fire-mage
Switchin’ It Up For ICC Hardmodes
As the ICC buff continues goes up and up and raids wear on and on, more and more of the raiding community has been tackling hardmodes. I know this is definitely true for my raid team, as we’re now 10 out of 12 hardmodes in Icecrown. While I definitely favor FireTTW spec for my overall play, there’s definitely 2 fights where arcane is just that much better, if you need the burst. If you play arcane continuously, there’s also some fights where Fire might benefit you. The whole situation just comes down to understanding the mechanics well enough to know the pros and cons of the situation. Most of the real critical DPS checks have been lessened by the 25 percent buff on most servers and will only get easier as we approach 30 percent.
The two fights in question are Lady Deathwhisper and Saurfang hardmodes. Why do I go arcane for these fights instead of fire? FOR THE BURST, MON! Lady D and Saurfang both have adds or add phases that are critical to DPS down as ranged, and arcane definitely helps with that. While fire, in my gear, does better damage overall, you really can’t be some of the cooldowns that arcane has available.
Lady Deathwhisper Hardmode: One of the reasons I initially switched to arcane on LDW is just because having Living Bomb do splash damage on Mind Control targets was not cool, and omitting that portion of my spells from the fight was a huge waste of DPS. This fight really brings every mage skill into question, no doubt. What might you be doing besides DPSing?
Spellstealing – There’s a buff that goes up on a lot of the adds you will be DPSing down (Fanatics) and that is not only a boost to your spellpower, but also makes the adds easier to DPS since they won’t be healing themselves. You might also be spellstealing buffs that get applied to Lady Deathwhisper by her mind-control targets in your raid. Fun ones are things like Earth Shield, or Power Infusion. I’ve even stolen Focus Magic off of her.
Counterspelling – Interrupting her casts in Phase 2 when she’s throwing out Frostbolts and Frostbolt Volleys is pretty important and might give your melee a break if no one is on the boss.
Polymorphing – Being on top of crowd control in Phase 1 when your raidmates get mind controlled is very crucial. Polymorph is a strong CC for members of the raid who aren’t directly in melee range, as I’ve found most of the sheep get broken if they are anywhere near the melee blender on adds. So stick to things like your ranged or healers, melee if you absolutely have to stop that rogue with all their cooldowns up from ganking your priests mid-fight.
Blink and Frost Ward also come in handy for getting away from bad things (Death and Decay, Vile Spirits in P2) or reducing damage in P2 when she Frostbolt Volleys. Never hesitate to use secondary abilities.
Secondary abilities aside, arcane’s DPS just won out here just due to the fact that we were having some problems with splash damage injuring our mind control victims. When you are learning a fight, this is pretty important and killing off folks early usually means a wipe later on, if not immediately. So switching to arcane didn’t feel like a big deal. And considering the fact that we needed a lot of burst on adds, it made it the optimal choice. While the heavy movement of the fight means I do suffer a little bit, overall, the benefits to the raid are immense. If you’re not having problems with splash damage, it might be alright to stay fire.
Heroic Deathbringer Saurfang – I’m almost positive some raids could swing mages being fire for this fight but I opt for arcane just because I routinely tear up add DPS as arcane. Most strats that raids suggest for this fight have ranged taking individual Blood Beasts as their focus before splitting off to help other range. I tend to stand near the back of the semi-circle on the left hand side because it is fairly easy for me to grab aggro on my beast and do a lot of DPS before it ever reaches me. I then switch and help the other ranged on my side. Arcane is very, very useful in this because if you save your cooldowns for beast phases, you can pump out a ton of damage on them and make this fight got a lot smoother. Having access to more channeled casts and high damage quick casts makes this optimal as arcane. What I try to do is watch the cooldown timer for the Blood Beasts and stack up Arcane Blast so that I have as much DPS for the one or two casts I can get off on the beasts before they get pushed back and then continue on DPSing them down once they are back in range. This means I have threat on them right away and they don’t go snarling off at a healer or a closer DPS. Don’t be afraid to pop off arcane missles or even an Arcane Barrage to polish off Beasts that are on someone else and have little health left. Beasts hitting a raid member just makes the fight harder for your healers, as Saurfang gains more runic power and the raid member might die from the melee swings.
So now that we’ve discussed why switching to arcane as FireTTW spec on certain hardmodes is beneficial, let’s discuss why fire is so useful elsewhere in ICC.
MOAR Damage?: Fire tends to scale a little better with 264/277 gear, but it really is a toss-up. However, the stats on a lot of the good 277 tier gear and off-set pieces favor Fire in terms of hit/crit budgeting. Well-geared arcane and fire come very close to eachother most of the time though.
Range: This is a big reason why I love fire on most fights. Arcane just doesn’t have the range of fire, especially if you stick with 1/2 or 2/2 Flame Throwing in your fire builds. There’s really no substitute for having options in where you stand because your primary spells can hit from the 35 and 41 yard range. This comes in handy on things like hardmode Putricide and Dreamwalker.
Mobility: Given that fire has more and higher DPS instant casts (Living Bomb/Fire Blast/Pyroblast where applicable), the mobility aspect comes into play on fights that require a lot of movement. You just have better DPS uptime when you’re not in fear of losing your Arcane Blast stack, or clearing it off with Arcane Barrage in an attempt to gain some DPS during high movement portions of the fight.
Splash Damage: This is mostly in regards to Heroic Gunship (lol) and Lich King. Living Bomb’s damage on adds (such as Shambling Horrors, Valkyries) is pretty amazing and not only churns out more Hot Streak procs but does quite a lot of collateral damage on ghouls and other adds that are in range. What I like to do during LK is keep Living Bomb up on him as well as Horrors (which has a lot of splashing on Drudge Ghouls), and also use my trusty Living Bomb macro to DoT up all the Valks so that they splash onto eachother as they are travelling along the same vector. You get a lot of instant damage (including Pyroblasts) this way. And that can be crucial going into Hardmode LK attempts.
The long and the short of it is that while there are mage specs suited more for some of the fights, I’d opt to say that arcane and fire do roughly the same damage in the hands of people who play the class well and there is no substitute for gearing and speccing as you feel more comfortable with, especially this late in the expansion. However, the things I outlined are just some of the ways you can get a little bit of the edge on some of the fights you may encounter while doing ICC hardmodes. Hope you enjoy!
Playing With Fire – Thoughts on the Icecrown 5-Mans
Blizzard has ignited a deep and abiding lust back in my heart – playing as fire spec. Ever since they released the three new 5mans, I have had an insatiable desire to flop back to my abandoned fire spec and blow everything up. Why is this? I guess it is finally time to do something other than run around in a room with no trash for once. Fire is pretty incredible for doing these heroics with – it doesn’t have quite the control that frost does for these places, but it definitely has the excitement and damage that I enjoy.
Ever since I switched from my “primary” spec to my “secondary” spec, it felt like coming home. It was a forbidden, sexy thrill. But let’s not forget about the instances, shall we? › Continue reading
Mage T10 is Powerful Ugly, No One Surprised
What is this?
MMO-Champion just released some addition PTR info for 3.3, including tier set models for warlock and mage tier 10. Right now I’m rather flabbergasted at how ugly this is. I know that Icecrown is supposedly emulating some of the things we’d be fighting up on the glacier and indicate some level of camouflage, but this is just silly. We look like beat up a bunch reject Blood Princes and stole their clothes. It’s also is the same color palette as death knights. I’m hoping that other set colors get released because it’s a double insult to not only have a horrible set AND have the same horrible colors as another class. Least it isn’t purple, but knowing Blizzard, it won’t even be a cool purple like warlocks get if they do get around to updating the set colors.
The bone boots and mouth on the hat are making me boggle as well. Someone at Blizzard needs to just be taken out back and shot. Half of what’s wrong with this set is the hat design. The one saving feature of this tier are that the set bonuses are decent.
In other PTR notes, some updates for fire talents were included but seemingly are for PVP-oriented abilities:
- Burning Determination: The duration of interrupt immunity granted by this talent is now 20 seconds.
- Dragon’s Breath: The mana cost of this talent has been significantly reduced.
- Firestarter: When this talent is triggered, it makes the next Flamestrike cost no mana in addition to being instant.
- Blast Wave: The mana cost of this talent has been significantly reduced.
Finally, I really want a flying pony. Ghostcrawler promised me one.
Blizzard Nerfs Mage QQ – New 3.3 PTR Changes
Big frickin’ changes for mages just got dropped on MMO-Champion just now. Makes me wonder if Ghostcrawler just started reading our blog. Hold onto your chairs, ladies and gents and onto the sexy changes:
Fire
* Improved Scorch now increases spell critical strike chance against the target by 5% but no longer stacks. (Up from 1%, Stacks up to 5)
Ice
* Frozen Core now also causes your Ice Lance criticals to reduce the cast time of your next Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt by 0.4/0.7/1 sec.
Glyphs
* Glyph of Improved Scorch is now named Glyph of Scorch and Increases the damage of your Scorch spell by 20%.
* Glyph of Eternal Water – Your Summon Water Elemental now lasts indefinitely, but your Water Elemental can no longer cast Freeze.
I cannot tell you how much myself or Metaneira are squealing right now. This is a big step up for both PVE fire and frost mages. It feels like all of the grousing that mages have been doing for the past couple years has finally paid off.
Scorch being changed from a stacking debuff to a single-application debuff now means that we get the benefit of the Glyph of Improved Scorch as it is now, with the benefit of being able to use our third glyph slot with fireball/frostfire bolt glyphs. This is a huge DPS bonus on every single fight – scorch can be kept up easily across both single and multiple targets with little time lost. This is such a major fix to the biggest flaw in playing fire in raids and makes it very not only comparable to other mage specs but other classes as well in both playstyle as well as DPS.
The scorch glyph is an obvious change since the scorch spell mechanics will be changing. Will it be a DPS boost against other glyphs? Time will tell.
The Glyph of Elemental Water is a big boost for PVE frost – it gives them the benefits of their pets and doesn’t hurt those who play frost in PVP. Will this, along with Frozen Core talent make raiding as a frost mage more viable? We’re very excited.
Metaneira will be testing the new build on the PTR shortly and we will report to you about these exciting, and frankly ground-breaking changes.
I’ll be over here hyperventilating like a little girl.
Scorch Bitching
This has been sitting in the back of my mind for a while, but came back to forefront last night during my raid. Sometime in every fire mage’s life, you’re gonna be that mage that has to cast Scorch. Maybe it’s because the other mages in your raid are lazy, or you have no warlocks in your raid, or you just like doing it. (Jesus, what’s wrong with you? I kid.)
Still, every mage at some point has had to be the “scorch bitch.” Last night it was me, due to our very wonderful demo lock being absent. I have been playing arcane 24-7 since 3.2.2 so it was even a bit weird just playing fire in general. When our faithful deathknight scribe handed me the scorch glyph, I felt like a part of me died inside. I’d been keeping scorch up for years, but having to glyph it is what really made it reality.
Why is this such a hated job of mages? I think it is the terminology more than anything – “scorch bitch.” Think about the other sorts of things that “bitch” connotes. Aggressive females and female dogs aside, bitch is frequently used in the gaming community and the world at large for the weaker, more effeminate, and dominated person in a situation. A scorch bitch has been, in the past, the weakest mage in a team, and they are sacrificing their personal DPS so that the other casters and mages can comfortably go on doing whatever it is they were doing. This negative image is one of the reasons that makes “taking one for the team” a lot less palatable. Why do you want to help the raid out when you’re essentially being likened to something less powerful, and ultimately less capable at DPSing.
Other classes have to take a personal DPS hit for debuffs. Rogues don’t get called “Expose Armor bitches”, druids don’t get called “mangle bitches” – there’s a lot more neutral terminology. And people seem to react a lot more nicely about it, in my heavily-biased mage perspective.
What made me feel better about my changeover to cover scorch last night was how nice the other mage in my raid was. He’s been my scorch-buddy-in-crime for 2 years now, and he thanked me for how nice it was that I picked up the slack myself. It was awesome that our raid scribe already had a scorch and fireball glyph waiting so I didn’t have to go buy them myself and could swap back and forth with ease. Your raid treating you bringing scorch as a benefit and less of a curse is a good thing. I think that we should herald this new age of “bring the player, not the class” by treating debuffs and buffs from everyone as something positive that a raid member does (Basically how we’ve been treating shaman all this time). Let’s throw off the shackles of oppressive naming and negative attitudes, not only from raids but mage-kind in general. Scorch isn’t great, but it’s a really awesome benefit to your raid and something we need someone to bring, in whatever form. Revel in it! You’re doing a great thing!
I was definitely enjoyed playing the part of the scorch-bot last night. Being an efficient robot was a lot more positive than being a crappy mage. And I felt good about providing that buff for my raid. Plus, it was fun to play fire again and try out a glyph I had only looked at with pure derision. Reclaim your debuff, my fellow mages! Scorch-bots, scorch-mages, scorch masters unite! Take back the word, make it your own!
At least until Blizzard fixes the mechanic at least. We can only hope.
Fire At Heart, Arcane At Mind
You know, I used to scoff at the idea that Lhivera, a well-known mage theorycrafter, used to present – “talent specs are not tools used to optimize your character for a particular kind of performance.” Even to me, as a fairly enthusiastic roleplayer AND raider, it seemed a pretty naive view that your character shouldn’t swap specs in order to gain an advantage in raiding. Maybe I had this view because I’d never had to move out of being a fire mage for my entire career.
But looking at myself, I wonder if I played right into what he was speaking about – even when frost was pretty much the only spec a mage could play in such fire-immune dungeon as Onyxia (1.0) and Molten Core, I stuck with fire. It is something I felt comfortable with and a playstyle I really enjoyed, even at my meager beginnings four years ago.
All of this weighs heavily on my mind as I made my first really serious foray into the world of arcane raid speccing last week with the advent of 3.2.2. I’m pretty sure many of our hard-won fire mages are feeling the sting of swapping to arcane, but once again, Blizzard has decided to tip the scales slightly and make arcane for all intents and purposes one of the best specs for high-end competitive PVE play.
Sure, I tried arcane for the 2 or 3 weeks back in Tier 5 content (specifically A’lar) when the Mystical Skyfire Diamond had been unchanged pre-2.3, but I wasn’t really feeling it. After the changes to the arcane rotation and mana useage, I’ve clocked some real raiding hours playing with my new spec and generally feeling unsure about how much I want to like arcane.
Is it remorse? Is it genuine admiration for the spec now? It’s strange and certainly in the minority to feel twangs of new appreciation for your class after something as “minor” as a talent spec change but maybe this is what Lhivera was really getting at all along. The specs we choose reflect us innately as players and the sorts of things we enjoy.
But I can’t say I am -not- enjoying some of the things the arcane playstyle brings in contrast to fire. While I love the gigantic crits, intense fireworks and DoTs of fire-spec, there’s something to be said about having my DPS buff continue across multiple targets, very little windup on pulls and having situational tools to increase my DPS versus my DPM. I know that according to fairly veteran arcane mage Euripedes of Critical QQ has some things to say about how the arcane playstyle has been made a lot worse on things like movement and rotation, but the spec and rotation as a whole still has a lot of configurability.
While I’m still continuing to grasp the real fundamentals of how arcane works in raids (my cooldown useage is still rather sloppy) – I’m terribly fond of how my DPS has increased just due to the mechanics of our raids, as well as the varied playstyle. I was allowed to go arcane quite fortuitously because of our caster lead (a warlock) decided that he swap to Demonology for the Shadow Mastery buff, allowing both myself and our other mage to try out arcane. So far, all three of us have been having fun doing something new for once. Being a scorch-bringer no longer has also been quite enjoyable, and the buff that demo locks bring with Demonic Pact is a huge raid-wide DPS increase.
Are there downsides to change? Of course. I miss Living Bomb and its dazzling EXPLOSION effects. I miss crits. I hate that one of my better arcane trinkets is from normal Trial of the Champion and hasn’t dropped yet. (HATE) I dislike how movement is quite the largest downside of the spec since so many fights in Trial of the Crusader require it.
Blizzard may never make a drastic change again with arcane or fire, but I doubt it. Will I be arcane forever? Probably not. Fire and arcane are still pretty dead even in most considerations. I’m just always seeking to further my DPS and my play within the confines of my raid and if something becomes a clear choice in damage, then that’s what I have to do. It is fun certainly that Blizzard has still given mages a lot to work with in choosing what they want to do or what kind of mage they want to be. Deep down, I’m always going to be a fire mage no matter what.
I’m never speccing frost however, and that’s final. Screw frost.
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