SO I just hit 80 and cleared the Undermine story. so gear is around 620 and went to do my first M0
I was 3rd DPS averaging around 1 million DPS for the run (prio of flame)
I noticed that when combustion isn’t available it feels TERRIBLE. Sometimes its down for 7 seconds and sometimes like 20-40. DO you just cast fireball/Phoenix and fireblast combo while you wait? (which fireball spamming feels like utter garbage.)
crit 28%
Haste 22%
I came from frost and I just felt powerful always but i wanted to play the meta and Tryhard but man… idk…
Its also tough where you use combustion on a pack then the pack dies and combustion ends and you don’t have it for the next pack so you do like sub 300k dps until combustion comes back. Just feels like the timing is super important or does that get better. If I have to plan and think about how much health a pack has, how fast it will die, and hope the tank runs to the next pack… it may not be fore me. Seeing as how you ONLY do DMG inside of combustion.
This is a build I’ve been messing around with right now. It might meh or even bad because I’ve not done any mythic+ or raiding content with it, but it yields very good results for me and the way I like to play. I simmed a bunch of talents for my character on raidbots and this is what I ended up with.
I prefer having more of a stable power balance— and doing good damage even without major cooldowns. Frostfire is nice especially in soloing content due to the Frostfire Bolt slow as well as the fact it casts way faster than Fireball, and sometimes it’s instant cast which I love. Frostfire for me feels way quicker and less clunky than Sunfury.
I also opted to use Sun King’s Blessing over Unleashed Inferno. This is seen as a big no-no right now but I don’t care for the time being. I prefer the proc and a giant Pyroblast. It also helps for those moments when Combustion (the cooldown) is ON cooldown by giving you Combustion after the hard cast. Time Anomaly in the class tree also sometimes grants Combustion or haste which is good too. Frostfire spec’s Meteor also hits like a monster truck which is very satisfying.
You need to read your talents and understand the gameplay interactions. You need to consume heating up to further reduce the CD of combustion to ensure that it is down for as little as possible.
SKB is definitely going to be better for a new player though, as you will end up with more average combustion time and it is substantially more forgiving.
I wouldn’t say it’s substantially more forgiving. Yes, you don’t have to micromanage your Combustion CDR as closely, but SKB in many fights can be very difficult to hardcast due to movement especially. You still have all the same interactions using SKB that you’re referring to, just a little different without Unleashed Inferno of course. I personally don’t think it’s that hard to manage Unleashed Inferno either for that matter. It’s just a bit different. The difficulty of your talent choice, playstyle, and rotation will be dictated by the fight/encounter by a large margin.
Yeah I agree. I’ve said it before but Combustion needs to work like a toggle or a battle stance at this point because Fire just feels terrible outside of its window. When everything about a spec starts to revolve around maximizing the uptime of a single cooldown to the exclusion of everything else you know something needs to change.
Not to be a pyro but difference between playing outside of Combustion vs during it is like playing with a lighter vs a flamethrower, lol.
Try looking up Azuna’s 11.1 vid on YT. Yes, outside of combust, you do less than healer dam. There are ways to have combust for every pack and sometimes 2 for one pack. Little tricks to keep buffs up etc.
I’ve been mage main for quite a while, I always play flavor of the month spec. I always hate switching specs and retraining my fingers every new season/expansion. But it is what it is. Azuna and Preheats guides helped me the best.
Edit: Frost is also still really good in keys. I’m playing fire in raid but I’ve stayed frost for keys (mainly because I don’t like how flamestrike is designed)
Ralecgos you said you don’t raid or do m+ so not exactly sure what even content you’re doing but your build is an absolute mess. Play how you want to play but please stop suggesting it to people looking for answers. Most people who care about min-maxing builds are actually doing content
Wowhead exists for anyone to copy and paste one of their pre-made builds into their game if that makes you happy. You are not the arbiter of who gets to use the forums. If someone finds my build bad, which I even said in my post with a disclaimer, they reserve the right to ignore it. They can even tell me it’s terrible if they feel so inclined. It’s just what I’ve been enjoying right now. The season literally just started and mythic+ and raiding is not the only content that exists in this game. Everyone should be simming their character themselves and finding out what works best for them anyway in my opinion. Blizzard added talent trees to the game to give the player “choice”. Evidently that didn’t happen, and it’s been an utter illusion once again because even with these massive talent trees, people are still looking for the perfect cookie-cutter builds. Sad really.
Yeah I think we are gonna need tier (and likely more haste) to really assess. With the nerfs to resource availability, it’s a bit of a slog right now in lower keys - unless you can get full value out of Combust, you can easily find yourself out of gas for the next pull. Kind of have to decide between holding bust/doing very little damage towards the middle/end of a pack and having something up for the next one, or just sending and potentially not having it back in time.
Not that bad in raid since you have constant uptime/CDR, but you can still really feel the loss of juice at present…
This is not the problem. mastery needs to be adjusted to give bigger dots baseline since fire mages are stacking haste. All fire mage spells need to be increased at least an additional 15 percent. The damage from fire is completely lacking still.
I came here looking for what people are saying. I just got 2 set bonus. My stats are a little wonky because I have not been getting a lot of haste + mastery stuff. But my ilvl is 636. I have been told I should be doing 1.5 mil dps overall at the end of mythics with my ilvl but I’m sitting somewhere around 800k in +2. It’s really hard to time combustion with each pack pull and when I use combustion I’m right up there with everyone else. But there is a lot of in-between packs when I have nothing just fireball spamming fishing for fire up doing less than the healers. I have watched guides and its mostly around rotation and spec and all that. Not sure how you get better reducing your combust down time.
fire and boomy are the worst dps imaginable for low keys because they’re reliant on uptime and packs die so fast in low keys. you need packs that are living close to a minute, not 15 seconds
I’m guessing most ppl here did NOT watch any guides or PTR or anything. You do not take fire mage into low/mid keys since the mobs don’t live long enough for IGNITE to be effective. If mobs don’t live long enough YOU WILL NOT do good damage as fire. Frost mage is your low/mid mage key pusher and fire mage does better in higher keys as the mobs live longer. This has been stated multiple times from many different people.