Fire Mage: Midnight Expansion Preview

Welcome to our Midnight guide for Fire Mage. Ahead of launch, this page will contain everything you need to know about the Fire Mage spec in the forthcoming Midnight expansion, including all of the Talent and Build changes, and some light predictions on the state of the spec going into the expansion.

This page is a constantly evolving work in progress, with regular changes expected as updates hit the Midnight Alpha & Beta. This is not meant to be a launch guide for Fire Mage, but instead serves as a resource for you to keep up to date with how the spec is evolving on Alpha & Beta, and what you can expect from its playstyle and feel on launch.

Midnight comes with a huge rework for almost all classes and specs due to Blizzard's new approach on Addons and class design. Fire Mage is no exception, and has received a lot of changes.

Mage is having a lot of its button bloat removed in Midnight. Especially on the defensive side of things, almost all of our defensive power will now lie entirely in Blazing Barrier and Ice Block, with most of our other defensives being removed, or turned into pure utility spells. Additionally, the Mage tree overall is seeing a bunch of nodes removed, which makes it significantly easier to pick up all remaining strong nodes with little trade off.

The base Mage part of the talent tree has received significant changes so far in Midnight. Many talents have been combined into one, or have been fully reworked, or turned into choice nodes, etc. Reading the full changes can be quite difficult to parse how it actually impacts you, so below I provide a summary of how it actually impacts what spells you have access to and how these have changed. Afterwards I will list the full detailed changes.

• Blazing Barrier has been greatly buffed, providing more damage reduction, healing, and a lower global cooldown (meaning you can go back to DPSing quicker).
• Greater Invisibility and Mirror Image are now purely utility spells and no longer provide damage reduction, but their utility has been improved. (more movement speed, lower cooldowns, etc)
• Instead of being able to choose between Ice Floes + Blink vs Shimmer, you can now choose between Shimmer or an improved Blink. Shimmer is also nerfed, having only one charge and less ways to reduce its cooldown.
• You can now only have Ice Nova or Cone of Cold.
• You can now only have Mass Polymorph or Ring of Frost.
• A new talent has been added: Brainstorm — Hot Streak increases your Intellect by 1% for 8 seconds. Multiple stacks will overlap.
• Some new talents have been added to improve the crowd-control and utility of our existing spells:
  • Improved Spellsteal: Spellsteal will repeat its effect after 4 seconds, but now has a 4 second cooldown.
  • Improved Counterspell: Counterspell prevents casting for an additional second.
  • Improved Remove Curse: Casting Remove Curse on a friendly target also casts it on yourself, but its cooldown is increased by 20 seconds.
• Incanter's Flow is removed and Overflowing Energy now only provides critical strike chance to Fireball, however various new talents are added that provide similar benefits in the form of Charm of Aegwynn and Charm of Medivh.
• The following active spells are removed:
  • Blast Wave
  • Ice Floes
  • Mass Barrier
  • Shifting Power
  • Slow
  • Supernova

• Mirror Image no longer reduces damage taken, allowing you instead to use it for its threat management effect. It now lasts 15 seconds. (from 40)
• Greater Invisibility no longer reduces damage taken, allowing you instead to use it for its threat management and target avoidance effects.
• Blazing Barrier now does 200% more damage and heals you for 15% of the damage it absorbs. Cooldown increased to 30 seconds. (from 25) It now shields you for 25% of maximum health (from 20%) and has a shorter global cooldown, allowing you to more quickly go back to casting other spells. Long story short: It is a REALLY strong defensive now and costs almost no DPS to use.
• Mobility changes:
  • Shimmer now has a 30 seconds cooldown (from 25) and no longer has 2 charges.
  • Blink now has a 15 second baseline cooldown. (from 13)
  • New talent: Spatial Manipulation — Blink gains an additional charge. Choice node against Reflection.
  • New talent: Reflection — After casting Blink, it is replaced with Reflection, which allows you to teleport back to where you last Blinked from. Choice node against Spatial Manipulation.
  • New talent: Improved Blink — Reduces cooldown of Blink by 2 seconds. Choice node with Shimmer.
  • New talent: Time Walk — Alter Time resets the cooldown of Blink / Shimmer when you return to your original location. Choice node with Temporal Realignment.
  • Master of Time no longer grants a charge of Blink/ Shimmer, but instead grants 5/10 seconds cooldown reduction on Alter Time.
• A new talent has been added: Brainstorm — Hot Streak increases your Intellect by 1% for 8 seconds. Multiple stacks will overlap.
• Some new talents have been added to improve the crowd-control and utility of our existing spells:
  • Improved Spellsteal: Spellsteal will repeat its effect after 4 seconds, but now has a 4 second cooldown.
  • Improved Counterspell: Counterspell prevents casting for an additional second.
  • Improved Remove Curse: Casting Remove Curse on a friendly target also casts it on yourself, but its cooldown is increased by 20 seconds.
• New talent: Temporal Realignment — When you drop below 25% health, you automatically retroactively cast Alter Time and get healed back up to 50% health, putting Alter Time on cooldown. Choice node with Time Walk
• New talent: Improved Conjuration — Reduces Mirror Image's cooldown by 30/60 seconds.
• New talent: Charm of Aegwynn — Increases the critical strike chance of your spells by 5%.
• New talent: Charm of Medivh — Increases your mastery by 3%.
• New talent: Permafrost Bauble — Reduces Ice Block and Ice Cold by 30 seconds.
• New talent: Master of Escape — Reduces the cooldown of Greater Invisibility by 45 seconds.
• Overflowing Energy now only increases the critical strike chance of Fireball, instead of all spells.
• Quick Witted now reduces Counterspell's cooldown by 5 seconds.
• Time Manipulation now reduces your crowd-control cooldowns by 5 seconds.
• Incantation of Swiftness now reduces your movement speed during Invisibility by 30/60% for 6 seconds.
• Ice Nova replaces Cone of Cold when talented. Ice Nova is now a choice node with Freezing Cold.
• Mass Polymorph and Ring of Frost are now choice nodes.
• Improved Frost Nova and Ice Ward are now choice nodes.
• Many talents were removed. Most of them just talents related to spells which have been reworked to include them directly in their main effect, or otherwise are no longer relevant to the changed version of spells. Below a list of the relevant deletions:
  • Blast Wave
  • Displacement
  • Ice Floes
  • Incanter's Flow
  • Mass Barrier
  • Shifting Power
  • Slow
  • Supernova
  • Reduplication

As already described well above, Fire is going to see a lot more impactful Pyroblast / Flamestrike damage, but at a slower pace, especially outside of Combustion. This is largely due to the removal of a lot of different talents that guarantee critical strikes, like Phoenix Flames and Sun King's Blessing. This will make it so that Fire is all about its core of fishing for Hot Streak and then firing off hard hitting Pyroblasts.

This change in approach to Fire also makes Combustion a very strong and meaningful part of your damage again (with less uptime than before), as outside of Combustion, critical strikes are much rarer, making Fire a more burst oriented spec, instead of the more sustained damage profile it had in recent years.

Fire has received a large rework in Midnight, with a very large amount of changes across almost all spells and talents. I will first highlight the core changes made to the spec and how this impacts your available spells and how they work. Afterwards I also provide the full changes for context.

• At a very high level: A lot of guaranteed critical strikes and damage outside of cooldowns has been removed, while singificant damage has been added to Combustion, making Fire a more burst oriented spec, and focusing on less frequent but hard hitting Pyroblasts.
• Combustion and its related talents have received a lot of changes, making it generally a stronger cooldown:
  • New Apex Talents:
    • Fired Up: Consuming Hot Streak has a 20% chance to grant you a stack of Fired Up, increasing your Fire damage by 4% for 12 seconds. Multiple stacks will overlap.
    • Fired Up: Gaining Fired Up reduces the cooldown of Fire Blast by 2.5 seconds/5 seconds.
    • Fired Up: Hot Streak significantly increases the chance of gaining Fired Up, reducing each time you gain Fire Up. Fired Up now also extends Combustion's duration by one second.
  • New talent: Slow Burn — Combustion grants mastery equal to 75% of your Critical Strike stat. Combustion causes your spells to apply Ignite at 15% increased effectiveness.
  • Kindling now grants a flat cooldown reduction instead of cooldown reduction based on the amount of critical strikes you do.
  • In general, your Pyroblast/ Flamestrike now hit significantly harder, causing your Combustion damage to be higher.
• Fireball, Pyroblast, Meteor and Flamestrike now do significantly more damage.
• Many methods of obtaining guaranteed critical strikes or higher Combustion uptime have been removed:
  • Phoenix Flames and all of its related talents has been removed.
  • Hyperthermia has been removed.
  • Sun King's Blessing has been removed.
• Scorch is no longer an active spell you can cast while moving. Instead, it is a passive which makes your Fireball a guaranteed critical strike when your target is below 30% health.
• All of Scorch's old effects have been moved to Fireball, like Scald now increases Fireball's damage to targets below 30% and Frenetic Speed increases your movement speed by 30% when hitting a target with Fireball below 30%.
• Mastery: Ignite has been reworked: Ignite no longer automatically spreads to nearby targets when you cast Fire Blast and its base strength has been nerfed. However, you can regain this power (and more), throughout the talent tree, making the cleave builds a real trade-off instead of just free damage.

• New Apex Talents:
  • Fired Up: Consuming Hot Streak has a 20% chance to grant you a stack of Fired Up, increasing your Fire damage by 4% for 12 seconds. Multiple stacks will overlap.
  • Fired Up: Gaining Fired Up reduces the cooldown of Fire Blast by 2.5 seconds/5 seconds.
  • Fired Up: Hot Streak significantly increases the chance of gaining Fired Up, reducing each time you gain Fire Up. Fired Up now also extends Combustion's duration by one second.
• Fireball, Pyroblast, Meteor and Flamestrike now do significantly more damage.
• New talent: Ignition — Fire Blast now spreads 50% of your target's Mastery: Ignite to one nearby enemy. And Flamestrike applies 50% more Ignite.
• New talent: Slow Burn — Combustion grants mastery equal to 75% of your Critical Strike stat. Combustion causes your spells to apply Ignite at 15% increased effectiveness.
• New talent: Burn It All — Grants you increased spell damage, and increased spell damage based on your critical strike chance.
• New talent: Pyromastery — Increases your Pyroblast damage and size. Choice node with Mark of the Firelord.
• New talent: Mote of Flame — increases all your Fire damage.
• Mark of the Firelord has been reworked: now makes Meteor and Flamestrike do more damage instead of increasing Ignite damage.
• New talent: Burnout — When Combustion expires, all of your active Mastery: Ignite explode, dealing 50% of their remaining damage. Note: this does not remove the active Ignite.
• New talent: Conflagration — Fire Blast deals extra damage to up to 8 nearby enemies.
• New talent: Frenetic Speed — Grants you 30% movement speed after hitting a target below 30% health with Fireball.
• New talent: Pyroclasm — Consuming Hot Streak has a chance to make your next non-instant Pyroblast or Flamestrike cast within 15 seconds deal significantly more damage. Stacks up to 2 times.
• New talent: Cinderstorm — Casting Pyroblast or Flamestrike has a chance to summon a storm of 5 cinders that pursue your target. The cinders apply Mastery: Ignite and spread 50% of the Ignite currently active on the target they hit to one nearby target.
• Mastery: Ignite has less baseline effectiveness and no longer spreads to nearby targets via Fire Blast.
• Fervent Flickering has been changed to instead grant one extra charge of Fire Blast and make it do more damage, instead of reducing Fire Blast's cooldown.
• Flame On gains one additional charge and its cooldown is reduced by 2 seconds.
• Fuel the Fire now also causes Flamestrike to deal increased damage for each enemy it hits, up to 5 targets.
• Blast Zone now reduces the cooldown of Meteor by 15 seconds, instead of its old Lit Fuse related effects.
• Deep Impact has been changed to make Meteor do significantly more damage to the enemy closest to its center.
• Critical Mass has been reworked slightly; It now grants 4/8% increased chance to critically strike, and you gain 10/20% more critical strike chance from all sources.
• Molten Fury has been buffed to 15% (from 7%).
• Scorch is no longer an active spell you can cast while moving. Instead, it is a passive effect which gives Fireball a 100% critical strike chance against targets below 30% health.
• Firestarter is now a choice node with Scorch.
• Flame Accelerant now reduces Pyroblast and Flamestrike cast time, instead of Fireball.
• Inflame has been buffed to grant 25% Mastery: Ignite bonus. (from 10%)
• Kindling now provides a 30/60 second cooldown reduction for Combustion, instead of reducing the cooldown for every critical strike. Has 2 ranks.
• Scald now makes Fireball do significantly more damage to targets below 30%. (instead of the now removed Scorch)
• Feel the Burn has been reworked: Each stack now has its own duration and has no stack cap, instead of all of them being refreshed when you gain a new stack. Meaning you can no longer refresh all stacks by timing Fire Blast. The Mastery per stack has been rebalanced.
• Wildfire has been reworked: Now a 2-point talent which makes Fire Blast spread Mastery: Ignite spread to 1/2 nearby targets, and increase Fire Blast's damage by 10/20%.
• Controlled Destruction now also triggers from Flamestrike instead of just Fireball/ Pyroblast. This allow it to be stacked on multiple targets more easily.
• Master of Flame has been reworked: Now increases Mastery: Ignite damage while Combustion is not active and makes Fire Blast spread an additional 50% of your Ignite.
• From the Ashes reworked: Increases Fire Blast damage by 15% and your direct-damage spell reduce its cooldown by 0.5 seconds.
• Frost Bolt gets replaced by Fireball when you spec Fire, effectively removing Frostbolt from Fire.
• Flamestrike no longer slows enemies.
• Flamestrike now has a targeted variant.
• Flamestrike, Fuel the Fire and Cauterize are now talents. (were baseline abilities)
• Many talents were removed:
  • All talents related to Living Bomb and Lit Fuse
  • All talents related to Phoenix Flames
  • All talents related to Scorch
  • Hyperthermia
  • Sun King's Blessing
  • Unleashed Inferno
  • Flame Patch

Most of the changes really emphasize the "not having to track buffs" philosophy that blizzard is describing in the blue post. Almost all of the new Frostfire tree is focused on being visually very appealing, and simply buffing what Fire already does, making it do significantly more damage, with minimal rotational impact.

• New talent: Duality — Casting Pyroblast has a chance to fire a Glacial Spike.
• New talent: Molten Chill — Your Frostfire spells apply Mastery: Ignite at 10% effectiveness.
• New talent: Elemental Conduit — Comet Storm, Glacial Spike, Pyroblast, and Meteor now apply Ignite. Ignite’s critical strike damage is increased by 10%.
• New talent: Heat Sink — Fire Blast now does Frostfire damage and deals 30% more damage.
• New talent: Dualcasting Adept — Your Frost spells deal 20% increased damage. Pyroblast and Flamestrike deal 10% more damage.
• New talent: Blast Radius — Meteor and Comet Storm do 20% more damage.
• Frostfire Infusion has been changed: Frostfire Bolt has 15% increased critical strike change. Your Frost and Fire damage is increased by 8%.
• Flash Freezeburn has been changed: Combustion grants Frostfire Empowerment and Combustion's cooldown is reduced by 30 seconds.
• Severe Temperatures h as been changed: Frostfire Empowerment stacks an additional time and causes Frostfire Bolt to explode for an additional 20% damage.
• The damage from practically all procs on the tree are greatly increased: Isothermic Core procs do ~35% more damage, Frostfire Bolt does ~50% more damage.
• The following talents were removed:
  • Excess Fire
  • Excess Frost
  • Frostfire Mastery

The core mechanics of Sunfury remain mostly the same, however, most of the buffs are simplified a bit to be more direct, instead of potentially being played around. For example, Burden of Power simply makes Pyroblast/ Flamestrike do more damage, instead of being a proc after reaching a certain amount of stacks.

• New talent: Ashes of Inspiration — When your Arcane Phoenix expires, grants you Lesser Time Warp, granting 20% Haste for 10 seconds.
• New talent: Spellfire Salvo — Fire Blast gains one extra charge. Meteorite damage increased by 15%.
• New talent: Pyrocosm — Fireball has a 20% chance to summon a Meteorite. When a Meteorite lands, it reduces the cooldown of Fire Blast by 0.5 seconds.
• New talent: Explosive Potential — After casting Combustion, your next Blink will cast Blast Wave at your previous location. Choice node with Lessons in Debilitation.
• New talent: Time Twist — The cooldown of Alter Time is reduced by 10 seconds. Choice node with Merely a Setback.
• Codex of the Sunstriders has been changed: When your Arcane Phoenix is summoned (when you press Combustion), it consumes all Spellfire Spheres, increasing the damage during Combustion by 2% per stack. It also casts one exceptional spell during its duration for each Sphere consumed.
• Merely a Setback has been changed: The effects of Blazing Barrier last 8 seconds after it is removed, and Cauterize no longer does damage to you.
• Glorious Incandescence has been changed: Now procs when you gain a Spellfire Spheres (instead of when consuming Burden of Power). It no longer causes Fire Blast to hit additional targets.
• Memory of Al'ar has been changed: No longer extends Hyperthermia based on exceptional spell casts. Hyperthermia is now always 6 seconds long. (was 2 baseline + exceptional cast increase)
• Sunfury Execution has been changed: Now increases Pyroclasm damage bonus and Meteor now grants Pyroclasm.
• Burden of Power now pasdsively provides Pyroblast and Flamestrike damage instead of being proc based.
• Ignite the Future was removed.

• Mage Fire 12.0 Class Set 2pc — Pyroblast and Flamestrike deal 8% increased damage.
• Mage Fire 12.0 Class Set 4pc — Casting Pyroblast or Flamestrike reduces the cooldown of Fire Blast by 0.50 sec.

The first tier set is a bit of an interesting one, as part of the initial changes to Fire focused on bringing down Fire Blast usage to make Pyroblast/ Flamestrike more impactful but less frequent, whereas this tier set is bringing back some of the Fire Blast cooldown reduction again. The amount of Fire Blast cooldown reduction outside of Combustion does not look that significant with current tuning, however, it basically guarantees an extra Fire Blast during Combustion, further emphasizing the importance our Combustion phase.

As it is still very early on in the development process, the optimal rotations are in no way determined yet. However, there are already very clear rotational changes to Fire we can summize now from the notes and testing them all on Alpha:

• Probably by far the biggest immediately noticeable change is the change of pace outside of our Combustion phase. We are casting singificantly more Fireballs fishing for Hot Streak and Heating Up procs. This is due to the removal of a lot of our guaranteed crits (like Phoenix Flames, but there are others), but also the removal of various other mechanics which we played around outside of Combustion like Sun King's Blessing, Improved Scorch and others.
• There is a lot less need to track buffs and debuffs than before. (as expected due to the changes to addons) No more need to track Feel the Burn, or many of the different interactions with Phoenix Flames, just like all of the buffs/debuffs from the different Hero Talents.
• Pyroclasm is a new talent which will be our main proc aside from Hot Streak which we will be tracking and optimizing around. Depending on tuning, it is likely that we will try to align at least one stack around Combustion so we can hard-cast Pyroblast and use Combustion at the last possible second to guarantee a very hard hitting Pyroblast that is guaranteed to crit as our entry to Combustion.
• Although highly reliant on tuning, AoE is most likely going to be quite different. Previously we could quite easily opt into a cleave build while giving up minimal single-target damage. This is no longer an option now, meaning we will either invest more into cleave, or opt into a Flamestrike oriented build, which was very rare in the last few expansions.