• 

  World of Warcraft: Dragonflight

  Franchise:

  Warcraft

  Platform:

  PC

  Developer:

  Blizzard, Activision

  Publisher:

  Blizzard, Activision

  Genre:

  MMORPG

  Released:

  2022-11-28

Table of Contents

Fire Mages haven’t been performing particularly well at the start of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, but this is still a good spec to consider if you’re focusing on PvE content. Season 1 already brought with it a number of important balance changes that made Fire Mages better and there’s likely even more tuning coming in the near future.

If you’re new to playing a Mage or new to World of Warcraft, in general, Fire is a perfect specialization to help you learn the ropes. Fire Mages have a simple playstyle revolving around high burst damage on individual targets, with some good AoE damage-over-time potential. Appropriately enough, Fire Mages burn bright at the start of an engagement but then need a bit of time to cool off while relying on DOTs in the meantime.

This guide is specifically intended for level 70 players focusing on PvE end-game content in World of Warcraft: Dragonflight.

Best Races For Fire Mages

Your race won’t have a huge impact on how you perform as a Fire Mage in PvE, but it can provide you with some slight advantages. The best racial abilities for Fire Mages tend to revolve around stat increases or additional magical damage.

Trolls have been a popular choice for Horde Fire Mages for more than a decade thanks to Berserking, and that continues to be the case in Dragonflight as well. Meanwhile, Orcs have a somewhat similar ability in the form of Blood Fury that provides a nice, albeit temporary, DPS increase. Tauren and Nightborne are two other solid choices thanks to Brawn and Magical Affinity, respectively.

If you’re playing Alliance, you can’t go wrong with Dwarves and their Might of the Mountain passive. Gnomes, Humans, and Void Elves are a few other races you should strongly consider. In the case of Gnomes, it’s primarily because of Nimble Fingers, although Expansive Mind is nice to have too if you’re also considering trying out Arcane. Meanwhile, Humans get the aptly titled The Human Spirit racial while Void Elves get a number of abilities that are useful to Fire Mages, including Entropic Embrace and Preternatural Calm.

Best Professions For Fire Mages in WoW: Dragonflight

As always, Tailoring and Enchanting are great professions for Fire Mages who like to be as self-sufficient as possible. Tailoring can be skipped if you don’t have any issues relying mostly on loot drops for gear, but Enchanting is very nice to have since good enchants are expensive and difficult to come by in Dragonflight.

Alternatively, Engineering is also very good in Dragonflight as it provides a lot of utility and allows Fire Mages to craft a few head and wrist items for themselves. Alchemy is another useful profession to have, especially if you’re doing a lot of raid content. There’s no synergy between these last two professions, though, so you’ll need to buy all the crafting materials yourself.

Here are just a few examples of helpful recipes and patterns you can learn with these professions:

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Best Talent Builds For Fire Mages in WoW: Dragonflight

Fire Mages have a bunch of viable builds at their disposal in World of Warcraft: Dragonflight. Most builds revolve around single-target damage, but they usually include at least a few AoE talents as well. This time around, each spec gets access to two talent trees and although the spec tree is way more important when it comes to DPS, it’s also worth paying attention to the class tree since that’s the one that contains most of your utility talents and spells.

If you’re looking for a deep dive into the best Fire Mage talent builds feel free to click the link below. Otherwise, skip over it for a quick overview of some of the most popular builds right now for raiding and Mythic+.

Fire Mage Talent Builds

Fire Mage Raid Build

A standard raid build focuses on single-target damage via key spells like Pyroblast, Fire Blast, and Scorch. Phoenix Flames is also an important one to keep in mind as it provides cleave when needed and is the best spell besides Fire Blast for triggering those all-important Hot Streaks.

Whenever possible, Fire Mages should focus on pumping out the big damage during their Combustion window and/or after placing down a Rune of Power. There are numerous talents that play around Combustion, including this build’s two capstones – Sun King’s Blessing and Fiery Rush.

Fire Mage Mythic+ Build

Fire Mages are expected to participate more in mob clearing in Mythic+ and so it’s important to have a more balanced mix of single-target and AoE spells. While Flamestrike and talents that improve it can often be skipped for raiding, they’re almost mandatory for Mythic+.

Meanwhile, Phoenix Flames often takes precedence over Fire Blast in the rotation and Shifting Power becomes more useful than Meteor. Utility and survivability talents like Ice Block, Cryo-Freeze, Alter Time, Blast Wave, and Cauterize all play a bigger role here. Flamestrike replaces Pyroblast in Mythic+ during thrash pulls but should still be used during boss fights for obvious reasons.

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Fire Mage Rotations in Dragonflight

Fire Mage rotations are pretty straightforward as they don’t incorporate a ton of different spells. The name of the game here is optimization. Most of the damage is done during the Combustion window where every spell has a guaranteed chance to be a critical strike. Combustion can be used as a regular cooldown once every couple of minutes and can also be activated via Sun King’s Blessing.

Hot Streaks, which allow Fire Mages to instantly cast Pyroblast and Flamestrike, are another major component of the rotation. A Hot Streak can be triggered with two consecutive critical strikes from any direct-damage fire spell like Fireball, Fire Blast, Scorch, and Phoenix Flames. It’s important to save up Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames charges whenever possible during your regular rotation so you can use them during Combustion instead.

The basic idea of the rotation is to trigger Hot Streak as often as possible and use it to cast instant Pyroblasts during Combustion. Combustion doesn’t last for very long, though, so the challenge is to pump out as many high-damage spells as you can during that short window.

Below are a couple of basic rotations that will give you a better idea of how this works.

Fire Mage Single Target Rotation

1. Place down a Rune of Power and cast Fireball until you land a critical strike and trigger Heating Up. If used against targets above 90% health, a critical strike is guaranteed thanks to Firestarter.
2. Cast Fire Blast or Phoenix Flames to trigger the second critical strike you need to trigger Hot Streak. Phoenix Flames is a guaranteed critical strike only with Alexstrasza’s Fury.
3. Cast Pyroblast.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 until you have consumed a total of 8 Hot Streaks, at which point Sun King’s Blessing will become active.
5. Hard-cast Pyroblast to activate Combustion from Sun King’s Blessing.
6. Use a few Fire Blasts and Phoenix Flames during the Combustion window to trigger free Pyroblasts, but save a couple for later.
7. Once the Combustion from Sun King’s Blessing wears off, activate it again via the normal cooldown and use your remaining charges of Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames.
8. If you run out of charges, use Scorch or Dragon’s Breath to try to get more Hot Streaks. Scorch is guaranteed to critically hit on targets below 30% health thanks to Searing Touch. Dragon’s Breath is guaranteed to crit on any target but has a long cooldown. In a pinch, other instant-cast spells like Meteor or Living Bomb can be used to fill in the gaps.
9. Sun King’s Blessing will become available again either during or shortly after the second Combustion window. If it is, place down a Rune of Power and hard-cast a Pyroblast to trigger a third window.
10. After the third window things will slow down for a bit so go back to step 1 and resume the basic rotation until Sun King’s Blessing, Combustion, or Rune of Power become available again.

The Time Anomaly talent will give you an additional 5-second Combustion window along with a free Fire Blast charge, however, it’s impossible to predict when it will trigger, which is why it wasn’t included in the rotation. Temporal Warp is a very good alternative that gives Fire Mages an additional burst window but planning around it can be challenging when you also have to worry about the other cooldowns. We recommend picking Temporal Warp instead of Time Anomaly only after you’ve become familiar with the regular rotation.

Fire Mage AoE Rotation

1. Hard-cast Flamestrike if there are four or more targets present, otherwise start with Dragon’s Breath or a Fireball to get a critical strike (guaranteed by Alexstrasza’s Fury or Firestarter, respectively).
2. Cast Fire Blast to trigger a Hot Streak and throw down an instant Flamestrike.
3. Cast Combustion and start alternating between Phoenix Flames and Fire Blasts while throwing down more instant Flamestrikes as they become available.
4. If you run out of charges while Combustion is still active, cast any other instant AoE spells you have at your disposal until it wears off. Be careful about using Blast Wave, though. That one should be used defensively. Combustion works with any Mage spells, not just Fire-based ones, so you even can use things like Arcane Explosion, Cone of Cold, or Ice Nova.
5. Put down a Rune of Power and cast Shifting Power to quickly regenerate charges of Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames.
6. Start casting Fire Blasts as soon as they become available while you’re still channeling Shifting Power.
7. Cast Flamestrike.
8. Cast Phoenix Flames and the occasional Fire Blast to generate more Hot Streaks for additional Flamestrikes.
9. Keep an eye on that Sun King’s Blessing meter and get ready to hard cast Flamestrike if it already reached eight charges. If not, go back to step 8 and start using Scorches on targets with low health to speed up the process.
10. If available, place down a Rune of Power before hard-casting Flamestrike and try to finish the mobs off during the Combustion window with Phoenix Flames, Dragon’s Breath, and any other spells that are off-cooldown. If there are targets still standing afterward, cast a regular Combustion (should be available again by now) and continue with the main rotation.

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Helpful Macros For Fire Mages in Dragonflight

Casting the wrong spell at the wrong time can easily mess up your rotations, so it’s a good idea to use a few macros that can help you stay on top of your timings. Of course, there are also plenty of macros that can help Fire Mages in various other ways. Check out some of the most useful ones down below.

Press ESC and click Macros or simply type in ‘/m’ in the chat to start setting up your macros.

Cast Flamestrike At Your Cursor’s Current Location

This macro removes the need to manually click on a target location and works with any other similar spell. For instance, you can replace ‘Flamestrike’ with ‘Meteor’ in the macro to cast a Meteor at your cursor’s location instead.

Quick Activate/Deactivate Ice Block

Use this macro to immediately stop casting the current channeled spell and activate Ice Block. Use it again to deactivate Ice Block without having to manually click the icon. Very useful for situations where you need to become invulnerable for a quick second or clear debuffs.

Combustion And Trinkets

This one will cast Combustion and immediately follow it up by activating the top slot trinket. Replace ‘use /13’ with ‘use /14’ to activate the bottom trinket instead. Or you can use the macro to activate them both.

Combustion And Racials

Pretty similar to the previous one. Allows Fire Mages to use racial abilities in conjunction with Combustion. Replace ‘Berserking’ with ‘Blood Fury’ or any other similar racial if you’re not playing a Troll. You can also include ‘/use 13’ and/or ‘/use 14’ to add trinkets to the mix.

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Fire Mage Stat Priority

Similar to other caster specs, Fire Mages should prioritize Intellect over everything else, with Haste being their most important secondary start.

1. Intellect
2. Haste
3. Mastery
4. Versatility
5. Critical Strike

It’s important to note that Versatility becomes more important than Mastery for Fire Mages that focus predominantly on single-target DPS. Mastery tends to be better for cleave-based builds and damage-over-time thanks to Mastery: Ignite. Click the link below to learn more about why some stats are more important than others.

Fire Mage Stats Explained

Best Enchants For Fire Mages in Dragonflight

Only weapon, chest, and ring enchants can be considered mandatory for Fire Mages. All the other slots are down to personal preference since they won’t directly impact your DPS. While not technically enchants, spellthreads are crafted using Enchanting and perform a similar role, which is why they were also included in the table below.

Best Gems For Fire Mages in Dragonflight

The best gems for Fire Mages are those that increase either Intellect or Haste, preferably both. Epic gems are limited to one per character in Dragonflight, so players will have to fill up their remaining slots with either blue or green ones. Gems can be created with Jewelcrafting or purchased from the auction house. Here are the best gems you should keep an eye for:

• Fierce Illimited Diamond
• Energized Ysemerald
• Keen Ysemerald
• Quick Ysemerald

Best Consumables For Fire Mages in Dragonflight

Consumables in Dragonflight are split into four categories: food, potions, phials, and runes. Potions provide healing and short-term buffs while everything else enhances certain stats or attributes for anywhere between 30 minutes and 2 hours. Most consumables can be crafted either with Alchemy or Cooking, but some can also be acquired from other sources like vendors, drops, or the auction house.

Best in Slot Gear For Fire Mages in Dragonflight

BiS gear changes with every new major content update, so we created a separate guide to help players keep track of it. Click the link below to find out all about the Fire Mage best in slot gear available at the moment.

Fire Mage Best in Slot Gear – Dragonflight Season 1

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