State of Fire Mage going into 7.1.5 PTR

I want to address the boogyman that is Fire Mage and talk about where it currently sits and the changes that are currently on the PTR.

Note: All of the Warcraft Logs data that I will link to will be Mythic kills, 75%. I feel like this is a good representation of people who know their class, execute mechanics, and put up solid numbers. It also excludes people who were super lucky with either double BiS legendaries and with procs in the fight itself. This should be the type of data which is considered when making balance changes.

From what I have gathered, people seem to think that Fire mages are complete monsters destroying all PvE content that they see. This is not true. If you look at the current overall ranking for EN, you will see that it isn't at the top. Let's go down through each individual boss.

• Nythandra
• Spider Bird
• Ursoc
• Dragons
• Heart
• Cenarius
• Xavius

Not a single fight has fire mage being the top damage. On fights with AoE/cleave, fire is near the top and on ST fights it is mid/bottom...

When you look at the historical data, you will see that Fire was one of the top specs during the first weeks of progression, but has not scaled well going forward.

• Nythandra historical
• Spider Bird historical
• Ursoc historical

What people remember is the Super OP mage that they saw in their 5 man group. This was caused by a number of things:

• Most of the pulls in dungeons are short. Bosses are alive for less than 1 minute meaning that you are Seeing a full burst from the mage and aren't seeing what the DPS will 'normalize' at after a long down time. Kindling also allows you to use combustion on every 2nd or 3rd trash pack giving you more 'wow factor' as you melt trash.
• The changes to secondary stat scaling made playing lower level fire mage similar to playing raid geared fire mage. someone at 850 was able to have 60% crit while those kinds of numbers are typically not available until much later in the expansion. As this chart shows, At all times, crit is more valuable than intellect is. I lvl isn't important, your crit value is. (The change in how secondaries scale is also part of the reason that fire isn't scaling as well as other classes in raids).
• The class is naturally suited to 2-3 target passive cleave like typical dungeon packs. Outside of Living Bomb, the spec doesn't scale incredibly well with massive AoE and can struggle on pure ST when you aren't in a straight burn phase.

The changes for 7.1.5

For the 'how does this impact the spec, I am going to reference one of my 81% M ursoc kill (390k dps) here (Imgur if you just like pictures)

I'm sure people have already seen the patch notes on MMO-Champ, but here is a list of the Fire Mage specific changes

• Frost Barrier to Blazing Barrier. I can get behind this change. It changes the spell from being a passive set it and refresh it whenever to something that is more 'Active Mitigation'.
• Cauterize being added to baseline is a nice QoL since it was seldom selected in its talent row.
• Removal of Ice Floes and adding Frenetic Speed. I don't mind that Ice floes is removed. It just seems like it is poor design space to have frenetic speed and an artifact talent which both do the same thing (give you a MS buff after casting scorch). I am going to miss the mobility a little bit, but it will require you to plan out your movement a little bit more.
• Firestarter is still pretty useless in most situations. You are typically pre-potting and combusting on pull, so you will have 100% crit anyway. This helps on a fight like Odyn where you consistently have to swap to new adds, but those fights are not your strong point anyway.
• The level 30 talent row feels strange with a movement ability being matched up with a DPS talent (melee range) and a way to refill your flame barrier. Shimmer will most likely still be the go to here.
• RoP nerf is pretty significant. It will make RoP vs IF a lot closer in terms of overall DPS. Compared to live: I did 50M damage under RoP. If RoP was just 40% instead of 50%, I would have dealt 46.6M during that period instead. 3.4M damage reduction or a 3% overall nerf.
• The Baseline Fireblast/Flame On change is going to be tough. On live, with 11% haste (considered high for fire mage), my fireblast has a recharge time of 10.8 seconds and got a total of 33 casts off during that Ursoc pull (out of a possible 34/35). With the new fireblast/flame on system, my Fireblast would recharge every ~7.8 seconds (depends on how they factor the flat reduction vs the haste % reduction) so I would have gotten 35 potential fireblasts. The total number of fireblasts for the fight is the same, but you are unable to bank them up for large burst damage. Instead of having 11 seconds of 'bank time' where you have one charge but aren't capped you now have just 8. This is actually significant as there are times where I am casting 3 Fireball + pyros in a row since they keep giving me hot streaks back. On live, I never feel starved for fireblasts during the non-burn phases. I am seeing some conflicting information regarding whether the base number of fireblasts has been reduced from 2 to 1. If it is base 2 and increases to 3 with this talent, it can keep it as a minor loss (worse burst phases), but more consistent other play
• Critical Mass: Passive crit increased by 5% (from 10% to 15%) Decreased by 5% (from 20% down to 15%) and no longer gives 1.1x scaling for fireball and pyroblast. For Everyone above 50% crit, under 17k crit, this is a nerf. at 13k crit, ~65%, my effective crit is going to drop from 72% down to 70% 61%. A 11% nerf for my current character
• Combustion... well I saved the worst for last. Combustion will only give 50% of your crit rating to mastery on use. On live my combustion brings my ignite rating to 42%. If this change would go live, my rating would only go up to just 21% 27% (I forgot to add the 6% base back in). On the Ursoc pull, I did 19.5M ignite eligible damage during combustion. Instead of getting 8.2M damage from those combustions, I would be getting 4.2M 5.25M. That's another 3% nerf to the class.

The total nerf from RoP, Critical Mass, and Combustion when you combine them multiplicativly is ~~~9%~~ ~16%. None of the current logs show that fire (as a class) is deserving of a 9% nerf across the board. Yes bracers need to be changed/nerfed. I don't know anyone who would argue against that, but you should not be punishing an entire spec that is in a good/decent spot just because one legendary is out of line.

The spec moving forward

If the goal of blizzard is to make fire less of a ST spec and make its damage less spiky, I would make the following changes:

• Pyroblast damage changed from 375% spell power down to 300% of spell power
• Flamestrike damage changed from 207% spell power to 275% spell power
• Ignite scaling changed from 466.666 points per % to 425 points per %

That would be my starting point. Significantly reducing the amount of ST damage being put out from pyroblast spam, Increasing the amount of damage being put out by Flamestrike to the point that it is a damage increase to be casting it on 3+ targets instead of the current 6+, and increasing the % of the damage that is being done as a DoT to your mid-large AoE packs will allow the spec to fill that niche and will leave frost to be the 1-2 target spec. This will also change the pyro bracers from being super strong to being a unique legendary that allows an AoE class to perform on ST Fights. Rather than being required, it will be just another tool in the toolbox (much like other legendaries try to fill a niche with either giving survivability, providing a unique effect, or changing your rotation).