Fire Mage Frequently Asked Questions — Dragonflight 10.1

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 a good 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.

Fire Mage has gotten large buffs with 10.1 while also getting a relatively strong new tier set, setting it up to be a strong overall spec in 10.1.

In a raiding environment, it is likely that for optimal performance, you will want to play multiple specs, including Fire on some bosses and other specs on other bosses. However, with current tuning, it looks like Fire can perform quite well on all bosses if you only want to play one spec, although it most likely Fire will be slightly worse than Arcane on a large chunk of the bosses.

It is currently looking very likely that Fire is going to the best Mythic+ spec amongst Mages. Fire does still struggle with short-lived enemies, so it will most likely struggle to pull good numbers in lower Mythic+ keys where enemies die quickly, but at the higher end, it is looking to be a very strong spec.

All races are very close in DPS, and it generally does not matter what race you play. For a full overview of the DPS of every race, check the simulations page.

Rune of Power and Incanter's Flow are pretty close in overall DPS, with Rune of Power being ahead with good play. Generally, you should play Rune of Power as long as you are relatively comfortable playing it. Below we have listed some reasons to not run Rune of Power:

• There are raid mechanics which you can not plan for in advance that may cause you to have to move out of your Rune of Power.
• A lot of movement is required in the fight in general that line up with your burst windows.