Survivability of fire mage

[Deleted]

What do you think of it? I find the main tools are ice block, cauterizing blink and the barrier. Thing is it might be kinda weak on prolonged unavoidable damage since only an ice block might be strong there so if it's on cooldown, the barrier is kinda weak/medium and the blink can be also only a moderate help.

[Deleted]

Iceblock always is pretty strong. You can remove some Debuffs with it in the actual raid. This helps a lot. The Ice Barrier could use a buff for fire mages, but this would not fit for fire mages. Cauterizing blink will get stronger over the time with artifact power. We gain 0,75% more health for every point in it. When we hit 34 Artifact power, our healthpool should be big enough with Ice barrier.

Cauterizing blink every 15 sec, the selfheal isn't to shabby. With a legendary you can get a 20% health shield on top of it.

I came from a warrior, and I personally find it ridiculous how many survivability a mage has, compared to my warriror. As well as not real problems to keep up your dmg while moving. With a lot of crit, you get a lot of instant casts and the rest can be covered with ice flows and blinks during a cast.

TL,DR: If you find mage survivability bad, try warrior and you will be happy with the mage.

[Deleted]

What do you think of it? I find the main tools are ice block, cauterizing blink and the barrier. Thing is it might be kinda weak on prolonged unavoidable damage since only an ice block might be strong there so if it's on cooldown, the barrier is kinda weak/medium and the blink can be also only a moderate help.

What more do you want!?? :P If your talking PvE here, then the healers do want to play the game as well. Cauterizing blink is an insane heal for prolonged damage, with shimmer is like a free rejuv or renew for your healers, thats massive on mana over the course of fight.

PvP wise they are more than fine, you mainly have to consider stuns most of all since you will always be taking shimmer because of CB and prismatic cloak.

[Deleted]

We are suppose to be class cannons. But we aren't. We got pretty good surv

[Lioo]

It is above average, just like anything about fire mage now.

[Deleted]

Cauterizing blink will get stronger over the time with artifact power. We gain 0,75% more health for every point in it. When we hit 34 Artifact power, our healthpool should be big enough with Ice barrier.

I think that's irrelevant because the entire game will be balanced around it (all classes) and hence the incoming damage will be appropriately higher.

[pkm]

In what situation though? Mage survivability is fine in raids. Ice barrier absorbs enough damage to act as a good buffer for your health to keep you out of the danger zone. Ice block for when shit really hits the fan and to cheese mechanics. Blink heal is actually pretty decent for Mythic raiding where every little thing matters. If you are still dying then the issue lies elsewhere, not with the mage toolkit.

WQ is another story heh. Just get a class hall guardian and call it a day :P

[Deleted]

Ice barrier absorbs enough damage to act as a good buffer

Do you use any good raid frames that indicate graphically the size of it? The barrier of fire is pretty weak. It is fully depleted by most cases of low unavoidable damage and it is 100% depleted by big unavoidable damage while it only helps a little there. The arcane and frost double barrier is another matter, that's pretty strong.

[Deleted]

Do you use any good raid frames that indicate graphically the size of it? The barrier of fire is pretty weak. It is fully depleted by most cases of low unavoidable damage and it is 100% depleted by big unavoidable damage while it only helps a little there. The arcane and frost double barrier is another matter, that's pretty strong.

That is the idea behind ice barrier, it is just a buffer not a "I am Immortal" skill.

[Deleted]

That is the idea behind ice barrier, it is just a buffer not a "I am Immortal" skill.

It does little, that's the point. The only viable choice on big unavoidable damage is ice block and if you try to double it you lose double blink, which is a big loss. Cauterizing is almost nothing when there is at least 1 healer available. That leaves the spec with a single big damage reduction CD on unavoidable damage on a 5 minute cooldown. That's pretty weak compared to what we had. Arcane is godlike compared to it. It can ice block, it can double barrier, it can greater invis. Double barrier on its own on frost and arcane is huge. It can take almost all medium unavoidable damage without a sweat and on big-wiping-unavoidable damage it can save you in most cases while fire will almost always end up dead.

[Deleted]

Aside from us and many ranged dps spec not being as imba as tanks in WQ.

The only real issue i had with fire mage survivability is Cour of stars Mythic+ 4-5. Their is a certain type of mob you need to clear for the 2e boss that does a long casttime aoe that just one shots you. I can dodge one with iceblock but if we face a second mob im dead, Icebarrier doesn't seem to be enough to survive.
Other than that it's trash like neltharions lair but many dps get huge dmg incoming.
PVP wise im still not sure, but it's too meleecraft their.

What i'd really like to see is having epic relics be swappable so i can swap betwseen dps and cauterizing blink and possibly give every spec Greater invisibility. Ideally buf it to 80% so we get the soaking raid mechanic identity back. But that might be too homogenizing.

[Deleted]

I don't know about pvp, but about pve it's clear, it's an unfair feeling when you haven't taken any avoidable damage at some types of content and then you run out of spells to mitigate anything. I understand the need of limits but I believe it's too excessive in this case. 5 minute cooldowns are cool but they could be reserved for specs that also have something minor that works. The single-barrier of fire is just not it, and cauterizing is just an extra moderate hot that won't make a difference when healers are passively doing their thing.

[gallamann]

So I just leveled second mage as Frost (herb/mine bitch) and my main is Fire. Out in the world what I missed most from Fire was LB and Dragon's Breath.

Everytime I ended with a 4-5 mob pull as Frost, Blizzard sucked ass compared to LB, and the total lack of Dragon's Breath was huge as I couldn't daze them all and gain distance. This inevitably leads to barrier being dropped and no recourse outside of hit mirrors to buy me time to kill them (don't run mirrors on Fire).

Whereas with Fire, Shimmer and have a heal while barrier is down which mostly buys me the time to get a new barrier.

Mythic+

That Shimmer is really nice with CB, we all taking damage, shimmer and buy the healer a couple seconds.

Raids

Here Shimmer will help a bit but most times you really need a healer as they like to debuff you with shit you need to drop out of raid, and oh by the way it drops 4-6 times and damages you everytime.

Only change I'd like to see is a shorter cool on Ice Block, sometimes you are just fucked by RNG and not a damn thing you can do because Ice Block is on cool.

Still don't get why Arcane only gets GI, if all specs had that could ignore my IB comment.

[lhehitman]

My only complaint about our survivable as a Mage is that we do not have a stun. In the grand scheme of things I don't think we need a stun because of our high mobility but for the life of me I cannot get past the withered army training scenario when the elite rogue comes out and kills me. Every. Single. Time. Not having a stun and wearing cloth makes this specific thing so much more difficult than say for a demon hunter or warrior. He either rips through my army before I can kill him or comes at me and rips through me before my army can help kill him and there's not way I can stop him. The only thing we have is a disorient or root which breaks on damage. I haven't done the scenario in over a week because I get so frustrated by it.

[PurechaosSK]

My only complaint about our survivable as a Mage is that we do not have a stun. In the grand scheme of things I don't think we need a stun because of our high mobility but for the life of me I cannot get past the withered army training scenario when the elite rogue comes out and kills me. Every. Single. Time. Not having a stun and wearing cloth makes this specific thing so much more difficult than say for a demon hunter or warrior. He either rips through my army before I can kill him or comes at me and rips through me before my army can help kill him and there's not way I can stop him. The only thing we have is a disorient or root which breaks on damage. I haven't done the scenario in over a week because I get so frustrated by it.

Always go using 2000 mana and make sure you get up to 30 or more withered before you get in the room. make sure your reactivating the withered frenzy. Make sure your combustion and all CDs are up including Time warp. Kite like youve never kited before. DB, blink, frost nova, blink, DB. Iceblock. Keep frenzing with the withered and they will bring him down.

[Stacyrect]

My only complaint about our survivable as a Mage is that we do not have a stun. In the grand scheme of things I don't think we need a stun because of our high mobility but for the life of me I cannot get past the withered army training scenario when the elite rogue comes out and kills me. Every. Single. Time. Not having a stun and wearing cloth makes this specific thing so much more difficult than say for a demon hunter or warrior. He either rips through my army before I can kill him or comes at me and rips through me before my army can help kill him and there's not way I can stop him. The only thing we have is a disorient or root which breaks on damage. I haven't done the scenario in over a week because I get so frustrated by it.

You are doing it wrong. Ley stalker is gonna smash your withered, it's unavoidable. You keep ley stalker polyd till your done unlocking doors and mobs are cleared. Fight him down in the big circular room downstairs. Their is enough room where you can safely keep him away from the withered whilst u kite em till dead.

[Azcatryo]

The best way I have found to handle Dro is make sure you have a decent amount of withered (15+ is usually enough for me) have cooldowns on reserve and be quick to hit that berserk action for the withered to do damage. Dragon's breath is good for that charge attack he does. Otherwise, kiting seems to work. Most of the time I can kill him before I even have to start kiting as long as I have cooldowns (combustion and time warp) ready to blast him. Since everything else is predictable in there as long as you are careful, you should have cooldowns ready for whenever he pops up.

Honestly the worst thing he does anymore when I am in there is ignore me to hit my withered. These days it is a personal challenge to see how little damage I can let him do to my army before he goes down. As a fire mage, shimmer (with cauterizing blink) and ice barrier are sufficient to keep me alive through his ambush while also allowing me to be offensively casting to destroy him. (having withered berserkers helps a lot as well.)

Frankly I have played Fire Mage as my main since TBC, never straying from the spec apart from the odd battleground back in the day when I would go frost until the BG was over. Fire mages have never been more robust than they are now. Putting a heal on blink while also allowing us to possibly have a talent that lets us blink twice is killer. Ice barrier may be a tad weak, however when used with cauterizing blink I think it is superior to the arcane and frost alternative of a stronger barrier because we can recover health. As we should not be actively taking damage regularly, this is a perfect solution for us. Plus we are mobile and still have a root and an AOE slow on top of that. For WQ you have Invis as well should things get too hairy and you can spec into Mirror Images if you are still having problems.

No we are not the most tanky of casters, nor are we supposed to be. Glass cannon does define us pretty well. But our tool kit allows us to be a mobile and slippery glass cannon these days! And, unlike a few previous iterations of the spec, we also have the "cannon" portion down thus far this expac with our nice burst capabilities.

When playing a mage, you have to get into the mindset of "if it catches you it is going to hurt" on just about everything. We don't have the plate armor to let things hit us. We have an absorb barrier to buy us time to open distance or kill something fast. I make it a personal challenge when soloing stuff to take as little damage as possible. I have done that basically everyday I have logged into my mage since TBC and find my survivability has increased greatly since my early days.

We have the tools to do our job, we just need to know how to use them.

The only concern I had with survivability was in patch notes for 7.1 on the PTR that had cauterizing blink taking a big hit. Hoping they back that off (if they haven't already.)

[Deleted]

Check if you have Devilsaur Shock-Baton (can't post links yet, but you can find it easily on wowhead) helps a lot in kiting (considering you're not overgeared that you have significantly better trinkets). I mistakenly disenchanted one, later on I noticed that sometimes in mythics and such it accounted for 4-5 or up to 10% of another mages damage, so I recovered it and next time I met Dro after that I killed him for the 1st time.

[thracken13]

I personally love it - between the tools we have + the class set bonus, i'm almost unkillable questing

[13en3]

We are suppose to be class cannons. But we aren't. We got pretty good surv

I am actually surprised by how much durable mages feel right now. I rolled Boomkin thinking we wouldn't be such glass cannons. It's why I am considering re-rolling.