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!
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