Ever a point where Scorch > Fireball?

[karkooshy]

So I've been goofing around on the Timless Isle now that I have my cloak. Mainly abusing it in World PvP . And I got super lucky with the Chi-Ji buff: http://www.wowhead.com/spell=147283/chi-jis-hope" target="_blank

In my "World PvP" set (mostly Prideful items + Cloak + T16 nm 4 set), that translated into about 65% Crit, and 45% haste. Give or take. I was completely devastating other players with just Scorch spamming and using Pyro on proc. I decided to have a go at the Celestials... and I was actually dealing some decent DPS (all the while PvPing at the same time).

Because of this I was wondering, since I don't do any theorycrafting: is there a statistical point where using Scorch instead of Fireball as a filler spell might be a DPS gain (or not too much of a DPS loss)? What would the ideal stats (via gems and reforging mainly) be for a Scorch Fire spec? I'm tempted to start ignoring socket bonuses and just go full crit gems... since Scorch is a short cast already?

I ask this because the reason I dislike Fire, even with the copious amounts of Crit I can farm for it, is that I also need to farm a lot of haste to make it "feel smooth"; for me at least. And I've never been lucky with those perfect Crit/Haste item. All in all, I dislike my filler spells over the 1.5 sec cast time mark... and the Fireball animation is just ugly to be perfectly honest :I... not to mention Scorch while moving just feels right...

Besides the damage, I'd also imagine the rotation might be slightly different? Since the rotation depends on waiting for Heating Up to stack with Pyroblast! and then firing the Pyroblast while a Fireball is in the air. Since Scorch doesn't have a travel time, I'm guessing this would need to be altered somehow?

Thanks for reading! Interested in any opinion/responses. Especially if they involve any sort of theorycrafting :L

[Spirillum]

Scorch can be better than Fireball in a number of situations, but as an overarching replacement imo it doesn't stand up. The idea was that using Scorch could generate more Pyroblasts over an encounter and this would offset the lower damage from using Scorch over Fireball in the first place. If you're prescribing to this school of thought, Scorch would replace Fireball in your rotation entirely.

If not, the main differences between the two abilities illustrates when you would use one over the other:
- Scorch has no travel time, so depending on your target's health, your range, and the urgency with which you do damage to your target it may be prudent to use over Fireball
- Scorch can be cast while moving. With PoM being essentially mandatory for PVE fire mages, it replaces Fireball when you need a filler while moving
- Scorch has a lower cast time than Fireball. If your Pyroblast DoT has fallen off or your trinkets have proc'd and you're trying to get a HS/HU you can get them faster using Scorch over Fireball to fish for crits.
- Scorch has a lower DPET than Fireball, so only use it when it makes sense to do so

[Komma]

The issue with Scorch is that with our levels of gear and the legendary meta gem, it GCD caps far too often. In sims, scorch falls behind even with perfect play. You gain a decent amount of pyroblasts (~8%) but it only recovers part of the DPET lost from using scorch over fireball. That said, Chinese mages dominantly prefer ultra-low haste (~5-7Kish) scorch-fire builds. I've often theorized that this is due to ease of use and other factors, which explains their preference and perceived better performance with it.

[Freshpepper]

This may be slightly off topic, but why do the top parsing Chinese players always use some extravagant build like a 5k haste fire mage or a pure haste arcane mage or something like that? I've heard that they get extra gear upgrades which would effect their playstyle, but I've never actually had that confirmed.

[Wilderness]

I don't know about what builds they use or why, but they do have extra gear upgrades - I believe they have 2 more upgrades than we do. So they are able to get to 6/6 whereas we're capped at 4/4.

[Hotpots]

I'm gonna experiment on my 583 alt mage and see how it goes:

- Use scorch as my main filler.
- Use fireball during bloodlust/meta.

I'll see how it goes then return the results. I tried it last week and got decent-ish results with fights I got Imm on the pull, will give it a few more weeks though before I make the decision to stick with the standard rotation or stick with this badboy.

Results worth showing:

Protectors - http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/NBk ... amage-done" target="_blank

Shamans - http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/yQH ... amage-done" target="_blank

Nazgrim - http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/apL ... amage-done" target="_blank

[Rastlin]

So, I don't have any logs to show the results as I was just playing around on the target dummy in stormwind when I saw this. At my current stats (8698 haste, 15387 crit, 6522 mastery) I wasn't able to see much difference between using scorch as a filler and fireball. I didn't pop Time Warp, but even with the legendary meta proc'd my scorch never went below 1.25 cast time.

There was a major thing about this though. At any decent level of latency you have a MUCH harder time casting the inferno blast auto crit if you're spamming scorch. As there's no travel time like there is for fireball/pyroblast there's no small delay in which you can place that inferno blast. I was however causing pyro chains, as my spells were critting about 60% of the time on average.


For old time sake, there was a point in WotLK where if you were fire scorch DID preform better than fireball. Since spirit = crit due to the molten armor you could stack insane amounts of it and I remember running around ICC just spamming scorch, increasing my dps roughly 5-6% on non-movement fights. You can imagine how much it would go up on very movement intensive fights.

[Komma]

So, I don't have any logs to show the results as I was just playing around on the target dummy in stormwind when I saw this. At my current stats (8698 haste, 15387 crit, 6522 mastery) I wasn't able to see much difference between using scorch as a filler and fireball. I didn't pop Time Warp, but even with the legendary meta proc'd my scorch never went below 1.25 cast time.

Legendary meta proc : 1.3 spell haste multiplier.
Scorch : 1.5 sec base cast.
Scorch with zero haste rating, no raid haste buff, no time warp, just meta proc : ( 1.5 / 1.3 ) = 1.154 seconds.

8498 haste rating = 20.466% haste.
Scorch with no buffs but just 8498 gear haste : (1.5 / 1.20466) ~= 1.245 seconds.

I can't help but feel that you might have made some errors with your testing.

For old time sake, there was a point in WotLK where if you were fire scorch DID preform better than fireball. Since spirit = crit due to the molten armor you could stack insane amounts of it and I remember running around ICC just spamming scorch, increasing my dps roughly 5-6% on non-movement fights. You can imagine how much it would go up on very movement intensive fights.

Scorch being castable on the move was an addition in MoP, if I remember correctly.

[Rastlin]

Scorch being castable on the move was an addition in MoP, if I remember correctly.

Actually it was prior. Even if my memory is a little fuzzy (WotLK was quite a few years ago), http://freecode.hu/wowtal/eng/?MG" target="_blank shows the talent trees as they were in Cata, with the fourth tier right hand side talent called Fire Starter allowing Scorch to be cast while moving.
Edit: Now that I think about it, it wasn't movement scorch that was a big deal, it was the 5 stack debuff that was required to be stacked on the boss, thus requiring scorch weaving into the rotation. The shorter cast time made it easier to move and keep the stack up and thus provided a higher net dps on movement heavy fights. Either way it was what, like 4 years ago? That was mostly just a "Remember when" addition to the post.

I'm not currently able to double check the numbers for the cast time of the spells, but I'll be sure to do so, after all false information isn't good. Especially if it's given accidentally.
Edit: .93 would be the accurate cast time. That includes the meta proc as well as a 3 stack of the 2 set bonus, sadly I've noticed it higher than 3 stacks, but I can't say it hasn't happened at some point without my notice.

[karkooshy]

Yes, Scorch was made to be useable while on the move with the introduction of Cataclysm.Thanks for the testing either way! I will be trying this out this week... or the next... depending on how lucky I am with Crit pieces. Not very highly geared (and loads of Haste-Mastery gear), but will see how this performs in the 560-570ilvl range.

And yes, I did expect the rotation might be awkward to pull off without travel times, but practice makes perfect I guess On a side note:

That said, Chinese mages dominantly prefer ultra-low haste (~5-7Kish) scorch-fire builds. I've often theorized that this is due to ease of use and other factors, which explains their preference and perceived better performance with it.

Do they then stack Crit-Mastery? Also, I'm assuming this is just me lacking a lot of common sense, but I can't for the life of me navigate the Chinese armory. Could you perhaps link a Mage on there that uses such a build? Thanks in advance.

[Komma]

Do they then stack Crit-Mastery? Also, I'm assuming this is just me lacking a lot of common sense, but I can't for the life of me navigate the Chinese armory. Could you perhaps link a Mage on there that uses such a build? Thanks in advance.

Yes, they go crit-mastery and ignore haste in the same way that frost and arcane mages ignore crit.

596 mage with 4915 haste: http://tw.battle.net/wow/zh/character/% ... E/advanced" target="_blank

594 mage with 5550 haste:
http://www.battlenet.com.cn/wow/zh/char ... D/advanced" target="_blank

[Sky]

Do you think it would ever be viable in our ilvls? I'm still missing 2 pieces from full BiS but I'd be interested to try it out just for fun anyway - if it's close to being viable in our gear levels that is. I think someone mentioned in the Arcane Thread that Mojah was trying it out?

[Wilderness]

Yeah, that was me that mentioned it as I noticed when I look at Vatti's logs.

He's been running it for a while, I looked back through at least a few weeks of it. Its certainly viable, but as someone else who responded in that thread mentioned, gear and kill times (and very good play obviously, not taking away from that) have a lot to do with rankings. However, there was often another fire mage in the logs I looked at using a normal fireball rotation and he was pretty better or even. He might just be a better player - there are a lot of reasons outside of scorch vs fireball (Mojah looks to be just slightly more geared but only by a couple of pieces so its not huge), but it was pretty consistent.

It seems that the common thought is to use FB during meta or lust, but he doesn't seem to do that most of the time from what I saw - there was rarely any FB's cast at all. I wonder what sort of haste he normally runs with - his armory currently has him at 10% hit so I assume that's not his normal stats.

I played around with it on target dummy for a bit yesterday, but it felt kind of awkward. Part of it was just being used to my scorch being much faster normally since I was down at 5.5k haste as opposed to the 12.5k I generally run with. But the other issue I ran into was the best way to handle when you are fishing for a HU proc when you already have a HS ready to go. You want to have another scorch queued up to go if you don't get the HU and you still have time before 2 piece falls off, but if it does proc you may end up munching a HS. I tried using a /stopcast macro for Pyro but that didn't go well with queueing up your Pyro at the end of casts. I only played with it for about 10 mins or so because we had a raid coming up (and I reforged it all back to normal for raid as I wasn't comfortable enough with it) so it may just be something that more practice would get me more used to it and better able to react. It was interesting though, the whole thing just felt very different from the usual rotation for whatever reason. I'll be missing most of our raid this week due to going out of town, but the week after that I'll probably give it a shot since I'll have had plenty of time to practice.

[Sky]

@Wilderness:

Hmm, interesting. I like the idea of using Scorch just for the movement benefit but if I need to do an emergency interrupt or something I like being able to move to stop my cast instead of hitting escape. :<

What kind of cast time was your scorch playing at those low levels of haste?

Re: Fireball during BL - yes, I thought one would've done that too but I suppose it also depends on just how slow your Scorch is casting with that kind of haste. Even so by Komma's math above with 0 raid haste + 0 haste rating + BL, Scorch cast time is 1.154 seconds which sounds rather quick, and it sounds like he would be GCD capping during BL.

How many Fireball casts is he doing over the course of a fight? Under 20? Under 10? I just checked his armory and atm he is running with 7235 haste, but that seems a little high for a scorch build. I think I saw him post on the forums a while ago so hopefully he comes back soon and provides some explanations for his gearing/rotation choice!

[Wilderness]

Most fights I looked at he wasn't casting FB at all, or maybe a few times but that was it. It does look like his armory is correct since he's at 15% hit now. I don't think he can drop his haste any lower - he's reforged out of haste on every piece that has it. I'd roll a lvl 1 to ask Mojah more about how he plays with it, particularly how he handles the no travel time when fishing for HU proc with HS already up, but I'm not EU.

I don't recall my exact cast time when testing with 5.5k haste, but it should have been about 1.3 seconds. With that amount of haste either hero or meta should put you at about a 1 second cast, but both together would drop you well below 1s.

It was kind of weird not to be able to quickly sidestep to stop a cast, and hitting esc if you really needed to stop it is awkward. I'll play around with it in the flex run we do with alts and friends, but I'll be missing most/all of our raid this week so that's about all I can do.

[Sky]

Cool, let me know how it goes. Really interested to see how you find it. I really want to try it out but going into the WoD roster cut I'm also wanting to play it a bit safer/comfortable for longer. I would try Flex/LFR but a) they're death b) kill times tend to be slooooow, and I don't think that would return anything promising other than just getting a feel for it.

Maybe he still frequents here, I'll send him a PM when I get a chance. Pre sure his user is Mojah if you're interested too.

[Dutchmagoz]

Wasn't really going to reply, since all my results are anecdotal, but I'll do it anyway:

Scorch pros:
- More pyroblasts.
- Higher 2pc uptime/stacks. (adding even more pyros)
- Fluid playstyle, never have to interrupt a cast to move, very fast playstyle.
- Can go lower haste than with fireball, while still keeping fast casts and able to keep 2pc up.

Scorch cons:
- Lower DPET than fireball.
- Can be harder to pyro camp with, due to short cast time.
- It sims lower than fireball.
- Lower ignites than fireball, making cleaving theoretically worse. Obviously more pyros = higher ignite again, but my average ignites with scorching are lower than with fireball.

My experience:
- Keeping 2pc up is very easy, even when I dropped to like 8k haste.
- Results were kinda bad. I wasn't getting the same numbers I got with fireball. The obvious issue here is: Very small sample size, and any type of RNG or bad/good play will swing it to either fireball or scorch's favour.

I finally obtained BBoY (1 year of garrosh heroic farming, only now I got it, hooray), so I don't really want to expirement with scorch this reset, since I want to try fireball with BBoY first, but I'll try it out next reset, and see what results I get that time.

[Sky]

Is it at all possible to drop down to ~5500 haste or something similar to what the Chinese mages are using?

[Wilderness]

In what I think is commonly accepted as Fire;s BiS you can't drop that low. You can drop that low if you swap in the hit/mastery ring for thok's and the hit/crit bracers though. I can get mine that low just through reforging as I don't have the ideal BiS set-up.

[Figdan]

i tried it tonight, had decent results.

logs here http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/vm8VrD7FyNAzPpcY

improved on some stuff, particulary on sha, siegecrafter, and dark shaman before i died (940k or so with boss at 15%ish)

i can do better, i had a lot of bad play where i switched back to fireball out of habbit. the raid as a whole did a lot of dumb stuff as well.

i ran 6.7k haste and 13.4k mastery
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/t ... dan/simple" target="_blank