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Here at Altered Time we have a tradition of finding ways to abuse Ignite and Combustion. We've had pretty amazing results before. Here's my latest addition to the list of "neat tricks" - not nearly as crazy as the last one, but still strong enough to consider using in raids.

During beta, it was revealed that the Tier 17 2PC bonus would be "2 charge Inferno Blast". At the time, most of the Ignite/Combustion silliness was focused on Ignite compression, which meant that people think too much about it. I've always thought of this as a very abusable mechanic though, such as creating multiple waves of Living Bomb explosions. The trick I have for you here uses 2T17 together with Prismatic Crystal for boosting Ignite. Here is what you do:

1. Pyro camp on boss until you have both "Pyroblast!" and "Heating Up".
2. Summon Prismatic Crystal.
3. Time Warp, trinkets, potions, everything.
4. Build a big ignite on Prismatic Crystal: Fireball+Pyroblast 2 or 3 times, and then dump all Pyroblasts. Make sure to leave time for 2 GCDs on Prismatic Crystal.
5. Quickly use Inferno Blast twice on Prismatic Crystal.
6. Switch to boss and use Combustion.

*NEW* Here's a video of how it looks in practice. http://youtu.be/Qw415ks-aVY" target="_blank

When you use Inferno Blast on a target, it "copies" the Ignite over to all neighbouring targets. Targets that already have an Ignite will add this spreaded Ignite to the existing one. By spreading twice, the large Ignite you've built on the Crystal will be copied twice to the boss, inflating the value of the ignite by a significant amount (<=83.33% in theory). Here is a log of what it looks like, with a shadow priest, self buffs and consumables: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/KR ... e&source=1" target="_blank

Komma attacks prismatic Crystal to generate an Ignite of ~14K ticks, quickly spreading it twice: This creates an ignite that peaks at 19.7K on Training Dummy. This is about 40% higher than the original on Prismatic Crystal. The perfect Combustion would have captured the 19.7K ignite tick, generating 31.4K Combustion crits. Unfortunately, Combustion was used slightly early, and only 28K crits were produced: A potential 31.4K Combustion crit is not too bad for a lot of missing raid buffs, I think.

There are some requirements for this trick to work. The first is that you must have enough haste to get close to 1 second GCD. Time Warp, haste buffs and maybe even haste trinkets are desired. The second is that you need a substantial amount of crit to even chain "Fireball+Pyro" into Prismatic Crystal, so a crit trinket proc (such as Sandman's Pouch or Goren Soul Repository) is most likely required.

Taking a step back though, this "double spread" strategy might not be optimal. Maybe a simple "chain a few Pyros into PC, Combust and spread" strategy is better, because you can gain double Combustion ticks while PC is still up. It is too early to say now, and a lot of work needs to be done before SimC can model our current Prismatic Crystal Combustion tricks.

What are your thoughts on this trick? Do you guys think this can be a thing?

There's a bit of math involved in determining whether this method outweighs simply using combustion on PC and spreading to boss. I'd say your method works best with a bit of luck. Let's assume the two following situations:

Situation 1:

- Bloodlust is up, haste/crit trinkets have procced, you've used a potion. Basically this situation is everything that should happen at the start of an encounter (assuming bloodlust is not being saved). Somehow, this results in a chain of 4-5 pyroblasts (3 as a result of fireball/pyro being sent out simultaneously 1-2 standalone) on the prismatic crystal. At this point prismatic crystal should have ~4 second left and a huge ignite. Even if one were to use combustion on the crystal at this point it would only have 4 second of uptime on the crystal, you're way better off just using double IB on the crystal and using combustion on the boss.

Situation 2:

- No bloodlust, no procs, no potion. The filler portion of the encounter. Instead of crossing your fingers and hoping for 4-5 pyro crits you're better off assuming that this will not happen. At this point you're probably better off immediately dumping pyros, building a large ignite, and using combustion on the crystal early (for larger combustion uptime on crystal) and spreading to boss with IB. There's also the glancing problem of not having the required haste to reduce the GCD to 1 second.

Again, there's a bit of math involved in determining which method should be used based on how big the ignite is vs how much uptime is left on the crystal. Overall, its going to come down to luck and decision making.

*Note* : These assumed scenarios do not take the tier 4P into account. Your method would reign supreme with the 4P proc even if you could not lower the GCD to 1 second.

With us going for large amounts of Mastery once we get our T17 set bonuses, I could see the value in this increasing greatly. As said above though it's only really doable at the start of a fight with bloodlust rolling, but I'm wondering if Trolls would be able to abuse it later in an encounter with Berserking and Shards of Nothing. At that point though you'd still have an in between PC with no Haste buffs to pull it off with, and screwing up either your opener or your 3rd PC would tank your DPS completely(I've had similar happen in every Mythic Butcher kill we've had -_-) and it generally leaves a lot open to bad RNG, even worse about it than AT usage was like in MoP.

I'd prefer if this was fixed xD

Another thing to consider about this trick: When there are multiple enemies, immediately after using Combustion, using another Inferno Blast would lead to not only spreading the Combustion, but again stacking the large ignite onto neighbors.

An attempt at this without using Prismatic Crystal:


I wonder if we might see 40-50K Ignite ticks within BRF, with 3 IBs.

How do you get to 83,3%?

On AOE fights, I see this trick being potentially gamebreaking. Here is a screenshot using Kindling (not Prismatic Crystal):

A normal "stacked" ignite with 4T17 and trinket procs might be 15-20K. The "multiple times stacked" ignite I obtained was 34830, and spread to multiple targets. This isn't even considering the 18576 Combustion that will get spread.

I am almost certain at this point that this will be the standard AOE Combustion/Ignite spreading tactic.

How do you get to 83,3%?

The rough idea is: Combining 11 ticks into 6 ticks. 11/6 = 183.33%.

It didn't take very long for Ataxus to one-up me.

And it didn't take very long to realize that we were all doing it wrong, and Meteor is King for this.

Holy crap that's a huge combustion. Could you go through, step-by-step, explaining the steps you've done to achieve that?

Omnomnom Fire Wonder how this would affect the sims and the Tier values per class

I see some great potential on beastlord where you can build a good ignite on the boss (or whichever beast he is on) double IB when the adds are out, combust an add, then IB that to all adds and boss. Seems like it could lead to some broken ignite ticks on all adds, combust, and lb on top of all of this. Things would have to line up nicely and you would have to get some lucky crits, but when it happens I would be interested to see the result.

Honestly, I agree with Berl here... I'd like them to "fix" this trick for the sole reason that I don't have to use PC. I hate that spell.

Except Meteor looks to be better for this, as Komma showed in this thread

Except Meteor looks to be better for this, as Komma showed in this thread

It will be quite hard to pull this off on single target fights without PC

When they nerf fire to shit I am going to blame you, I remember people talking about this trick back in SoO as well.

It was a lot more severe in SoO. We could multiply our combustion by 4-5 in SoO, whereas here we increase it by 83% maximum.

I've been fiddling with it a bit more, and can get it working reliably now on the PTR, sadly playing with 200+ ms on ptr though due to being EU. It's definitely worth using if you're not running PC. With pc im not too sure.

Added a video to show how it looks on single target. Had a run where I got a 51K Combustion crit, but unfortunately I didn't record that.

When they nerf fire to shit I am going to blame you, I remember people talking about this trick back in SoO as well.

I don't think you understand what this is, because it is pretty different from what happened in SoO.

using crystal on single target my max combustion tick crits were 56k thus far. But Komma I am still unsure how you managed 44k ignites on multi target in the prev screenshot. How did Meteor help and when did you use it? did you make sure to hit just one mob with it?

Often getting better results by dumping one more pyro after 2x IB into it before combustion.