With TWW upon us, it’s clear fire is the weakest dps. Not the weakest mage spec, but the weakest dps spec overall. I’m sure there will be tuning, but it’s unlikely it’ll push fire to the top. We can only hope it’ll be middle of the pack eventually.
Anyway, hope fire gets it’s time to shine in season 2. For now, eat well Arcane.
Please make me eat my words, blizzard. Fire Mage is life.
So season 1 isnt even out yet and you wrote off the entire season, Thats not doomer talk at all.
You do know they always do a massive balance change before heroic raids launch every single expansion right
I really hope they figure it out. It’s the only spec I really enjoy playing.
Really hope the next tuning pass isn’t limited to just getting Living Bomb off life support, since the left side of the tree / LB-agnostic ST damage really needs some love as well (and Sunfury doesn’t directly interact with LB).
I’d like to see, e.g. Hyperthermia made into an active spell and tuned accordingly; Pyromaniac being more than a ~3% effective amp to Pyro (with zero synergy with Hyperthermia); Inflame and Fevered Incantation being a bit more competitive; Ashen Feather scaling instead of being useless if it accidentally clips an add; and Heat Shimmer getting a second look (the instant cast throws off the rotation, isn’t particularly useful on such a short cast, and feels more like a maintenance buff than anything else.)
Massive.
Well fire has shined in like every season since shadowlands so maybe its time to try arcane or frost
What a crap menality. “Hey you’re spec has been good before, it deserves to be at the bottom now.” That makes it okay for 7 talents to be utterly worthless and to have a buggy, underperforming hero tree? Get that weak argument out of here.
It also hasn’t even been true. Season two of shadowlands saw fire nerfed into borderline unviable territory, and season three required buffs for like eight weeks in a row before it was competitive again. Early dragon flight it was okay but God awful to play (imo, 15 sec sun kings and pyroclasm was a travesty) then in the rework it got overtuned to the moon. Season four saw the problem of not fire alone but it’s synergy with God comp, another problem entirely.
Fire has not been the go to raid spec since nathria, that has been arcane or frost. People act like fire is always op when it is certifiably untrue. Just recency bias.
Going back further, fire was unplayable in season one of bfa, buffed a ton, and became good in season three with the introduction of azurite essences, mechagon bracers, and double on use trinkets. This was amped further in season four with corruptions.
Since bfa fire has been the dog##$-#, okay, and op in about equal measure
Not even that, Fire earned that reputation because of it’s very relaxed AoE cap, which means organized M+ groups that push insanely high keys always wanted to have a Fire Mage with them, but in low keys and in Raiding, Fire tends to be middle of the pack or worse.
Also, Arcane was BiS in Season 1 DF for Raiding as well, not Fire.
lul get trolled
Yeah… how many bugs did they fix on Frostfire Bolt on launch? what about week one patch? They don’t have a single care about fixing Fire mage. Why else would they alter a damage % and a proc % at the same time? That’s basic math. There’s no way they’re actually THAT bad at balancing, right?
And for reference, in case you aren’t aware, there are FOUR talents in the Fire tree that don’t work at all with Frostfire Bolt, One in the Mage tree that doesn’t work with Frostfire Bolt, One Heroic talent in the FROSTFIRE tree that doesn’t work as intended with Frostfire Bolt (requires 2 procs to work), and just for fun there is one ability (Frostbolt) that DOES work with the Forstfire Bolt talent that should not (It applies the DoT for some reason).
I’d love to be proven wrong here, but HOLY SH*T did they screw this pooch.
as of right now talents in fire tree seem to work correctly with frostfire bolt
Pyrotechnics, Kindling, Unleashed Inferno and Firefall do not work. The easiest to see/test is Pyrotechnics; go hit a dummy and test for yourself if you don’t think so. Overflowing Energy from the Mage tree is also easy to test at the same time.
Edit: WAIT, NO YOU’RE RIGHT! I literally tested these (Pyro/Overflowing) this morning and they’ve been shadow-patched. They did something. I WAS proven wrong. Thank you Crowface!
Edit 2: Testing all talents, Yes, they are in fact all working. On one hand, I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. On the other hand, these were Alpha level bugs and should NOT have taken 14days (including pre-release) to fix; especially with them being listed in the Mage Discord FAQs. Mind you, these were for the Hero spec that is behind after they put Living Bomb into the ground. Frostfire went from fighting Tank single target to trying not to be 20-30% behind it’s other 5 hero specs.
Does the ultimate (final) talent of the frostfire tree work correctly with combustion though? It wasn’t giving me full effect of frostfire mastery this morning.
But yes they did shadow patch things sometime in the last 24 hours.
It no longer gives max stacks, it give the free Frostfire Bolt (Frostfire Empowerment) that then does give 6 stacks of both properly now. Frostfire Bolt does seem to have a new bug of give 2 of each stack instead of 1 though.
Just tried fire again after the hot fixes and its still terrible. Its unfortunate as i was really looking forward to it. Seems like the same classes get buffed every expansion/season now.
Should just be a pally and never worry lol
We had a healer in our group out dps the fire mage. 
Like yikes, the fire mage was basically just the water-boy for the healer we had lol
It wouldn’t had been so bad if it was just a one-off, but the fact I’ve seen it happen more than once 
Well … Lets just say before I even got to play my mage, I knew NOT to play fire.
Because the only thing that’s hot with fire at the moment is the fact that it’s hot garbage, in SERIOUS need of a buff.
lmao like you wouldnt be on their forums making posts complaining
I was playing on my veng demon hunter and there was a fire mage doing 800k dps over all.
Seen him doing around 700 single target.
Thats almost as much as i do on my arcane mage (overall not single target).
Seems like its possible to perform as fire. He was 584 ilvl. Maybe the spec is gear dependant?