Fire Mage Rawr

I was asked to post a fire mage guide for my guild and thought I would share what I have done up. Any questions/discussion points, feel free to ask!

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Alright so I've finally gotten off my hiney and started this guide. Please remember this is a guide only, you may find things here you disagree with and would prefer to change based on your style of game play.

Talents

With the new talent trees came a few lovely changes for us fire mages, though I'm going to approach this as if this was your first time playing with fire.

You can check out my talent tree here.

Instead of explaining why I put points in the categories I did, I will go over the ones I missed and put few points in.

Burning Soul - a key thing for a mage to learn is threat mitigation. It does your party no good (and irritates healers, melee dps who are running after the boss, and tanks for obvious reasons) to pull threat. As you won't be pulling threat, since you are a good mage, you will not be getting hit. Ergo, damaging attacks will not be an issue for you. So save your points. The only reason I have anything in this talent is to get to the next row.

Blazing Speed - this is completely a pvp talent. If you want to pvp with fire, and it is a fantastic spec to do that with now that it has so much more instant casts, definitely put the points in here. As you won't be moving around much as a raider, this talent really is not beneficial.

Cauterize - this is a tricky talent. It is very very cool, but it can backfire. If you have heals on the ball, a hot will often carry you through that last tick, and save your life. It may also be the difference between downing the boss and a wipe. It is important to note that the more points you spend in this talent does not change the percentages of the damage or healing done, but rather the frequency of the talent proc'ing. So really it comes down to how lucky do you feel? I put the one point in this talent mostly to get to the next row, but I leave that one up to you.

Improved Scorch - Now I could have used the one point I put in cauterize in this to max out this talent. The reason I didn't though, is because aside from being something one can cast on the move, there is very little use for scorch now. In fact, since this update has been released, I rarely use it, even on the move. I usually try to time my movements with my instant pyros and fire blast procs. Again though, if you decide to pvp as fire, I would highly recommend this talent, as you should never be standing still for pvp anyway. And free is free.

Molten Shields - this is again a pvp talent. As it procs the Blazing Speed talent, I refer you to my comments there.

Every other talent in this tree should be maxed out. If you have any questions on why, feel free to post here or send me a message.

Once you have filled out your fire tree, it's completely up to you where you want to spend your remaining points. I have split it up between upping my haste in the arcane tree, and my crit chance in the frost tree. If you have previously been using icy veins, I'm sorry, there is no way by 85 that we will ever get that back unless you go frost.

Glyphs

Prime glyphs - Glyph of Pyroblast, Glyph of Living Bomb. Unfortunately these are the only two fire glyphs available. If you use mage armor at all, you can grab that one for a third, but as you shouldn't have any mana issues and you should be using molten armor, it's not necessary to fill in this space.

Major glyphs - Glyph of Frostfire, Glyph of Molten Armor and Glyph of Mirror Image. Why frostfire over fireball? Frostfire doesn't do as much base damage, but the difference is tiny. It has, however, the slowing effect, and will do frost or fire damage based on your target. With the glyph, it also adds a dot of another 3% damage. Dots are good. More dots. Molten Armor should be obvious as crit = good. And mirror image, well, you are a fire mage, son, time to shoot some fireballs and take advantage of your damage increases.

Minor glyphs - honestly, this is totally and completely up to you. The minor glyphs really are minor. The only one I recommend is Glyph of Slow Fall, as not having to fill your bags with feathers is a good thing. Once Glyph of Armors is available (if it ever is), this of course is another good one to use.

Stats

Stats for a fire mage really haven't changed that much. You should stack your stats in the following manner:

Hit (17% is cap) > Crit chance (about 35% is fine, more is a bonus) > Spell power (coming from Intellect if you don't have anything else directly buffing spell power) > mastery > haste

The reason why I put haste last? Really with all the instant casts we have available (and if you are stacking your crit, you will have a lot of them), the only thing we really need to worry about is global cool downs. Yes, haste is always a good stat to have, but balancing it out over the other stats, it really isn't that big a thing. Of course, this is for fire only - if you go with frost or arcane, haste is much higher up on the list.

Rotation

This is where the real fun starts. And where the disagreements really start flying. That being said, this is the rotation I use, and it has been working fairly nicely.

Start off on your dots - Living Bomb, then Combustion. As you will note, Combustion doesn't work unless there is already a dot on, hence living bomb. Like other DOT classes, you will have to maintain your dots. Living bomb does more damage the longer it goes, doing an aoe at the last tick as well as more damage. If you do not want it to aoe off, it is now refreshable at any time. If you can avoid it though, let it go for it's full timing to get the max dps out of the spell.

Fireblast is next on my rotation. No, it doesn't do huge damage, but it is an instant cast that has a high critical strike chance which will give you burning soul and other goodies. Remember that your instant pyroblasts are based off of your critical strikes - the more of them you have, the better.

Next is Frostfire bolt. This again adds more dots and the other effects I discussed earlier, as well as more crits.

Keep repeating Frostfire bolt until you either a) you have an instant Pyroblast proc b) need to refresh your dots or c) Fireblast cooldown is up. An instant Pyroblast is the ONLY TIME YOU SHOULD BE CASTING THIS SPELL. Unless you have haste of 1000%, it should never be cast at any other time. The time it takes to cast this spell without the instant proc is ridiculous and a waste of your time. This is one of your hardest hitting spells, though, and the reason why we stack crit chance over so many other stats. Remember that this also procs off of any critical strike from any fire spell - so the more you cast, the better.

AOEs

Unfortunately this was the biggest nerf Blizzard handed all mages. As fire mages though, we have one saving grace - both our Flame Strike and Blast Wave are instant and can be cast in a specific location. For an AOE rotation, I use Blast Wave which slows down the mobs, followed by Flame Strike and then Blizzard. Back to Flame Strike, Blizzard, then Blast Wave which should be off it's cooldown. Remember as well that Living Bomb can be cast on multiple targets, though I find the time it takes to cast it on large groups is not worth it.

And so there you have it. Again, any questions you have, just ask!

Now THAT is a dragon

The Cataclysm trailer has been released, and it does not disappoint. In case you haven't seen it:

There can be only one

Race, that is. Suddenly, I have a hankering to change all my toons to undead. The best racial ability in the game just got better.

Read the article on WoWInsider.

End game woes

When we last left our intrepid explorer....

Sensabull is now 80, slowly gearing up, (as fast as can be with waining patience for pugs so I JUST. DON'T. PUG.) No raiding, yet anyway, and although this druid is soooooper fun to play, I have too much raiding commitments already to jump in with yet another toon.

And fyi, I won the bet. Handily.

In other news the great Himhotepp has been brought down. In fact all of Scott's toons have been brought down. By a hacker. Alas. Our banking guild has been cleared out and all his toons stripped clean. We are awaiting that resolution.

So back to raiding. It is starting to become a frustrating ordeal. I don't know if it's that school is starting again and so schedules are becoming an issue, or if it's because the expansion is coming soon, but people just aren't logging in for raids. It poses a question whether end gamers are there for the gear or just for the fun of the progression.

Both Schokti and Kali are in end game guilds, with the Lich King being the final hiccup for 10 player regular mode. I am the type of gamer that would love to just see the guy go down. I don't care how many attempts it takes, we don't win until we see that final drop. I know, it unlocks heroic modes and then we get to start all over, but I am a progression player.

I recognize that some people are not. Some just want the best gear they can possibly get, which, I admit, I have my wishlist of gear as well. But I don't find that to be the be-all of the game. I don't put a whole lot of stock in gear score or in dps meters, trusting that by the time you are end game raiding, you simply know your class enough to gel with most groups and get the job done.

A recent conversation with one of our guilds brought into question the role that the guild plays. It seems that one of our guilds is being treated almost like a teaching guild - a safe place for new 80s to join and run the first four bosses of ICC and get gear and learn how to raid. I must conceed that these types of guilds are necessary, but it does put a damper on my raiding.

I know that not everyone playing Warcraft today is a vanilla player. Most players have no idea what to do in group dynamics (beyond more than 5 people), don't understand that it is important to let the rogues drop the traps and let the tanks pull instead of some warlock, or even what crowd control is. While I think it's fantastic that we have all kinds of aoe tanks to choose from these days, 30k dps is not impressive if you are aoe'ing down 15 mobs. Show me a hunter who really understands chain trapping and kiting, or a mage who can keep it's mob sheeped (and corresponding players that understand that damage = broken sheep), or a priest who will mind control a lost mob back to the tank or shackle the skeleton before he wipes the group - these abilities that can save a wipe that simply aren't used any more. Perhaps I'm just being a class snob, or maybe I just like that challenge. Either way, it makes me question why people play.

Are you a progression player or a gearing player? What thoughts do you have here?

A bit of an update

So much happening these days. First and foremost, Cataclysm Betas are out and... we don't have one. /sad face. I'm sure they lost our e-mail. But with WotLK the beta received in this house didn't come until the beta had been out for a month or two, so our fingers are still crossed.

In the mean time, we are both trying to complete end game before the expansion drops. Himhotepp and Schokti are both getting nicely geared, and are once again guilded together, with a guild we are both loving mucho grande. Focus in our guild is on 10 man progression, to get the ICC completed eventually on heroic modes and then on to Ruby Sanctum.

A "quick" 10 man into ICC last night gave huge gains to Schokti, where I finally got my reputation to exalted with the Ashen Verdict, giving me 40 exalted factions and the title "The Exalted". I will post a photo when a) the servers are up and b) I am awake to do so. Last night's quick run lasted 4.5 hours, and we finally progressed past Professor Putricide and one shotted the remaining bosses to Sindragosa. Our best attempt on her was to 20%, wiping mostly due to inexperience with the fight. Our timing was off in the third phase, but of course with progression this is expected.

Our plans now are to extend the lock out for this raid and get her down tonight, hopefully getting a chance at the big man himself.

In the mean time I have been levelling a druid, AND TOTALLY LOVING IT. I knew druids were somewhat OP, but there are things I can do with this toon I have not been able to do with any others. It has become so much fun to play.

Add to that our daughter has challenged me to a race to 80, with her mage Fyggi against my druid Sensabull. A celestial steed is on the line for her should she win, and bragging rights for me, since I already have the mount. Believe me, bragging rights are far more exciting lol. And so... game on!