Fire Mage Talents Guide

Based on beta tuning and gameplay, Frostfire seems currently on the weaker side and hopefully this will change in the future, for the sake of this guide and keep it simple we’re gonna focus on Sunfury as it’s the superior choice for all aspects of the game as far as fire goes.

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Going into The War Within, some of the Mage Class talents received changes, these are the most important ones:

• Ice Nova and Ring of Frost are on the same row
• Supernova and Dragon’s Breath are on the same row (Supernova will see more play most likely since we don't have to be in melee to stop mobs and it deals damage)
• Barrier Diffusion - whenever one of your barriers is removed, reduce its cooldown by 4 seconds(works very well with mass barrier)

We also still have access to Mass Barrier, Cold Snap, Greater Invis and all our utility from Dragonflight.

I want to discuss a few of important talents on the class tree that warrant mentioning:

• Unleashed Inferno got changed and we now get more damage from it, but it’s currently still behind SKB
• Phoenix Reborn is, as we mentioned, our previous tier set from Dragonflight and honestly fire is not the same without this talent since most of our SKB stacks generation will comes from our Phoenix flames refunds (due to low crit early season)
• All the Living Bomb talents on the right side of the class tree just makes Living Bomb a really strong talent
• Flame Accelerant has been changed to reduce the cast time of Fireball, Pyroblast, Flamestrike by 40%
• Fervent Flickering - has been changed to reduce the CD of Fireblast by a flat 2 seconds rather than on ignite ticks like it has been on Dragonflight (it’s essentially the same with enough haste we won’t feel this change at all)
• Controlled Destruction - just a really powerful talent on Single Target (only downside is that it’s heavily affected by downtime if we cannot continue casting or swap targets)

Flamestrike vs Ignite:

I want to discuss Flamestrike vs Ignite since it’s been a hot topic on beta and with the current tuning even with all the new talents to buff and make our flamestrike stronger on everything that is constantly aoe/cleave related, Ignite is the stronger choice currently due to our Living Bomb interaction combined with all the Ignite talents in our spec tree.

However Flamestrike is far more powerful in lower content such as open world or low Mythic+ if you need to blow everything up since Flamestrike is more of a bursty frontload profile compared to Ignite which is more backloaded and rampy profile.

TL;DR - Ignite on everything unless you feel like you need more burst AoE Profile in lower dungeons. Historically Flamestrike has been never good in the raid since fire was always more of a cleave damage profile with ignite in order for us to really double down on Flamestrike we have to sacrifice a lot of Single targets and it’s just not worth it during the raid.

For our Hero Tree and Hero Talents we are going to focus on Sunfury as it’s the superior choice and I want to discuss some talents from the Sunfury tree so we can understand together how they impact on us and why they are important:

• Spellfire Spheres - every 6 times we consume a hot streak we create a sphere. Spheres increase our spell power damage by 1% stacking up to 3 times
• Burden of Power - creates a sphere increase the damage of our next Pyroblast by 15% and Flamestrike by 60%
• Invocation: Arcane Phoenix - when we cast our OWN Combustion (not SKB) we summon an arcane phoenix to deal damage. During our arcane phoenix he cast random fire and arcane spells.
• Mana Cascade - consuming hot streak grants us 0.5% haste for 10 seconds, stacking up to 10 times
• Glorious Incandescence - consuming Burden of Power causes our next fireblast to call down 4 meteors on our target, each meteor hit from burden of power reduce the CD of fireblast by 1 second. (this is important to track with a WA, since we don’t want to sit on 2 or 3 stacks of fireblast and we get another stack from the meteors essentially wasting a fireblast charge)We want to be at 1 or even 0 fireblast charges during burden of power because it can take us up to 2.5 fireblast charges or even 3 depending on haste.
• Savor the Moment - when we cast Combustion, the duration is increased by 0.5 seconds for each spheres we have up to 2.5 seconds
• Codex of the Sunstriders - over the duration, our arcane phoenix will consume each of our spheres to cast an exceptional spell. Once he consume a sphere we get Lingering Embers - Increases our spell damage by an additional 1%
• Memory of Al’ar - While under the effect of our OWN combustion (Not SKB) we gain as twice as many stacks of Mana Addiction. When our arcane phoenix empowers us we gain Hyperthermia for 2 seconds + additional 0.5 second for each additional spell the phoenix has cast (Hyperthermia synergies well with our Kindling talent granting us a pretty big cooldown reduction to our Combustion).