Fire Mage DPS Guide — The War Within Pre-Patch

Fire Mage has received a minor rework in The War Within, with a minor spec talent tree rework and some changes to the base talent tree. Below we will first go into the changes in the Mage talent tree, before diving deeper into the changes in the Fire tree.

The Mage tree did not receive a lot of changes, but it did receive some important ones to hotly debated talents. Below we list the most import changes:

• Temporal Warp has been removed, which was a highly divisive node, with some players loving it and some hating it. It was replaced for a passive 3% Intellect choice node against Time Anomaly.
• Ring of Frost and Ice Nova have been turned into a choice node, reducing the total amount of crowd-control available by a little bit, although neither were picked very often in PvE.
• Supernova has been moved from the Arcane tree to the class tree, and put into a choice node with Dragon's Breath. This new choice node is in a very central place in the tree, so it is easy to pick up.

In contrast to the Mage tree, the Fire tree got a minor rework. Many nodes have been repositioned, turned into choice nodes, or split choice nodes into their own individual nodes allowing you to pick both. Additionally, a fair amount of new nodes have been added.

See below a list of the most important changes. The full, exhaustive list of changes can be found in the Class Changes page linked further below.

• Scorch and all of its related talents were changed:
  • Scorch now has the guaranteed critical strike effect of Searing Touch and the 30% movement speed from Improved Scorch merged into it, for targets below 30% health.
  • Searing Touch was removed, however, all of its previous effects were put into different nodes into one way or another, in stronger versions. As described above, the guaranteed crit is now baseline on Scorch, and the bonus damage to Scorch was moved to a new node, Down in Flames, which greatly increases the damage of Scorch to targets below 30%. This new node is in a choice node with Improved Scorch, which was buffed. This means, you now have to pick between doing significantly more damage with Scorch, or a bit more damage with all of your spells.
  • Heat Shimmer is a new talent, which has a chance to give you a new proc effect, making Scorch instant-cast, and treat the target as if it is below 30% health.
• Living Bomb has received a bunch of changes, with new talents modifying its behavior, proccing it, or otherwise changing it:
  • Living Bomb itself was removed as an ability you can cast manually. Instead, you can proc it and spread it via other means.
  • Lit Fuse is a new talent which will be the primary way to proc Living Bomb. It gives you a new proc that makes your next Fire Blast apply Living Bomb to 3 nearby targets, which on explosion can spread up to 5 targets.
  • Sparking Cinders is a new talent that gives your Living Bomb explosions a chance to make your next Flamestrike and Pyroblast do more damage.
  • Explosive Ingenuity is a new talent that increases the Lit Fuse proc chance and further increase Living Bomb damage.
  • Convection was changed to now reapply Living Bomb to the original target if there are no nearby targets to spread to. This can only happen once per original Lit Fuse proc.
  • Explosivo guarantees a Lit Fuse proc when you cast Combustion, and significantly increases the Lit Fuse proc chance during Combustion.
  • Blast Zone greatly increases the amount of targets that Lit Fuse can apply Living Bomb to, by making the initial proc apply it to 5 targets, and any further explosions spread to up to 8 targets.
• Quickflame is a new talent that increases the damage of Flamestrike. This is a choice node with Flame Patch, letting you choose between higher AoE burst via Quick Flame, or lower burst but higher overall damage with Flame Patch if the enemies stay inside the patch.
• Pyromaniac and Inflame are no longer choice nodes.
• Call of the Sun King now provides the guaranteed critical strikes on Phoenix Flames that Alexstrasza's Fury used to provide, making Alexstrasza's Fury now only apply its effects to Dragon's Breath. Additionally, Alexstrasza's Fury is now a choice node with a new talent, Ashen Feather. This new talent increases Phoenix Flames' effectiveness on single-target.
• Controlled Destruction was changed to increase Ignite damage as you fight the same target longer, up to 50 stacks.
• Tempered Flames was replaced for Spontaneous Combustion. This new talent is a choice node with Improved Combustion, which immediately sets all your Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames charges to the maximum.
• Kindling and Unleashed Inferno now also provide cooldown reduction on Combustion for Flamestrike crits, allowing an overall shorter Combustion cooldown time both on single-target and AoE scenarios.
• Sun King's Blessing was changed to now require 10 stacks instead of 8 stacks.
• Molten Fury increases all damage dealt to targets below 35% health.
• From the Ashes is now no longer a choice node, and was changed to increase Phoenix Flames damage and reduce its cooldown on direct damage from other spells.
• Mark of the Fire Lord is a new talent that increases your Ignite damage from Flamestrike and Living Bomb.
• Many nodes changed position in the tree, were replaced, or had their numbers changed, but these are all minor changes and hard to list as it is basically a new talent tree.

On top of the relatively large changes in the Fire tree, the Hero Talent Tree system also has a significant impact on the spec. However, the Hero Talent Tree system is not yet available during the pre-patch, so these will not be relevant until the expansion fully launches.