I havent played Mage in years, as I don’t really like pure DPS classes, but I do enjoy Aff and Fire Mage.
I know Arc and Frost are pretty good right now and Ive not seen a single Fire Mage in any of my 8+ keys or Heroic Raid.
I don’t care if the spec is “S tier” or Meta, I just want to know if it can do solo content like Delves, Zekvir. Casual group content like low keys.
From what I understand Fire scales bad in low keys. Its hard to play too. If you screw up a combust window it sucks.
If your tank does weird pulls it sucks. If packs dont live long enough it sucks.
It is fun though if you really understand the combust windows, but its a frantic playstyle. You have to be thinking hard about the next pack and engaging it quickly etc and not wasting phoenix flames or fireblast etc.
There’s not a lot of buttons to push either. Its very tight in focus.
Compare that to say RET or Frost DK or hunter or something.
Its way easier with those specs to not worry about what’s being pulled. If the tank pulls 2 versus 10 it won’t matter that much unless your hunter does bad AOE anyway.
Lots of specs are pull size agnostic but fire is all about big big pulls with mobs that stay alive forever. If they all die in a the middle of a combust you don’t even get to enjoy yourself fully.
It’s still fun but far from its better days. With only one currently viable hero spec, it’s back to a ~1 minute mage playstyle, and even then your burst is pretty outclassed by other specs. Completely anemic outside your window. Getting it to 1m is also dependent on your uptime so it’s incredibly punishing if you Combust at a bad time. Really needs an ST buff and for Frostfire Fire to get looked at since it synergizes really well with SKB for those that prefer a playstyle that’s less frontloaded into your one casted cooldown.
You might have fun with fire if you stack a lot of crit, but you won’t be doing much DPS as the true damage comes from stacking ignites over a long period of time. That’s why fire prefers haste and mastery for massive DPS numbers.
That means, fire really sucks for practically everything but a raid boss. Fire is iffy with AoE, hopefully you get Living Bomb procs or Hyperthermia, otherwise you’re doin insignificant dps.
Its fun but not that great