Scorch during combustion

[Deleted]

Hello,


Why icy-veins guide tells you to use scorch over fb during combustion ? watching logs at this very moment and only fraction of top parsing mages do this, why ?

"Scorch should be used in place of Fireball Icon Fireball while Combustion is active. The reasoning is fairly straightforward:

•Faster cast time
•Guaranteed Critical Strike
•No travel time

In contrast, Scorch is very weak outside of Combustion for the same reasons. Because it has no travel time, you cannot efficiently fish for Pyroblasts."

Would appreciate simple explanation.

[Aphrel]

Its possible its an old guide fromwhere we had shorter combusts and thus whould often only hardcast a single spell during the entire combust. That way the difference between a scroch->pyro and a fireball->pyro could mean the difference between making it be4 combust runs out or not.

Or it could be possible that scorch really is the more efficient spell during combust, tbh i havent checked the sims to see what it actually does.

[Isaelyn]

i believe that the reason for this is because during combustion you want to your pyroblast chain to last as long as possible. The faster cast time on scorch is (I believe) roughly the same time as a GCD is anyway, and the lack of travel time means you're not waiting for the spell to actually LAND before you can chain it into hot streak. So if for some reason you run out of fire blasts of phoenix flames during combustion, you can chain directly from scorch into pyro, as opposed to fireball where you could get partway through a second fireball cast before the first land to proc hotstreak.

Similarly outside of hotstreak, you don't have the guarenteed crit chance so the higher damage of fireball and it's ignites serves to make up for the damage lost when you're not chaining crits. Similarly, in these scenarios the travel time of the fireball smooths out the ability to string together combos. The hang time of the fireball animation buys you time to process the current state of your procs so that you're not wasting crits with all of your damage happening instantly.

[Araitik]

Watching logs at this very moment and only fraction of top parsing mages do this, why ?

Wonder what logs you are watching, I opened a few top 10 random logs and litteraly everyone uses Scorch 1 to 4 times during Combustion.
It's just the most efficient spell for the Combustion rotation.

To quote current Altered Time guide :

If you are to run out of instant cast spells, casting Fireball has been proven to be a dps gain over Scorch provided you do not lose a Hot Streak! proc over the duration. It is relatively hard timing to judge so think of it more like "I've used up all my instant casts and have 3-4 seconds left on Combustion. Can I fit in 2 Pyroblast if I use scorch? If not, i'll use Fireball + Pyroblast. Losing a Hot Streak! is the biggest dps loss.

Rule is to maximize Hot Streak. I'd cast Fireball during Combustion only in the following situation :

- No instant spell left, obviously
- Only 1 Pyroblast possible anyway

So if you have ~2s left on Combustion AND a Hot Streak proc, then it's better to Fireball + Pyro than Scorch + Pyro.
In any other cases, you can fish for an additionnal Hot Streak proc.

Also, remember that crit strike is calculated at the moment the spell leaves your hands, not when it hits the target. 0.1s on Combustion is still guaranteed crit.