Will fire still be the best spec for raiding and m+ after 9.1?

Not a fan of fire but i’ll change if theres no sign of fire not being the best overall.

Arcane is already better on the last 3 bosses of cn. Between the nerfs and how nice nathria was for fire it’s not likely to be top but its on demand burst is likely to be needed at some point. Its also popular for its mobility and survivability.

Most likely fire will still be best for mythic progress raiding. Having execute + movement is some of the best niches for end game progression, especially full movement during CDs, but it depends on the final version of sylvanas.

As for M+ it’s a bit more up in the air, the dungs are the same, but there are more tuning changes. I would still bet on fire to be the best. Arcane is getting indirect nerf with the removal of pride.
As for fire vs frost, i have played both to between 19 and 21 keys and while can do about the same overall, frost is just so useless by comparison, you don’t do anything of value. No DB and no burst means that you don’t really contribute to difficult pulls, and your boss damage is horrendous, and you do nothing for prides either really.

Obviously pride is going away with reduces the usefullness of fire, but i would still bet on it being the best as it’s toolkit is just much better, but maybe the nerfs are enough for frost to overtake.

What???

Have you ever played Frost or you just assuming things? Frost has amazing prio target damage, very good AoE damage and his ST damage is far from horrendous.

My highest frost key is like a 19 and have played it in 20s aswell, which we didn’t finish though, so no i am not assuming anything.

Frost does good aoe, the problem is that it takes them 5 times as long to get the same damage out as fire, meaning the tank has to kite due to running out of defensives (unless they are bear with incarn maybe), which heavily punishes frost mage.

The prio damage is so soft, yes you can do more damage to a selected target, but a vast majority of your damage is still blanket aoe.
If there is a target that is really super prio, then an st combust will be worth so much more than a frost funneling.

And yes their ST damage is quite horrendous, but it might be legendary dependent i guess. I played glacial fragments, which doesn’t buff st at all. I could play Freezing winds which buffs it by a little bit.

But the biggest downfall is still not having db, i felt so useless not having any real mob control.

That is the problem. Glacial Fragments is doing good aoe damage but its flat. Freezing Winds does bot contribute to AoE but the cleave damage is so huge that it is actually doing more damage than Glacial Fragments on PRIO targets as well. Including pride. In huge pulls you can safely have permanent orb up which means infinite procs

On ST targets is doing very good damage as well. It has great synergy with thermal void effectively making Icy Veins last over a minute and reducing its cooldown by over a minute at the same time.

Seriously. The only reason i can think anyone would still use Glacial Fragments is on Bolstering weeks. Other than that Glacial Fragments is useless compared to Freezing Winds.

I really think Frost will be the best spec for M+.
With the end of pride, you don’t need to have a 1 min30 burst and Fire is too burst dependent. That mean, if you don’t do very big pull, you waste so much damage. Frost can have very hight damage whatever the size of your pull, as Elem sham.
And you can have very hight damage on boss/ST prio, that’s why I think Frost will be the best spec for M+.

Arcane seems very good too.

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Some quick simming showed that freezing winds is a 6% upgrade on ST, but a 16% damage loss on aoe (5 targets), and glacial fragments scale better into bigger pulls.

Yes prio targets are a thing, but you have to consider how much damage is it worth losing to gain on those prio targets that are only in some packs, and hard prio targets even rarer.

This would definitely mean more if orb wasn’t a 1 min CD, which is barely reduced on ST, like it’s nice if boss fights are 45s like on 17s or below, but once fights goes to 2 minues, using orb twice in that time doesn’t feel like big impact.

It’s the most played legendary from the top 3611 frost mage runs (between +16 and +24).
But i’ll definitely give it a try if i ever touch frost mage again.

But this was not really the discussion, the point was that frost does it’s damage to slow and doesn’t bring DB, the legendary doesn’t change that.

Frost prio damage is good if you’re venthyr with freezing winds, it’s not combust tier of burst but it’s very good. If you played GF NF frost then it’s not even comparable honestly.

if you are talking progression most likely, fire simply has the best kit for it.
unless you are going for world first it hardly matters though

SLG yes, not so much for the other two especially during progression

Tbh even if frost still underperformes then Fire i still go Frost the spec is rlly fun to play and still can do somehow the same dmg as fire immo, its like freezing winds against glacial fragments i still go freezing winds because it lines up well with Icy veins and Frozen orb. The playstyle is just more amusing then fire.

Exactly.

I beleive that the “bad reputation” of frost mages comes from this Legendary alone. Frost mages joining with GF legendary does a good overall damage with AoE (IF the tank keeps mobs inside Blizzard) but they do absolutely zero damage on prio targets and bossfights and thats a really bad thing if you do +15 and above keys.

Since most Frost mages are using GF as Legendary the community thinks that we cannot do any ST damage at all. I had a group leader the other day asking me if i am able to do 4k damage on ST :frowning: . I tried to explain to him the difference between using GF and FW, but eventually he said “Sorry man, i’ve never seen a Frost Mage doing more than 2-3k ST damage”.

Well i dont blame him. He didnt want to take the risk. I mostly blame Frost Mages for using that Legendary tbh :slight_smile:

EDIT: People that runs GF in +20 probably uses this Legendary because of huge pulls where that Legendary shines, and the group knows that the mage wont do damage on ST or Prio targets so they will “cover” him. But in an average PuG, with an average tank this wont be the case, the tank wont pull huge groups, he will kite like crazy and in bossfights you will get flamed for doing same damage as tank.

People stare themselves blind on the theoretical sims being posted on sites like wowhead etc.
It’s all about damage / healing profiles that excel in certain bossfight (talking about mythic raiding).
In M+ fire will still be really good because of the uncapped aoe and 3rd potencty (people will either run the pyro conduit or flamestrike depending on ST or AOE).

Probably it will, due to insane on demand burst (which is super helpful in raids to kill priority targets fast - and fire mage delivers);
There are plenty sustained dps classes, but only very handful that can do these fire-mage-level bursts (yes even after nerfs).

Ofc in pug world where only recount maters - you better pick smth else to top meters.

So does Arcane though and fire’s raid dmg is looking really bad, at least early in the patch.

Is fire going down that badly in 9.1?

Early on. The nerfs are an 8% ST loss and our ST isn’t that great to start with. We should gear through the kindling nerfs and the 3rd conduit and conduit empowerments will help us through the other nerfs but it will take weeks of unlocking renown.

The only “big” nerf is Kindling and Infernal Cascade.

For Kindling as Minji said, it will even up to its current state after a few weeks while your crit will rise through new gear. It will still take some time though.

For Infernal cascade… well its debatable. Personaly i beleive that 20% damage bonus nerf is very low in raw numbers. It basicly means that a spell that currently hits for 1288 damage with 2 stacks of IC (226ilvl), will hit for 1224 damage in 9.1.
I dont beleive that will make much of a difference in overall damage output.

EDIT: Generally, fire mages are bound to be an S-Tier dps in Mythic+ because of their uncapped AoE, Dragon’s Breath and on demand burst. Unless they do something crazy like (50% flat damage nerf during Combustion), Fire mage will always be the top dps in M+

You know most casters and some melee have uncapped aoe?

I dont know the major aoe ability of every class/spec so i only speak for frost mages.

As a frost mage my major AoE ability is Glacial Fragments Legendary (Blizzard has become a CD reducing ability, not a damaging spell).
Glacial Fragments is hard capped at 5 targets.

Fire mage’s major AoE ability is Flamestrike. And flamestrike is uncapped (well soft capped, but its pretty much the same). It does rediculous damage when inside combustion. An ability that can hit every target within its area for aproximately 1.4k each (only counting Infernal cascade as damage multiplier) should be hard capped.

Glacial Fragments is hard capped at 5 targets (10 if you count Splitting ice) and it does half the damage of Flamestrike alone. Even if you hard cast Flamestrikes outside of combustion you will still be doing more AoE damage than a frost mage with Glacial Fragments.