Crit % before Fire is Acceptable

[Natrii]

I have always enjoying fire and have returned to my mage after a couple years. I know fire is not good at lower gear leaves, what Crit % is the earliest I can break into fire?

[Polarthief]

I have always enjoying fire and have returned to my mage after a couple years. I know fire is not good at lower gear leaves, what Crit % is the earliest I can break into fire?

If you're trying to be competitive, you can't because Fire is horribly undertuned atm. If you just want to faff about as Fire, you can get into it right away, actually due to Enhanced Pyrotechnics.

[Deleted]

Please stop your negative campaign against fire. Seriously you formally agitate against this spec in every single topic... However the facts: warcraftlogs. com /statistics/8 are telling us an entirely different story from yours...

OP: I tried fire last week and i could easily score a 94% Xhul'horac kill even dying at -20sec. Using Dragon's Breath on cooldown is essential, so more or less we are a melee class (note that one cannot go against boss mechanisms; so for example during archimonde P1 it is almost impossible to cast DB on CD because you have to stay far from the boss) On single target fights using Prismatic Crystal talent is a must. Unfortunately the crit barrier to consequently score pyro chains into the PC is really high. If you check the best fire mages like Shayande (42% unbuffed), Nocni, etc. you will see that they pumped up their crit in a mad way, so they can repeatably build up high ignites during their burn phases (PC doesn't affect ignite's value, but one must do PC+combustion lined up with the legend ring). My crit didn't reach the 40-50% of these players' crit but i was still able to do some decent DPS with 6/6 Sandman's tracking and with some luck. But with bad RNG my DPS fell down badly, so without a high ilvl crit gear fire's damage is unreliable on ST fights. On fights like Xhul'horac you can go without PC (tho PC would be the most optimal) and combust after long pyro chains. Thanks to the numerous adds, your dmg done during the ring phases will never be that bad and you can pull a decent overall dps. On ST fights without PC one has no chance to pull some decent dps during the legend ring phases. So on ST it's better to forget fire with low crit The proc based trinkets (sandman's and goren) are too random to line them up with the ring's 2 min CD; therefore one must build a gear with really high base crit in order to repeatedly chain 3-4 pyros into the PC (independently of trinket procs).

[Polarthief]

Please stop your negative campaign against fire. Seriously you formally agitate against this spec in every single topic... However the facts: warcraftlogs. com /statistics/8 are telling us an entirely different story from yours...

We're all aware it's good on a few fights, but if you're trying to be competitive, you're not going to play it because the majority of fights just cater to Frost/Arcane. You might play it on that specific fight sure (Xhul and Iskar are the two fights where Fire is good; you could do good on Killrogg too), but you're hindering your raid by playing a very inferior spec on the other fights. Also, stop MY negative campaign? I'm not the only one saying this.

PS: Linking an irrelevant link because most of the Mages who play Fire only play it on fights that cater to them. Don't skew the real data.
PPS: Even the stragglers of Fire Mages who get like 20th place on fights, those are the extreme outlier cases of amazing RNG. The "Statistics" link you linked means literally nothing because, again, so few Mages are playing Fire (especially in Mythic) and those that do are mostly doing it to either get ranks on fights where Mages don't play Fire, or on fights where Fire is good.

[Woobels]

We're all aware it's good on a few fights, but if you're trying to be competitive, you're not going to play it because the majority of fights just cater to Frost/Arcane. You might play it on that specific fight sure (Xhul and Iskar are the two fights where Fire is good; you could do good on Killrogg too), but you're hindering your raid by playing a very inferior spec on the other fights. Also, stop MY negative campaign? I'm not the only one saying this.

PS: Linking an irrelevant link because most of the Mages who play Fire only play it on fights that cater to them. Don't skew the real data.
PPS: Even the stragglers of Fire Mages who get like 20th place on fights, those are the extreme outlier cases of amazing RNG. The "Statistics" link you linked means literally nothing because, again, so few Mages are playing Fire (especially in Mythic) and those that do are mostly doing it to either get ranks on fights where Mages don't play Fire, or on fights where Fire is good.

Fire also suffers from people just not playing it.

If some of the very high end mages, who mostly just play arcane on everything, would go fire that 'real' data would look way different.

Granted I believe fire is the weakest spec and for progression you probably shouldn't play it, but the way you talk makes it seem like fire needs significant buffs, which is going to make it really dumb again like in BRF.

You should rename yourself Captain Hyperbole or something.

[Charge me Doctor]

About 50% should do the trick. Don't expect to ever do the decent damage without soul repository trinket or scribe trinket tho

- - - Updated - - -

Fire also suffers from people just not playing it.

Fire also suffers from the fact that not 100% of raids upload their logs to whatever.

[Deleted]

Pulling ahead of Arcane on average? Never
Pulling decent numbers overall and strong numbers on good fights for fire? 2k~ Crit is was felt more than fine to me and yes,it can pull decents numbers even on singletarget if you have the right gear

[Polarthief]

Fire also suffers from the fact that not 100% of raids upload their logs to whatever.

That would make Fire suffer worse. The majority of guilds that don't are Normal guilds that usually don't even clear.

[AvCloudy]

Please stop your negative campaign against fire. Seriously you formally agitate against this spec in every single topic... However the facts: warcraftlogs. com /statistics/8 are telling us an entirely different story from yours...

Fire is weaker than the other two specs on single target, by a huge margin, and HFC doesn't have the sustained AOE fights fire needs to thrive. (Before you start throwing out fights, think how long the adds stay up, and if there's a priority target.)

Play fire if you want, but right now it's not a very viable spec.

[Deleted]

Crit is not currently problem in fire - all abilities just have too lot scaling to do enough dmg.

- - - Updated - - -

Please stop your negative campaign against fire. Seriously you formally agitate against this spec in every single topic... However the facts: warcraftlogs. com /statistics/8 are telling us an entirely different story from yours...

OP: I tried fire last week and i could easily score a 94% Xhul'horac kill even dying at -20sec. Using Dragon's Breath on cooldown is essential, so more or less we are a melee class (note that one cannot go against boss mechanisms; so for example during archimonde P1 it is almost impossible to cast DB on CD because you have to stay far from the boss) On single target fights using Prismatic Crystal talent is a must. Unfortunately the crit barrier to consequently score pyro chains into the PC is really high. If you check the best fire mages like Shayande (42% unbuffed), Nocni, etc. you will see that they pumped up their crit in a mad way, so they can repeatably build up high ignites during their burn phases (PC doesn't affect ignite's value, but one must do PC+combustion lined up with the legend ring). My crit didn't reach the 40-50% of these players' crit but i was still able to do some decent DPS with 6/6 Sandman's tracking and with some luck. But with bad RNG my DPS fell down badly, so without a high ilvl crit gear fire's damage is unreliable on ST fights. On fights like Xhul'horac you can go without PC (tho PC would be the most optimal) and combust after long pyro chains. Thanks to the numerous adds, your dmg done during the ring phases will never be that bad and you can pull a decent overall dps. On ST fights without PC one has no chance to pull some decent dps during the legend ring phases. So on ST it's better to forget fire with low crit The proc based trinkets (sandman's and goren) are too random to line them up with the ring's 2 min CD; therefore one must build a gear with really high base crit in order to repeatedly chain 3-4 pyros into the PC (independently of trinket procs).

one of two fights where is fire "usable" - fire is currenlty shit as whole package, i don't care about some proc lucky logs on WoL, i live in the real world (of warcraft)

[Champagne Supernova]

From a non heroic/mythic raiding view, Where Frost and Arcane perform better, for anything else such as PvP or LFR 45-50% crit is generally decent with the scribe trinket, at that percentage you're looking at 680-700+ Item level which is easy enough to obtain.

[Deleted]

We're all aware it's good on a few fights, but if you're trying to be competitive, you're not going to play it because the majority of fights just cater to Frost/Arcane. You might play it on that specific fight sure (Xhul and Iskar are the two fights where Fire is good; you could do good on Killrogg too), but you're hindering your raid by playing a very inferior spec on the other fights. Also, stop MY negative campaign? I'm not the only one saying this.

PS: Linking an irrelevant link because most of the Mages who play Fire only play it on fights that cater to them. Don't skew the real data.
PPS: Even the stragglers of Fire Mages who get like 20th place on fights, those are the extreme outlier cases of amazing RNG. The "Statistics" link you linked means literally nothing because, again, so few Mages are playing Fire (especially in Mythic) and those that do are mostly doing it to either get ranks on fights where Mages don't play Fire, or on fights where Fire is good.

I can agree that fire is not competitive until we reach 40-50% crit unbuffed, but after it is more than viable even on ST target fights. If you check the logs, Shayande, Combusty, etc. are always close to the top logs on any ST fight (except Archimonde) and in many cases they perform better than frost players.

The fact that arcane is topping the meters is so simple: with the new set bonuses and with PoF trinket its dps can go out of control with good RNG and since an enormous number of mages play the spec we can see those extremely lucky bosskills on warcraftlogs. Arcane has a ridiculus variance at moment, with no control over it, your performance is almost independent from your "skill". Spawning 3 ghosts and getting double PoF procs both on boss and on PC while trinket+pot+hero are up is just ridiculus; having these conditions (2x PoF proc + 3x helpers) during all PCs is top 10 log for sure - at least in your own ilvl bracket. Just check that the top10 arcane logs are 40-50k above the 30th or 40th best kills. The top arcane mage players show more variance (yes there are some returning names, but mostly we can see the high geared mages in a totally random order) than any other spec's top players. And with the fights getting shorter a good opener will decide everything...

On the other hand fire is less RNG dependent than ever. DB became a hard hitting cooldown (10-20% of our dmg done), and with the proper crit gear, scoring 3-4 pyros into the PC is baseline, so the final damage output is almost as predictable as in frost's case. I am so happy that Archimonde prefers frost (on heroic and lower due to the extremely short kills arcane will be better - better nuke during ring phases) because frost is a really nice spec with 4p and class trinket. Channeling WJ into the boss and using all FoFs on adds while we are shatterlancing is finally something fun. I really disliked the low skillcap of frost and i always found it to an extemely boring spec to play, but in this tier i enjoy it the most. I hope Blizz will favour this gamestyle too and make shatterlancing+longer WJ+4 FoF baseline, even at the cost of sacrificing BF/FFB.

[Deleted]

I can agree that fire is not competitive until we reach 40-50% crit unbuffed, but after it is more than viable even on ST target fights. If you check the logs, Shayande, Combusty, etc. are always close to the top logs on any ST fight (except Archimonde) and in many cases they perform better than frost players.

The fact that arcane is topping the meters is so simple: with the new set bonuses and with PoF trinket its dps can go out of control with good RNG and since an enormous number of mages play the spec we can see those extremely lucky bosskills on warcraftlogs. Arcane has a ridiculus variance at moment, with no control over it, your performance is almost independent from your "skill". Spawning 3 ghosts and getting double PoF procs both on boss and on PC while trinket+pot+hero are up is just ridiculus; having these conditions (2x PoF proc + 3x helpers) during all PCs is top 10 log for sure - at least in your own ilvl bracket. Just check that the top10 arcane logs are 40-50k above the 30th or 40th best kills. The top arcane mage players show more variance (yes there are some returning names, but mostly we can see the high geared mages in a totally random order) than any other spec's top players. And with the fights getting shorter a good opener will decide everything...

On the other hand fire is less RNG dependent than ever. DB became a hard hitting cooldown (10-20% of our dmg done), and with the proper crit gear, scoring 3-4 pyros into the PC is baseline, so the final damage output is almost as predictable as in frost's case. I am so happy that Archimonde prefers frost (on heroic and lower due to the extremely short kills arcane will be better - better nuke during ring phases) because frost is a really nice spec with 4p and class trinket. Channeling WJ into the boss and using all FoFs on adds while we are shatterlancing is finally something fun. I really disliked the low skillcap of frost and i always found it to an extemely boring spec to play, but in this tier i enjoy it the most. I hope Blizz will favour this gamestyle too and make shatterlancing+longer WJ+4 FoF baseline, even at the cost of sacrificing BF/FFB.

Just pretty much an overall "no" besides the rng arcane thingy.
Frost has a non existent skillcap with 4pc and classtrinket,only cycling between WJ and dumping proccs via shattering.
And fire,as much as i would like it,is not "close to top logs" at all-it is only for heroic which is irrelevant due to variance of killtimes etc-,if you look through mythiclogs fire is 30k~ish behind arcane which isnt close at all.
Fire will get closer the longer the Tier is out imo,but youll never be able to reach arcane dps on one of those insane openerpulls you mentioned

[Woobels]

Just pretty much an overall "no" besides the rng arcane thingy.
Frost has a non existent skillcap with 4pc and classtrinket,only cycling between WJ and dumping proccs via shattering.
And fire,as much as i would like it,is not "close to top logs" at all-it is only for heroic which is irrelevant due to variance of killtimes etc-,if you look through mythiclogs fire is 30k~ish behind arcane which isnt close at all.
Fire will get closer the longer the Tier is out imo,but youll never be able to reach arcane dps on one of those insane openerpulls you mentioned

I think his point is that you're not guaranteed to get one of those insane arcane openers, then again you don't have any guarantees for fire either.

It's kind of silly actually how we have two RNG-ridden specs, and I find it hilarious that fire is now more consistent (even if it's often weaker) than arcane.

[Nocni]

Guess I'll share my thoughts on the matter since many people seem to think that fire is irrelevant or completely RNG based like it was on previous tiers.
Fire is about as stable in damage as frost is with proper gear, reason being you can get up to 52-55% crit base rather easily and with the 1.3x multiplier from our passive that brings us to 67-70% crit on our main fire spells, on pulls with my oregorger trinket proccing i'm at around 82-ish%. with the 1.3x multiplier that means i'm over 100% crit on pulls which will always result in a good burst, some bursts will be higher than other times due to multistrike. I started to notice that the more I obtain gear/int/ilvl I'm getting closer and closer to arcane on single target (I've had pulls where I would be rank1 mage on single target fights such as fel lord, sadly we don't always get to kill bosses on our god pulls!) Don't get me wrong, there is still a strong aspect of the rng we always knew fire has outside of openers (no crit trinkets etc). If you have the confidence to play fire and you have proper gear for it I have no doubt that u can perform as well as the other specs can. I'm at a point myself where I feel like I'm outperforming my own arcane capabilities. I'm currently ranked 23th mage on the 'all star' list without having Archimonde killed so I'm still lacking points from that fight, point being that fire is the underdog right now and I guess I feel like it should be said that with the right gear you can pull it off. Assuming you're not in a top guild there shouldn't have to be a problem to play fire on every fight IF you manage to have the required crit (50-55).
Oh and for those who think that fire has no reasonable opener? I'm always on par with the arcane mages in my guild if not higher! If we (fire mages) will ever really beat arcane on pure st? I don't know, maybe if rnjesus shows up, but then again, arcane is more RNG than fire is.. by far (arcane missile proccs, temporal heroes proccs, doom nova proccs, let alone all of these things line up for a burst when you either have doom nova or your PM up, just thinking of that makes me want to cut my wrists). All of that is besides the point, you need to play what you enjoy most!

I can't link my armory due to my account being too new but you could look me up on armory (Nocni on stormscale EU) Note that this is nowhere near BiS gear for fire, I've just not been gettin loot lately so I get by with what I have :P.

I'll gladly answer any questions you might have if you'd have any.

[Natrii]

Well I did not intend to start a fight here...

So it is looking like I'm kinda stuck with Frost and Arcane until Fire is a bit better until fire is better tuned.

[Deleted]

As nocni stated,with decent critgear fire is pretty stable outputwise,youll be behind other arc/frost mages with the same gearlevel but you wont be "the problem the raid needs to carry" and even tho many people wont be with me on this one but even T17 fire wasnt that heavily rng based-double IB gave you more than enough chances to make up for earlier mistakes or maybe a bad opener.
Ofc dps could spike pretty heavily between pulls but that was rather a thing for the mages going full mastery,even for singletarget.

tl;dr Fire with decent amounts of crit isnt nearly as rng dependant as many people think and its an "okayish"/viable choice for everything but mythicprogression

[Polarthief]

Well I did not intend to start a fight here...

You didn't, don't worry. You have two super-low post accounts coming in here and being the ONLY two people to say that Fire is good. Methinks they're the same person with a not-brand-new account on here and wants to stay anonymous so they can fling their non-dirt dirt on me

So it is looking like I'm kinda stuck with Frost and Arcane until Fire is a bit better until fire is better tuned.

Fire will never be tuned until 7.0, so it really depends on how far/competitive you want to be. If you're just clearing Normals AND it's with a guild, don't worry about it. If you want to push Heroic and/or you're pugging, you're basically forced to play Arcane or Frost (or both).


Look, I may be a Mythic Hardcore gone Not-Even-LFR-Raiding-atm Casual, but I definitely keep up with most of the general knowledge stuff about Mages. I may not know when a stealth-buff suddenly breaks a spec/fight/etc., but I can say with certainty (and proof from my second post) that unless you're fighting Xhul, Iskar, and MAYBE a few of the other bosses (going down on Killrogg for example), Fire is just not competitive enough to be taken seriously outside of Normal Guild runs.

Fire is about as stable in damage as frost is with proper gear

On SINGLE TARGET? Do you even do research before posting things like this? Look, I even linked Mythic where Fire should be doing its best since it scales amazingly well and... Oh look, it's about 10k DPS loss on average from Frost, and almost 15k from Arcane.

youll be behind other arc/frost mages with the same gearlevel but you wont be "the problem the raid needs to carry

Let me clear up this misconception for everyone right now: nobody was saying Fire is unviable. It's definitely viable, it's just not competitive.* The problem with that is unless a Heroic guild run is really nice to you, you're not going to get into anything better than a Normal guild run. Pugs will not take you if they find out you're Fire, or you'll be kicked for being generally lower than most other classes. If the pug leader takes ONE quick peek at SimC, your ass is grass and they'd kick you for someone who is picking a more competitive DPS spec almost immediately.

Again though, no one ever said you COULDN'T play Fire. It's viable, but it's more than most teams don't want "viable", they want you playing what brings the most damage (though Frost and Arcane are close enough that almost any non-Mythic guild/pug will be fine with either, especially since Arcane is very RNG).



* Viable = Not so horribly undertuned that simply picking this spec makes the game (and community) mock you.
Competitive = You're pushing for higher numbers, as you should be doing as a DPS. Frost is lower than Arcane for single target, but it's still competitive because it's within a fairly close delta and Arcane is fairly RNG.
If you still don't know the difference between these two words and you want to argue about a spec's usefulness in raiding, just leave now because you won't be taken seriously by anyone.

[Nocni]

You have everything figured out so I'll just keep it short, I do progress mythic as fire, I do top the meters alot and COMPETE on single target with arcane. If I were to raid in a top guild that has quicker kill timers/less wipes on good pulls, you would've seen that simcraft isn't something to just take for granted. If I can pull it off, so can others, not to mention im behind on gear level. If some top guild mages decide to swap over to fire with their 730 ilvl, you'd see the WoL change drastically.
But hey, what do I know, I'm just a new account.

[Maverixx]

You have everything figured out so I'll just keep it short, I do progress mythic as fire, I do top the meters alot and COMPETE on single target with arcane. If I were to raid in a top guild that has quicker kill timers/less wipes on good pulls, you would've seen that simcraft isn't something to just take for granted. If I can pull it off, so can others, not to mention im behind on gear level. If some top guild mages decide to swap over to fire with their 730 ilvl, you'd see the WoL change drastically.
But hey, what do I know, I'm just a new account.

Give a link to your logs please. Or it didn't happen.