So I was bringing my mage through the undermined story getting gear and I realized how we do literally no damage outside of combustion. It’s hilarious, I can be casting and getting a couple hot streaks outside of combust but as soon as I hit combust everything dies immediately. It is absolutely laughable.
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Welcome to fire mage my friend, just how it goes.
We go from a walking flamethrower during combustion, to a dude throwing flaming marshmallows at their enemy outside of it.
If you want a spec with more consistent damage try frost, even outside of icy veins they can do solid damage with shatters. Not to mention all the roots and slows makes it so even if you kill a little slower you’re still safe.
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Fire is what it is right now. It’s extremely cooldown and context reliant. It also needs the gear to successfully cycle through combustions.
If you don’t want to deal with that, play a spec that isn’t gimmicky. I play frost, accept it’s awful in raids and only okay in M+ and do fine.
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This is a major problem with blizzard’s designed philosophy around dps buff cooldowns. Frost DK suffers from the same problem with Pillar where so many essential talents are spent in it just to be nerfed so as to not allowed “too much” burst.
The end result being medium damage during the buff window and pitiful damage outside of it.
Blizzard has to change the philosophy around this to favour consistent damage for those of us who prefer to at least have the option, rather than relying on cooldowns for our bulk damage.
A reminder that Frost Mages essentially get a baseline 65% crit chance due to Shatter without ever having to waste a single stat on Crit rating, not that I’m complaining about it. It’s much easier to balance classes who’s damage doesn’t fluctuate wildly and Frostfire Frost I’d just so much fun.
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What bugs me about it more than anything else is that your gameplay changes during the cooldown. During combustion I’m getting more charges and everything is critting and it’s fun and it feels “right”. But as soon as it ends I immediately stop having fun. Same thing with marksman as trueshot injects more fun into the gameplay.
I am going to pull something out my butt and say that I imagine a majority of players would say they feel better when most of their damage comes from outside cooldowns.
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God forbid you use a global or two for spells other than Pyro, FB, or PF during Combustion, now your damage is gimped.
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That would be an accurate intuition, my personal experience tells me the same.
There are always exceptions, which is why it would be a good idea to have talent builds that cater to preferred individual playstyles. Otherwise we end up in arguments with a minority of players who think dps should rely heavily on cooldowns and don’t want their spec to change.
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I concur as well. There is a minority of folks, which sadly includes the devs, who think optimal cooldown usage is “skill expression” but the vast majority of people play games like WoW because they want to have fun and feel powerful all the time not just for a few seconds once every minute. Cooldowns still have a role to play, particularly when it comes to defensives and utility but when the overwhelming damage output is tied to DPS cooldowns like it is with Fire (but other specs as well to a lesser extent) it loses all meaning and you cease feeling powerful when you activate the cooldown and instead just feel weak, borderline useless, when it’s not up.
I’ve said this before but Combustion has become so integral to the Fire Mage gameplay that it may as well be a toggle skill like Warrior stances or Paladin Auras at this point. Obviously, the damage boost it provides would have to be scaled down accordingly to compensate but the fun playstyle of instant casting would be preserved. I would even go further and say that ultimately hard casting (really any spell but specifically filler spells like Fireball) just feels incredibly outdated and like a vestigial aspect of online games of yore that no longer makes sense, especially in WoW which prevents movement while casting unlike most other modern games and yet demands constant movement to counter virtually all mechanics the game throws at you.
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I did a couple quests on my fire mage in Hyjal yesterday and it FEELS sooo much better than retail. Obviously, it’s dated for sure, BUT fireball hits HARD, pyro blast crits are doing more than 50% hp to a mob (my mage isn’t very geared at all.) When I’m not critting in Cata, I don’t feel as bad because my fireball and fire blast and even scorch are doing decent damage!
You want every ability to feel strong and have purpose and with current fire it’s not the case at all.
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Wish I could find this magical damage. My fire mages dps is garbage to frost and arcane spec…
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Fire desperately needs something like a guaranteed crit for fireball every 10-15 seconds and a 4x damage bonus for hard casting pyro.
The crit fishing is completely unfun when you’re overly reliant on combustion to refresh your only viable abilities to obtain hot streaks, and all of the crit fishing spells do pitiful damage outside of combustion. (In pvp, it’s even worse, with the bonus damage cut in half for these spells)
I’d honestly be all for a total removal of Unleashed Inferno with a baseline 20% buff to all the underwhelming abilities this spec has, especially since SKB is actually fun to play around, and that buffed pyro should be hitting HARD.
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This is going to be controversial or maybe not but I’ve been playing some Cata Classic and leveling my fire mage. He’s 84 now and my god it’s so fun! I don’t even have gear and it’s sooo fun. I love this combustion way more than current retail version. I like that fire blast spreads to all enemies when it procs. Fireball hits hard and is fun, the procs feel SOOO good.
Honestly, I’d rather this version than whatever this garbage retail version is. We just stack a crazy amount of crit and haste and my godddd it’ll feel SOOO good with the massive pyroblasts. When I hit pyro in Cata Classic it feels like I’m about to obliterate everything and I’m not even level capped or have decent gear. In retail I hit pyroblast and I feel I’m allowed to breathe in one nostril for air for a half a second.
Playing cata fire is reminding me how fun this game can be through gameplay.
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when I play Fire, for 12 seconds every 2 minutes, I feel like the Most Dangerous Man On The Planet.
just gotta figure out the rest of the time. 
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I never beat my dps in frost or Arcane as fire… So Idk where the dmg is but its not showing its OMGAMAZBALLZ dps for me.
Fire feels terrible and like Im handicapping myself.
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I agree here… I have been a fire mage since the very beginning, for 20yrs and am just confused about the state this spec is in now… complete garbage imo. And with every patch, instead of further bettering yourself, you have to relearn the doctored talents and specs to even do average damage. I went to the dummy this morning (no combustion)… fireball hits for 302, fireblast 294, PF 277, and pyro hits for 202, like WTF??? And I’m a 667 mage! We are now being forced into constant “human torch” mode, combustion always on in order to do damage. No more saving it for the bigger pulls, it MUST be on ALL THE TIME. If you don’t have the haste and mastery stats, good luck on that dps lol. And single target damage is a joke! Yes, we do well in mythic+ BUT, and I say BUT, certain criteria MUST be met. 1 – higher keys, 2 – bigger pulls, 3 – PI helps, 4 – did I say bigger pulls? 5 – tank knows how to work with fire mage, 6 – help with mechanics… if dungeon is full of decursing, certain affixes, interrupts, etc, you will be taken out of a very unforgiving rotation, and your dps will suffer, 7 – an organized defined group… many of these “meta” mages are not simply jumping into some random pug, they run with people they know and have run several keys together. I did a 10 the other day, a que’d pug group, finished it with 8 mins left, yet I still got chewed out by the 2 pallys in group. I did all the decursing, interrupts, and kicks cuz all the pallys wanted to do was show how big their epee was and they ignored every mechanic. I have run LOTs of keys where tank pulls only 3 adds, like wtf is that? And flamestrike is such a pain in the butt, even with mouse over macros. Depending on position, meaning if you are at top of stairs and mob is at bottom, sometimes macro won’t work. Or even better, the flamestrike ends up on a wall, or the chandelier hanging from ceiling. And I’ve run tons of delves where the macros don’t work at all. I can go outside of Dorn, attack a spider (using no combustion) and it just feels like crap, like it takes forever to kill it, yet if I use combustion, it’s dead instantly… like I have to use the most powerful spell to kill a tiny yellow spider??? And yet, I watched a pally come, attack same spider, and with one swing, 90% of its life is gone 
. And don’t get me started on hyperthermia… sure it’s like a machine gun, BUT you are NOT in combustion which means your pyros go back to crap and hit like a wet noodle. It just feels like I’m in the constant kiting mode waiting for combustion to return…
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Damn, dude, is your Enter key broken? That’s hard to read.
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I am so sorry, had a lot to say, wasn’t focused on proper grammar and paragraphs
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I want living bomb back as a spell that actually does damage. I want big pyros back.
I want FUN back (meanwhile, I am having fun on destro with massive chaos bolts, at least)
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Living bomb used to do insane damage when it was uncapped. Now it only spreads to 3 mobs, even as a passive it might as well just not exist anymore.
Pyroblast feels weaker than Fireball used to, it doesn’t feel like a nuke and much less for the effort of perfectly timing fire blast to line up crits.
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I enjoy fire, but it is extremely frustrating to play. If you have a group that pulls slowly or pulls small packs you do negative damage.
Fireball is also the most annoying ability to cast in the game. I wish they would get rid of it and just make scorch the default filler spell, its better in every way possible
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