Fire Mage Frequently Asked Questions — Dragonflight 10.0.2

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 Strike levels, so you do not need to worry about having enough Critical Strike. Of course, having more Critical Strike is not a bad thing, but it is not required. 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 is a solid spec to play in the pre-season of Dragonflight, as it can do great damage in dungeons, while also being a relatively safe spec to play, which makes learning all the new dungeons safer. It is slightly behind the other Mage specs in raw damage in the early dungeons, but all 3 specs are fairly close and can all be played without any issues in the Mythic dungeons.

Fire has solid single-target DPS, and can cleave very efficiently via Mastery: Ignite spreading to nearby targets. It does lack proper all-out AoE damage unless you spec into it, but this comes at the cost of significant single-target damage.

That said, the balance in raiding and Mythic+ is not yet known, and there is very likely going to be a lot of class tuning happening between the launch of Dragonflight and when the first season starts. (and the first few weeks after the start of the first season) Due to this, the relative position of Fire for raiding is currently not yet known.

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 optimal play. Because of this, it is quite hard to figure out when to use which talent. In general, in a fight with very little movement and other fight mechanics, Rune of Power is usually the best choice. Below we have listed the 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.
• There is a lot of movement required in the fight in general.
• It is also worth noting that Rune of Power is a lot harder to play with than Incanter's Flow, so it should not be used when you are not very comfortable with the spec and fight.