Question about two often heard claims

[Devlonir]

Hello there little fire mage community.

I just want to make this post to try and get some information on two often heard claims. The last reddit dps weekly thread kind of triggered it for me, and I simply want to try and get some facts out on the table.

Two claims keep being repeated like they are undisputed fact over and over. And for some they also seem to be the main excuse/reason why fire is bad right now. And I simply want to know what is true and what is not. The two claims are:

1) Fire scales bad in BFA
2) Crit is a bad stat for fire

Both my personal experience and my basic simming/stat weights seem to disagree with both of these claims.

First: Fire has historically always been a spec that is bad at the start of an expec and gets better with more gear, so it historically always scaled really good. So what has changed to cause it to scale so bad? Is it just the lack of secondary stats and the changes in how those scale? What is the actual proof behind this claim.

Second: Crit is always a stat we had a love/hate relationship with. But there also have always been certain thresholds where things got better. For me personally for example, as long as my crit is about 30%, it seems to be the best secondary stat for dps together with Haste. I know all the talent and fight reasons why it loses value in certain situations, but it never felt as a bad stat to me when gearing. And it seems more crit does get better results, as many high performing mythic fire mages are running crit builds too.

Every time I hear these two claims I just wonder if those people even still play fire or if they even sim (bro). So I merely come here now to wonder: How true are these statements and are they indeed the reason behind fire doing bad?

Or is there more than just these things, is it a matter of playstyle, a matter of mobs doing too quick, a matter of missing PF as a baseline.

It would be nice to find out what really causes fire to be in a bad place right now.

Would love to hear the AT community's thoughts!

[Toriankel]

I'm not smart enough to know what simmers think, or to do the math, but let me tell you, I've been raiding stacking crit and playing with pyroclasm (I'm at 45% with Reorigination Array), and I'm usually around 13k dps. I'm not raiding hardcore anymore, and only have 366 ilvl but the spec just feels better with that much crit, there's just nothing else to it.

[Devlonir]

My experience is very similar to yours, currently just on 357 ilvl I have around 35-36% crit with origination array and since I hit around 30% crit has been my highest or second highest stat when simming for ST.

This suggests to me a certain level of crit stacking is still worth it. Just wondering if I am losing out too much with other stats getting there.

[Saharez]

Crit is only scaling poorly for the RoP + Meteor build.
Crit is a pretty solid stat for fire mages running Incanter's invocation + Pyroclasm.

Currently RoP + Meteor does sim slightly higher than any other fire build, but it is far more vulnerable to unexpected events in raids and in my opinion harder to play since it's dps is focused so heavily around the combustion phase, the precision required during the 3 seconds leading up to combustion and for the 10 second duration of the combustion buff is so harsh that simply losing 0,5 a second can easily cost you a 100% crit Pyroblast powered by rune of power.

The alternative Incanter's invocation + Pyroclasm is a little weaker but it's less reliant on the combustion window and will be able to land respectable numbers even if the combustion phases are not perfectly executed, it rewards haste and crit rating over mastery and versatility, which leads to a more fluent rotation.

There is indications that the Incanter's invocation + Pyroclasm scales better than the RoP + Meteor build aswell.