Fire Mage DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Dragonflight 10.2

Welcome to our Rotation page for Fire Mages. On this page you will find everything you need to know about actually playing the spec in Raiding scenarios.

The primary focus on this page is on raiding scenarios. Although the rotation is going to give pretty good results in Mythic+ as well, for a more Mythic+ oriented rotation, see our Mythic+ page.

If the rotations below seem overwhelming to you, or you would like to read a more simplified version of the rotation, you might benefit from visiting our Easy Mode page, which outlines a close-to-optimal rotation in simpler terms.

The content on this page is purely PvE-related. If you are looking for PvP Rotation Tips, please visit our PvP page below.

Use the switches below to tailor the rotation to the talents you are using or situations you expect to be facing, and it will populate the rotation priority list appropriately:

• Sun King's Blessing Talented
• Fiery Rush Talented
• Shifting Power Talented
• Temporal Warp Talented
• Searing Touch Talented
• Dragon's Breath Talented
• Alexstrasza's Fury Talented
• Improved Scorch Talented
• Hyperthermia Talented
• Meteor Talented

1. Cast Time Warp while under the effects of Temporal Displacement (or similar effects), right before you plan to use Combustion, stacking 2 Time Warp effects.
2. Cast Pyroblast while Hyperthermia is active.
3. Cast Meteor if Combustion Combustion is ready, or Combustion is not ready within 45 seconds.
4. Cast Combustion 0.5 seconds after casting Meteor. Then follow our Combustion rotation below.
5. Cast Combustion while you are in the middle of a Fireball cast. Then follow our Combustion rotation below.
6. Cast Shifting Power when Combustion is on cooldown, and you do not currently have it active. Lastly, ensure you do not have 3 charges of Fire Blast. Generally, this means using it right after your Combustion phase ends.
7. Hardcast Pyroblast when you have a Sun King's Blessing proc.
8. Cast Pyroblast when you have a Hot Streak proc.
9. Cast Scorch if the target is below 30% health and Improved Scorch is timing out within a couple of seconds, and you do not currently have Hot Streak.
10. Cast Fire Blast when you have Heating Up.
11. Cast Phoenix Flames whenever Feel the Burn is close to running out, and you do not have Hot Streak.
12. Cast Dragon's Breath to generate Heating Up or convert Heating Up into Hot Streak. Ensure there are no spells in flight toward the target when using Dragon's Breath.
13. Cast Scorch if the target is below 30% Health to generate Heating Up.
14. Cast Fireball to generate Heating Up.
15. Cast Scorch if you have to move and have no instant casts to burn.

The core component of this specialization is chaining as many Critical Strikes together as possible to maintain large Mastery: Ignites. Fire is an extremely reactive specialization, meaning most optimizations occur moment to moment rather than planning a large damage dump minutes.

It is highly recommended you read the "Combustion Usage" section as it is of crucial importance to the Fire specialization.

Combustion should be used on cooldown whenever possible. You should always overlap Combustion with other damage boosts that allow for a large overall Mastery: Ignite, such as Meteor, trinkets, and racials.

Since Combustion makes every spell critically strike, you want to get as many hard-hitting spells in the window as possible. To facilitate this, you should save at least one charge of Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames, though preferably, all charges will be available for both of them. This is the case for normal Combustions , and Combustions gained via Sun King's Blessing.

During Combustion, we will be casting a lot of instant Pyroblasts. Since Combustion guarantees a crit, this will always cause your Pyroblast to proc Heating Up or Hot Streak. Because of this, you only need one other spell to generate Hot Streaks. During Combustion, this will be Fire Blast, Scorch (or Fireball with very high haste) and Phoenix Flames (unless you have talented Alexstrasza's Fury, in which case you only use Phoenix Flames outside of Combustion). Below, we have listed the priority of spells during Combustion:

1. Use any on-use trinkets and racials like Sinful Aspirant's Badge of Ferocity and Berserking.
2. Cast Fireball if you are casting Combustion manually in the step below. If you gained Combustion from Sun King's Blessing, skip the Fireball and the next step.
3. Depending on your Hot Streak / Heating Up status, execute the option listed below:
   • If you already have a Hot Streak proc: cast Combustion near the end of your Fireball cast
   • If you already have a Heating Up: cast Combustion + Fire Blast near the end of your Fireball cast.
   • If you have neither: cast Combustion + Fire Blast halfway through the Fireball cast, followed by a second Fire Blast near the end of the Fireball cast.
4. Instant-cast Pyroblast whenever you have Hot Streak
5. Hardcast Pyroblast when you have Sun King's Blessing 8th stack
6. Use Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames for generating Heating Up / Hot Streak while keeping Feel the Burn buff up. If you run out of both Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames, use Scorch instead.
   • If you have very high haste (100%+, only achieved during double Time Warp effects), use Fireball instead of Scorch.
   • This is done because at these high haste levels, Scorch will have a shorter cast time than the global cooldown, which would cause downtime during which you are casting nothing.
7. Use Fire Blast and Scorch for generating Heating Up / Hot Streak while keeping Feel the Burn buff up.
   • If you have very high haste (100%+, only achieved during double Time Warp effects), use Fireball instead of Scorch.
   • This is done because at these high haste levels, Scorch will have a shorter cast time than the global cooldown, which would cause downtime during which you are casting nothing.
8. Cast Dragon's Breath if Combustion if there is less than 1 second left on Combustion and you do not have any Hot Streak procs.

It is important to note if you proc the 8th stack of Sun King's Blessing during Combustion, you should hardcast Pyroblast to extend your Combustion by 6 seconds. Make sure to keep up your Feel the Burn buff during it.

Worth noting, activating Combustion while you have Sun King's Blessing's Combustion active will NOT add 12 seconds to Combustion. Instead, it will reset the duration. So never cast Combustion during Sun King's Blessing's Combustion.

If you are not running Firestarter, you just immediately go into the Combustion rotation after pre-casting Pyroblast.

The opener below assumes the standard talent setup containing Feel the Burn and Sun King's Blessing, combined with the less standard but still commonly used Firestarter.

You always pre-cast Pyroblast 4 seconds before the pull timer finishes.

1. Right after the pre-cast Pyroblast, cast a single Phoenix Flames (if you are running Alexstrasza's Fury).
2. During the global cooldown of Phoenix Flames, use your potion and activate double Time Warp. (assuming your strategy involves using Time Warp or a similar effect on the pull)
3. Chain Pyroblast and Fire Blast until you are out of Fire Blasts.
4. Cast Shifting Power to get 3 Fire Blast charges again.
5. Cast Fireballs and Fire Blasts and consume your Hot Streaks as you get them until 8 stacks of Sun King's Blessing. Keep your Fire Blast charges at or above 2.
6. Once at 8 charges of Sun King's Blessing, hardcast Pyroblast (even if the target is still above 90% health). Near the end of the cast, cast Combustion. Ensure you press Combustion before the Pyroblast cast finishes, or you will lose the Sun King's Blessing Combustion.
7. Continue the standard Combustion rotation like normal.

There are two primary ways to do AoE damage as a Fire Mage. One way is to simply do your single target rotation and spread Mastery: Ignite to additional targets passively. This allows you to optimize your priority target damage while still doing decent cleave and AoE DPS. The other strategy is to opt into a more Flamestrike oriented talent build, allowing you to do significantly better AoE damage on high target counts, but at the cost of single target and priority target DPS.

This means you do not have Fuel the Fire / Flame Patch talented.

Do the standard single target rotation. Avoid target switching when possible, as it will reduce the overall damage of Mastery: Ignite. Only target switch for Searing Touch or when required due to fight mechanics.

This means you have Fuel the Fire / Flame Patch talented.

Even with the Flamestrike build, you should generally only cast Flamestrike when there are 3 or more enemies. Technically, in some situations, it is a small DPS increase to use it on 2 targets, however, if the enemies even move out of Flame Patch for a tiny portion of time, or Flame Patch does not tick for the entire duration, it is already better to use a standard single target rotation.

The Flamestrike AoE rotation is very straightforward: Instead of casting Pyroblast with Hot Streak, you use it to instant-cast Flamestrike. You still generate Heating Up / Hot Streak via Fireball (or Scorch below 30% health or in Combustion), but instead of Pyroblasts, you cast Flamestrikes. All of the standard single-target optimizations still apply. (e.g., keeping Feel the Burn up as much as possible) There is one exception for when you do hardcast Flamestrike:

• Hardcast Flamestrike to activate Sun King's Blessing.

In this section, we list some tips that apply to both the Mastery: Ignite and the Flamestrike builds.

If you have Alexstrasza's Fury, use Phoenix Flames only when you do not have a Hot Streak.

Cast Living Bomb if there are 3 or more targets stacked, and at least 1 of the targets will live for at least 8 seconds.

Cast Dragon's Breath if there are 3+ targets present or at any target count with Alexstrasza's Fury talented, and you do not currently have Hot Streak.

If you have Meteor talented, only cast it within Combustion, either a standard Combustion or Sun King's Blessing Combustion.

The Season 3 (Tier 31) Tier set ( Mage Fire 10.2 Class Set 2pc + Mage Fire 10.2 Class Set 4pc) does not impact the Fire Mage rotation in any way, it is just a passive bonus.

Understanding how to generate Critical Strikes as efficiently as possible is crucial in utilizing Fire effectively. This specialization is designed to crit more often than not, so it is easy to understand why learning to execute the right combos to create a chain of crits is paramount.

Whenever you get a Heating Up proc, you should convert it to a Hot Streak using Fire Blast. Generally, you will then want to cast a Fireball and immediately spend your Hot Streak on a Pyroblast as your Fireball cast finishes. Both of these spells will strike simultaneously, giving a chance of an immediate follow-up Hot Streak if both critically strike. If only one of the spells critically strikes, Heating Up will proc, and you can immediately Fire Blast and repeat this process.

There is a 0.2-second grace period where Heating Up will not be canceled if two spells impact simultaneously and only one critically strikes.

This is known as "Pyroblast Fishing" and is the best way to create a large chain of crits. The exception to this rule is during Combustion, where all spells will crit, allowing you to chain together various combos that will be covered in more detail later in the guide.

• Dragon's Breath (unless talented into Alexstrasza's Fury)
• Blast Wave
• Living Bomb
• Meteor
• Frost Nova
• Flamestrike (unless talented into Fuel the Fire
• Any non-damage spell, such as Blink or Ice Block

This can be cast when you have to reposition slightly. It lasts for 60 seconds, but it only has a 25-second cooldown. You can and should cast it before the start of every engagement.

Scorch should be used in place of Fireball while Combustion is active. The reasoning is pretty straightforward:

• Faster cast time
• Guaranteed Critical Strike
• No travel time

In contrast, Scorch is very weak outside of Combustion for the same reasons. Because it has no travel time, you cannot efficiently fish for Pyroblasts.

Scorch can be cast while moving and will also grant you a speed buff when talented into Frenetic Speed. Wherever possible, try to instead rely on Shimmer before relying on Scorch. Combined with Frenetic Speed, this spell can benefit extended movement if your charges of Shimmer are unavailable. However, try to lean less heavily on this spell as a movement crutch, as it will deflate your damage due to its lack of potency. The only exception is when you have talented Searing Touch, and your target is under 30% Health, as you can then use Scorch freely instead of Fireball.

Fire Mage is an elementary enough specialization to perform on a target dummy. Still, a few key factors will separate the good from the great. Learning to focus on what is important and mastering the core concepts of a specialization is what leads to overall solid performance on the damage charts. 3 major concepts form the central trinity of optimizing for success:

1. proper use of Combustion;
2. critical Strike chains;
3. movement management.

Managing movement is a fundamental skill shared by all the caster classes in World of Warcraft. The highly mobile nature of the Mage class allows flexible and creative ways to move during combat, making it of supreme importance that you give this the proper respect.

We talked about "Pyro Fishing" earlier in the guide, so there is no need to go over it in detail again here. It should be considered, however, how important properly chaining together your abilities is and its overall impact on your DPS. This is especially true on cleave, as building a smooth and powerful Mastery: Ignite will determine how much cleave and AoE you can output. Get used to properly chaining your spells by practicing on target dummies or in LFR.

While it is difficult to describe the best ways to position and move during a dungeon or raid encounter, it is essential to your success as a Fire Mage.

Try and use Shimmer for "urgent" movement — when you need to travel from one place to another as quickly as possible. Blazing Barrier is a good choice when you only need to take a few steps, as it only costs a single global cooldown.

Ice Floes is an incredible talent that allows you to not have to worry about interrupting the long Pyroblast hardcasts when using Sun King's Blessing. You should always keep 1 stack ready for Sun King's Blessing to ensure you do not need to interrupt it for movement.

Always try to position yourself in a location central to fight movement. For example, if the boss is being moved in a circle, try to stay on the inside of the kite path to ensure minimal movement.

Many players will unconsciously move during fights, despite it being unnecessary. For example, sometimes the boss or adds will be moved by the tank a couple of yards. Though you are still in range to cast, you subconsciously mirror that movement, costing you global cooldowns. Consciously work to "quiet" your movement, and reduce unnecessary movement to a minimum. The best way to see this in action is to take a video of your raid, then watch yourself play. Most players will be surprised by the amount of wasted movement they commit. When you are forced to move, use the tips above and make your path as direct and decisive as possible.