What I mean is, bm hunter is objectively easy, it’s hard to mess it up, and it does decent damage. Is fire mage like that? I’d like to try a mage, but I don’t like arcane, and I’ve heard that frost is poop right now.
No, not really. You’re basically waiting for a big burst cooldown (this is coming from BFA experience, I don’t think it’s changed too much) and you really don’t want to miss even a single pyroblast in that burst as it’s a pretty big damage difference.
BM is pretty easy cuz your rotation is simple, and even dropping your main stack of barbed shots doesn’t affect you too much.
At least in BFA, fire mage was definitely the hardest spec to learn and properly do your bursts.
Combustion needs to be played perfectly. Ten errors outside of Combustion won’t hurt you much; one inside Combustion will utterly break your damage for the entire fight.
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Preheet has a useful little guide
I found it helpful when o swapped to fire.
Isn’t that that the guy who tried to sue a guy who had a similar name?
I’ll pass won’t support streamers who treat ppl like that.
That’s the guy who was being sued.
Preheat tried to c/d preheet
Ahhhh ok well I’ll have a look in that case
No, that’s Preheat.
How does that even hold up in court?
The answer? It doesn’t.
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It’s required that you jump around each time a instant fire ability is available.
The biggest challenge with fire mage is learning to not spam click your keys. Fire Blast doesn’t have a CD on it + isn’t on the GCD, and it’s your primary spell for proccing Hot Streak while in your Combustion phase, which allows you to instant cast Pyroblast. It can also be cast while casting other spells, so you have to be extra careful not to use it unless you’ve activated Heating Up. If you spam click, you can quite literally waste all of your Fire Blast charges in under three seconds, effectively handicapping your DPS output for the remainder of the fight.
This is because fire mage DPS revolves around Combustion, and if you time your Fire Blast (and Phoenix’s Flames) charges correctly during it, you can get a handful of Pyroblasts off, which is a significant amount of DPS.
It’s not a forgiving spec. There isn’t a lot of room for error, but it is very rewarding when you finally get it down. It’s easily the hardest mage spec, if not one of the hardest ranged specs.
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Also factor in mechanics happening when you’re trying to line up your combustion window…
I played fire for a lot of 8.3, and it can be very frustrating. However, once you get the hang of it, it’s not bad.
Going from just about any ranged dps to BM hunter is like coming up from being under water with all your clothes on. You can breathe, and you can move around so freely. Stick to BM.
I’ve played fire for a while now. It’s ok, kinda\tiny bit dull outside of combustion. I don’t run a lot of group content, mostly solo stuff and I grow tired of the “staying alive” mini game. With ignite lighting up half the zone while questing it finally got to me. Yes I could pull if off an live thru it but it was just too much excitement. I’m benching my mages for now. So if you like to blow things up and scoot around staying alive, it should be right up your alley. Just time and space out your defensive cool downs and you should be fine.
Gearing is also more challenging for fire spec, as we are dependent on critical strike. An upgrade that decreases our crit strike score can actually be a downgrade, and this is frustrating. Very rng dependent.
That said, crafted gear can now employ items to get specific secondary stats (rather than random), so that helps a lot.
Critical strike is one of the worst options for fire mages right now. You should definitely not be prioritizing it.
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Whelp, my mistake for not staying current, but good to know! Thanks! 
Edit: did some checking, and pyroblast procs still rely on crit strike. So, while the stat might not have the importance it did in previous expansions, it is still key. It looks like haste has gained popularity for us (as for pretty much everyone). I remember that day when crit strike was listed above intellect for fire mages.
I could be wrong, but Im pretty sure Fire Mages have a bit of crit built in with the spec via some talents and something else. As a fire mage, you don’t need to build crits. Combustion makes everything a crit, Fire Blast is an auto crit…certain talents make spells auto crit based off enemy health or another variable.
HASTE is what you should be stacking.
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Frost is getting some pretty big buffs today, so…
Critical strike is a very important stat if you are running “Fevered Incantation” legendary. Otherwise its meh… you can always do a stat weigh sim to find out the value in each stat for your character specifically.