Fire Mage Frequently Asked Questions — The War Within (11.2)

You do not need any specific amount of Critical Strike to make Fire playable. Due to passive talents like Pyrotechnics giving stacking 10% critical strike rating, Critical Mass boosting your overall crit, Firestarter and Searing Touch guaranteeing crits, you can play Fire just fine, even on very low Critical You do not need to worry about having enough Critical Strike levels. Of course, having more Critical Strike is not a bad thing, but it is optional. There is no Critical Strike "cap" (aside from 100%), at which point more Critical Strike is bad. Additionally, there are no meaningful haste caps or breakpoints either.

Having said that, the best way to determine what items you should use is to use Raidbots' Top Gear.

In Raiding content, Fire is currently not performing very well. It falls behind both other Mage specs and most other classes in the game. This is mostly caused by its relatively low single-target damage output. However, it is still very early on in the season, and it is likely that class tuning will improve Fire's performance. Additionally, Fire really wants its new tier bonus to be strong in order to compete with other specs, so it can take a couple of weeks before it is in a good place.

In Mythic+, the situation is a bit better for Fire. It does perform on the lower end of the spectrum, but it is not that far behind, and has a great damage profile which allows it to still provide significant value to groups. The utility also makes it so that generally speaking you will still be able to find groups.

All races are very close in DPS, and it generally does not matter what race you play. Usually, Dwarf or Human is going to be the highest DPS, but it depends on your gear and the content you are doing, and generally all races are within half a percentage of each other. For a full overview of the DPS of every race, check the simulations page.