I’ve been playing WoW Classic since it was released. I’ve long heard that Mages are supposed to generate massive DPS, but I’ve never been able to do it. I recently added dual spec so I could try Fire Mage as opposed to Arcane. Yet I still come in fourth in every group I join. I don’t raid. Any idea what I could be doing wrong? I’m playing Hemocrit on Old Blanchy
My Fire Mage is based on one of the builds at WOWhead, with Blast Wave added.
My fire mage often gets top damage in WG, and that’s not with the best gear by any means. Living bomb is awesome.
Sounds like an advertisement for hot sauce.
I wish I could claim top damage. Living Bomb is the bomb. I use it on just about everything.
Take this with some grain of salt since I don’t main mage.
If you feel like your spec is sorted, the likely suspects are gear and/or rotation. Possibly target choice and/or target swapping as well, esp. in Arc where a cancelled AB cast will hurt your dps both in lost time and in stack building.
Quite possible also you aren’t using your CDs often enough or well.
Fire mage in particular is crit dependent, and if memory serves you want 40% crit minimum buffed for it to work at all. If you’re gearing/gemming for haste and below the crit target, that’s going to cost you in fire where a lot of your damage comes from crit procs rather than hard casts.
Arcane, conversely, is more haste focused to work. If you’ve been gearing/gemming for both, you may be stuck in an awkward middle.
If you’re 4th, given the implication that you aren’t raiding this means you’re below the tank. If you’re solely doing gammas and looking at overall damage, this may be misleading, however, since you may well be the lowest geared, and the tank gets a huge boost from Thorns. If you’re losing to the tank on single target, however…
In Arcane esp for fights where your CDs aren’t up you’re going to lag on trash pulls somewhat imo because single target takes some time to spin up, cleave is non-existent, and aoe is fine but not amazing, esp. compared to some other classes.
First thing I’d do is log some runs. You can log your weekly VoA, your 5 mans, your target dummy, whatever.
Then look at your cast timeline. How many casts are you cancelling? How much dead space is between casts? Are you using cds and when?
Had one guildy that was absolutely wrecked when he saw his timeline. Once he fixed the “not always casting” his dps went up almost 1k average on bosses for the next run.
The casts timeline can show A LOT of mistakes you don’t notice while playing.
You also have to look at gear levels and fight times.
If you’re 4500 running with 6200s they’re going to melt stuff and when bosses don’t even last a minute mistakes are amplified significantly.
Living Bomb is amazing, but unless the target lasts 10 seconds it’s a waste of a GCD. Since you said 4th on damage, and I found no logs, I’m guessing you just do dungeons. Chances are everything dies far too quickly and if you’re doing fire, my recommendation is AOE minus living bomb on trash (flamestrike x2 into blizzard) and for bosses then start with CDs and use fireball, living bomb (don’t overwrite) & pyro procs.
Also, if you’re doing dungeons you probably don’t have enough gear to have fire be super amazing. You need a ton of crit and hit. Frostfire spec could work better as it requires less hit. Arcane is probably the best though for burst and low hit needs.
For arcane, don’t do the basic rotation wowhead gives you, do the “better rotation” below it. Mana shouldn’t be an issue for bosses because it’ll be dead before you oom. Evocate after as everyone will keep moving. During trash you can drink quickly after each pack to stay somewhat topped off. AOE trash which for arcane is actually PoM into a blizzard. If you have to move as it’s a chain pull, be in the middle of the mobs and cast arcane explosion.
What logs are you talking about? I’m not aware of logs in WoW.
You really need Raid gear to make Fire perform, since you need to have so much crit for the spec. What is your current crit chance self buffed?
If you’ve never raided then fire is not the way to go. Fire only does well once you have enough crit through raid gear. Go arcane if all you are doing is dungeons.
There’s combat logs. WoW records everything happening. You know how in the chat default there’s a tab that shows “what happend to me” or whatever? That information, plus others can be captured using /combatlog (or a couple addons will auto log for you). One would then upload the file saved onto your harddrive from the game to a third party website, warcraftlogs - or in our case classic.warcraftlogs where it translates the text into graphs and specific things to look for. They’re supposed to be used to analyze what was happening to improve individual gameplay. Granted, it’s morphed into basically just a scoring competition for most, but it still can be used for it’s intended purpose. With them you can see how much each hit/tick does, how much damage was taken, how much healing was received, how long between casts was happening… the order of spells cast, and so on.
If you have no intention of raiding, don’t worry about it. Logs are pretty overwhelming to look at. You have to know what you’re looking for to have it be of value.
I rarely raid, yes. On my Primary, Arcane, Crit Chance is listed as 35.16%. On Secondary, Fire, Crit Chance is listed as 33.35%.
Turned on combatlog. Now to do a dungeon to get data. Done. Pit of Saron.
Fire mage needs high crt gear to make it work. Is the same in retail. Most people play frost or arcane since it doesn’t need high crt to play well.
My mage is Arcane.
Arcane prefers haste over crit.
I believe you are just spamming Arcane Blast 3-4 times, and Arcane Missile if procced, Arcane Barrage otherwise. Nothing much else can be done in fact.
It’s all about timing. You may want to practice a bit to find the sweet spot for you to keep casting without clipping the previous cast.