Fire Mage Combustion Tips Inferno Blast

[Mars 0]

First off a compliment on the excellent fire mage guide, you have found the balance between making it easy enough for new mages and complex enough to give experienced mages a good read.

Still after reading 4.3.1 the part about tips for combustion, you left me with a lot of questions. When you think about fire mage mechanics it would make sense that inferno blast as a skill would give less ignite than a fireball or pyroblast crit. The thing what im interested in, did you sim the difference between the three combinations you name in your guide? Is it at the point where you would consider changing your rotation. For example opening with inferno blast in the hope of getting a quick fireball pyroblast crit?(probably not though) or a pure fireball > fireball > pyroblast rotation. Or would you always go for the fireball (crit) > inferno blast > pyroblast (crit)>fireball (crit) >combustion?

[Damien 1,514]

Thank you for the nice feedback

To reply to your question, what I wrote in 4.3.1 is mostly speculative (although I wouldn't have written if I thought I'd be very far off). In Simulation Craft, you give the rotation as a priority list and I don't know how to specify something along the lines of "cast X if penultimate action was a crit with Y and antepenultimate action was a crit with Z". I actually don't think it's possible in Simulation Craft's current incarnation.

I wouldn't say that you should change your rotation for getting one of the combinations I mentioned. Compared to Cataclysm, you will get a lot more casts of Pyroblast and thanks to Critical Mass, you will also get a lot more critical strikes with it. What ultimately happens is that you can afford delaying Combustion for a few seconds, because, in the next 5 or 10 seconds, you will most likely get one of the combinations I mentioned. Remember that Inferno Blast as an 8-second cooldown, so you will not always be able to cast it to transform Heating Up into Pyroblast!, which opens the way for one of the other combinations.

[Panador 0]

As it's somewhat related to the topic I'll write here rather than start a new one.

Regarding the Stone Guard encounter:

We did it yesterday, beat it, and I was Fire on it (Invocation, rather than Incanter's, didn't feel comfortable enough predicting the best times to use the Ward with its 8second duration, and Living Bomb). Supposedly it's a Cleave-Warrior/Rogue etc. and Fire Mage's wet dream, 2 targets to damage all the time but ... I couldn't. The damn dogs stood too far apart for Inferno Blast to spread the dots (yes, while they were tanked by the same tank).

Very few times they aligned so that I could actually spread the dots, but that usually happened only after some "wiggling" of the tank.

Any tips for that? Don't wanna annoy our tanks too much with this, they had enough problems as it is with the various <Color>-Explosions etc. but I felt kinda useless the way it was. Actually considered switching to Frost, seeing as I couldn't benefit from Fire as I should have.

I'm going Fire, Frost rather than Fire, Arcane because they both focus around Crit or Haste respectively, with Mastery being the lowest priority, so I figure I'd be able to switch Crit and Haste reforges more easily, rather than completely switch around Mastery from lowest to highest priority. Haven't tried Frost in raids yet, so can't tell how good it is, did fine in heroics.

Edited October 4, 2012 by Panador

[BrightBrown 4]

I read that in patch 5.1 combustion will only take into account ignite dots and no others... something tells me that will change the equation quite a bit.