Monday, March 7, 2011

Tips for Fire Mages, volume 1.

(warning: lots of jargon and technical details ahead :)
Alright, so now we'll focus on the Mage side of things instead of the Paladin side.
Personally, I play Fire for raiding/dungeons/PvE, and Frost for PvP (like everyone else?). I've always loved Fire since Vanilla, but until recently it hasn't been viable for DPS. Arcane just took a solid lead during the Wrath era, so Fire just kind of got shoved to the wayside. Not so in Cataclysm. With patch 4.0.1 came immense changes to the core Fire mechanics, so much so that it became the de facto raiding spec come Cataclysm. We've become masters of on-the-move casting and DoT-throwing. With that in mind, here is a small batch of tips for those looking to make the switch from someone who considers themselves a pretty good Fire Mage.
First off. Always make sure you have your DoTs up. These include Living Bomb, Ignite (procs automatically as you cast), Living Bomb, Living Bomb, and of course, Living Bomb. Without these (this), your DPS is going to suffer immensely. Living Bomb is out bread and butter. Not only does it tick off a healthy chunk of damage every second, it explodes at the end of its duration and damages all enemies near the afflicted enemy. Not bad, if I had to say. This is key to the rest of our rotations.
Now about your spells. If you've spec'd right, you'll have Critical Mass maxed out, so we're going to toss a Scorch at first to throw the 5% crit chance debuff onto the mob. Then, we're going to Fireball til we run out of mana (or at least start to get low), throwing down an Impact-ed Fire Blast when we can.
The most important part is knowing when to use Combustion. If you're in a boss scenario, you always want to wait until you have the DoT from Pyroblast! (yes, with the exclamation point, this is the one that procs from Hot Streak, then throw down the Combustion. It not only does damage (negligible, but appreciated), but it totals all your DoTs, duplicates them and combines them, then ticks away for that amount of damage. It's a double-DoT that's capable of critting. It's probably the best thing to happen to fire mages since man discovered fire.

aaaand now we're out of the woods, because that's all for today. If you have any tips or things to add, let me know! Next post we'll talk about viable specs and glyphs. Until then!

12 comments:

  1. Looking forward to all the viable specs and glyphs I can get.

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  2. Thanks for the fire magi-tips :)

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  3. Damn there's a lot more in WoW tactics then I thought...

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  4. Reminds me of good old wow - days...

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  5. great post, you should really try rift!

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  6. Will try to keep this in mind

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  7. Heh, sure is a lot of emphasis on living bomb. Makes sense, though

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  8. Great tips, I love playing as a mage. Looking forward to more posts! Thanks for sharing :)

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  9. i was thinking of starting a fire mage myself.. it will help me a lot thanks.

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