How To Improve As Fire Mage — The War Within (11.0.5)

As a Fire Mage, due to having filler spells, there is always something you could be casting. This means any time you are not casting something, you lose lots of damage. This is most often due to movement. Many people end up casting a lot of Scorch while moving; although this is better than not casting anything at all, Scorch deals very little damage, so there are multiple other better ways to deal with movement.

The first one is not Fire Mage specific, but it goes for all casters. Plan your movement. If you know that in 10 seconds, you need to be at a specific position, you should use the Global Cooldown of any instants that you use in your normal rotation to slowly move to that position. Since Fire Mages use quite a lot of instants, especially Pyroblast, you can stutter step towards your desired location during the Global Cooldown.

The second one is quite obvious but often not optimized properly, and it is Shimmer, Ice Floes and Alter Time usage. Shimmer and Ice Floes will not interrupt your cast and should thus always be used over interrupting your cast and manually moving, when possible. If a patch of fire spawns under your feet, you can simply Shimmer out of it or use Ice Floes to move out of it without interrupting your cast. Wherever possible, try to rely on Shimmer or Ice Floes before relying on Scorch. Additionally, Alter Time can be used to avoid moving altogether by activating it right before a large amount of damage happens and then healing to full health straight after instead of dodging the big hit.

Combustion is a massive cooldown, and where you will do most of your damage. You should always try to cast it as much as possible during a fight, including the combustions gained via Sun King's Blessing. However, pressing Combustion and the boss then going inactive is a massive DPS loss, so ensure you watch boss mod timers for mechanics that might impact your ability to hit the boss. We generally also suggest saving at least a Shimmer or Ice Floes stack for Combustion in case you need to move while hard-casting a Pyroblast during it.

It is impossible to correctly play and optimize a Fire Mage without using Raidbots to sim your own character. There are simply too many variables involved to intuitively figure out what gear to wear and so on without simming it first. Generally speaking, a simulation should be the first and final say in the gear you end up wearing for any given situation.

Simming is now very easy, with no need to understand SimulationCraft syntax or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and the Raidbots website. Below you can find a video on how to sim your own character using the website.