Fire Mage DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Midnight (12.0.1)

Aoe Rotation

The Fire AoE rotation follows a priority system. Below we list this priority system. You should read from the top to the bottom, and then execute the first action where all conditions match.

In AoE, the rotation largely plays the same, with one very critical difference: You cast Flamestrike instead of Pyroblast.

Target Counts for Replacing Pyroblast With Flamestrike

Note: you should always be specced into Fuel the Fire to make casting Flamestrike worth it.

As Frostfire, you only replace Pyroblast for Flamestrike at specific target counts:

As Sunfury, you only replace Pyroblast for Flamestrike at specific target counts:

1. You should stick to using Pyroblast over Flamestrike at all target counts if you want to maximize your damage to a specific high priority target.
2. When the target is above 90% health with Firestarter specced: Never use Flamestrike
3. During Combustion: 4 targets or more
4. Outside Combustion: 3 targets or more
5. Both during and outside of Combustion: 4 or more targets
6. Only replace Pyroblast, never replace a Fireball cast with Flamestrike!
7. Only replace Pyroblast, never replace a Frostfire Bolt cast with Flamestrike!

This leads to the following full priority list:

1. When running Firestarter, delay your first Combustion until the target is below 90% health. Also do not cast Flamestrike whatsoever when the target is above 90% health.
2. Cast Combustion when ready and then go into the Combustion Priority List below. Cast Combustion near the end of a hard-cast spell. - Click for hard-cast priority

   • Flamestrike with Pyroclasm
   • Fireball
   • Frostfire Bolt
   • Scorch (when target is below 30% health)
3. While Hyperthermia is active, cast Flamestrike. - Click for advanced tips

   During Hyperthermia, if you have Heating Up, convert it with Fire Blast into Hot Streak. Even though Hyperthermia guarantees critical strikes, you will still want to convert Heating Up into Hot Streaks via Fire Blast, because Hot Streak greatly increases the Mastery: Ignite applied by Flamestrike.
4. Cast Meteor immediately as it becomes available. If you had to delay it more than 10 seconds, skip the usage and save Meteor for Combustion.
5. Cast Pyroblast when you have Hot Streak. Cast it after a non instant Frostfire Bolt so they both land at the same time. See the Pyroblast Chaining section for information as to why.
6. Cast Flamestrike when you have Hot Streak.
7. Hardcast Flamestrike when Pyroclasm procs. - Click for advanced usage details

   • Ideally you want to save a proc for Combustion if possible. This means, if you only have a single stack of Pyroclasm, and Combustion is coming up before Pyroclasm expires, you should delay the hardcast until right before Combustion, and then hardcast Pyroblast into casting Combustion as you finish the Pyroblast cast.
   • However, make sure Pyroclasm never runs out and you do not overcap on charges. This means, if you have 2 stacks, or it is about to expire, always cast it right away.
8. Cast Scorch if you have a Heat Shimmer proc, and you do not currently have Hot Streak.
9. Cast Fire Blast to convert Heating Up into Hot Streak.
10. Cast Scorch as your filler to generate Hot Streak / Heating Up when the target is below 30% health.
11. Cast Frostfire Bolt as your filler to generate Hot Streak / Heating Up.
12. Cast Fireball as your filler to generate Hot Streak / Heating Up.

Combustion is a powerful cooldown that makes all of your spells critically strike. The goal is to use it as close to on-cooldown as possible, while making sure to use any other damage increasing cooldowns alongside it, like trinkets and racials.

Since all spells are guaranteed critical strikes, you will be rotating instant-cast Flamestrike and Hot Streak builders, like Fire Blast.

1. Cast Meteor at any point in the last 8 seconds of Combustion, but ensure it lands before Combustion ends. In practice, this means cast it at any point between 2 to 8 seconds of Combustion left.
2. Cast Meteor.
3. Cast Flamestrike when you have Hot Streak.
4. Hardcast Flamestrike when you have Pyroclasm and Combustion has at least 3 seconds left.
5. Cast Scorch when you have Heat Shimmer and no Hot Streak.
6. Cast Fire Blast to convert Heating Up into Hot Streak.
7. Cast Scorch as your filler to generate Hot Streak / Heating Up when the target is below 30% health.
8. Cast Frostfire Bolt as your filler to generate Hot Streak / Heating Up.
9. Cast Fireball as your filler to generate Hot Streak / Heating Up.

Understanding how to generate Critical Strikes as efficiently as possible is crucial in utilizing Fire effectively. This specialization is designed to crit more often than not, so it is easy to understand why learning to execute the right combos to create a chain of crits is paramount.

Whenever you get a Heating Up proc, you should convert it to a Hot Streak using Fire Blast. Generally, you will then want to cast a Fireball and immediately spend your Hot Streak on a Pyroblast as your Fireball cast finishes. Both of these spells will strike simultaneously, giving a chance of an immediate follow-up Hot Streak if both critically strike. If only one of the spells critically strikes, Heating Up will proc, and you can immediately Fire Blast and repeat this process.

There is a 0.2-second grace period where Heating Up will not be canceled if two spells impact simultaneously and only one critically strikes. This grace window is why it is so critical to always cast Fireball into Pyroblast, because normally, if only one of them crits, and the other does not, you will lose the Heating Up. But if you cast both at the same time, if only one of them crits, you keep your Heating Up.

This is known as "Pyroblast Fishing" or "Pyroblast Chaining" and is the best way to create a large chain of crits. The exception to this rule is during Combustion, where all spells will crit, allowing you to chain together various combos that are covered in more detail in the rotation section above.

Burnout is a keystone talent, that causes all your active Mastery: Ignites to explode when Combustion ends for 75% of their remaining damage. This explosion is purely additional damage, it does not remove any of your existing Ignites when it happens.

Burnout greatly increases your burst damage, especially on enemies that live short, as it allows you to still get a lot of benefit of your Ignites on them, without them having them to live for the entire duration of Ignite.

Because Ignite has a 10 second duration, with some complicated rules on how it refreshes, what we want to do is make sure that at the end of Combustion, we have as high of an Ignite as possible, as it takes your active Ignites at the end of Combustion and explodes those, not all Ignite damage applied during Combustion.

The actual gameplay impact is quite minimal: During Combustion, you delay Meteor until there are 8 seconds or less left of Combustion. Everything else will naturally work out in such a way that your Mastery: Ignite will be very large at the end of Combustion without having to make any rotational changes.

Fire has the following Apex Talent:

• Fired Up: Consuming Hot Streak has a chance to grant you a stack of Fired Up, which increases your fire damage. Multiple applications may overlap.
• Fired Up: Gaining Fired Up reduces your Fire Blast cooldown by 2.5 seconds per point, 2 points.
• Fired Up: Combustion greatly increases the chance of getting Fired Up, reducing each time you proc Fired Up. Also causes Fired Up to extend Combustion by 1 second.

The Apex Talent for Fire grants a lot of damage for both Hero Specs, and is virtually always taken. Fired Up is a new proc which grants a large amount of bonus damage whenever it procs, which is just a very nice passive bonus. However, even more impactful is the massive 5 second Fire Blast cooldown reduction when it procs, which happens quite frequently, especially during Combustion.

This Fire Blast cooldown reduction makes it so you barely run out of Fire Blast charges during Combustion, often only running out towards the very end of Combustion. This allows you to chain Pyroblast into Fire Blast for almost the entire duration of Combustion without needing to weave in any other spells.

All these extra Fire Blast charges do cause a bit of a weird luxury "problem", where it relatively devalues Pyroclasm, because hard-casting Pyroblast during Combustion risks overcapping Fire Blast charges, making it difficult to hard-cast during Combustion. Due to this, you often end up having to delay the hard-casts until Combustion is over.

Pyroclasm is a key proc (if talented). When it procs, your next non-instant Pyroblast or Flamestrike does greatly increased damage. At first glance, this is a very simple proc: you just hard-cast Pyroblast and it does significantly more damage. However, there are some small things we can do to squeeze out extra DPS.

Since it makes our next Pyroblast do significantly more damage, we ideally want to use it during Combustion so we can guarantee it crits. And since it stacks up to two times and lasts 15 seconds, we do not immediately have to spend it. Additionally, whenever it procs a second stack, it actually resets the duration of both stacks to 15 seconds again. Due to this, we can theoretically delay one stack for a long time by getting one proc -> wait until second proc -> refreshes duration -> use one of the procs -> wait until next proc -> refreshes, etc. We can do this for as long as needed until Combustion is ready, if we proc Pyroclasm often enough.

In practice, you can play around this in the following way:

• Whenever you have 2 stacks of Pyroclasm, always use one. We never want to risk overcapping stacks!
• If you only have a single stack of Pyroclasm, hold onto it until either:
  • Combustion is ready: Hard-cast Pyroblast into Combustion as the cast finishes
  • It has less than 5 seconds duration left. Use it right away to ensure you do not waste any stacks.

Combustion is Fire's primary DPS cooldown, available every minute when talented into Kindling. It guarantees all your spells critically strike, amongst various other buffs like bonus mastery or straight up more damage, based on talents. As Sunfury, it also grants you an Arcane Phoenix while Combustion is active and various other benefits after it ends.

Since Fire is all about critically striking to generate Hot Streak, this is obviously a massive damage buff and makes your rotation very fast paced while Combustion is active.

Generally, you will want to use Combustion immediately as it comes up, but it can be beneficial to delay it in certain cases, for example if your group is about to use Time Warp or a similar effect soon, or an important raid mechanic that needs high DPS is coming soon, or additional targets that come up, etc. However, since Combustion is only a minute cooldown, delaying it is usually not a good idea as it is very likely to lose you an extra usage if you delay it too much.

Meteor is a 30 second cooldown when talented into Blast Zone, that hits hard and activates various other bonuses depending on Talents and Hero Talents, like proccing Frostfire Empowerment as Frostfire or granting Pyroclasm as Sunfury.

Meteor and Combustion have very tight timings, as Meteor has 30 seconds cooldown and Combustion one minute, meaning you can cast Meteor exactly once in-between Combustion usages. Since the timing is so close, it is critical you use Meteor immediately as it comes up to ensure you do not have to skip a usage, or delay Combustion, both of which are bad.

Without Blast Zone talented, Meteor timings become a lot simpler, because you can no longer fit in any extra Meteors in-between Combustion, so you simply only use it within Combustion and do not use it whatsoever outside of it.

Time Warp is an ability which buffs your entire party or raid group within 100 yards with 30% haste for 40 seconds. This buff is shared with multiple other spells like Bloodlust and Heroism. These all put a debuff on all your group members which blocks them from getting the effect again for 10 minutes, so you cannot get this same effect from multiple sources multiple times.

As Time Warp applies to the whole group, it is generally decided by the raid or party leader when it is used, to optimize usage for the whole group, instead of just using it when it is best for your personal usage. However, if there is no assigned time or you are in a pick up group without any real leadership in terms of strategy, it is generally a safe practice to use Time Warp right after combat starts so it is up while everyone has all of their DPS cooldowns ready. Of course make sure to only do this if there will be enemies active for the entire 40 second duration of the buff on the pull, as on some fights bosses might go inactive or do some kind of phase change early on in the fight.