Splitting damage on shared-health bosses?

[Majoock]

Hi,

Long-time Fire Mage here. I was curious about a something on bosses that are spread out, but share a health pool (Dogs/Coven etc.)...

If you're in a position to be in range of both/all bosses, is it worth chucking an occasional Fireball or Pyroblast on the other target? My thinking is that it could help to have Ignite running on both targets, but that depends on a couple of things:

1. Do you lose damage by having two smaller Ignites on both targets, rather than one larger one on your primary target?

2. Does Phoenix Reborn have a set proc chance per second, or will the likelihood increase based on the number of targets Ignited? Would the potential gain from having more Phoenix's Flames during a fight offset the damage loss (if there is one) from point 1?

3. Is there any way to check this in a sim, rather than whacking target dummies?

Thanks in advance for the help!

[Julia]

Hi there Majoock
Hope this helps you out, if you have more questions feel free to join us on discord!

1. Yes, you loose damage if you do that. This is because ignite stacks and the dot of ignite becomes bigger and bigger the more you pump in. Swapping targets will make you loose a lot of damage from the exponential growth of the dot. If the targets are within range the ignite will automatically cleave and give you damage all around. (This range is 8 yards from model to model)

2. targets affected by ignite have a 10% chance per ignite tick to flare up and take 50% extra damage of the ignite tick and reduce the cooldown of phoenix flames by 10 seconds. This is a artifact trait called http://www.wowhead.com/spell=215773/phoenix-reborn

3. You can write custom APL's to test out different theories. So yes, it's possible to test this However, this particular case has already been tested.

[Dutchmagoz]

1. What Julia said is wrong. Ignite is simply a % of how much damage you did. If you have 20% mastery, then doing 100k dmg to target A, gives you 20k ignite. Doing 50k dmg to target A, and 50k dmg to target B, makes you do 10k damage per target, for a total of 20k. It doesn´t matter in what order, or both, or only one, you hit. The ignite damage is the same. The only way you lose ignite damage from target swapping is when targets die before ignite is done ticking.

2. Having ignite up on more targets will give you more phoenix reborn procs, so it's beneficial to have ignite up on as many targets as possible.

3. No, not currently.

I do advice you to only try to do optimizations like this if you are very confident and comfortable in the base rotation. It is easy to make a mistake when constantly swapping targets to keep ignite up on both of them. Good luck though!

[Julia]

As Dutch said,

I made a mistake when referring to the mastery of Fire.
I took the question up for discussion with the high parsing fire mages in the discord and it was clear that theoretically swapping targets on Coven is a damage increase. However, this increase was so minor that non of them bothered doing it as bosses would be tanked close enough for splitting ice and there for phoenix flames bounce between bosses and there for refresh the ignite dot as well to get your CDR on phoenix flames. One yard closer and the bosses would actually be in ignite range and I quote
"You would pop off when that happens"

Sorry for the mistake on the mastery workings, hope it didn't cause to much confusion