I truly have failed to understand this spec every time I have tried it. My frost and arcane aoe and single target blow fires away so is it a star threshold? I have 4.8k haste currently.
I’ve tried ignite build (which is so fun with fire starter on target dummies btw) for aoe and if I pop everything I can get to 270k dps on the aoe dummies but it’s fake because of fire starter and mobs don’t live that long.
I tried flame strike and could only get a max of 220k and falls to around 205k.
Frost? Easy 325k aoe and 104k single target with aoe build.
Even arcane for me has better aoe and single target than fire.
I’ve looked at logs of m+ and raid, talents, looked at their casts to see if I’m doing anything wrong with my buttons and I can’t say I’m doing anything that makes this so unappealing.
My mage is 463 ilvl with 4 piece. Magesniper is the name of the character (not posting on it because I forget to change the forum character).
In comparison to my balance Druid, ele shaman who are 15-20 ilvls lower and doing 70-90k single target… I just don’t get it.
I know for raid you want crit and haste and for m+ you want haste mastery vers.
As a note, I don’t use lust on dummies because most of the time you play without lust so I don’t think it’s a good way of showing dps on a dummy.
Also, I want to say that Firestarter on target dummies plays like you would think fire would play. It’s the only way I can get close to my frost aoe… and it’s only until 90% HP. Unless everything crits this spec feels terrible to play.
Hoping someone with more knowledge drops some wisdom nuggets cuz man I’m in the same boat, I just do 25% less than my sims and I can’t figure out why 
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fire mage dps is heavily tied to doing your rotation properly. stats dont make a difference if you arent doing rotation properly
I’ll go back over to Warcraft logs and check the casts of the top players and see how they’re opening and playing but I’ve done this so many times already.
I did and was able to get to 112k but frost hovered at 130k and arcane around the same.
It’s the out of combustion that kills everything. Casting 4 fireballs in a row until you get a heating up proc feels so bad as you see your dps crumble.
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If you’re trying to match your DPS as frost on the dummies - that’s not gonna happen as fire. Frost is simply superior in lower target cleave. The ignite build is also a ramping build - not a burst build. Frost carries a very powerful opening burst combo which is always going to prove superior in lower level content.
Fire pops off when there’s large target count, especially when they live long.
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I was able to match my sims single target data for fire. Only about 1-3k off so that shows massive improvement! I guess flamestrike is better but then you lose the single target so on tyrannical week is it better to go single target in 17-20? I really don’t like playing flamestrike, those talents feel like such a waste.
Wow congrats! What’d you figure out you were doing wrong? Share share share 
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Ok, so using mirror image helped for numbers sake at the start. Open up with the pyro blast into the fireball combustion. Sending off two pyro’s into a combustion is the goal but isn’t always possible.
Inside combustion I’ve been casting scorch when I have no phoenix flames or fire blast charges, but when I have flame accelerant I have been using that inside combustion sometimes and I’m not sure if that’s good or not but it does more damage and has a faster cast time and is a guaranteed crit inside combust so if I have it I’ll let it go.
Definitely get a sun king’s blessing weakaura for when you can go into your mini combustion because that is extremely important to let fly as soon as you get it.
The only time you wouldn’t let it go right away is if combustion is on cooldown and you need fire blast charges so you’d cast shifting power first then get a hot streak pyro ready while casting your Sun King’s pyro.
Outside of combustion is actually just spamming fireball until you get a heating up in which you hit fire blast to get an instant pyro. Keep building up to Sun king’s as fast as possible.
One thing I haven’t figured out is that you can double pyro with a scorch cast. If a fire blast charge gets cooldown reduction during scorch and you have heating up, you can hit it and spam pyro and it’ll get the charge of hot streak off before scorch hits but it’s not been consistent for me.
Get into combustion as much as possible because that’s where allllll the damage comes from and spam fireball outside of combust. There will be times where you have no charges of anything and will have to rip 4 fireballs in a row to get a crit.
Don’t press phoenix flames outside of combustion unless running alexstraza’s fury.
I spent a lot of time over many just hitting the training dummies trying to improve, it’s going to take a lot of practice to push the dps close to the sims.
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Ignite build isnt good for anything below a 25 (from what I’ve been told). Flamestrike is best for lower keys. And I’d stick to haste and crit for flamestrike. You switch to haste mastery for ignite build. Preheat just released an updated guide on youtube just a couple days ago that I found pretty helpful.
Fire is currently ranked 2nd in M+ dps rankings. If you’re having trouble, it’s not the spec. Frost is ranked 3rd. If you’re doing better as frost I’d just play frost. Fire is easy at its core but plays very fast and requires a lot of muscle memory. I find myself munching procs a lot in raids (especially if someone PI’s me during double lust) after doing keys all week since the difference between the raid build and flamestrike build is night and day.
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