Fire Mage DPS Guide — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

The Midnight Pre-Patch has arrived, and Fire Mage has received a substantial rework affecting both the Mage class tree and the Fire spec itself. The core identity of Fire remains the same, chaining critical strikes for Hot Streak procs, but the pacing and burst profile has shifted significantly. Fire is now a more burst-oriented spec, with Combustion being a much stronger and more meaningful cooldown, however with significantly less Combustion uptime, while damage outside of Combustion is more reliant on fishing for critical strikes. Additionally, Fire now has significantly fewer buffs and debuffs to track.

Keep in mind that this is not the complete rework, as more changes are coming with the launch of the Midnight expansion. Once Midnight launches, we will gain access to 3 more Hero Talent Points and our new Apex Talent: Fired Up. These will further enhance Fire's new gameplay design.

Frostfire has been streamlined to reduce buff tracking. The tree now focuses on being visually appealing while buffing Fire's core abilities and firing off additional Frost spells for extra damage.

Sunfury has had any buffs you would previously track and play around removed, while keeping the core fantasy of summoning a Phoenix to do high burst damage.

The biggest change is the shift in pacing especially outside of Combustion. You will cast significantly more Fireballs fishing for Hot Streak and Heating Up procs. This is due to the removal of many sources of guaranteed critical strikes and greatly reduced Combustion uptime:

• Phoenix Flames and all related talents have been removed.
• Sun King's Blessing has been removed.
• Hyperthermia has been removed.

To compensate, Fireball now has a significantly faster cast time (1.8 sec baseline, down from 2.3 sec), making the rotation outside of Combustion feel quite fast despite fewer guaranteed procs. Additionally, a new proc in the form of Pyroclasm has been added, giving Hot Streak a chance to make your next hardcast Pyroblast or Flamestrike deal massively increased damage.

Additionally, Fireball is now also the optimal filler even on targets below 30% health due to Scald, making Fireball optimal DPS and Scorch more focused on being a mobility tool at the cost of a small amount of DPS.

Mastery: Ignite has been reworked: It no longer automatically spreads to nearby targets when you cast Fire Blast, and its base effectiveness is reduced. However, you can regain Ignite spreading (and more) through talents like Ignition and Wildfire, making cleave builds a real trade-off instead of free damage.

Additionally, the entire Lit Fuse / Living Bomb set of talents have been removed. However, these were all entirely passive and barely ever picked anyway, so this does not meaningfully change the rotation.

• Mage defensives have been consolidated and simplified:
  
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  • Blazing Barrier is now your primary defensive. When fully talented into all supported talents it now provides more absorption (25% max HP), damage reduction, and healing you for 15% of damage absorbed. It also has a shorter GCD so you can quickly return to DPSing.
  • Greater Invisibility and Mirror Image no longer reduce damage taken — they are now purely utility spells.
  • Mass Barrier has been removed.
  • Temporal Realignment has been added, which allows you to self-heal after dropping to low health, at the cost of some manual control over Alter Time. Alter Time is normally mostly used for dealing with high burst damage, but via Temporal Realignment, it can also be useful for healing yourself up when you get low health from chip damage.
• Mage Mobility has been slightly reduced and has a few tradeoffs to make now:
  
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  • Shimmer now has only 1 charge base (was 2) and a 30 second cooldown (was 25) baseline. You can gain back the lost charge, but it is now a trade-off between Reflection and the extra charge.
  • Blink can now be improved via talents: Spatial Manipulation grants an extra charge, Improved Blink reduces its cooldown.
  • Ice Floes has been removed.
• Various utility talents have been nerfed or changed into choice-nodes:
  
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  • Shifting Power has been removed entirely.
  • Blast Wave has been removed from baseline (only accessible via Sunfury talent, but very situational).
  • Ice Nova and Cone of Cold are now mutually exclusive.
  • Mass Polymorph and Ring of Frost are now mutually exclusive.
  • Counterspell now interrupts for 7 seconds (was 5).

We hope this summary helped you prepare for the Midnight launch. If you want to prepare for your leveling journey in Midnight, make sure to check out our recommended consumables and items that can help you reach max level faster!