With the anniversary patch coming next week, I am absolutely excited about the all of the features, rewards, and activities that this patch will bring. Just from seeing the large amount of content coming our way in a mid-season patch, I can see you all at Blizzard have put in some amazing work, and it is much appreciated! Seriously, I keep hyping it up to my friends in hopes of bringing them back. However, amidst all this excitement, I can’t help but feel worried about the state of Fire mage due to the net nerfs that it will receive next week – nerfs that I believe to be unwarranted. Although Fire Mage appears to be overperforming on the surface, deeper analysis shows that its performance is highly situational and inflated by external factors like Power Infusion and low parse counts. The upcoming nerfs are disproportionate to Fire’s actual performance and will likely unintentionally render the spec obsolete.
It’s understandable to look at the Warcraft Logs graph at a glance and see Fire mage near the top in mythic raiding. It immediately appears to be an outlier, and I know part of the balancing team’s job is to keep outliers in check. However, underneath this surface, the data becomes interesting and nuanced. Let’s examine the data within the past week as of 10/18/2024 (4:10 AM), nearly a week since the fixing of the Controlled Destruction incident. Note that although I will compare Fire to other DPS specs, it is not my intention to call for nerfs on those specs but rather to point out that Fire is not an outlier in need of nerfs.
In this past week, there have been 4,379 logged Fire parses. Compare this to Arcane’s 23,573 parses and Frost’s 6,372 parses. I know that popularity does not correlate with the strength of a spec, but it is a fact that Fire has been the 6th least popular DPS spec in Mythic raiding this past week. This could be for several reasons, but based on various anecdotes from both mage and non-mage mythic raiders, Arcane (and other specs in general) is more useful for actual progression in most fights. This is understandable, since Arcane deals more boss damage, which is the most important form of damage. Fire’s main strength is the ability to cleave with ignite while doing nearly full Single Target damage (around 5% less than pure Single Target situations due to the Ashen Feather talent only applying to pure ST scenarios). However, this not a unique strength, and with specs like Frost Death Knights (especially this), Fury Warriors, and Havoc Demon Hunters already handling these adds, you may as well choose better options such as Arcane, which can leverage these adds to funnel more damage onto the boss. If a spec is deemed to not bring as much value as its alternatives, it will not be played as much, and I believe that is what is happening with Fire.
What is the boss distribution of these 4,379 Fire parses? Around 40% (1,732) of these parses are on one boss: Bloodbound Horror. On this fight at the 95th percentile, you can see that Fire does the second highest overall damage while still doing the fifth highest boss damage. This is a strong fight for Fire, there is no doubt about that. However, this fight is an outlier because the hitbox of the boss is so large that Ignite can spread to nearly all the adds with a couple of Fire Blasts, allowing Fire Mages to completely focus on the boss for the entire fight if they wanted to. Because of this, Fire Mages can deal damage to almost all adds on the fight any time they are in the void realm. Knowing that, we can say that Fire excels on Bloodbound not because of high tuning but rather because it can leverage a certain quirk of the fight; I imagine that a spec that can cleave to all Bloodbound adds at once would have a far greater lead over other specs if it were overtuned.
What about the first boss, Ulgrax, at the 95th percentile on Mythic? Here, there are 1,273 Fire parses - less Fire parses than Bloodbound despite there being around 13% more overall parses for DPS. Warcraft Logs shows that Fire sits at the fifth highest overall damage on this fight, which seems great, right? However, for Ulgrax, Fire has the same role as Frost DK, DH, and Fury. The first of those two specs do higher overall damage than Fire, greatly so with Frost DK, while also doing about the same boss damage on Ulgrax as Fire, where all of these specs sit at the bottom (Ulgrax Boss Damage). Interestingly enough, Arcane still does the slightest bit more overall damage than Fire here while completely outclassing Fire on boss damage. It is difficult to recommend bringing a Fire Mage to Ulgrax over other options in most raid compositions for progression for this reason. Four of the top five most popular raid specs (Retribution, Fury, Frost DK, Havoc) all greatly weaken the need for a Fire Mage. In fact, later in this writing I will further commentate on how a raid comp’s lack of these specs can “boost” Fire parses, creating outliers.
Sikran may be “purest” Single Target fight in Nerub-ar Palace in the sense that it is the closest of the eight encounters to a Patchwork fight. Looking at this data, Single Target damage seems to have impressively low variance among the specs (except Fury). Fire looks quite good here, ranked at 6th highest DPS. However, it is important to note that there are thirteen specs (Enhancement, Arcane, Frost Mage, Beast Mastery, Marksmanship, Retribution, Outlaw, Balance, Arms, Frost DK, Destro, Feral, Devastation) that appear without Power Infusion (PI) before you reach the #1 Fire parse, which is boosted by Power Infusion. This says a lot about Fire’s current power level, since PI inflates Fire Mage parses disproportionately because the spec values haste so highly. In fact, when comparing top Sikran parses without Power Infusion, Fire falls behind more than half of the other DPS specs, indicating that its perceived strength is largely dependent on this external buff. In fact, you don’t see the highest Fire Mage parse without Power Infusion until rank 803 of general, non-spec-specific Sikran parses.
To more clearly see how much Fire parses are being carried by Power Infusion, here are the numbers of Sikran parses of other specs without PI that are ranked higher than the #1 Fire parse on Sikran without PI: 1 Frost DK, 6 Balance, 2 Feral, 5 Devastation, 1 Augmentation, 12 Beast Mastery, 23 Marksmanship, 142 Arcane, 6 Frost Mage, 1 Windwalker, 48 Retribution, 10 Shadow, 7 Assassination, 4 Outlaw, 14 Elemental, 126 Enhancement, 1 Destruction, 1 Arms. That leaves only six of the 23 other damage specs that do not have a higher parse than the top Fire parse when excluding PI. I know that looking at top parses isn’t at all conclusive, but Fire is already being nerfed seemingly based on extremes and at the highest level of raiding (Mythic). When there are few Fire parses yet many of them are buffed by PI (only 14 of the 50 top Fire Sikran parses are not buffed by PI), data can become skewed and unreliable. The fairness of balancing a spec around external buffs is beyond the scope of this post, but it does feel especially awful for the players who do not receive these externals like PI, especially when Fire is not even overpowered with PI.
The same thing as above can be observed with Rasha’nan to a lesser extent. Power Infusion does lift it up to a good spot on this fight according to the Warcraft Logs data, but keep in mind that Rasha’nan logs only show boss damage. Rasha’nan adds do not count towards damage done here, so I am unsure certain specs lose out on some boss damage to spend a global or two to burst down the adds. Furthermore, Fire does do increased damage in execute phases and can maintain great uptime on the boss even when it flies away due to Mage’s great burst mobility.
Broodtwister is an interesting fight to discuss because parsing well here seems to be extremely “gamey” due to the adds. At the 95th percentile for the past week, Fire sits at rank 5 overall damage with 103 parses, though completely outclassed in terms of overall damage by Fury, Unholy, and Frost. Even Balance, just a rank above Fire, tends to do more overall damage without PI on this fight than Fire with PI. Again, when excluding external buffs, Fire falls behind many other specs towards the lower mid area of DPS. Seven of the top eight Fire parses run the Flamestrike build, so these players forewent some boss damage to increase their overall damage.
But wait, you might say that Fire still sits at rank 9 on Damage to Bosses on this fight, which is quite good for a spec that’s rank 5 on overall damage. However, this may be because the top overall damage Fire parses and the top boss damage Fire parses use different builds and rotations (Pyroblast versus Flamestrike). The rank 1 boss damage (rank 11 overall damage)* Fire Mage parse out of all the parses that actively used the Flamestrike (AoE) build with PI did 1.05m boss DPS with 2.51m overall DPS ( Круциатусх-Ревущийфьорд, Oct 17). How about without PI? The rank 1 boss damage Fire parse running the Flamestrike (AoE) build without PI did 948k boss DPS and 2.47m overall DPS (Barkpls-Kazzak, Oct 6). These are some relatively tame numbers for a rank 1 parse. Now, 13 out of the 15 highest overall damage Fire parses uses the Flamestrike build, so it is possible that the parses with the Ignite build lift up Fire on the boss damage data, while the parses with the Flamestrike build lift up Fire on the overall damage data, giving the impression that Fire has rank 5 overall damage and rank 9 boss damage simultaneously, when there are actually separate builds/playstyles involved.
Before moving on from Broodtwister, it is worth mentioning that on many of the top Fire parses, there was either a shortage of specs such as Frost DK, Fury, Ret, and DH, or they parsed low on that pull. For example, consider the top log for Fire on Mythic Broodtwister (Venkz-Sylvanas, Oct 14). Notice that the specs that are great at dealing with these adds parsed low on this log. This likely allowed the Fire Mage to, upon adds spawning, spend the 14 seconds of Combustion casting Flamestrike on the adds and have time afterwards for Ignite to continue ticking. As I mentioned earlier in the post, when these players of these specs perform well, there is less reason to bring Fire Mage. If they are already handling the adds, why not bring a spec that can funnel to do more boss damage?
As for Nexus Princess, many say Fire is a terrible choice compared to the other mage specs, especially Arcane, since Cauterize is rendered useless on this fight due to the boss’s executions on players. Arcane has their powerful Prismatic Barrier, which provides 15% magical damage reduction on top of the damage absorption, so it is the better choice in terms of both throughput and survivability in this fight. I won’t touch on the other fights because there is still so little data on them.
So far, we have only discussed mythic raiding, and I completely understand why the game is balanced mostly or even solely around it, but I think it’s worth looking at heroic raiding data as well. (I am a Heroic raider myself who focuses a lot more on M+ than raiding, but I do have mage and non-mage friends in higher end mythic raiding guilds, and I interact with people in crowd almost daily.) Fire sits far towards the bottom on the Heroic Warcraft Logs graph for all bosses over the past week. I’m not completely sure why this is the case, but I imagine part of the reason is that adds die more quickly, hardly giving Ignite time to do any damage, as well as Fire not benefiting from shorter fight times as much as most other specs. Although Fire loves haste, Combustion is not a bursty cooldown due to its short cooldown, creating a smaller spike in damage than many other specs during lust. Furthermore, the benefits of shorter encounter times for Fire are likely mitigated by less time spent at max stacks of Controlled Destruction on the boss, which increases Ignite damage up to 50 stacks. Regardless of the reason, many players cap out at Heroic raiding and nerfing Fire would put these Heroic Fire Mage raiders at an even worse position.
Moving away from raiding and onto Mythic+, there are currently thirteen specs with more timed 12+ keys. In fact, there is only one timed 15+ run with a Fire Mage. That is still one more 15+ timed run than about half of the DPS specs, but the point is that Fire Mage does not appear to be an outlying DPS spec in Mythic+ at all. When Fire received buffs, some feared the return of God Comp; however, as of right now, that doesn’t seem very plausible with so little Shadow Priest and Fire Mage representation in high keys. Besides, Arcane already currently does what Fire used to do but better: priority damage while still doing good enough AoE. Arcane does this while funneling for more priority damage while having a greater burst, eliminating the most dangerous targets more quickly. Frost DK seems to have that same damage profile that Ignite Fire does with much greater numbers anyway. What Fire brings to keys is not unique at all in terms of damage profile and tuning. In fact, because of its damage profile, it even relatively struggles in low keys where enemies die too quickly for Fire’s loop of Combust → Cooldown Reduction through uptime → Combust, which requires mobs to actually live through Combustion. Because of all these reasons, I don’t believe that Fire needs any nerfing when it comes to Mythic+.
So then, what would it mean for Fire if the anniversary changes go through next week? At first glance, it appears as though there’s “just” a 3% aura nerf and a Flamestrike nerf, which is still quite a nerf for a spec that isn’t overly performing by any means. However, note that Controlled Destruction will be fixed to provide a maximum of 25% additional Ignite damage instead of the bugged 50% that has been in effect since the launch of The War Within except for lack week’s bug (on top of a bug). Recall that for half of last week, there was an issue with Controlled Destruction that allowed it to stack to a maximum of only 5% additional Ignite damage. The effect of this was immediately palpable, as Fire took a nosedive on the logs. Of course, having this value change to 25% rather than 5% is a big difference, but this is occurring in addition to the aura nerf. Combined, this has been determined to be a ~7% decrease in Single Target according to simulations run by Degenhours in the Mage Discord. This nerf is especially confusing when Arcane will be buffed by around 10% with its upcoming changes, despite already performing higher than Fire in all forms of content. Arcane already had better tuning with a better damage profile, so I personally see no reason why this gap should be widened even further. (EDIT: Also, the Living Bomb buffs do not offset losses in AoE. It still requires so many talent points to get Living Bomb online, sacrificing a lot of single target damage. Since we are already losing a fair amount of single target damage with the nerfs, picking up these Living Bomb talents will be even less viable. I also forgot to mention that the fix to Controlled Destruction will change stat weights for Fire as Mastery will lose value, forcing players to pick up new gear to replace the BiS items they worked hard for.)
I know this post is lengthy, but I truly believe that these Fire Mage nerfs are not warranted and I urge you to reconsider. Nerfing Fire Mage risks making the spec unviable in all forms of content, where it already has low representation. This will lead to even fewer players engaging with the unpopular spec, making it less competitive and reducing overall class diversity. Either way, I appreciate even just taking the time to read my thoughts.
***** We are ignoring a certain log because they ran the Flamestrike build while casting only Pyroblasts and no Flamestrikes
Also, I did not realize posting links is not allowed, so I couldn’t directly post the logs, so I included the player’s name and the day the parse was created.
Soon Blizz will have the conjuring refreshment table doing more damage than pyros