Introduction
Welcome to Method’s Fire Mage class guide.
My name is Tamir, also known as tam1h. I've been pushing high mythic+ keys since Legion as a mage and raiding since Warlords of Draenor. I have been raiding the top 30 scene throughout most of Shadowlands and Dragonflight.
What has changed
Fire Mage Changes for The War Within
Going into The War Within, mages generally but also Fire mages specfically are getting significant changes with some talents shifting around, some talents being removed and some new talents also being added.
I will note the most important changes that will affect fire mage below.
One of the main features going in the War Within is we are getting a new talents tree called Hero talents. Fire is getting two new talent trees to play with which will define our playstyle. The two new Hero Trees are called Sunfury and Frostfire, which we’ll talk about briefly in the Talent and Playstyle sections.
- Mass barrier is now a 3 minute CD
- Time warp is being removed (no double lust anymore)
- Time anomaly is changed to proc more often
- Inspired Intellect - on the same row with time anomaly arcane intellect grants you additional 3% intellect (however its additive intellect so its much weaker)
- Supernova is on the same choice as Dragon’s Breath
- Ice nova and Ring of frost share the same choice
- Barrier Diffusion - whenever one of your barriers is removed, reduce its cooldown by 4 seconds (works very well with mass barrier)
- Sun King's Blessing stacks required has been increased from 8 to 10
- Phoenix Reborn has been redesigned to work with our previous S2 Tier set from Dragonflight which gives us the refunds on Phoenix Flames and increase the damage by 100%
- Living bomb is now a passive talent that is tied into our Hot Streak (see more in the next section)
Fire Mage Tuning
Going into the War Within as a Fire Mage:
Unfortunately fire received a lot of nerfs and it’s currently behind compared to the other 2 specs in both single target and AoE. We hope fire will get some love going into The War Within, however with that being said fire does remain a solid choice across all content types because:
- It has very good survivability
- We have cheat death with Cauterize and all our other defensives aspect which makes fire extremely tanky
- Very mobile, especially during combustion with all our instant cast