[7.3.5] Fire Mage Compendium, by Ezekielyo

[ezekielyo]

Yo Eze. Amazing job as always.
The only thing i feel is missing is the new Fire shoulders isn't on the list of legendaries for ST/AoE and it would be nice with some trinket sims for ToS.
Keep up the good work <3

Thanks bro!

I'll be adding more sections and legendaries do have a dedicated one with new trinkets and how to use them in another. I don't work directly with the sims so don't display them here as I want to keep this specifically a playstyle guide not full of numbers which will be added in other posts from the sim guys.

That being said, I'll update the fire shoulders and ring into the current legendary rankings asap.

[Lahrast]

here's something funny about the new legy ring - it sims (when taking CB) exactly as high as koralon's... hm (for me). thats without any t20 bonus or owl trinket just plain old t19 stuff (albeit mastery heavy with rune+bracer) at 900k ST dps.

tried it yesterday in m+ for a while, CB plays somewhat weird but once you got a hold over the sporadic "wtf why do i have a pb-proc already?"-moment you start to miss it when you don't have it

edit: also kindling sims ~6k higher than meteor.. this is with WitD, i sim slightly lower with metronome instead of WitD (both with arcano..., hands down best trinket >.<) but that's a sacrifice i'm willing to make, already enough random in this spec with CB ;D

[jimme]

I'm playing fire on Fallen Avatar.

Can someone explain to me why "firestarter" is such a popular talent on warcraftlogs. It seems very lucklster to me unless i'm missing something.

Grats, you did shittons of damage for the first 15 sec of the fight and for the first "attack maiden phase".

[Devlonir]

I'm playing fire on Fallen Avatar.

Can someone explain to me why "firestarter" is such a popular talent on warcraftlogs. It seems very lucklster to me unless i'm missing something.

Grats, you did shittons of damage for the first 15 sec of the fight and for the first "attack maiden phase".

It is very popular in Mythic because of the higher health pools meaning you benefit of it a lot longer. Below Mythic it becomes less and less good because you simply have a lot less benefit.

Example; Mythic Krosus. The first 10% usually takes about 15-20 seconds depending on the raid's DPS, and only after that you use your combustion. Meaning your first combustion is effectively 30+ seconds long. This causes a huge initial damage spike and huge ignite which spikes damage so high initially that in the total fight you eventually do good damage as well.

But below Mythic, it is often quite lackluster in my opinion.

[jetbrains]

I'm playing fire on Fallen Avatar.

Can someone explain to me why "firestarter" is such a popular talent on warcraftlogs. It seems very lucklster to me unless i'm missing something.

Grats, you did shittons of damage for the first 15 sec of the fight and for the first "attack maiden phase".

more crits => higher chance for bracers proc => combust with bracers proc cast

[Delandel]

I'm still confused on when to spec Cinderstorm. It seems like the places where you'd expect people to use it, like M+ and AOE-heavy fights like Mistress, nobody actually uses it. I check warcraftlogs and for AOE fights/dungeons people are running Kindling instead.

I also rarely see Living Bomb used anymore. It seems like Flame Patch is just the default for most things.

Finally, no idea about whether or not to use Flamestrike during the Combustion rotation. I was told to use Pyro instead even in AOE + Flame Patch taken, but that just sounds wrong? I dunno.

These are small things in the long run, but I wish there was math updated for 7.2.5 explaining it.

[Vouxility]

I'm still confused on when to spec Cinderstorm. It seems like the places where you'd expect people to use it, like M+ and AOE-heavy fights like Mistress, nobody actually uses it. I check warcraftlogs and for AOE fights/dungeons people are running Kindling instead.

I also rarely see Living Bomb used anymore. It seems like Flame Patch is just the default for most things.

Cinderstorm was "just" good on a fight like Skorpyron cause there are tons of adds (if u tank it at the hole)
u dont got that much adds at mistress so its not as good as the skorpyron fight.

lb is rarely used cause of the combination Koralon's Burning Touch and flame patch, then gain from belt below 30% perma flamestrike spam is better than the lb dmg with the add sizes at tos.

[Uzeless]

Again thank you for the amazing work!
May I ask what's your opinion on the arcane relic from KJ? 4 extra seconds on combustion. How does it par against the other relics

[Pluckles]

It's not an extra 4 seconds. 4 seconds is what you get from 4 points into that combustion trait. That relic would only give an extra second to make the total combustion time to 15 seconds.

[Dunkaholic]

First time posting, sorry if I miss anything that might be in another thread.

But I'm not sure when to use my bracer proc? (Only legendary I've gotten and it was BIS fuck yeah!)

Do I use it at the tail end of combustion timer? Or when I'm not in combustion just whenever I want?

Also why no Rune of Power with bracers? Seems like it would be super strong.

Thanks for your content!

[Toriankel]

@Dunkaholic You use bracers whenever they proc, and especially when you're in combustion. You'll ideally want to use combustion after you've proced bracers with firestarter, it's the best dps boost you can get. On paper, RoP is pretty good with bracers, but in reality damage gain is insignificant compared to fire and forget Images, or the even simpler IF. You will ideally want to use RoP with combustion on add heavy fights, but as these don't really exist in ToS, stick with either IF / MI

[Devlonir]

@Dunkaholic @Toriankel

To add a little bit to what Toriankel said.. you want to use your bracer proc during combustion when the spell will be finished before the end of your combustion. This depends entirely on your Haste of course, but this is something to look out for.

Outside of combustion, use the bracer proc whenever it is available.

[Eyliria]

I'm playing fire on Fallen Avatar.

Can someone explain to me why "firestarter" is such a popular talent on warcraftlogs. It seems very lucklster to me unless i'm missing something.

Grats, you did shittons of damage for the first 15 sec of the fight and for the first "attack maiden phase".

I used to be on the same boat as you, and could never understand why people used Firestarter until I tried it out myself.

Think of Firestarter as essentially a tad weaker Combustion. Every Fireball and every Pyroblast will crit. So your opener and first few seconds of the fight look a bit like this:

Fireball + PF => Pyro + FB => Fireball + Pyro => Fireball + Pyro => Pyro + FB => ...

Essentially you're getting a Pyroblast every other cast, using 1 charge from Phoenix Flames and having 1 charge of Fireblast on CD (it serves us no purpose to not have those CDs replenishing) for extra proccage.

Not to mention, you're likely to get bracer procs that will crit... and if things align well enough for you, you'll get a bracer proc around the 91-92% mark, which you can then start casting, hit combustion at the tail end of the cast and go into a full blown combustion burn.

Assuming the first 10% of the boss took ~15 seconds or so (varies on difficulty and your guild's DPS performance), and our new longer combustion (14seconds at least) and you just had half a minute worth of guaranteed crits on our most potent spells.

Also, I may be wrong here, but, I'm fairly sure Mirror Images also benefit from Firestarter (at least my images tend to have 70ish% crit at the end of the fight -- with my crit rate being 44% on the sheet), and that's a huge boom for your opener as well, seeing as how firestarter+combustion will effectively mean your first MI gets nearly 100% crit rate on their spells.

This opener will put you up there with the burstiest classes and will carry you through until the next combustion burn.

It's also, as you correctly pointed out, a great asset on a fight like Fallen Avatar where you're likely to get two rounds of firestarter, one on Avatar, one on the Maiden.

tl;dr -- Firestarter is something that isn't intuitive to a lot of people, it wasn't for me. But once you play around with it, you'll miss it on the fights where conflag is the better choice.

[WhiteVulpine]

Please change the font of the headers. I can barely read that.

[CaliFireMage]

To add the comment of MI/IF above, I have found in TOS IF is simming now literally with a single percentage point of MI and way ahead of ROP for me but in practice is doing vastly better than both options likely secondary to the passive nature of the bonus that I cant screw up. Im not sure if the simulation is lining MI up with pot buffs perfectly or what (smarter people can probably answer this) but IF is now my go to talent in this row and from WOWlogs seems to be the new coolness of many top end DPS beasts.

[Lavok]

To add the comment of MI/IF above, I have found in TOS IF is simming now literally with a single percentage point of MI and way ahead of ROP for me but in practice is doing vastly better than both options likely secondary to the passive nature of the bonus that I cant screw up. Im not sure if the simulation is lining MI up with pot buffs perfectly or what (smarter people can probably answer this) but IF is now my go to talent in this row and from WOWlogs seems to be the new coolness of many top end DPS beasts.

I'm not sure if it was resolved yet, but if I recall right, earlier during the expansion MI had some wierd issues with dynamically updating its stats, which lead to lower than expected damage in game.

[FunnyGuy]

Hey Ezekielyo,

you saying you use on very high fortified keys (25+) kindling and gloves to have combustion for almost every pack.

I assume you use for trash packs helm and hands and for bosses then bracers and belt right?

And during that combustion do you only use pyroblast to kill priority adds and do you use flamestrike at all?

And my last and most important question

What about tyrannical ? do you use the same setup ? i mean like 25+ tyrannical
or should you play frost then?

thank you

[ezekielyo]

Hey Ezekielyo,

Hi! The old 24/25 is now roughly 19/20 so i'll use the new format to answer your questions.

you saying you use on very high fortified keys (25+) kindling and gloves to have combustion for almost every pack.

I assume you use for trash packs helm and hands and for bosses then bracers and belt right?

This is exactly what I do, yes.

And during that combustion do you only use pyroblast to kill priority adds and do you use flamestrike at all?

Depends on the pack. If there are PT that MUST die then I will use HS on pyroblast instead of flamestrike. If not, I'll flamestrike away.

And my last and most important question

What about tyrannical ? do you use the same setup ? i mean like 25+ tyrannical
or should you play frost then?

I probably should play frost but my fire gear set + skill set are both greater than my frost so I tend to stick to fire anyway since at that level, the issue isn't beating the timer, it's surviving the mechanics. I'm better at surviving in fire so I stick to what i'm good at

[Cope]

Hey Ezekielyo; I wanted to bring up something I've noticed in sims and practice lately.

I've noticed since acquiring the t20 4 piece that IF is becoming more and more desirable over MI for most of the ST fights in tomb. Based on how the t20 4pc bonus works it seems that the passive damage provided from IF is starting to outshine MI; and we're seeing in mythic Tomb that IF is the go-to talent for almost all fire mages. Was wondering why IF hasn't been brought up as much in discussion since its looking to be the top talent for us as we continue in Tomb. Also is pretty juicy getting those 5.6 mil pyro crits on a 5 stack IF bracer proc.

Just wondering if you or anyone else has picked up on this trend.

[CaliFireMage]

Hey Ezekielyo; I wanted to bring up something I've noticed in sims and practice lately.

I've noticed since acquiring the t20 4 piece that IF is becoming more and more desirable over MI for most of the ST fights in tomb. Based on how the t20 4pc bonus works it seems that the passive damage provided from IF is starting to outshine MI; and we're seeing in mythic Tomb that IF is the go-to talent for almost all fire mages. Was wondering why IF hasn't been brought up as much in discussion since its looking to be the top talent for us as we continue in Tomb. Also is pretty juicy getting those 5.6 mil pyro crits on a 5 stack IF bracer proc.

Just wondering if you or anyone else has picked up on this trend.

Yes! I just got my 4pc T20 and MI is now either dead even with IF or outright worse than IF depending on how I gear. Prior it was 10K difference in favor of MI.