Fire Mage playstyle and rotation guide

General Rotation:

Use fireball until you crit, and on the ensuing fireball cast use a fire blast and pyro. This is your bread and butter.

When any mob is in execute range, replace fireball with scorch in your rotation and scorch to guarantee you hot streaks.

When talented, do your best to maintain 3 stacks of Feel the Burn at all times. Outside of combustion, the 3 stack will inevitably drop, which is ok. Conserve some fire blast charges going into any new combustion, so you can get a new 3 stack rolling easily.

Do your best to spend Sun King’s procs ASAP, as any hot streaks spent past 8 do not contribute to a new Sun King’s bust until the one you have is spent.

Try to keep any pyroclasm procs from expiring by spending them immediately. However, if you have 1 pyroclasm and are only 1-2 hot streaks away from generating a sun king’s proc, it may be worth it to generate the sun king’s first so that you can guarantee your pyroclasm crits.

If you did not pick the Alextrasza’s Fury talent, you should only use Phoenix Flames in combustion. However, if you picked the talent, you want to use it outside of combustion to benefit more from kindling.

Opener:

Single Target & Cleave

Fire is fairly punished for target swapping so in general you want to find the priority mob in any pack and tunnel into that hard.

1. Pyroblast 5 seconds before the pull (depending on how far you are from the boss)
2. Use Rune of Power and cast fireball. Halfway through the fireball you want to cast Fire Blast since the boss is at firestarter range and you will gain a hot streak chain
3. Continue to build your Sun king’s Blessing stacks as long as the boss is at Fire Starter range
4. You want to be aggressive with Fire Blast within the firestarter window since you want to reach SKB stacks as fast as possible
5. Continue to pryoblast and Fire Blast until you are at 8 stacks of Sun king’s Blessing and you are ready to enter your Combustion window
6. Use Rune of Power and hardcast pryoblast and just before the pyroblast cast goes off you want to press your Combustion so you benefit from Sun king’s Blessing and a longer Combustion window
7. After your Combustion window you want to cast Shifting Power. At this point you should be at 7 or 8 stacks of Sun king’s Blessing
8. If SKB is ready, cast rune of power and start hard casting pyroblast to enter the SKB Window once again
9. Fill with fireball and don’t over cap on Fire Blast or Pyroclasm Procs

Playstyle

In general, your playstyle and especially cooldown use should be molded on a fight-by-fight basis. This has historically been one of the best strengths of Mage in cutting-edge content. Our CD timing is variable, and the damage we do in short bursts can overcome difficult parts of an encounter. In general, do your best to time your combustion and rune usage to increased boss damage windows, add spawn or just some point in the fight that allows you to stand in place for 12 seconds at a time.

Get used to stutter stepping between your GCDs. You want to only use your blink charges for large movements. If you only have to move 10 yards and you have a few seconds to get there do it by stutter stepping in your rotational down time.

Lastly, Mage is one of the tankiest DPS classes in the game, but nearly all of our defensives are proactive buttons and not reactive. Blazing Barrier, Alter Time, Mirror Images, and Ice Block all do no good if you haven’t pressed them before a damage event happens. Get used to studying damage patterns of encounters and knowing ahead of time when you are about to take a big hit. Your healers will be able to feel the difference if you are playing well defensively, and they will thank you for it.