Still worth going fire?

[MichaelTheys 10]

Since today (EU) blizzard putted a hotfix in for Fire mages and they reduced the damage over time from combustion by 50%. And they reduced the crit multiplayer from 1.5 to 1.25. So you after all this is it really still worth going for fire? or does it turns out frost or arcane seems more suitable to go with?

[Riko 0]

I would say not at the moment as the fun has just been sucked out of the spec. I agree that we probably needed the nerf but the change to critical mass makes the rotation very slow and boring and you find you are hitting fireball nearly all the time.

Add this to the fact that dps has been dropped by about 20% (on a quick normal clear of MV) and I will be going frost except where multi-targets

[Stasis 36]

I, for one, will be keeping an interested eye on raidbots to see what effect it'll have. Certainly can't deny that Fire was OP... a little surprised they nerfed it though.

http://raidbots.com/dpsbot/Overall_DPS/25N/100/14/60/default/

Edited December 1, 2012 by Stasis

[MichaelTheys 10]

I, for one, will be keeping an interested eye on raidbots to see what effect it'll have. Certainly can't deny that Fire was OP... a little surprised they nerfed it though.

http://raidbots.com/.../14/60/default/

well not suprised they nerfed it but yust suprised it's so badly nerfed

[Xing 1]

According to Raidbots Fire's DPS isn't exactly suffering post 5.1 so where's the complaints coming from here?

[midgettoes 6]

According to Raidbots Fire's DPS isn't exactly suffering post 5.1 so where's the complaints coming from here?

Raidbots also probably doesn't get a whole lot of parses since the hotfix went in yet as most guilds clear farm content on Wed/Thurs.

But the complaints are coming from the 50% nerf to combustion periodic damage obviously... But people seem to be neglecting something very key.

The nerf came AFTER blizzard changed Combustion to rely solely on ignite. I am really struggling to find some numbers on how they changed the scaling (and if someone has them I would LOVE them to share them with me), but it seems since the pyroblast component was removed, and the ignite portion scaled up, combustion actually got buffed in 5.1 original patch notes. To fix this they hotfix nerfed it by 50%. It sounds potentially very reasonable to me. I would wait a week or so and check raidbots again and see what the numbers are looking like then.

Also regarding Critical Mass, Ghostwalker actually said this was a scaling issue. Mages are already having a high level of crit and they were worried about crit just getting out of control at future content releases, and so thought tweaking it now rather than in a patch or two time would be a better option to let people adjust.

Hope this doesn't discourage me fellow pyromaniacs too much ;) I'm certainly still giving fire a go this week!

[shrepto 0]

I've really never been into fire. I know it had great aoe potential, especially on a fight like LFR stone guard when you could clump all 3 dogs together and roll your ignite through all three.

However, I don't feel that frost really struggles behind. I've seen very few frost mages actually play at the level I do, hence why there probably is such a short following. Not saying I'm the best, but my rotation is pretty much 99% perfect.

The real kicker comes with frost's mobility. Most every fight requires you to be mobifle, and unlike arcane and fire, frost can keep mobile and maintain high dps. Fire you can stay decent on the move but your only real instant casts are going to be POM PYRO, PYROBLAST!, Inferno Blast, Living Bomb, and Combustion. Now let's be honest, that may seem like a lot, but inferno blast has a decent cooldown to it, and you're not likely to cast those back to back when moving requires more than 1 gcd. Frost on the other hand is great for moving. POM isn't really a big factor in dps, it barely saves you time casting, so I've scratched that for 2 oln the move spell casts. I have a guaranteed frostfire bolt when my bomb blows up, and I can sit on that till my next bomb is about to. Frost also allows you to stack two ice lances, which is perfect for stutter stepping on fights like garralon when you need to be under the legs. Frozen orb is a gauranteed two gcds for movement since as soon as it hits it gives ice lance (Score).

While you can't always predict frost's procs, they're more likely to be there and you aren't inclined to use them right away. The biggest lost to dps is to not be dps'ing, and with frost I don't have that issue.

[midgettoes 6]

I've really never been into fire. I know it had great aoe potential, especially on a fight like LFR stone guard when you could clump all 3 dogs together and roll your ignite through all three.

However, I don't feel that frost really struggles behind. I've seen very few frost mages actually play at the level I do, hence why there probably is such a short following. Not saying I'm the best, but my rotation is pretty much 99% perfect.

The real kicker comes with frost's mobility. Most every fight requires you to be mobifle, and unlike arcane and fire, frost can keep mobile and maintain high dps. Fire you can stay decent on the move but your only real instant casts are going to be POM PYRO, PYROBLAST!, Inferno Blast, Living Bomb, and Combustion. Now let's be honest, that may seem like a lot, but inferno blast has a decent cooldown to it, and you're not likely to cast those back to back when moving requires more than 1 gcd. Frost on the other hand is great for moving. POM isn't really a big factor in dps, it barely saves you time casting, so I've scratched that for 2 oln the move spell casts. I have a guaranteed frostfire bolt when my bomb blows up, and I can sit on that till my next bomb is about to. Frost also allows you to stack two ice lances, which is perfect for stutter stepping on fights like garralon when you need to be under the legs. Frozen orb is a gauranteed two gcds for movement since as soon as it hits it gives ice lance (Score).

While you can't always predict frost's procs, they're more likely to be there and you aren't inclined to use them right away. The biggest lost to dps is to not be dps'ing, and with frost I don't have that issue.

Frost is great, no doubt! I think all 3 mage specs are going to be competitive with the fire tweak down, and arcane majorly on the rise. But I have to disagree about the mobility comment to some extent.

I think the biggest issue I noted with you post was the fact that you are talking about fights with predictable mobility (Garalon? Or maybe Spirit Kings?) and you are saying fire should be using POM over Scorch! Scorch can proc Heating Up! Which in turn can be used to proc Pyroblast! on the run (with Inferno Blast). Also, most fire mages stick with Living Bomb, which can obviously be recast on the move.

I would argue frost and fire are very similar in terms of mobility, and if you are only needing to stutter step it is easy to predict the movement and do this (ie, notice you are near the edge of Garalon leg's cricle as LB has 3 seconds left, refresh and move forward in GCD. OR Heating Up! procs and you notice you are getting off centre, stutter step as you cast Inferno Blast, etc.). And for longer movement (eg avoid flanking order in Spirit Kings), use 1-2 scorches to get out of the way, then resume normal rotation (NB: It is a DPS LOSS to use blink over scorch! For blink you use one GCD to get out, while doing 0 damage. With scorch, you use one GCD while running out AND get to deal damage!).

But, as I said initially, if frost is making you happy, by all means stick to it! It does offer a nice change up.

[Dannemmar 0]

The real kicker comes with frost's mobility. Most every fight requires you to be mobifle, and unlike arcane and fire, frost can keep mobile and maintain high dps.

Frost has good DPS on the move if you have to move for a couple of spell. Spamming ice lace without the proc isn't such a good dps

BTW it looks like we have to give a second look at arcane

http://raidbots.com/dpsbot/Overall_DPS/10N/all/7/60/default/#7

Fire is still on the top if u look at top100 but i think that for fire top 100 = top luck on procs. You can have 10k dps difference on the same fight with the same gear with fire

[Deathsblaze 0]

This is coming from an old school gamer but I think that the nerfs really did take the perverbial baseball to the knees for a spec that relies on procs. For some reason people on my server are looking at my mage like its the plague right now and that really just butchers my raid attempts. So my advice would be to avoid fire and respec to arcane and then send a nasty gram to the blizzard dev team to quit creating the flavor of the month for specs on toons......

[Sagetastic 20]

quit creating the flavor of the month for specs on toons......

This isn't possible. If you've been playing as long as you say then you know the FOTM will constantly transition as time progresses.

If you're loyal to a class, like I am to my mage, it is all the more annoying. I loved how fire was, but it did feel strong. Not strong enough to justify being broken nearly in half though.

Surely they will alter the changes, as they always have in this type of situation. Wouldn't expect to see a 1.5x modifier again though.

And now I feel like an idiot for not checking to see if they ever changed it, but I guess 50% reduced combustion damage is what we would have to trade to keep the 1.5x modifier.

The damage is surely crippled still, but at least maybe still in the field of competitive.

Test it yourself, imo. If you like the numbers then run with them.

~Sage

Edited December 22, 2012 by Sagetastic