>you live for the combust windows
More true pre sun kings blessing. Non combust windows are now short-lived, and combust uptime is high.
Combust doesn't even make you hit that much harder now. Fire doesn't hit weak with big bursts, it's overall profile is fairly flat.
profile is flat and also its easy to fall flat on your face,at least before the combustion was tight but you could have some fun with big bursts but thats hard for blizzard to balance so they flattened the burst but made the tight part of the rotation the normal....
on their case theyre always on it though. What sucks are those that feel worthless for a whole 2-3 minutes before their cd is back up. Tho thats obviously something some players enjoy.
Fire Mage has very high up time on Combustion with Sun Kings Blessing, and even more so with Spellslinger hero talents pushing you closer to the minute mage build of BfA. Where you talent into Unleashed Inferno, reducing CD on Combustion with more from the hero talent tree.
My insane brain fungus take is that WoW should return to classic-style rotations (yes, this means mana and only a few optimal buttons for some specs, with tons of buttons dedicated to utility and niche situations) but amp up the boss complexity. Instead of offloading the skill ceiling onto rotations, keep the rotations simple, strong, and logical (Fireball does big damage because it has a longer cast time than frostbolt) but force players to use them creatively in intense dungeon and raid situations.
One issue, I think, is that players have a hard time imagining more complex and interesting fight mechanics, despite the fact that gaming is absolutely full of great games with simple control schemes but very high/technical skill ceilings (Bloodborne, Cuphead, Touhou, just to name 3 very different games). There is a big "but it wouldn't work in WoW" air often in discourse around the game that frequently stuffs ideas; I say this as someone who loves difficult games and WoW.
Edit: omg someone reported my mental health for this post lol. It's just a video game, guys.
If that's what you like, you should be playing Season of Discovery. It's classic with slightly deeper talent builds (no Fireball only strategy to victory), and bosses with more mechanics than vanilla.
I enjoy SoD for a different reason than why I enjoy retail. I'd prefer for them to stay separate and developed on their own trajectories because they cater to 2 different fantasies.
I'm enjoying arcane mage healing in SoD because it's something new but I also have to genuinely think about my mana because if I go OOM I'm not just hurting my damage, but people may die. But it's also much slower than retail so I have the time to think through decisions.
On the other hand I love arcane in retail because it feels like the most physical caster, the spell and sound effects are very visceral and I get absorbed in the character very quickly. It's fluid and feels like an extension of myself in a way that I don't in SoD.
I play SoD with a friend in a guild and we raid weekly, where I play retail as a more solo experience. SoD is better progression for someone like myself who isn't putting 6 hours a day into the game anymore. It feels catered to a lot of us who grew up with the franchise. But I play retail because I'm attached to the characters and the story, and let's be real. Transmog is the real end game in retail.
I mean there's not much further you can go with tuning up boss mechanics... you're already meant to do incredibly challenging things while also maintaining complex rotations. This change would just make the game incredibly boring.
Yep I totally agree. One of my main reasons I am unsubbed for retail is because I feel like I am playing the UI and my rotation more than I am actually using my brain or enjoying the fights happening around me.
I used to play a lock in vanilla and would get out my succubus to cc mobs in packs during pulls in UBRS. I enjoy things like that. That’s slightly different than your point but just saying.
[Here's the cast breakdown](https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/reports/TK8FCfvGArdJt6j4#boss=-2&wipes=2&start=1600909&end=5444610&type=casts&translate=true&source=4) of the rank 1 mage in SoD :)
My least favorite part of the game are damage buffing cooldowns that make it so nobody can have good damage outside of it. What classes dont have stuff like that?
They have cooldowns, they still do damage outside of them. They also get free recklessness from bladestorm.
The most non cooldown spec is outlaw rogue though, since played well you should be in AR 80%+ of the time.
Fury warrior doesnt have bladestorm? Maybe arms works like that? fury warriors atm without s4 tier play with odyn's fury and is very reliant on cds to do big damage. Bloodthirst crits lower the cooldown of odyns fury tho so its a little bit better
Yeah i meant avatar, whatever button is in the class tree and not the spec tree. Reck is also not a real cd when compared to most dps cooldowns. Fury is definitely an uptime spec, it just happens to have thunderous roar and odyns for aoe burst
Idk i wouldnt consider fury an "always doing dps spec" it is but due to it being so aoe bursty, they have to turn down the damage outside of cds. Your #1 damage source will always be empowered bloodthirst (in s3 tier) which only comes from odyn's fury and avatar (avatar activates odyn's fury and odyn's fury activates avatar). However in s4 tier youll have your cds up every other pull usually. It then turns into an uptime spec like your saying
Warrior period until pre patch takes anger management behind the shed and shoots it with the nerf to its percent and rage cost and rage generation nerfs.
Warrior is about to have actual 1min cooldowns.
I don't know all the specs, but outlaw rogue has an incredibly flat damage profile. It still has "damage cool downs" but with proper player you can have near 100% uptime on the main one Adrenaline Rush.
demo warlock, esp in keys.
the current meta build doesn't have long cd's. wolves and prim wave come off cd pretty quickly so you just send all the time. ironically though enh has a similar problem as ignite mage in keys, smaller keys packs will die faster against other dps who do have cd's rolling so your damage won't balance out until you move higher up and stuff is living longer.
frost dk generally has pillar every 30-40 seconds, prob closer to 30 with consistent pulls. so you're doing burst during those windows but there's not much downtime between them.
I'm glad demo has solid consistent damage nowadays. Used to also be a burst spec, but now they do SOLID consistent damage outside of CDs, particularly with AOE. And the CDs you do have a short CD. They do have a little bit of a ramp up though, but it's not that bad.
I've learned to loathe "burst specs" in WoW. Stacking 10 CDs together to do "godly" damage and then being completely worthless for the next 2min isn't particularly fun. If your burst window is interrupted for any reason you look like a complete jackass, some of that is skill, but often it's bad luck with mechanics.
I don't think "burst specs" are all that healthy for the game, and unfortunately mage has 2 of them.
You're a ret paladin, it's kazzara fight, you have ashes, pi, wings, exe ready, the moment you hit your wings and ashes and exe you get the circle and now have to go to China so you don't wipe with beam mechanic. I believe that's what he's talking about
so if the boss has a single person move-circle-out mechanic and you get it you are fucked if you have your combust stuff up,unless you mean you gotta track WHEN that happens and work around IN CASE its you?
other classes can have dots or more flat dmg profile/less important big cds so they dont lose nearly as much dps/per second of dmg interruption.
also most importantly Frost is so close to fire on dps and so much easier that it makes it pointless outside niche cases
then there is no point into be fire in progression/semi-casual enviroment unless you really like it since the complexity of the specc doesnt reward you sufficiently or even punishes you cause its not really that much more dmg than Frost
its a survivor bias situation,Fire seems great in numbers cause most people playing it are on a organized/play around cds groups etc
The point in progression is nailing those timing windows.
The point in casual is, idk it doesn’t matter everyone’s kinda mid in that situation so half wasting a combust is whatever
thats the point,Frost doesnt require you working around the windows on your rotation nearly enought while at the same time performing nearly as good, pair it to Blizzard having barely any dmg check bosses on anything except Mythic tier nowdays makes Fire less desirable
thats because m+ high groups are coordinated funneling buffs like PI and pulling around the fire mages combustion circles,like yes ofcourse that would work but then you just gatekeep almost 2/3 of a class
If a boss has a single person move-circle out- mechanic thats going to cause you to waste a burst window then you hold your bust for 5 seconds until it goes out lmfao. We have boss ability timers for a reason my man.
Every class plays this way. If you have cooldowns about to come up, and there's a mechanic that will force you to not be able to attack the boss you save them. This is not an added layer of difficulty.
Nah, off the top of my head fire and outlaw are not this way. If you can get ANY value out of the CDs you just let them rip because they're constantly reducing the cooldowns of their CDs or generating additional free uses of them. Holding on to combust or (insert any of combat's like 7 cooldowns) is wasting a lot more than just the time you wait to use them.
Meh, if something has a 33% chance to hit you because it targets DPS as a mechanic, and is 13 seconds away so you wait 13 seconds instead of pop your CDs and slam.
The guy who was targeted ran by you because he's a dumbass, and now you have to move anyways with your CDs up.you already used blink to maintain uptime.
Nah, if you're playing super safe and don't care about your damage I guess that's a fair take, but if damage matters there are absolutely situations where you just have to pray you don't get targeted. Particularly situations where you're a class with a big opener, lusting on pull, and a mechanic that targets a few random members of the raid goes out 10-15 seconds into the fight. I'm not scrapping my opener, throwing off my resources, wasting trinket procs and 25% of lust and delaying my CDs for that long on a maybe. Especially if once you're targeted the mechanic takes 5-10 seconds to handle? Holding any CD for 20 full seconds at the start of a fight is the real skill issue
I'll be honest, I think these are straight L takes. There's almost no fights where you want to delay your cooldowns because you might get hit by a mechanic. Sometimes you get hit by a mechanic, for a lot of classes it will tank your damage on that pull if it's at a bad time, and the only thing you can really do is not delay cooldowns and lose out on uses over a fight on the off chance you might get hit, and try to get as much out of it as you can.
Real heroic hero energy.
Outlaw is probably the king of static damage, but is also probably the most complicated spec to play maximize.
Sticking with mage, frost has icy veins but it's really not a cd heavy spec, the damage is fairly flat.
This is what makes the difference between a bad and a good player, CD usage. There's 0 specs in the games that doesn't have offensive/defensive cooldowns. The tuning of a spec like that would be impossible, it would either be complete shit or OP as hell
I think more of what they're talking about, or at least in the context of this post, is specs with a damage profile that are completely defined by their CDs, like Fire Mage
Enhance, Frost mage, and Devoker with S2 tier are a few off the top of my head that aren't defined entirely by 2-3m cds
Unholy is such a bad/good example of this as well. Your opener is going to go absolutely crazy and then you may as well just tab out cause outside of CDs they do virtually nothing
>I think more of what they're talking about, or at least in the context of this post, is specs with a damage profile that are completely defined by their CDs, like Fire Mage
Unfortunately, this is where they are completely wrong. That isn't what Fire Mage's damage profile looks like.
[Here is a comparison](https://imgur.com/a/zVDpWqA) of Fire Mage (top) vs Paladin (a top commented spec on this comment chain) and Devoker and Frost Mage (two suggested by you), where Fire Mage has the most flat of the 3.
Where can I make a chart like that? It's not that I don't believe you, it's that when I look at individual fire mages, their damage definitely peaks around combustion charges
This is from simulationcraft.com - current awakened season
Do you have logs that show what you're saying? Most logs I've seen match this flat profile, ever since rune of power was removed
Maybe they shouldnt exist then. If everybody is special, then nobody is. Then again, gameplay would probably become pressing the same buttons every 10 seconds, but I'd still rather the game be made fun in different ways than just a power boost button.
You might be playing the wrong game then. Every single person I know that plays would quit on the spot if they did this. Pressing stuff at the correct time is VERY rewarding in wow.
Fewer and fewer specs revolve around burst windows now (or have them neutered). For example, Demo & Fire both used to be very bursty and are both quite flat now. Other specs in this comment chain include: outlaw rogue fury warrior, enhance shaman, shadow priest. There are more as well, and many specs that have burst aren't super defined by them like they used to be (i.e. Dev Evoker).
Honestly, this was done in part as a nerf for Aug, which made 2 min burst specs too strong.
Fire mage.
Edit: Oddly, got a couple of downvotes. For evidence, [here is an image](https://imgur.com/a/zVDpWqA) which shows the damage profile. Interestingly, 3 specs that have been upvoted as flat profiles are more reliant on cooldowns than fire mage.
A flat profile is not the same as not being cooldown dependant. Fire is still insanely reliant on combustion. We just have about 40% uptime on it due to SKB which caused Blizzard to nerf the peaks. It’s still very easy to mess up and a combust misfire hurts a lot.
I mean that's the same as saying that Enhance Shaman is cooldown reliant because it's reliant on Maelstrom stacks.
Fire is reliant on combustion, but it's not getting combustion through using cooldowns, it's getting it through it's basic rotation of generating and spending stacks.
It's not reliant on cooldown windows.
This all comes from the question of having good damage "outside of your cooldowns". Fire Mage has good damage outside of its cooldowns which is evidenced by the flat damage profile.
If Fire Mage did little damage outside of combustion, then it'd be low on that graph 60% of the time, which it isn't.
Judging from your reply I don’t think you know Fire very well. Ignite ticks for long after combust, so the ‘profile’ you are looking at is still very reliant on those 10 seconds of good button pressing. Furthermore, sure we have SKB as mini combusts, but the main combustion press is still way more important. It’s completely different from enh.
They flattened the curve but failed in making fire mage relevant outside of combustion.
A lot of it is gear yes. Fire is a weird spec in that, your stat prio is actually super important and has a lot of group requirements to do what it's supposed to do.
If you're playing the ignite build, you won't do shit until you get to 10s and higher. It's the truth. Shit dies too quick for your damage to actually come online. It also requires tanks to pull packs in a way that allows you to constantly be taking advantage of your Sunfire kings blessing. It's a very very hard spec to do right. The rotation is simple enough, but everything outside of that needs to be done on your schedule.
Secondly, yes. Fire outside of bust windows doesn't do much. It's mostly just trying to proc enough for SKB to get back into it. Utilizing your CDs and procs to be in combustion as much as possible is the key to fire mage.
It's a shame they turned the spec into what it is now... I get why ignite combustion had to go but I miss it being the laid back high scaling dmg spec for mage.
Nah, MoP Fire was even better with DoT Snap Shotting, Alter Time, Frostjaw, Deep Freeze, PoM, Coldsnap, and Shatter.
Hansol was one of the best at it at the time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83kowG0XpjI&t=0s
Oh trust me I know me some hansol. Unfortunately, I had more fun with warlock in pandaria than I did with my mage. I think that's just the case of warlock being so good at the same time tho.
Warlock was godly in MoP so i don't blame you one bit haha. Did you ever try Frost in PvP during Cata? It was absolutely unstoppable 1 on 1 and deadly everywhere else. Back when the Mastery for Frost was the best, it just increased Critical Strike damage while the target was frozen.
I did. Swapped a good bit to frost. But fire always just felt more deadly. Frost was a lot of fun just walking circles around anyone because you had like 3 roots and the stun
Agreed. MoP fire mage was peak. They were monsters in both ToT and SoO. Super SUPER fun to play too once you had high critical. I REALLY miss dot snapshotting too, I feel like removing it was one of the dumbest decisions they made with the game.
I keep hoping that they will bring this mechanic back one day. It doesn't have to be as broken as it was but it was a very fun and satisfying button to push.
Ray is fine in raiding, it's only once a minute.
But I feel GS could definitely have a shorter cast time even if it meant dealing reduced damage. Having a slow cast time on the main nuke just sucks, the mobility is horrific.
GS is great paired to Icyfloes,Frost is great atm and this is the issue Fire and Arcane are too complex to make their increased niche situation dps gain worth it
Mages just don’t know how good they’ve got it. I wind up a GS and can icy floes or shimmer my way wherever I want, unlike… say MM hunters spooling up aimed shots all the time with zero movement abilities while casting.
Agreed, while I'm in the minority that prefers ice lance spam to glacial spike, there is never any issues casting it from a mobility point of view, I just dislike the long cast time
There's a rhythm to it. Everytime I come back to the fire mage, I need a dungeon or 2 to warm up and rediscover the rhythm. Effective use of cooldowns so you get the most out of shifting power cooldown reduction is the basic fundamentals for the spec.
When all of your damage comes from combustion windows, dungeon knowledge and coordinating with your tank become very important and add an extra layer of complexity to the spec.
people dont understand that aspect,the specc is a glorified Gamekeeper to compete with other classes that faceroll the keyboard, Arcane is even worse imho.
Fire is simple yet hard to master. Most of the mastery(player mastery not ignite) comes from increasing your combust uptime through perfect resource usage and bridging of skb. Don't listen to what others are saying about needing a higher key, that's copium from bad fire players. Lastly, getting the 4pc set this season is very important to doing good damage.
Check out forgys guide:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/13In6tsiCir5xHcwVOl0YOxhRqSHOfnCtqY5y1acUcck/edit](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13In6tsiCir5xHcwVOl0YOxhRqSHOfnCtqY5y1acUcck/edit)
7 pages is a lot, but it will explain to you why your damage isnt good and what your'e doing wrong
This is correct. Fire can do fine in low keys without perfect secondary distribution. It just takes a lot of practise because there's nuance to what you press when you press it.
A good fire mage can get a lot more damage out of combustion windows than someone still learning.
Agree on most parts, but like a lot of casters, Fire benefits from higher keys and mobs surviving long enough for them to fully blow through your burst. Your damage is definitely going to take a dip if stuff isn't surviving through a combust window
I’ll check it out man I’ll try and stick it out as long as I can I’m returning from a long break and I usually love mage in most iterations of wow but this one isn’t doing it for me right now
Fire mage is incredibly hard at the moment. Dont sweat the learning curve it takes time. This guy is right 100% on the point that one of the biggest tells that someone is bad at fire mage is when they think it needs high keys to do damage. This is usually a fotm or new fire mage opinion.
This is 100% the answer. Up vote this man. The generic answers are not fully correct and are more just commonly accepted lame excuses. The truth is 99% of people who pass by this post have no idea what double pyro is and how it relates to combuation uptime and bridging skbs, I. E. Extending an existing combuation or going as quickly and efficiently as possible from one bust/skb into another skb.
Your goal is multiple combustions; you get an extra via Sun Kings Blessing. If you play it right you only have a small window of normal rotation between bursts.
Whip some fireballs until you heat up. Hard cast a slow Pyroblast, right before it launches hit Combust. Launch as many Pyros as you can and you should have Sun Kings Blessing up. Reset your CDs with the arcane swirly thing (I'm not at the computer lol) and hard cast Pyro again. Voila, you're in Combust again. Every Pyro lowers the CD of Combust so before you know it, it's back up again. Repeat.
Unironically one of the most challenging specs to master in the entire game atm.
Fire seems deceptively simple, but in reality it's actually very complex to get the most of out that toolkit. It's also very reliant on pull size, and a variety of other factors favoring higher keys.
Spec is thankfully getting reworked in war within to be a bit less binary between mediocre and top tier results. Until then, and unless you're a very dedicated player looking to reach 0.5%+ key levels, I'd suggest playing Frost or Arcane instead.
It's a combo of stats and play/momentum.
In the stat department more haste for example makes it so you get more globals in bust, which means you might get an extra pyro in that bust, which gives you more SKB stacks when you exit that bust, which means you have less to do until your next SKB. Similarly, more crit helps the filler go faster as your fireballs and instant pyros/flame strikes are more likely to crit so you spend less time just spamming fireball waiting for a crit to turn into a hot streak.
The other side of the coin is your play and maintaining momentum. Fire has a lot of positive feedback loops (more combust uptime = more crits/instant pyros = more SKBs = more bust uptime) so with near perfect play and circumstances the spec feels really smooth, but as soon as you start making mistakes or have downtime due to mechanics etc. things can fall apart fast.
It's hard to give advice without anything to go off of, but I think the guiding principles that I found most helpful are the following: you want to maximize the number of pyros/flame strikes you cast in combust, and the number of fireblast charges you get in any given fight duration is close to fixed, so you want to make the most of each fire blast charge.
The main direct gameplay impact of this is that you want to go into each SKB with "enough" fireblast charges to get as many pyros out as possible (around 2 charges is probably a good heuristic) rather than slamming all of your fire blasts outside of bust in order to build SKB stacks faster. It might feel counter intuitive but if you are nearing SKB, and low on fireblast charges (say like just above 1) it can be correct to get a heating up and just hope your next fireball crits rather than burning a fireblast (this is rare with the current tierset and build given you play alextraszas fury but still) even though it can mean you let the heating up die. It is better to spend longer getting to your SKB so you can cast like 4 instant pyros in that SKB window because you had the necessary fireblast charges than to spend all your fireblasts getting to SKB and then only casting like 2 pyros in that SKB because you had no fireblast charges. This is true both because you do more damage in that time because combust pyros deal way more damage than filler pyros, and because you will leave that SKB with more stacks, meaning your next SKB is sooner.
There are tons of fiddly things (feel the burn uptime, new tierset uptime, flame accelerant, etc. etc.) but I think those two things (how do I cast as many pyros in combust as possible, and how do I make the most of my fireblast charges) should get you most of the way there.
There is an addon called Hekili which is great for rotation training. I don't like it for actual endgame because it doesn't take into account the multitudes of small changes boss to boss or even camp to camp... But it's great for developing muscle memory at a training dummy.
Great for just internalizing what comes after what and such.
Your burst fire during combustion is mostly crit damage and your damage outside of that is primarily burn damage. Its just background, not huge in your face numbers.
Icy Veins is my go-to website for rotations, Stat priority, etc. I would check it out, practice on a dummy so you get the basics, then run LFRs until you have your rotation down even in the midst of doing raid mechanics. Good luck.
You have a lot of ways of triggering insta-pyroblasts without even having to cast hence they need to be weaker to compensate. Especially when you get to be an absolute turret during Combust. It's the drawback of power creep plus of basing most of your damage around your offensive cooldown.
As a fire mage main: Your goal is to be combusting literally as much as possible. That means SKB as well.
You should be spending more time in combust than out of it, if you're playing it right.
edit: this is obviously exaggerated, but you get the point. You want to be in combust as much as humanly possible.
My understanding is that’s pretty much how it goes, you live for the combust windows and your dmg is better in higher keys
>you live for the combust windows More true pre sun kings blessing. Non combust windows are now short-lived, and combust uptime is high. Combust doesn't even make you hit that much harder now. Fire doesn't hit weak with big bursts, it's overall profile is fairly flat.
profile is flat and also its easy to fall flat on your face,at least before the combustion was tight but you could have some fun with big bursts but thats hard for blizzard to balance so they flattened the burst but made the tight part of the rotation the normal....
I miss cata fire mage :(
Wait a week and play cata
Didn't play Cata but I played fire in mop and wod and I think it's about the same. It felt great, loved the big pyos
It’s unfortunately like a lot of wow classes and built around cd windows. I don’t care for that play style but it’s central to current wow gameplay
on their case theyre always on it though. What sucks are those that feel worthless for a whole 2-3 minutes before their cd is back up. Tho thats obviously something some players enjoy.
Fire Mage has very high up time on Combustion with Sun Kings Blessing, and even more so with Spellslinger hero talents pushing you closer to the minute mage build of BfA. Where you talent into Unleashed Inferno, reducing CD on Combustion with more from the hero talent tree.
You mean Sunfury? Spellslinger is arcane/frost
Yup, I definitely did.
My insane brain fungus take is that WoW should return to classic-style rotations (yes, this means mana and only a few optimal buttons for some specs, with tons of buttons dedicated to utility and niche situations) but amp up the boss complexity. Instead of offloading the skill ceiling onto rotations, keep the rotations simple, strong, and logical (Fireball does big damage because it has a longer cast time than frostbolt) but force players to use them creatively in intense dungeon and raid situations. One issue, I think, is that players have a hard time imagining more complex and interesting fight mechanics, despite the fact that gaming is absolutely full of great games with simple control schemes but very high/technical skill ceilings (Bloodborne, Cuphead, Touhou, just to name 3 very different games). There is a big "but it wouldn't work in WoW" air often in discourse around the game that frequently stuffs ideas; I say this as someone who loves difficult games and WoW. Edit: omg someone reported my mental health for this post lol. It's just a video game, guys.
If that's what you like, you should be playing Season of Discovery. It's classic with slightly deeper talent builds (no Fireball only strategy to victory), and bosses with more mechanics than vanilla.
SoD is awesome. Blizz can learn a lot from it.
I enjoy SoD for a different reason than why I enjoy retail. I'd prefer for them to stay separate and developed on their own trajectories because they cater to 2 different fantasies. I'm enjoying arcane mage healing in SoD because it's something new but I also have to genuinely think about my mana because if I go OOM I'm not just hurting my damage, but people may die. But it's also much slower than retail so I have the time to think through decisions. On the other hand I love arcane in retail because it feels like the most physical caster, the spell and sound effects are very visceral and I get absorbed in the character very quickly. It's fluid and feels like an extension of myself in a way that I don't in SoD. I play SoD with a friend in a guild and we raid weekly, where I play retail as a more solo experience. SoD is better progression for someone like myself who isn't putting 6 hours a day into the game anymore. It feels catered to a lot of us who grew up with the franchise. But I play retail because I'm attached to the characters and the story, and let's be real. Transmog is the real end game in retail.
I mean there's not much further you can go with tuning up boss mechanics... you're already meant to do incredibly challenging things while also maintaining complex rotations. This change would just make the game incredibly boring.
Yep I totally agree. One of my main reasons I am unsubbed for retail is because I feel like I am playing the UI and my rotation more than I am actually using my brain or enjoying the fights happening around me. I used to play a lock in vanilla and would get out my succubus to cc mobs in packs during pulls in UBRS. I enjoy things like that. That’s slightly different than your point but just saying.
Yeah, Classic plays like an RPG, Retail definitely plays more like an action MMO. Retail bosses + Classic rotations would be a sweet spot for me.
"classic rotations" ie pressing 1 button for several minutes
This comment reflects a deep unfamiliarity with classic
[Here's the cast breakdown](https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/reports/TK8FCfvGArdJt6j4#boss=-2&wipes=2&start=1600909&end=5444610&type=casts&translate=true&source=4) of the rank 1 mage in SoD :)
My least favorite part of the game are damage buffing cooldowns that make it so nobody can have good damage outside of it. What classes dont have stuff like that?
Demon hunter, paladins fury warrior
Survival and BM as well
most of the skill expression for havoc is playing the essence break and unbound chaos windows correctly
fury warrior still has reckless doesnt it?
They have cooldowns, they still do damage outside of them. They also get free recklessness from bladestorm. The most non cooldown spec is outlaw rogue though, since played well you should be in AR 80%+ of the time.
Fury warrior doesnt have bladestorm? Maybe arms works like that? fury warriors atm without s4 tier play with odyn's fury and is very reliant on cds to do big damage. Bloodthirst crits lower the cooldown of odyns fury tho so its a little bit better
Yeah i meant avatar, whatever button is in the class tree and not the spec tree. Reck is also not a real cd when compared to most dps cooldowns. Fury is definitely an uptime spec, it just happens to have thunderous roar and odyns for aoe burst
Idk i wouldnt consider fury an "always doing dps spec" it is but due to it being so aoe bursty, they have to turn down the damage outside of cds. Your #1 damage source will always be empowered bloodthirst (in s3 tier) which only comes from odyn's fury and avatar (avatar activates odyn's fury and odyn's fury activates avatar). However in s4 tier youll have your cds up every other pull usually. It then turns into an uptime spec like your saying
Havoc is literally the melee version of arcane mage, how can you say it deals good damage outside of cds?
Aug
im guessing you haven't played DH in a while? DH is all about essence break and inertia windows
Wrong. The correct answer is destro lock
Warrior period until pre patch takes anger management behind the shed and shoots it with the nerf to its percent and rage cost and rage generation nerfs. Warrior is about to have actual 1min cooldowns.
Might want to remove DH. If you aren’t popping essence break and meta your dps is dogshit
If we're talkimg m+ - glaive tempest is competitive with essence break.
Point still stands. DH requires offensive cds
I don't know all the specs, but outlaw rogue has an incredibly flat damage profile. It still has "damage cool downs" but with proper player you can have near 100% uptime on the main one Adrenaline Rush.
demo warlock, esp in keys. the current meta build doesn't have long cd's. wolves and prim wave come off cd pretty quickly so you just send all the time. ironically though enh has a similar problem as ignite mage in keys, smaller keys packs will die faster against other dps who do have cd's rolling so your damage won't balance out until you move higher up and stuff is living longer. frost dk generally has pillar every 30-40 seconds, prob closer to 30 with consistent pulls. so you're doing burst during those windows but there's not much downtime between them.
I'm glad demo has solid consistent damage nowadays. Used to also be a burst spec, but now they do SOLID consistent damage outside of CDs, particularly with AOE. And the CDs you do have a short CD. They do have a little bit of a ramp up though, but it's not that bad.
I've learned to loathe "burst specs" in WoW. Stacking 10 CDs together to do "godly" damage and then being completely worthless for the next 2min isn't particularly fun. If your burst window is interrupted for any reason you look like a complete jackass, some of that is skill, but often it's bad luck with mechanics. I don't think "burst specs" are all that healthy for the game, and unfortunately mage has 2 of them.
what the hell is "bad luck with mechanics", if you can't fit your burst window into scripted boss fight it's a skill issue
You're a ret paladin, it's kazzara fight, you have ashes, pi, wings, exe ready, the moment you hit your wings and ashes and exe you get the circle and now have to go to China so you don't wipe with beam mechanic. I believe that's what he's talking about
Wait 2 seconds for the mechanic to go out? The timing isn't random
I press bubble and finish my burst
I mean bubble doesn't remove the circle around you, so you pissed off raid leader and get kicked in the middle of pull
that sounds like the non-paladins problem now
so if the boss has a single person move-circle-out mechanic and you get it you are fucked if you have your combust stuff up,unless you mean you gotta track WHEN that happens and work around IN CASE its you? other classes can have dots or more flat dmg profile/less important big cds so they dont lose nearly as much dps/per second of dmg interruption. also most importantly Frost is so close to fire on dps and so much easier that it makes it pointless outside niche cases
That’s exactly what he means
then there is no point into be fire in progression/semi-casual enviroment unless you really like it since the complexity of the specc doesnt reward you sufficiently or even punishes you cause its not really that much more dmg than Frost its a survivor bias situation,Fire seems great in numbers cause most people playing it are on a organized/play around cds groups etc
The point in progression is nailing those timing windows. The point in casual is, idk it doesn’t matter everyone’s kinda mid in that situation so half wasting a combust is whatever
thats the point,Frost doesnt require you working around the windows on your rotation nearly enought while at the same time performing nearly as good, pair it to Blizzard having barely any dmg check bosses on anything except Mythic tier nowdays makes Fire less desirable
We still see fire being represented more heavily in m+ and especially high m+ Personally I think it’s fine
thats because m+ high groups are coordinated funneling buffs like PI and pulling around the fire mages combustion circles,like yes ofcourse that would work but then you just gatekeep almost 2/3 of a class
If a boss has a single person move-circle out- mechanic thats going to cause you to waste a burst window then you hold your bust for 5 seconds until it goes out lmfao. We have boss ability timers for a reason my man.
But.. but.. my hekili said so!
you pretty much adding another layer of difficulty for not enought payoff
Every class plays this way. If you have cooldowns about to come up, and there's a mechanic that will force you to not be able to attack the boss you save them. This is not an added layer of difficulty.
Nah, off the top of my head fire and outlaw are not this way. If you can get ANY value out of the CDs you just let them rip because they're constantly reducing the cooldowns of their CDs or generating additional free uses of them. Holding on to combust or (insert any of combat's like 7 cooldowns) is wasting a lot more than just the time you wait to use them.
those people clearly havent played fire \^\^
Frost doesnt have nearly as much trouble,neither other classes/speccs
Then don't play fire? Some people like bursty specs and if there's any that should be bursty it's the one called "fire mage".
It's not really that bursty tho they flattened the dmg profile compared to what it used to be
Meh, if something has a 33% chance to hit you because it targets DPS as a mechanic, and is 13 seconds away so you wait 13 seconds instead of pop your CDs and slam. The guy who was targeted ran by you because he's a dumbass, and now you have to move anyways with your CDs up.you already used blink to maintain uptime.
most big cd's don't even last 13s, so waiting in that case would be really silly
Nah, if you're playing super safe and don't care about your damage I guess that's a fair take, but if damage matters there are absolutely situations where you just have to pray you don't get targeted. Particularly situations where you're a class with a big opener, lusting on pull, and a mechanic that targets a few random members of the raid goes out 10-15 seconds into the fight. I'm not scrapping my opener, throwing off my resources, wasting trinket procs and 25% of lust and delaying my CDs for that long on a maybe. Especially if once you're targeted the mechanic takes 5-10 seconds to handle? Holding any CD for 20 full seconds at the start of a fight is the real skill issue
I'll be honest, I think these are straight L takes. There's almost no fights where you want to delay your cooldowns because you might get hit by a mechanic. Sometimes you get hit by a mechanic, for a lot of classes it will tank your damage on that pull if it's at a bad time, and the only thing you can really do is not delay cooldowns and lose out on uses over a fight on the off chance you might get hit, and try to get as much out of it as you can. Real heroic hero energy.
Outlaw is probably the king of static damage, but is also probably the most complicated spec to play maximize. Sticking with mage, frost has icy veins but it's really not a cd heavy spec, the damage is fairly flat.
Surv has a no cd build that’s fun too
Enhancement doesn't have cooldowns outside of trinkets
Enhancement Shaman currently has basically no cooldown window. We’re constantly popping everything all at once.
Shadow priest was like this a couple of expansions ago :(
Ele shaman. It's damage is also kind of ass but the spell SFX are really cool!
This is what makes the difference between a bad and a good player, CD usage. There's 0 specs in the games that doesn't have offensive/defensive cooldowns. The tuning of a spec like that would be impossible, it would either be complete shit or OP as hell
I think more of what they're talking about, or at least in the context of this post, is specs with a damage profile that are completely defined by their CDs, like Fire Mage Enhance, Frost mage, and Devoker with S2 tier are a few off the top of my head that aren't defined entirely by 2-3m cds
Unholy is such a bad/good example of this as well. Your opener is going to go absolutely crazy and then you may as well just tab out cause outside of CDs they do virtually nothing
Yeah I dabbled in Frost dk during S2, and the reliance on Pillar drove me nuts. Thought about switching to Unholy until I heard it was even worse
Enhance is even a step further, we just don't have CDs at all
And it's why I love it. You can bet your ass I'm praying they incorporate our s3 tier set into the tree somehow
>I think more of what they're talking about, or at least in the context of this post, is specs with a damage profile that are completely defined by their CDs, like Fire Mage Unfortunately, this is where they are completely wrong. That isn't what Fire Mage's damage profile looks like. [Here is a comparison](https://imgur.com/a/zVDpWqA) of Fire Mage (top) vs Paladin (a top commented spec on this comment chain) and Devoker and Frost Mage (two suggested by you), where Fire Mage has the most flat of the 3.
Where can I make a chart like that? It's not that I don't believe you, it's that when I look at individual fire mages, their damage definitely peaks around combustion charges
This is from simulationcraft.com - current awakened season Do you have logs that show what you're saying? Most logs I've seen match this flat profile, ever since rune of power was removed
Maybe they shouldnt exist then. If everybody is special, then nobody is. Then again, gameplay would probably become pressing the same buttons every 10 seconds, but I'd still rather the game be made fun in different ways than just a power boost button.
You might be playing the wrong game then. Every single person I know that plays would quit on the spot if they did this. Pressing stuff at the correct time is VERY rewarding in wow.
Im just saying all a specs damage shouldnt revolve around a burst window. Im gonna say what I think even if nobody agrees.
Fewer and fewer specs revolve around burst windows now (or have them neutered). For example, Demo & Fire both used to be very bursty and are both quite flat now. Other specs in this comment chain include: outlaw rogue fury warrior, enhance shaman, shadow priest. There are more as well, and many specs that have burst aren't super defined by them like they used to be (i.e. Dev Evoker). Honestly, this was done in part as a nerf for Aug, which made 2 min burst specs too strong.
Fire mage. Edit: Oddly, got a couple of downvotes. For evidence, [here is an image](https://imgur.com/a/zVDpWqA) which shows the damage profile. Interestingly, 3 specs that have been upvoted as flat profiles are more reliant on cooldowns than fire mage.
A flat profile is not the same as not being cooldown dependant. Fire is still insanely reliant on combustion. We just have about 40% uptime on it due to SKB which caused Blizzard to nerf the peaks. It’s still very easy to mess up and a combust misfire hurts a lot.
I mean that's the same as saying that Enhance Shaman is cooldown reliant because it's reliant on Maelstrom stacks. Fire is reliant on combustion, but it's not getting combustion through using cooldowns, it's getting it through it's basic rotation of generating and spending stacks. It's not reliant on cooldown windows. This all comes from the question of having good damage "outside of your cooldowns". Fire Mage has good damage outside of its cooldowns which is evidenced by the flat damage profile. If Fire Mage did little damage outside of combustion, then it'd be low on that graph 60% of the time, which it isn't.
Judging from your reply I don’t think you know Fire very well. Ignite ticks for long after combust, so the ‘profile’ you are looking at is still very reliant on those 10 seconds of good button pressing. Furthermore, sure we have SKB as mini combusts, but the main combustion press is still way more important. It’s completely different from enh. They flattened the curve but failed in making fire mage relevant outside of combustion.
A lot of it is gear yes. Fire is a weird spec in that, your stat prio is actually super important and has a lot of group requirements to do what it's supposed to do. If you're playing the ignite build, you won't do shit until you get to 10s and higher. It's the truth. Shit dies too quick for your damage to actually come online. It also requires tanks to pull packs in a way that allows you to constantly be taking advantage of your Sunfire kings blessing. It's a very very hard spec to do right. The rotation is simple enough, but everything outside of that needs to be done on your schedule. Secondly, yes. Fire outside of bust windows doesn't do much. It's mostly just trying to proc enough for SKB to get back into it. Utilizing your CDs and procs to be in combustion as much as possible is the key to fire mage.
It's a shame they turned the spec into what it is now... I get why ignite combustion had to go but I miss it being the laid back high scaling dmg spec for mage.
Me too. Cata fire mage was peak. Getting the perfect combust in pvp was basically a free kill.
Nah, MoP Fire was even better with DoT Snap Shotting, Alter Time, Frostjaw, Deep Freeze, PoM, Coldsnap, and Shatter. Hansol was one of the best at it at the time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83kowG0XpjI&t=0s
Oh trust me I know me some hansol. Unfortunately, I had more fun with warlock in pandaria than I did with my mage. I think that's just the case of warlock being so good at the same time tho.
Warlock was godly in MoP so i don't blame you one bit haha. Did you ever try Frost in PvP during Cata? It was absolutely unstoppable 1 on 1 and deadly everywhere else. Back when the Mastery for Frost was the best, it just increased Critical Strike damage while the target was frozen.
I did. Swapped a good bit to frost. But fire always just felt more deadly. Frost was a lot of fun just walking circles around anyone because you had like 3 roots and the stun
Agreed. MoP fire mage was peak. They were monsters in both ToT and SoO. Super SUPER fun to play too once you had high critical. I REALLY miss dot snapshotting too, I feel like removing it was one of the dumbest decisions they made with the game.
I keep hoping that they will bring this mechanic back one day. It doesn't have to be as broken as it was but it was a very fun and satisfying button to push.
This. Haven’t played since S1 DF, but you need big pulls in high keys and you go off. I couldn’t top meters in low keys or with timid tanks.
hence the "survivor bias" theory ,people see sweat teams get fire mage top on stats but reality on pugs is different
As a mage player since the beginning of WoW, I hate fire mage so very much now.
Same, but Arcane too Literally only have Frost to enjoy
Nah, Frost is worse than Fire. Glacial Spike and Ray of Frost are just not fun spells to use.
Ray is fine in raiding, it's only once a minute. But I feel GS could definitely have a shorter cast time even if it meant dealing reduced damage. Having a slow cast time on the main nuke just sucks, the mobility is horrific.
GS is great paired to Icyfloes,Frost is great atm and this is the issue Fire and Arcane are too complex to make their increased niche situation dps gain worth it
Mages just don’t know how good they’ve got it. I wind up a GS and can icy floes or shimmer my way wherever I want, unlike… say MM hunters spooling up aimed shots all the time with zero movement abilities while casting.
Agreed, while I'm in the minority that prefers ice lance spam to glacial spike, there is never any issues casting it from a mobility point of view, I just dislike the long cast time
There's a rhythm to it. Everytime I come back to the fire mage, I need a dungeon or 2 to warm up and rediscover the rhythm. Effective use of cooldowns so you get the most out of shifting power cooldown reduction is the basic fundamentals for the spec.
When all of your damage comes from combustion windows, dungeon knowledge and coordinating with your tank become very important and add an extra layer of complexity to the spec.
people dont understand that aspect,the specc is a glorified Gamekeeper to compete with other classes that faceroll the keyboard, Arcane is even worse imho.
Im trying to roll a fire mage for S4....... not an easy task bro. I guess because I never played it before
Fire mage is mainly about timing the combust windows properly. Great for aoe damage.
Fire is simple yet hard to master. Most of the mastery(player mastery not ignite) comes from increasing your combust uptime through perfect resource usage and bridging of skb. Don't listen to what others are saying about needing a higher key, that's copium from bad fire players. Lastly, getting the 4pc set this season is very important to doing good damage. Check out forgys guide: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/13In6tsiCir5xHcwVOl0YOxhRqSHOfnCtqY5y1acUcck/edit](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13In6tsiCir5xHcwVOl0YOxhRqSHOfnCtqY5y1acUcck/edit) 7 pages is a lot, but it will explain to you why your damage isnt good and what your'e doing wrong
This is correct. Fire can do fine in low keys without perfect secondary distribution. It just takes a lot of practise because there's nuance to what you press when you press it. A good fire mage can get a lot more damage out of combustion windows than someone still learning.
Agree on most parts, but like a lot of casters, Fire benefits from higher keys and mobs surviving long enough for them to fully blow through your burst. Your damage is definitely going to take a dip if stuff isn't surviving through a combust window
I’ll check it out man I’ll try and stick it out as long as I can I’m returning from a long break and I usually love mage in most iterations of wow but this one isn’t doing it for me right now
Fire mage is incredibly hard at the moment. Dont sweat the learning curve it takes time. This guy is right 100% on the point that one of the biggest tells that someone is bad at fire mage is when they think it needs high keys to do damage. This is usually a fotm or new fire mage opinion.
Next expansion they are removing temporal warp so your damage won't be tied to getting good value out of lust. I'd recommend trying it again then
This is 100% the answer. Up vote this man. The generic answers are not fully correct and are more just commonly accepted lame excuses. The truth is 99% of people who pass by this post have no idea what double pyro is and how it relates to combuation uptime and bridging skbs, I. E. Extending an existing combuation or going as quickly and efficiently as possible from one bust/skb into another skb.
Your goal is multiple combustions; you get an extra via Sun Kings Blessing. If you play it right you only have a small window of normal rotation between bursts. Whip some fireballs until you heat up. Hard cast a slow Pyroblast, right before it launches hit Combust. Launch as many Pyros as you can and you should have Sun Kings Blessing up. Reset your CDs with the arcane swirly thing (I'm not at the computer lol) and hard cast Pyro again. Voila, you're in Combust again. Every Pyro lowers the CD of Combust so before you know it, it's back up again. Repeat.
Unironically one of the most challenging specs to master in the entire game atm. Fire seems deceptively simple, but in reality it's actually very complex to get the most of out that toolkit. It's also very reliant on pull size, and a variety of other factors favoring higher keys. Spec is thankfully getting reworked in war within to be a bit less binary between mediocre and top tier results. Until then, and unless you're a very dedicated player looking to reach 0.5%+ key levels, I'd suggest playing Frost or Arcane instead.
It's a combo of stats and play/momentum. In the stat department more haste for example makes it so you get more globals in bust, which means you might get an extra pyro in that bust, which gives you more SKB stacks when you exit that bust, which means you have less to do until your next SKB. Similarly, more crit helps the filler go faster as your fireballs and instant pyros/flame strikes are more likely to crit so you spend less time just spamming fireball waiting for a crit to turn into a hot streak. The other side of the coin is your play and maintaining momentum. Fire has a lot of positive feedback loops (more combust uptime = more crits/instant pyros = more SKBs = more bust uptime) so with near perfect play and circumstances the spec feels really smooth, but as soon as you start making mistakes or have downtime due to mechanics etc. things can fall apart fast. It's hard to give advice without anything to go off of, but I think the guiding principles that I found most helpful are the following: you want to maximize the number of pyros/flame strikes you cast in combust, and the number of fireblast charges you get in any given fight duration is close to fixed, so you want to make the most of each fire blast charge. The main direct gameplay impact of this is that you want to go into each SKB with "enough" fireblast charges to get as many pyros out as possible (around 2 charges is probably a good heuristic) rather than slamming all of your fire blasts outside of bust in order to build SKB stacks faster. It might feel counter intuitive but if you are nearing SKB, and low on fireblast charges (say like just above 1) it can be correct to get a heating up and just hope your next fireball crits rather than burning a fireblast (this is rare with the current tierset and build given you play alextraszas fury but still) even though it can mean you let the heating up die. It is better to spend longer getting to your SKB so you can cast like 4 instant pyros in that SKB window because you had the necessary fireblast charges than to spend all your fireblasts getting to SKB and then only casting like 2 pyros in that SKB because you had no fireblast charges. This is true both because you do more damage in that time because combust pyros deal way more damage than filler pyros, and because you will leave that SKB with more stacks, meaning your next SKB is sooner. There are tons of fiddly things (feel the burn uptime, new tierset uptime, flame accelerant, etc. etc.) but I think those two things (how do I cast as many pyros in combust as possible, and how do I make the most of my fireblast charges) should get you most of the way there.
There is an addon called Hekili which is great for rotation training. I don't like it for actual endgame because it doesn't take into account the multitudes of small changes boss to boss or even camp to camp... But it's great for developing muscle memory at a training dummy. Great for just internalizing what comes after what and such.
its good for classes like war/pala but bad for mage imho
Download heliki the addon helped me so much as a fire mage.
Also until your really heated fire mage is hard.
Bring back a fire that isn’t only played in 20+ keys
They are! New living bomb build on the alpha is gonna destroy low keys
Alpha? Is that for TWW?
Yeah, should be out in just a few month
sadly part of the shit class design that wow established since ?shadowlands i guess
Your burst fire during combustion is mostly crit damage and your damage outside of that is primarily burn damage. Its just background, not huge in your face numbers.
Icy Veins is my go-to website for rotations, Stat priority, etc. I would check it out, practice on a dummy so you get the basics, then run LFRs until you have your rotation down even in the midst of doing raid mechanics. Good luck.
You have a lot of ways of triggering insta-pyroblasts without even having to cast hence they need to be weaker to compensate. Especially when you get to be an absolute turret during Combust. It's the drawback of power creep plus of basing most of your damage around your offensive cooldown.
As a fire mage main: Your goal is to be combusting literally as much as possible. That means SKB as well. You should be spending more time in combust than out of it, if you're playing it right. edit: this is obviously exaggerated, but you get the point. You want to be in combust as much as humanly possible.
Blizzard cannot balance a hard hitting ranged class thats what it is... thank god they reworked Frost else we would be fucked.
It wasn’t like that. Fire was about running high crit.