I am not new to fire mage but I am simming over 200k for singletarget patchwork 5 minutes but I am lucky if I can sustain 140k in boss fights.
I just play Frost. It’s marginally behind and feels better to play. Better AOE too and overall damage unless you’re running something insane like a +30 key. I’m not sure about raids, I stick to M+ and heroic raids if even.
1 Like
Hey Zukko, cool transmog btw, looks good for a fire mage. I’m no expert, I play Arcane, but learning how to get better is universal. I looked you up on logs. Just looks like some minor differences between you and higher DPS’ing fire mages and checked their casts. A good thing to do if you aren’t already. Some minor differences like starting to cast pyro before pull (might be something you do, just didn’t see it) and stacking fireball casts with instant pyro’s during lust.
I’d suggest running yourself through Quick Sim and looking at the rotation it uses. It’s not going to be a guide to follow every time, but it’ll give you a good idea of where you can improve. That’s one of the things I do when I have questions about my rotation.
I’m in the same boat, I absolutely love fire spec mages, just something about hurling fireballs and pyreblasts I find a lot of fun. But when you compare them to arcane, and frost they seem like it’s, well the worst spec in the game. Their DPS is terrible compared to the other ones. As a test I boosted a Warlock to 70 and with the base gear that the warlock had it was out DPSing my fire mage which had Significantly better gear. I’m really starting to wonder is it me? Or is the spec really that lack luster.
It’s not the easiest to play optimally, but it’s still far and away better than it was when Rune of Power was a thing. Probably as mobile as one could possibly get for a caster. Just suffers from a somewhat stale talent build / our main cooldown being sorta lackluster by virtue of it being active half the time via SKB. Would benefit from some changes to the dead talents, e.g. Living Bomb being useless, Deep Impact being awful, Unleashed Inferno being undertuned, Hyperthermia being a redundant budget RNG Combust, etc. Also shines in priority target cleave and virtually none of the raid bosses in the entire expansion have catered to that niche.
That’s just the difference between a simulation which assumes perfect play and being able to stand still vs the reality of a chaotic boss fight chock-full of movement heavy mechanics. Of course you might also be doing something wrong but no way to determine that without looking at your logs in detail. But rule of thumb always assume that you’re going to perform much worse than a sim unless you are fighting a training dummy.
There was like no actual advice given on this thread…
So I am going to talk just about raiding since that’s what I enjoy the most.
Ok so fire mage is definitely the hardest of the 3 mage specs despite having the least buttons in it’s core rotation. The entire idea behind fire mage is maximizing time in combustion through proper SKB management.
Quickly looking at one of your logs for Volcoross (good simple ST fight) your SKB rotation are just wrong. I recommend checking out Forgy’s youtube videos + documentation for more specific detail, but coming out of SKB you should always have 4.5 or 5.5 stacks of SKB so that the bridge to your next one is really quick and easy.
This also means you want a fixed amount of fireblasts ready for SKB which you seem to be missing using them more to get random pyroblasts outside of SKB instead of saving them for proper usage in SKB.
I want to highlight this part. The amount of damage tied to Combustion windows means you have to have the discipline to not respond to every Heating Up proc you get when you need to be saving charges for a Combustion window.
1 Like
Not to mention, Frost is far less punishing. 
I love the aesthetic of fire, but frost is just much more user & situation friendly in most cases.