. Arcane does require strategy, I won’t deny that, but frost is just bland and the least interesting from these three specs. If I were to compare difficulties between the 3 specs, I’d say it’s fire>=arcane>>frost.

3

Fire doesn’t take any more skill than the other specs right now, if anything Frost is the one that takes the most skill (PVP). Fire possibly does take the most skill regarding PvE because of its rotation and RNG crit management.

Fire is only good right now because the other specs are undertuned.

However, Fire from TBC until MoP/WOD took the most skill out of all the mage specs in PVP. The hotstreak mechanic functioned differently back then, you didn’t have 3 fireblast charges and you didn’t have any safety badluck mechanics for when you weren’t critting. Its possible the notion of fire taking more skill has still stuck with some people throughout the years, and the people that would flaunt that fact after so many years have past since fire’s “skill requirement” are generally more “toxic”

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Fire does not take any skill these days. Wrath, Cata and MoP was its pinnacle. Modern version is an insult.

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Tbh, frost spec has being made like this in this expansion. 2 months ago when Glacial Spike build was actually doing damage, you had mechanics that you needed to take care that weren’t widely known.
Frost had to ALWAYS have distance check. If you were too close, you would lose dps because of travel time (it still applies to some extend). If you were too far you would screw your rotation. You had to utilize your frost nova, pet freeze and your Brain Freeze procs so that you dont overlap shatters.

Now that Blizzard decided to make us spam icelances i can only agree with you that it feels blant. In AoE fights we just cast frozen orb into Blizzard and we sit back spamming icelances. I wont lie though that the numbers on the screen feels realy satisfying. But i have hopes that conduits and legendary powers will be added to make a Glacial Spike built viable again.

I think its just a matter of preference tbh. Different players would set the difficulties between the 3 specs in a different way. I think that most of the people that say (fire spec is the easiest, or frost is the easiest etc) would find out that if they somehow changed to a different spec and try to learn it they would see that each spec has its difficulties. I beleive that every spec in the game is easy to play but hard to master.

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Was looking at MDI fiesta yesterday, the mage did a 22k dps while jumping.
That was seriously skillful, high skill cap stuff.

Jumping skillful caster.

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Idk, when you can put the entire Combustion burst in one castsequence macro without it being that much less efficient or effective, it is hard to call Fire more skillful.

Otherwise you can quite literally practise the burst for 10 minutes on a dummy and fill the rest up with a tank-level fireball spam and call it a day.

Arcane? Well, AB, AM and Barrage, rough life.

Frost? Well, arguably the most dependant on getting their hard casts off. Other than that just press shiny buttons.

In the end al three specs are simple and straight forward atm. It’s just that one of them performs much better than the other two, in every kind of content.

8

You do understand that a fire mage is jumping during combustion for a reason right?
As i said, people that looks down to a spec should play it a bit and they will realise that it actually takes much more thinking and it has much more depth to it than they imagine.

1 Like
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Is there any fire passive that gives you increased damage while jumping?
If not, whats the reason ?

Yeah sure, bursting 3x more damage from what others do takes alot of effort. Ill tell you a secret: Making 10 mistakes with this damage in your rotation would bring you down to what others do with a flawless rotation but you never thought of that when you play your “high skill cap jumping caster” spec right?

10

Because during combustion the rotation will sometimes make you press pyroblast faster than it actually procs so your character will start hardcasting Pyroblast. So people are jumping during combustion so even if they accidentaly hit pyroblast key while not being instant it wont start casting.

As i said, looking a spec from the outside gives you really false opinion. Play the spec (any spec) and you will realise that you were wrong in many things.

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This is a matter of spec tunning, not a matter of skillcap. And tbh i would like to see Blizzard buff the other 2 specs rather than nerfing fire spec which is the only viable end game spec.

P.S : I play frost only for the past 6 years.

12

Depends on the situation. Fire can be quite hard to play in dungeons, aoe combust is awkward and knowing when to use combustion but in raid its straight forward. I’d say Arcane is harder to play in raid than fire.
Frost is seen as easier because you aren’t so punished for mistakes. Traditionally, in raid, mess up a combust or go oom then your pull is scuffed, miss some procs with frost and your fine… but the way thermal void works now it is actually a lot more punishing than it used to be.

13

Actually frost spec is punnished by default because FoF and BF stacks overalps. So frost mages finds themselves 60% of the time using a FoF proc while they already have BF stacks on the target.
This is one of the many reasons why Frost spec is underperfoming in ST fights. They should make FoF to not consume stacks of BF and everything will be ok. Frost spec will be competitive in ST fights as well.

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Sounds more like major design flaw if you have to jump while doing raid rotation. What a joke game this has become.

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No, you dont HAVE to jump.

Its just a safety action you do so you dont accidentally press Pyroblast before Phoenix Flames for example (which has a travel time) lands on your target and give you the crit proc. The game doesnt give you a proc unless your target has been hit. This is how the game works. This is how it has always been working. Its not a flaw design.

In reality you should just wait for your travel timed spell to land and then press your instant Pyroblast. But in the heat of the rush you may press it accidentaly, which will make your character start casting Pyroblast. That may actually result in a bigger dps loss because when you accidentaly hardcast Pyro and you dont realise it fast enough and you proceed into pressing Fireblast or Phoenix Flames again then you screwd up your rotation by a HUGE margin resulting into HUGE dps loss.

16

Virgin single-spec Mage vs CHAD omni player.

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Doesnt concern me then. Only play PvP.

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Yes in pvp the above safety action is irrelevant.

19

So you actually jump to not hardcast?
Cant you just NOT press that button you “high skill cap spec player” ?

Its like seeing these melee’s pressing their 2 buttons and left-right dancing.

Yet you try to convince us its not ridiculous a CASTER is jumping + doing 20k+ ST dps…

Its a matter of an OP spec that is allowed to do mistakes and still oudps lower output specs whilst gives you the impression youre a good player just because you play that broken spec pressing 3 buttons like we all do.

For a change i would like to see blizzard nerfing ALL mage specs and make it a trash tier spec for once since all xpc’s mages was, is and always will be broken and ridiculous as this.

Did you manage to see the WoD arcane mage?
Ive never seen something so absurd and this kind of trash happens ONLY with mages.

20

Heat of the rush. It happens to the best of us. Even skillfull players make mistakes.

Jumping and doing 20k dps are 2 different things. The first one is an action that players adopted in order to eliminate any mistake to their rotation caused by the heat of the rush. Doing 20k dps has to do with aura’s and multipliers that Blizzard is applying to each spell. Dont confuse gameplay with spec tunning.

Same as above. It has to do with numbers.
You think they just roll their face on the keyboard and toping damage meters? I dare you to actually play the spec and meet me in a target dummie (single target) and compete against me who btw i am a frost mage. The worst ST damage spec of all 3.
If you manage to even get close to my dps on ST i will give you all my gold from all my characters (thats over 260k).

This is just toxic mentality. You’d rather want to see another player being brought to your own dps capability rather than asking to buff your own class to the point that your class can compete against others.
Seriously by your mentality i am 99% confident that you do not play your class/spec properly and instead of trying to get better at it and listen to what other players has to say, you just proceed to do things like you always do and blame game mechanics or other classes for your insufficient skills.

1 Like