WoW Fire Mage 4.0.1 Guide

Found this very good Fire Mage Guide, updated for patch 4.0.1, have fun.

I decided to refresh the old guide to help combat some of the more common questions we see on the forum and to help keep people on track with the changes made to the spec in 4.0.1. This version of the guide will be pretty short since this information will only be relevant until Cataclysm is released on December 7. Until then, enjoy.

Arsenal

With the implementation of the Mastery system in 4.0.1, all the talent trees were overhauled with a new focus in mind (mana for arcane, dots for fire, instants for frost). Fire in particular will heavily play on its damage-over-time effects, but still relies on its direct damage nukes (scorch, fireball, pyroblast) to augment those dots. To give you an idea of the major playstyle changes, I’ll go over your basic attacks, since most of them have changed in some way.

Scorch

● Mobile dps with the Firestarter talent
● Kick-start your rotation with Critical Mass’s 5% crit debuff
● Primary nuke in PvP and against PvE mobs with low health that won’t last a fireball cast

Fireblast

● Mobile dps
● Spreads your Living Bomb, Pyroblast DoT, Ignite, and Combustion effects to everything in a 12 yard radius from the target once you get an Impact proc
● Has an additional 8% chance to crit and 40 yard range with Improved Fire Blast

Fireball

● Primary nuke in PvE
● Base cast time was decreased to 2.5 sec

Pyroblast

● Procs from Hot Streak talents
● Base cast time was decreased to 3.5 — still does burly damage

Now for your damage-over-time effects:

Living Bomb

● Can only be cast on up to 3 targets at a time, and the explosion will only hit 3 targets – Fire Blast’s Impact talent obeys this rule
● Ticks can crit, proccing Ignite
● You are able to now refresh Living Bomb’s duration before it explodes
● Explosion does piddly damage compared to ticks, so if you accidentally clip your LB, it’s not a huge deal

Pyroblast DoT

● Ticks can crit, proccing Ignite
● This DoT can only be spread with Impact if the Pyroblast that caused it was hard-cast (meaning, not from Hot Streak). This is a bug.

Ignite

● Procced on the target by other fire spell crits – 40% of the spell’s damage is done every 2 secs for 4 secs.
● Ticks cannot crit (that would get ugly, wouldn’t it?)
● Currently suffering from a bug that causes any new fire crits made roughly two secs after the crit that originally procced Ignite to not be added to Ignite’s total damage — we’re going to whine a lot until this gets fixed

Combustion

● This is your 2-minute cooldown for Fire. It takes a snapshot of the total damage per second of all your fire damage-over-time effects and creates a new DoT called Combustion that ticks at that total dps for 10 secs.
● By far your highest dps DoT is Ignite, but Living Bomb and Pyroblast also contribute a portion of the damage
● Best used when all your DoTs are on the target, and you’ve just landed a big 30k Pyroblast or something for a big Ignite
● Spreadable by Impact
● If ever you feel Combustion is a lame cooldown or your manhood is lacking in girth, spread a Combustion on Sindragosa’s whelp pack
● Occasionally you’ll get small, wimpy Combustions due to Ignite’s bug detailed above. You’ll land a fat 30k Pyro and think “combustion time!” but that juicy 12k Ignite was never added to the “Ignite bank” because it was right after, say, a 3k Living Bomb crit. There’s not much you can do about it at the moment except moan, so feel free to moan on the Damage Dealing forum until a blue notices our tears

Okay, so now you know all the changes made to the abilities you’ve been using comfortably forever and how they’ll affect your playstyle.

Talents

Here we’re going to look at some of the more confusion or detailed talents. By the way, the talent trees are organized so you basically can’t make a horrible spec. There are certainly ways to maximize your damage in different situations, however. So read this and you’ll have all the info you need to make your own “optimum” spec for your playing environment (raiding, casual, heroics, etc).

● Blazing Speed: This is mostly a PvP talent, but I thought it would be nice to point out that you actually don’t need this talent for Molten Shields to work.

● Impact: As stated earlier, this will spread all your fire DoTs to everything in a 12 yard radius from the target. If there are more than 3 targets nearby, you will probably notice your Living Bomb disappear off your target — this is because of the 3-target maximum, and we’re not sure if it’s a bug yet.

● Improved Scorch: This talent will mostly come into play in Cataclysm, unless our level 85 mana issues get fixed sometime farther along in the Beta. Right now you simply don’t need it.

● Blast Wave: A pretty good talent for both PvP and PvE (aoe, trash, a couple bosses). For PvE in particular, it’s not a great choice if you don’t plan to pick up Improved Flamestrike along with it.

● Cauterize: Lots of debate on this one. It’s a great talent for skipping boss mechanics (Festergut spores for example) but you do need to tell your healers ahead of time so they can heal you back up. Mage Ward + Mana Shield will barely save your ass, and it is costly. Standard PvP talent.

● Hot Streak (T3): This talent is meant to ensure that hot streaks aren’t too infrequent for you, even if you have a low crit chance. Likewise, this talent will gives you no benefit whatsoever if your crit is over 45%, because it operates on a curve. For example, if you have 20% crit chance, there is a roughly a 50% of Hot Streak proccing on a single crit. If you have 35% crit, it’s a 20% chance to proc. You are able to view the graph here:

http://elitistjerks.com/f75/t104767-fire_cataclysm_discussion_updated_4_01_a/p12/#post1766032

● Hot Streak (T4): The Hot Streak we all know and love. Works totally independently from T3 HS. Note that Living Bomb explosions no longer proc this.

● Combustion: Your 2-minute cooldown. Use it well. The details of this spell were outlined above in the Arsenal section.

● Molten Shields: Mostly a PvP talent.

● Firestarter: ***WHEN YOUR MOLTEN ARMOR IS ON*** this talent will allow you to cast Scorch while moving. A simply STAGGERING amount of people freak out thinking this talent doesn’t work when 99% of them forgot to put on Molten Armor. The remaining 1% ran into an actual bug that is fixed by stopping, casting Scorch normally, then trying to move — it should work then.

● Molten Fury: Standard talent for both PvE and PvP folks

● Dragon’s Breath: What, you never liked this talent? Well, apparently Blizzard wants you to like it. It’s still a PvP spell, but note it does has pretty good damage now — you still won’t use it much outside of heroics and PvP.

● Improved Flamestrike: If you care about trash, aoe, or heroics, then you probably picked up Blast Wave, which complements this talent. It’s also pretty good for painting floors and crap in Dalaran.

● Pyromaniac: Falls into the “trash, aoe, heroics” crowd. Still pretty good, and you should pick it up anyway because it’s bugged and sometimes stays on you semi-permanently even once you’re not in combat or fighting 1 target.

● Critical Mass: This basically means you won’t need to use Scorch in your standing single-target rotation anymore except for the initial application. You occasionally will go 30 secs without a Hot Streak (happens in our post-3.3.3 world, get used to it), but outside those rare occurances your Pyro will do most of the work. This talent is pretty much mandatory.

● Living Bomb: Can only cast on 3 targets, blows things up, yadda yadda. Standard for both PvP and PvE.

So with all that in mind, you can come up with your own spec. Here’s a sample raiding build, but by all means come up with your own.

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#o0bZfshrz0Rosfoc

Glyphs

Mage glyphs are bugged right now. Several glyphs that should be Prime are Major, allowing you to take more than you should be able to. For now, get Living Bomb, Pyroblast, Fireball, and Molten Armor. The rest are up to you, but here are details on a few:

Mirror Image: This seems like it would be a direct boost since your Mirrors will gain benefit from your Mastery, but actually they’re not a dps increase (possibly a decrease). Reason being? They stop casting Fire Blast, which ‘vanilla’ Mirrors do. They also have longer cast times. So don’t use this glyph unless you like the aesthetics.

Frostfire Bolt: You would only use this glyph for a Mastery-based build. Currently Mastery simply isn’t good for Fire because in order to achieve a high enough Mastery to make a difference, you must reforge and sacrifice a significant amount of your crit and haste. Keep in mind that DoTs benefit from crit (ticks crit) and haste (additional ticks), so once you factor in Mastery, it’s really a wash. It basically comes down to glyph benefit of each main nuke – Fireball versus Frostfire Bolt. Fireball is 5% additional crit. Frostfire Bolt is a <100 dps DoT. You do the math. In the future both options should work, but for now, they simply don’t.

Minor Glyphs: They are all insignificant and don’t affect your dps at all. Pick whichever you think looks convenient.

Gear

How you should gear up is mostly fuzzy right now, because the fine folks at EJ are saving their brain power for when Cata hits and they can devote their time to updated mechanics and…stuff that actually matters at 85. However, there are some rules you can abide by until relative stat values are worked out.

First off is spirit. It is now totally worthless. It doesn’t increase your in-combat regen, it doesn’t give you any crit, it has zero use. Get rid of it. If you have 10 int/10 spirit gems, guess what! Those gems are actually just 10 int, because spirit. does. nothing. I can’t say it enough. Regem, reforge. It’s not expensive.

Next on the list is hit rating. +hit talents are gone, so every spec needs 17% (446 rating) to reach the cap. You know a great way to get more hit? Get rid of those spirit gems in your blue sockets and replace them with 10 int/10 hit Veiled Dreadstones. Then you can reforge off any excess hit you may have and convert it to crit or haste.

Intellect is the new Spell Power. You’ll still find Spell Power on weapons, trinket procs, and enchants. But everywhere else it’s been replaced by Intellect, which raises your mana, factors into your out-of-combat regen, raises your crit extremely slightly, and also gives you an equivalent amount of Spell Power. So Int is now great for all specs and is your best stat in almost all cases.

I’ve already talked about Mastery, and how it is lackluster until Cataclysm and everyone’s 85 and picking up gear with Mastery on it without having to reforge and sacrifice other stats. Perhaps its worth will increase when Ignite’s bugs get fixed. But for now, stay away from it. Mastery’s great for frost and arcane, just not for fire at this time.

As for crit and haste, well…you want both. Crit will increase the frequency of Hot Streaks (sometimes moreso than others, take a look at that graph from earlier and look at the wavy red line). It will also cause your DoTs, including Combustion, to crit. Haste will add ticks to your DoTs (there is discussion that this is the cause of the Ignite bug) and raises the frequency of damage events that cause Hot Streak. They are both very good, and you want moar. MOAR. As for which is better, I don’t have an answer backed up by a simulator.

Rotation

It actually hasn’t changed much. This is your priority list:

Hot Streak Pyroblast > Living Bomb > 5% crit debuff > Fireball

Sentence format: Cast HS Pyros as soon as you get them, refresh Living Bomb as soon as it explodes, keep the 5% crit debuff up either with HS Pyro or Scorch, and fling Fireballs in your downtime.

A note on HS uptime: A lot is changing in Cataclysm. You know how you have a 75% HS uptime in your fancy ICC25H gear, and you have like an 80% crit chance? That is going away. Blizzard admits to screwing up how they did combat ratings this expansion, and that they got way too inflated. In Cataclysm, you can expect to have more like a 25-30% crit chance.

Well, that’s what T3 Hot Streak was made for. To ensure that no matter your level of gear, you’ll usually get a HS Pyro at least every 30 secs. It may seem like the rotation will be super boring only having a HS every 30 sec instead of every 5, but talents like Firestarter were made so dpsing while on the move will be a more common and viable occurance, so in fights you’ll be standing around pressing one button a lot less. As for how that will work in practice, we’ll leave that up to the encounter designers.

Other Stuff: Cooldowns & AoE

Sure, you might not find a use for say, Dragon’s Breath in a raid encounter, but AoE has become fire’s niche and it does a damn good job at it. Your biggest catalyst for multitarget damage is Fire Blast’s Impact proc – load up a target with Living Bomb, a hard-case Pyroblast (HS Pyro dot is bugged and doesn’t spread, but a 3.5 sec cast isn’t too painful), and a decent Ignite (a fireball crit is good) and then hopefully by then you’ll have an Impact proc to use, spreading all the DoTs around to nearby targets. If you have Combustion up, you want to hit it before you Impact. Be prepared to Ice Block, invis, pop MI, run away, or otherwise deal with your aggro.

That’s the basis for most of your AoE damage in an ideal situation. However, there is another factor that comes into play while your DoTs are ticking on multiple things, and that is Flamestrike. You are able to actually pull pretty decent dps by just spamming the hell out of Flamestrike over and over, but alternating between Flamestrike and Blizzard does comparable dps and doesn’t hit your mana quite as hard. Try both and see which works for you.

As for cooldowns, you obviously want to use Combustion close to the beginning of the fight once you have Mirror Image up (you do have your 4T10 by now, right?). To increase your chances of not running into the Ignite bug, try and time Combustion after a series of big crits as opposed to just one. That way hopefully at least one large fireball/pyro crit will have landed into the Ignite bank and will net you a hefty Combustion.

Using Combustion properly will take some practice, especially on AoE packs where you want to get some hard-hitting DoTs on a single target, have an Impact proc, Combust it, and spread it before the target dies. Keep at it and you’ll have an edge when the real fun begins in the first raiding tier of Cataclysm.

My “general tips” section will stay since all of these tips improve your raiding ability to some degree regardless of what kind of spec or class you play.

1. Maintain a clear, functional UI. Avoid encumbering the screen with a lot of pointless addons. Take a look at your setup and ask yourself: “Do I really need all of this?” Important information, like spell alerts, buffs, raid frames, and the like can make you play faster and give you more situational awareness, but get rid of anything you find yourself not looking at. Do some research, ask fellow guildies, and create a clear UI setup that works for you.

2. Use the following command to zoom far out and help you keep aware of your surroundings:

“/console cameradistancemaxfactor 5” (remove quotations)

3. While moving, aim to constantly be doing something productive. Fire Blast and HS Pyro are your first bet, but don’t forget you can refresh LB too. You are able to also Scorch while moving to maintain a great portion of your standing dps. In order to maximize your damage, however, you need to get good at…

4. Positioning. By picking a spot close to totems, out of the way of conical or area effect abilities, and spread out from others (when needed), you will be keeping yourself safe while maximizing your sit-on-butt chain casting time. Don’t tunnel vision, however, as you need to be aware of other raiders and the boss moving around you. Move before the coldflame is within 5 feet you, get the hell out of the way of cleaving adds before they’re on top of you, and run from people with raid-damaging auras.

Oh, and to quote Raisa’s High-End Destruction Guide on Stratfu, Know Who the Idiots Are. You’ve seen them miss bites on BQL. Stay away from them.

5. What skills do you use on any given fight? What cooldowns, utilities, and items do you use in combat? Keybind all of that. I don’t care how fast you can click. The boss certainly doesn’t care how fast you can click. Your latency doesn’t care how fast you can click. Keybinding is not just for pvp. Putting all of your skills, whether major or minor, at the tip of your fingers will vastly improve your reaction time and efficiency when moving and attacking. Use a bar mod (I prefer bartender) to create keybinds and modify the look/size of your action bars. Create (and get used to) a new keybind every day, until all your abilities are keybound. Your mouse hand will thank you, and you’ll notice a great difference in the speed of your playing.

6. If your tank has solid initial threat generation and/or you plan on using MI at the start of a fight, use a Potion of Speed/Wild Magic a second before combat starts; you’ll get to use a second potion later in the fight.

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