Season of Discovery Fire Mage DPS Talents and Runes

This build maxes out all the Fire damage talents available, allowing you to maximize your damage with powerful talents like Ignite, Fire Power, Critical Mass, and the capstone Combustion.

You can also now talent into Elemental Precision, Ice Shards, and Frost Channeling for added damage and Mana sustain. Keep in mind that getting full benefit out of Shards requires you to focus on using Frostfire Bolt and Balefire Bolt rather than regular Fireball and Scorch pure Fire spells.

A great thing about Fire talents is that they will work just as well for area damage as they do for single target, provided you adjust your pants rune between fights, and even with the single target setup you will have high cleave from Living Bomb explosions.

• Gloves — Living Bomb
• Pants — Icy Veins (ST) or Living Flame (AoE)
• Chest — Enlightenment
• Waist — Frostfire Bolt
• Feet — Spell Power
• Head — Hot Streak
• Wrist — Balefire Bolt
• Back — Overheat
• Ring — Fire Specialization
• Ring — Frost Specialization

Fire has straightforward Runes; all of them contribute towards making Frostfire Bolt hit as hard as possible, as quickly as possible. Thus, Burnout is an important enabler for more critical strikes and Spell Power makes those even bigger.

For AoE damage, Living Flame and Living Bomb are easy picks, although you will want to swap Living Flame to Icy Veins for single target fights.

Hot Streak and Overheat provide a reliable way to throw some instant Pyroblasts and the ring runes take care of most of your Spell Hit requirements by themselves.

Make sure to check our Mage Rune guide in order to learn where to get all the SoD runes!

The fire tree is full of utility goodies for Mages, including powerful damage boosting talents at the end of the tree.

Ignite allows your critical strikes to create a damage over time effect on the target for 40% extra damage over 4 seconds. This damage over time effect has its duration reset and grows for each additional critical strike landed while it is active.

Improved Scorch allows Scorch to stack up a debuff that increases enemy damage taken from your Fire spells. While this is a powerful effect, it takes time to stack. Make sure you focus on applying it first when fighting long-lived enemies, and never allow it to drop off during the fight.

Blast Wave is both a powerful AoE damage spell, and a crowd control tool due to its 50% slow for 6 seconds to anyone hit. Use it when kiting, and to open up a fight, especially against multiple opponents.

Combustion is a powerful 3-minute cooldown that causes your critical strike chance with Fire spells to increase by 10% (stacking) for each of your Fire spell hits, lasting until you caused 3 critical strikes with Fire spells. Use it for bursting down enrage phases or whenever all of your other cooldowns and trinkets are also available.

From the Frost tree, you will want Ice Shards for extra critical strike damage with Frostfire Bolt and Elemental Precision for extra hit chance with most of your damage spells.