6.2 Challenge mode fire mage viability

[a little Kappa]

Hey. I like to mess around with uncommon specs in CM's and thought about fire mage. Every mage is playing frost in CM and I find the spec annoying, boring and too reliant on FoF procs to shine when crystal/orb is not up.

My point of the thread here is to ask you more experienced mage players if fire could be viable with full crit gear from timewalker with the prophecy of fear trinket + copelands clarity. You will have about 55% passive crit if every gear piece is with crit, 5% from the int buff + trinket proc will net around 75% crit if I'm correct so you should be getting pyro procs back to back with living bomb ticking for ridiculous numbers.

A pyroblast crit does about the same damage as 2 ice lances, think of it like every time you cast a pyro and it crits it does the same damage as 1 ice lance + the extra lance from the glyph. Along with living bomb ticking around on each target its about the same as the frost bomb spread damage from being triggered with a ice lance.

Fire would be more flexible in damage and not reliant on CD's which are on 1-2 minute cooldown to excel, however on really big packs it would still not shine as bright as the Prismatic Crystal, Frozen Orb, Frost Bomb on crystal and ice lance turret into crystal.

This is again just my theory and a question I'm asking you guys who play mage as main class =)

Thanks for reading, all feedback is welcomed and appreciated.


edit: What talent build would you use for AOE and what would you use for single target as fire in CM?

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...eomagex/simple my mages armory (not even close to bis as I rarely play this char)

[Saiyoran]

Fire is indeed viable for realm/region times (though not for world times atm). The trick with CMs as Fire is that Combustion is essentially worthless because you have no mastery. Almost 100% of your damage is going to be Living Bomb/Dragon's Breath on AoE. Prophecy is really RNG, I personally find it pretty good, but GSR from foundry is probably a more consistent option. For AoE, I typically spec Cold Snap (your biggest CD, since Dragon's Breath is >30% of your damage), Living Bomb (spread it with IB then again with Combustion > IB and hope you can get some additional bombs up with this), Incanter's Flow, and Meteor (crystal I find is better saved for your single target spec, which you'll want to have to swap to for bosses where pushing a dps check matters), though the lvl 100 talents are all pretty lackluster for mass AoE.

For your single target spec, Blast Wave/Crystal/Mirrors is pretty respectable burst, though you're not going to beat Frost/Arcane in a burst situation without some really good RNG. GSR and Copeland's are pretty much unbeatable here, even if you wanted to go PoF for your AoE setup.

Make sure you glyph Inferno Blast and Dragon's Breath, the 3rd glyph slot is pretty much whatever.

Let me know if you have any questions, I ran with a fire mage for a while for some realm times before I moved to a double shaman team.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Interesting notion. I'd like to see it in action. I've not played with anyone playing fire and doing it well, but after going from 5.0 to 6.0 CMs as a frost mage, I pretty much shelved the class.
Would love to see some videos or logs of fire mage in proper gearing showing whats up. I assume its actually better then frost?

[Saiyoran]

It's pretty comparable AoE, it'll beat Frost with bad RNG and lose to Frost with good RNG (since frost AoE fluxuates wildly with PoF/Comet Storm setup if you go that route). It won't really beat frost on bosses, but its not far behind. the advantage to fire is that while Cold Snap is a great CD, you can do almost your max damage every pull, since LB and DB are always up, and even Meteor is 45s, though its not much damage to be honest. Frost is pretty crippled without either a prophecy proc, crystal, or icy veins. Your regular AoE damage with just frost bomb/comet storm/orb is strong, but pretty low compared to full cd burst.

TL;DR: Fire's damage is pretty consistent on every pull because it's not super cooldown-reliant, its pretty close to frost overall.

[a little Kappa]

Fire is indeed viable for realm/region times (though not for world times atm). The trick with CMs as Fire is that Combustion is essentially worthless because you have no mastery. Almost 100% of your damage is going to be Living Bomb/Dragon's Breath on AoE. Prophecy is really RNG, I personally find it pretty good, but GSR from foundry is probably a more consistent option. For AoE, I typically spec Cold Snap (your biggest CD, since Dragon's Breath is >30% of your damage), Living Bomb (spread it with IB then again with Combustion > IB and hope you can get some additional bombs up with this), Incanter's Flow, and Meteor (crystal I find is better saved for your single target spec, which you'll want to have to swap to for bosses where pushing a dps check matters), though the lvl 100 talents are all pretty lackluster for mass AoE.

For your single target spec, Blast Wave/Crystal/Mirrors is pretty respectable burst, though you're not going to beat Frost/Arcane in a burst situation without some really good RNG. GSR and Copeland's are pretty much unbeatable here, even if you wanted to go PoF for your AoE setup.

Make sure you glyph Inferno Blast and Dragon's Breath, the 3rd glyph slot is pretty much whatever.

Let me know if you have any questions, I ran with a fire mage for a while for some realm times before I moved to a double shaman team.

I plan to test this when TBC timewalker comes so I can get the crit items required to pull this off. Might stream it also, gonna repost here when my mage is ready.

[Dizzeeyooo]

I ran with a fire mage for a while for some realm times before I moved to a double shaman team.

thank you for reminding me why I miss mop challenge modes

[Saiyoran]

thank you for reminding me why I miss mop challenge modes

Oh man so many reasons I miss MoP CMs... No soul caps, no blademasters, no mass grips, tank damage was super important ALL THE TIME, the dungeons didn't suck, healers were actually a relevant part of CMs.... I could go on. Fuck WoD CMs basically...

[Kelthenar]

Fire is good on some fights

[Cracked]

I did all CMs as fire in 6.1, it was completely viable. You are pretty much king on any aoe (... pretty much all of cms if done with decent group), but kinda sucks on ST, even with high crit.

[WarcraftMages]

It would be probably better than a Prismatic Crystal Arcane. The trash packs are a large part of CMs. But, I would probably prefer an Arcane Orb Arcane over it.

Frost is preferred because it's a good average between bosses and trash.