HELP embarrassingly low Fire mage deeps

[Druyouknew]

Hello Mage community. I first want to say I love this site and appreciate all the content contributors. The time and dedication put in is tremoundous and very helpful to plebs like me that enjoy the game and want to help their raid team more. That being said I need some help from you guys. I have a fire mage and it is my only class I play currently due to time restrictions. I am parsing embarrassingly low and don't know what I'm missing. We are a heroic raid guild that will be breaking into mythic next week. I wanted to see what I can do to improve my performance. I have tried nearly every build and every stat setup and can't seem to get it right. Here is my live logs from last night. If there is someone out there that can get me going in the right direction I would be grateful.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/thGCkn3BZfRTzMa9/

[Syana]

You seem to be favoring using Mirror Images a lot which leads to you stacking a lot haste. The issue with this is that the T20 set bonuses are pretty bad for a Mirror Image build, and works better with Incanters or Rune. That coupled with there almost always being something to cleave on to in ToS makes Incanters Flow the better option for bosses with cleave.
So I would maybe try adjusting your stat weights around the usage of Incanters Flow and then try running with that.

Also, there is no boss in ToS right now that I would ever consider running cinderstorm on so I highly recommend you avoid this talent for now. If you do want to up your performance on these cleave fights try upping your mastery a bit and rely more on your ignite to dish out that extra damage.

Also, from looking at your logs I feel like your pyroblast count is a bit on the low side for most fights. So, are you perhaps capping out on 3 fireblast charges and not being able to convert them into hot streaks? If this is the case, then maybe you should look into getting a bit more crit so you can more reliably use those charges and cap out.

[Druyouknew]

Syana,

Thank you very much for your help. I will make the adjustments you suggested and see how it goes in next weeks raid. The talent changes are easy enough and I will make a weak aura to track the fire blast charges that I may be letting sit at cap and causing me to use too few pyroblasts.

[Druyouknew]

I have another question. In my research to get better I have seen people mention "adjusting lag tolerance". Can someone explain this to me and how or if I should apply this to my personal situation.

[Syana]

It is something that used to be very important for frost mages, less so for fire, but can still be useful.

And basically it's a queuing system for your abilities to help the game feel more fluid when played at higher latency.
How this applies to a caster is that if you are casting a spell, when the cast time that is left on your spell is less than 0.4s you can queue up another one and it will be cast immediately after the first one has completed. 0.4s or 400ms being the default value set by blizzard.

If you don't find yourself accidentally casting the wrong spell a lot of the times, such as accidentally queueing up a fireball when you meant to cast an instant pyro, you would probably be better of not worrying about it.

However, if you do find that to be an issue you can adjust this value through a chat script/macro or through an addon such as AdvancedInterfaceOptions.
Generally what you would want to to is set this a little bit over your in-game latency. As an example, I usually have a latency of around 25ms so I've set mine to around 50ms because that is where I feel it works best for me. Beware that if you set this value too low, as in below your latency or even too close to it, it will actually have a negative impact on your dps.

[Druyouknew]

Thank you for the info! I have had some issues with this actually. I will get to a target dummy and play around with this some.

Big thanks to syana and the mage community as a whole for the tips content and willingness to help!!!