Altered Time - your #1 World of Warcraft Mage resource!

how much of a buff will fire mages get ?

They got a 6% overall damage increase and Flame Strike got buffed by 15%.
https://www.wowhead.com/news=286999/upc ... id-release

hopefully this we be good enough to compete in mythic .

would love to see the pyroclasm talent included in the passive buffs and bring back the cinder talent to replace it .rotation is too simple right now

I think 6% wont make much difference, as we scale pretty badly, can see fire still sitting bottom 3 if not bottom overall still. Shame

Yep the proposed buff won't be nearly enough; 106% of a very small number is still a small number, and as Kalstrom said this won't change the spec's awful scaling with gear, especially crit which should be its main stat.

I think we are vey Lucky to receive a buff this soon after Uldir is out.
Im fairly certain this isnt their final balance patch either, it is most likely a quick and dirty way of making the differences less extreme. shaving a few percentages from the top, and giving that to the bottom specs. it won't bring us to the top of the meters, but at least we are confirmed by blizzard in our beleive that fire was vastly under performing.
In mythic + we will be a lot better, our single target was already fine due to the fights being short, and the burst being very good with combustion. If flamestrike with flame patch now generates good dps as well, we might be usefull on AoE too.

all that aside; flamepatch scales with haste better than crit (i believe), so my earlier posts on other topic about a crit build possibly outscaling haste builds (at least for fun) might become invalid for mythic... still keeping an open mind, and will experiment in both raids and mythic + after next weeks buffs.

I expect a more elgant fix for the fire spec later into this raidtier, or with 8.1 where flat damage buffs are removed and replaced with mechanical fixes.

hopefully they surprise us Tuesday and give us the buff along with phoniex flames or pyro to make the rotation more challenging and fun like it was in the previous patch .

It would be a nice surprise, but these tuning patches are only meant to be number tweakings.

Talent and spell changes won't occur before 8.1 and it is not known if Fire will receive any changes by then.

hopefully this we be good enough to compete in mythic .

No chance. Even with the 6% buff and 15% flamestrike buff Fire is going to be no where near the constant output of Frost.

Bring pheonix flames back like 99.99% of mages have been asking for and increase our pyro + ignite damage then they may be back to their competitive state.

I would like them to bring back the Legion rotation. It's fun throwing PF, hard-casting Pyros, and spamming scorch below 30%. I guess we will see where blizzard goes from here, because 6% increased overall damage still puts us dead last in Uldir. We won't be as solidified into last place, but last place nonetheless.

So I checked Uldir dps charts on warcraftlogs today and fire seems to be really up there. Definitely the best spec for mage right now slightly over arcane. Frost took a big hit and is now below average. Was the buff to fire this strong or am I missing something?

P.S: Link for reference https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/19

Im not sure how that graph is composed, but it is a graph shwoing data for mythic. If you check heroic fire mage is very much near the bottom. even if you only show the data from the last day.

Factors in firemages showing up high might be

1) mythic is not cleared yet, and Taloc seems to be very firemage friendly
2) Firemages are very much underplayed (only 6 parses in the graph shown in he link). the handful of firemages that plays mythic are likely very skilled, and might not represent the overal status of the spec.

That said, i havent raided with the buff yet, and am curious to see if i can keep up with my guild mates... last week i wasnt even close to them (except on Taloc normal/heroic).

Im not sure how that graph is composed, but it is a graph shwoing data for mythic. If you check heroic fire mage is very much near the bottom. even if you only show the data from the last day.

Factors in firemages showing up high might be

1) mythic is not cleared yet, and Taloc seems to be very firemage friendly
2) Firemages are very much underplayed (only 6 parses in the graph shown in he link). the handful of firemages that plays mythic are likely very skilled, and might not represent the overal status of the spec.

That said, i havent raided with the buff yet, and am curious to see if i can keep up with my guild mates... last week i wasnt even close to them (except on Taloc normal/heroic).

Dunno if Taloc is particularly fire friendly. For the most part you can just stand still and cast. Mother however I think it could have a big advantage since you can fish for an cast insta pyroblasts with scorch while the wind is blowing. On the other hand the execute window is only from 30% to 10%.

You argue that fires logs are are better because only a few good people try it. In my oppinion its reverse, you need alot of logs to see what the max potential is, if you look at the mother logs you can see that the cast timeline is not optimal for the 100% log plus we dont know what group he was moving with etc.

One thing that seems interesting is that the nr.1 heroic ghuun mage lock is fire doing ST rotation even when so few people tried fire on Ghuun. https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/ranki ... &boss=2122

I'll atleast try fire on mother mythic tonight and on next weeks heroic clear to get a better idea.

I classified Taloc as fire-friendly because he starts at 60% HP.
With searing touch talented that means you get execute for half the fight.


Mother i havent done HC yet. our guild cleared normal last week and after that only killed HC Taloc.
But on normal i didnt need scorch during wind, i could continue casting fireballs and after shimmering twice the wind phase was over.
I'll probably get to experience it on HC tonight when our guild starts HC progress

I hadn't seen that firemage on G'huun yet! curious indeed but good to see a firemage in the logs doing well here and there

I initially looked at Steffenesjef logs for Ghuun and attributed it to abnormal luck, I set out to gather the evidence to prove that claim and as I dug into it I realized I was quite far off the mark.

His critical rating was at 30%.
his haste was 13%
He had 3 combustion phases.

with his haste rating he would be able to land 7 pyroblasts pr. combustion.
Ghuun was above 90% for roughly 20 seconds, which would have provided about 10 more pyroblasts at 100% crit chance.
During the adds phase there would have been plenty of opportunity for landing pyroblasts at 90%+ adds, I'm working with a figure of 10 auto critting pyroblasts over the course of the fight.
that's 41 at 100% crit chance.

There is 51 remaining, roughly 15 of these should have been critting which adds up to a total of 56 critical hits or 60.9% crit chance on the pyroblast.
In comparison Steffenesjef landed 63 Pyroblast crits or 68,5%.

These 7 extra crits only amounts to a tiny fraction of his total damage for the fight.

In short, any fire mage should be able to repeat his results, if they change targets often during the add phase, manage their combustion phase perfectly and have the right stat configuration for the fight.

I classified Taloc as fire-friendly because he starts at 60% HP.
With searing touch talented that means you get execute for half the fight.


Mother i havent done HC yet. our guild cleared normal last week and after that only killed HC Taloc.
But on normal i didnt need scorch during wind, i could continue casting fireballs and after shimmering twice the wind phase was over.
I'll probably get to experience it on HC tonight when our guild starts HC progress

I hadn't seen that firemage on G'huun yet! curious indeed but good to see a firemage in the logs doing well here and there

Did Taloc and Mother HC yesterday. Winds blow faster indeed... needed to scorch. The difference between me and my guildies in terms of damage was noticably smaller (no just the buff, but i also got quite some gear since last run), and I didnt do particulairly well (50-60% percentile).
Mother went fine, but there is a lot of downtime if you pass the wall early it seems. so hard to compare DPS there, and i failed to do well on Taloc because i was taken of guard by a blinking-issue... i seem to be consistently blink backwards on that fight and i didnt dare use it again after a few failed blinks.

Long story short. I was a lot closer to guildies this week, but gear was a factor. and I screwed up to much and the fights weren't perfect so i cant really compare.