Burning Crusade Endgame Fire Mage Compendium

[Hugmancer]

Hey guys, 

If there are excalibur server players you might know me as Alodia. I dont want to boast myself, but you should know who is the author. I have spent 5 years as mage in hardcore guilds, we cleared SWP in under 1h on several occassions, I also overdpsed M'uru several times, max Brutallus dps was above 3.3k (lucky crits) but I was doing 2.9k+ every time ..And I was a scorch slave 😄

 

 

(I ruined cooldowns at the end because the kill was too fast and I didnt adjust)

My favorite bossfight as mage 🙂

 

I decided to share my old mage spreadsheet. All the guides I found on the internet present something as best without data to back it up and every guide tells something different... so I made pretty much rawr in excel where you can check all the calculations yourself (maybe I did a mistake somewhere, but the calculated DPS matches my experience)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sd7kuunesHqYtOPo7apTy2QHi_kUi4oO/edit?usp=drive_link

 

The sheet calculates crits based on bernoulli distribution. With bernoulli distribution I realised, that as long as you have less than 50% crit, its more likely to score less, than is your rating. Above 50% you will be scoring more. Even though its possible to achieve 50% crit, it would mean a lot of sacrifices tho and its not worth it, but maybe it will make ele shamans happy.

I dont think it calculates hits, so just get hitcapped as priority.

Back then I didnt know that the spell power coefficient is dependant on base casting time, so I made thousands of hits on dummy with different spell powers and then averaged it 😄

 

you can compare 2 builds with each other. You basically pick gear (with bis enchants already), gems, set fight lenght, buffs, the 80 at the top means drums of battle (yes, we all had drums)

points to calculate mean "how much the equivalence points would change if I had x more of the sp/haste/crit"

You will most likely need to plug your own gear choices, to do so, just follow the logic in item tabs. Put there gear with best in slot enchants.

Then you need to put the same name into the main tab dropdown menu. It works like this: F and G checks if the item is picked in main tab (1), multiplies it by either 1 or 0 and then it just sums up the values at the bottom. Sorry but im not going to do it 😄

Or just ignore the sheet and stack spell power and ignore this. Haste and SP and crit are very similar, but more haste = more mana, crit has diminishing returns till 50%..

 

Gear is somewhat important, but more important is to spam properly (put fireball on mouse wheel up and down) also its crucial to time your cooldowns, mages do main portion of their dps below 20%, so dont be like me at brut and time it properly. When you dont have Veins and you take damage then wait with trinkets till you dont if possible to avoid pushback.. 

Oh and whats up with arcane mages here? Is there some mechanic im not aware of? I tried arcane with scorch as a filler (most efficient dmg spell) but I did WAY less dps even when I just spammed arcane blasts... and asking for 5 innervates on a fight isnt really fair.

Edit: I did calculations for arcane later in spicy comments 

 

My talent tree: https://www.wowhead.com/tbc/talent-calc/mage/-5052021123033312531251-023500001

My custom addons: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ru5zjvO46SeLJP4ijO6-8tF4bgAEKzSm/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p6qrqCdZX1_4cOxrAzR06DLdO2Gx8nbt/view?usp=sharing

 

Regards, Hugmancer

Edited September 29, 2023 by Hugmancer

[Zoonara]

its pretty easy, destro wl > fire mage, so u will never get elemental/boomy. and arcane > fire in shadowpriest grp. filler spells for arcane are 3xfrostbolt not scorch.

all in all, do what u want, but a fire mage will objectively mage a raid comp worse.

 

also why u change name from eggsy

[Hugmancer]

You are right about locks, they are stronger dps who doesnt need supporting classes to do well. But it doesnt mean mages dont have a spot in raids. Anyways I was overdpsing locks with shadowpriest and ele, they had usually ele and boomy. 

Do you have any numbers or proofs to back up what you say about arcane vs fire? 

Maybe Im wrong, so Id like to see it :) 

[Hugmancer]

1 hour ago, Zoonara said:

its pretty easy, destro wl > fire mage, so u will never get elemental/boomy. and arcane > fire in shadowpriest grp. filler spells for arcane are 3xfrostbolt not scorch.

all in all, do what u want, but a fire mage will objectively mage a raid comp worse.

 

also why u change name from eggsy

I checked logs of Najentus in BT, its pretty much a fight without movement, also mages can evocate / invis without loss of dps during shield phase.

It didnt convince me tbh

[Zoonara]

3 hours ago, Hugmancer said:

Do you have any numbers or proofs to back up what you say about arcane vs fire? 

 

what proof mate i can show u logs, u gonna say its player issue, i can show u sims where u barely (+10%) beat out arcane mage when in FULL BIS GEAR, its solved game, u can cheese and pump lusts at 20% all u want but until full bis when no one cares, u gonna lose vs arcane.

[Hugmancer]

16 minutes ago, Zoonara said:

what proof mate i can show u logs, u gonna say its player issue, i can show u sims where u barely (+10%) beat out arcane mage when in FULL BIS GEAR, its solved game, u can cheese and pump lusts at 20% all u want but until full bis when no one cares, u gonna lose vs arcane.

show me then, i want to see calculations for 3 min fight, not some simulations where you dont know how they came up to the numbers. but show me the simulations too

Edited September 28, 2023 by Hugmancer

[Zoonara]

literally google wow tbc sim

Edited September 29, 2023 by Zoonara

[Zoonara]

actually thats a 5min fight, here is 3min

[Hugmancer]

4 hours ago, Zoonara said:

actually thats a 5min fight, here is 3min

So this is a pure arcane blast spam?

There is no execute for arcane mages. 

Does it take into account cooldowns? The dps didnt change at all. 

What gear did you use? 

Edited September 29, 2023 by Hugmancer

[Hugmancer]

I did some calculations. Lets say its a 180 sec fight, with unlimited mana. Average AB hit is 3k, crit is 6k, crit chance is 40%, cast time 1.5 sec

then you do 72 hits and 48 crits, which means 2800 dps. 

 

But how real is that you can keep spamming purely AB for 3 minutes?

 

Good shadow priest does 2k ish dps? 5% from that is 100 mps. Arcane blast costs 480 mana / 1.5 = 320 mps  ... - 100mps = 220 mps

so on 3 min fight its 180 * 220 = 39600 mana  ... thats actually not impossible thanks to evocation 🙂 

 

but on longer fights, lets say 5min its 66k mana, 4 min is 53k mana and that is impossible.

 

So its rather situational, if the fight is short, arcane is actually viable, but on longer fights your dps will drop significantly because of the filler spells unless you get innervates. 

 

Also you get pretty much dmg capped, i did 500 more dps as fire on brutallus.

Edited September 29, 2023 by Hugmancer
3.5k average hit and 7k crit was too much

[Zoonara]

why u still doing ur napkin math when there is a combatlog on the sim. this is getting stupid, hf with fire 

[Hugmancer]

2 minutes ago, Zoonara said:

why u still doing ur napkin math when there is a combatlog on the sim. this is getting stupid, hf with fire 

Because what you share isnt knowledge, but pure speculation/religion and im tired of such people. Im interested in proofs and actual numbers. 

Hf with arcane

[Zoonara]

30 minutes ago, Hugmancer said:

Because what you share isnt knowledge, but pure speculation/religion and im tired of such people. Im interested in proofs and actual numbers. 

 

u must be trolling, a sim with thousands of iteration and correct math is "speculation/religion" but ur napkin excelsheet is proof 😄 holy fire mage brain

[Hugmancer]

12 hours ago, Zoonara said:

u must be trolling, a sim with thousands of iteration and correct math is "speculation/religion" but ur napkin excelsheet is proof 😄 holy fire mage brain

then tell me where is the mistake in my math, I will gladly change my opinion and say arcane is the way. But you just keep throwing salty comments on someone who is actually trying to help the community and who spent years doing theorycrafting. Whats even more sad is that you obviously dont know a thing about it, your research = open website and click a button 😄 my sheet is also based on thousands of casts with different spellpower setups 😉the arcane dmg i only estimated, the problem is mana anyways so it doesnt really matter in my opinion

check Dunning–Kruger effect, you jest emberass yourself

until you show me numbers there is nothing to talk about.

Edited September 29, 2023 by Hugmancer

[Zoonara]

i wanna take u serious, but its too clowny, someone tell me thats a troll.

lets act like its not for one last time and see.

so you go to google.com and type in "wow tbc sim" and then u click on the first link, there u can click mage and do preset bis gear, u can change fight duration, buffs, talents, anything really, cause guess what, this game is 30 years old and ppl figured it out already u dont need to do more theorycrafting (in terms of minmax dps).

now that u did that u can see what i posted earlier, arcane mage in bis gear doing 2.8k dps in a 5min fight and 3.1k dps in a 3min fight.

now comparing that to ur sheet which shows 2.9k dps in a 5min fight, which is higher than arcane! i wont deny simple math (like u do). BUT to reach ur dps u need a suboptimal raidcomp (extra elemental), which is fine, but its overall worse dps.

i have no clue what u on about thousands of casts at different spellpower, the spellcoefficient of fireball is known, google the formula. and u actually only need 1 cast with known spellpower to figure it out.

its like BaseDmg+X*Spellpower=Dmg and then u solve for X, 1 math to figure out what u needed thousands for, gl.

 

u tell me its obvious i have no idea 😄 which is so funny cause u dont even know the correct filler rotation for arcane mage, u talking about scorch LMAO.
 

check Dunning–Kruger effect, you jest emberass yourself

someone once said.

[Eggsy]

On 9/28/2023 at 7:44 PM, Zoonara said:

its pretty easy, destro wl > fire mage, so u will never get elemental/boomy. and arcane > fire in shadowpriest grp. filler spells for arcane are 3xfrostbolt not scorch.

all in all, do what u want, but a fire mage will objectively mage a raid comp worse.

 

also why u change name from eggsy

Oh, dont u worry baby boo, iam still here watching your journey thru the internet world xD, keep us entertained 

PS: I really like fire mage!

[Someone]

Logically Fire should be better on longer, buffed fights as it isn't nearly as mana hungry as Arcane can be there and execute phase is longer too. For example I don't see a good reason why anyone would bring Arcane over Fire for fights like Brutallus. Not only Fire should do more damage on its own but it also doesn't need Innervate. No clue what kind of sims Zoonara used but every time I simmed BiS geared SWP mage Fire was always ahead or pretty much same damage. You also have to consider 15% extra Fire damage for your entire raid which can be quite helpful because your raid will often use 2x Enh, warlocks will use Infernals and Resto shamans can pop Fire Elementals too.

PS. Don't sim 3 min fights as it's useless for Netherwing where most fights are buffed a lot and last 7 minutes at least.

Edited October 16, 2023 by Someone

[blackestjack]

I would say arcane > fire due to cucking 1 lock to get into the proper group for crit auras.

Edited October 22, 2023 by johnywoo

[Someone]

On 10/22/2023 at 8:26 PM, johnywoo said:

I would say arcane > fire due to cucking 1 lock to get into the proper group for crit auras.

I think good fire mage can do on par if not better damage than warlock on fights like Brutallus (assuming that fire mage has right gear). Fire brings unique debuff your raid can use while Arcane doesn't really bring anything of such sort.

EDIT. After checking in sim it's actually wrong and warlock in SWP should always be above mage on fights where you can stand and cast. 

Edited August 15 by Someone

[Someone]

Sorry for digging up this old thread but I happen to play mage now and I noticed something weird with posted talents here.

@Hugmancer I don't understand your talents to be honest. Blast Wave, Pyroblast and Dragon's Breath are pretty much useless vs 90% of bosses unless we're talking about something like Felmyst where you can deal a lot of AoE damage with these abilties to skeletons WHILE moving. Blazing Speed is PvP talent and completely useless vs 99% of bosses. Something like this would be WAY better build vs most bosses and vs Felmyst you can change it a bit to have Dragon's Breath + Blast Wave.
 

On 9/28/2023 at 7:44 PM, Zoonara said:

its pretty easy, destro wl > fire mage, so u will never get elemental/boomy. and arcane > fire in shadowpriest grp. filler spells for arcane are 3xfrostbolt not scorch.

all in all, do what u want, but a fire mage will objectively mage a raid comp worse.

 

also why u change name from eggsy

Actually BiS SWP geared Fire can be high up there with warlocks if geared and played properly but in general it's true that warlocks should outperform mage but that's true for BOTH Arcane and Fire. The only reason why Arcane sometimes outperforms warlocks here is because 90% of players here are super bad and don't even know how to play their class properly and that's especially true for warlock and hunter players here.

Why Arcane > Fire in SP group? SP's mana regen isn't based on mage's spirit or anything like that so it actually doesn't matter.

@blackestjack That's common misconception on this server it seems which should never be common. Fire mage would never want to be in Elemental/Boomer group over SP because having SP is simply MUCH better because of mana. In earlier seasons it's even more true because Fire Blast should be part of your rotation and that can cost a lot of mana. You don't need 3% hit from Ele because you have 3% hit talent in Frost tree what warlocks don't have. You're giga-cucking your Fire if you don't give him SP. You could maybe get away with not giving SP for Fire but then you HAVE TO give him 2x Innervate cause otherwise your Fire gona run into big mana problems. I know Innervate is better on Arcane but in perfect raid comp you gona use 1x mage at best (look below).

Innervates are more powerful when used on Arcane but it's not like they're completely useless when used on Fire that has SWP/T6 gear. Mage T6 gives some spirit so 1x Innervate can easily restore 30-40% of Fire's mana. If you add Innervates for Fire in SIM you can see its DPS increases but if you have 2 mages in raid comp for some reason (should never happen if you have 4-5 GOOD warlocks in guild) then of course you'd use Innervate on Arcane instead. If you give Innervate to Fire there's a chance he won't even have to use Evocation which is a downtime on many bosses.

Edited March 5 by Someone

[Boomshine]

I love absolute bum players still living in 2006 pretending the game hasnt been solved. Any kid can can learn solved mage dps in 10 minutes from the info in a discord server, whilst the bums in this thread have spent 1000 hours playing in clown guilds and have learnt nothing. The only person who isnt an absolute bum in this thread is zoonara.

Edited June 12 by Boomshine

[Hugmancer]

On 3/5/2024 at 1:13 PM, Someone said:

Sorry for digging up this old thread but I happen to play mage now and I noticed something weird with posted talents here.

@Hugmancer I don't understand your talents to be honest. Blast Wave, Pyroblast and Dragon's Breath are pretty much useless vs 90% of bosses unless we're talking about something like Felmyst where you can deal a lot of AoE damage with these abilties to skeletons WHILE moving. Blazing Speed is PvP talent and completely useless vs 99% of bosses. Something like this would be WAY better build vs most bosses and vs Felmyst you can change it a bit to have Dragon's Breath + Blast Wave.
 

Actually BiS SWP geared Fire can be high up there with warlocks if geared and played properly but in general it's true that warlocks should outperform mage but that's true for BOTH Arcane and Fire. The only reason why Arcane sometimes outperforms warlocks here is because 90% of players here are super bad and don't even know how to play their class properly and that's especially true for warlock and hunter players here.

Why Arcane > Fire in SP group? SP's mana regen isn't based on mage's spirit or anything like that so it actually doesn't matter.

@blackestjack That's common misconception on this server it seems which should never be common. Fire mage would never want to be in Elemental/Boomer group over SP because having SP is simply MUCH better because of mana. In earlier seasons it's even more true because Fire Blast should be part of your rotation and that can cost a lot of mana. You don't need 3% hit from Ele because you have 3% hit talent in Frost tree what warlocks don't have. You're giga-cucking your Fire if you don't give him SP. You could maybe get away with not giving SP for Fire but then you HAVE TO give him 2x Innervate cause otherwise your Fire gona run into big mana problems. I know Innervate is better on Arcane but in perfect raid comp you gona use 1x mage at best (look below).

Innervates are more powerful when used on Arcane but it's not like they're completely useless when used on Fire that has SWP/T6 gear. Mage T6 gives some spirit so 1x Innervate can easily restore 30-40% of Fire's mana. If you add Innervates for Fire in SIM you can see its DPS increases but if you have 2 mages in raid comp for some reason (should never happen if you have 4-5 GOOD warlocks in guild) then of course you'd use Innervate on Arcane instead. If you give Innervate to Fire there's a chance he won't even have to use Evocation which is a downtime on many bosses.

I think it depends on personal preferences, I used the instant aoe's quite a lot on trash mostly etc, blazing speed was just fun to have, dragons breath can interrupt some nasty casts or save healers. The clearcasting is good, but I had shadowpriest all the time so it made no sence to have it, reducing resistances is useless in pve and getting extra hit on arcane made no sence to me either in full bis.

But as I said, it depends on gear and playstyle 🙂 thing is I tried both full bis arcane and full bis fire on excalibur server (R.I.P.)  and i figured out it made no sence to play arcane there, mana hungry and lower dps, im not sure whats the scripting here, nor i know how the two compare outside of swp, since i played those instances rarely 🙂 sometimes arcane mage outdpsed me in dungeons on 30 sec fights, thats it. All i can do is some funny math and it tells me its trash, anyways people should play what they enjoy.

With scorch as a filler I know its an unorthodox idea, but scorch is the most mana efficient dmg spell in tbc and purpose of a filler spells is to save mana, so you can spam more ABs, but I dont recall how it compared to frostbolt filler to be honest, its been more than 6 years since i played mage and tbc seriously in general 🙂 

Lock or mage superiority is for discussion, I have never played lock. But you can leave them easily behind you on fights like kalec, felm, brut, muru.. on twins you get threat capped and on kj is a lot of movement so locks have advantage with shorter casts and better aoe in my opinion. On KJ I tried to stay in the stacking spot as much as possible since mages can iceblock out debuff or blink away, but still I did pretty bad there. 

Edited July 9 by Hugmancer

[Someone]

On 6/12/2024 at 10:54 PM, Boomshine said:

I love absolute bum players still living in 2006 pretending the game hasnt been solved. Any kid can can learn solved mage dps in 10 minutes from the info in a discord server, whilst the bums in this thread have spent 1000 hours playing in clown guilds and have learnt nothing. The only person who isnt an absolute bum in this thread is zoonara.

Except I raided in "top" guilds even tho "top" guild on private server doesn't mean much, let's be honest. Game is solved but apparently for some people it isn't cause it's too hard for them to sim SWP geared mage I guess. To this day you have plenty of players who are clickers, backpedallers, retards, etc. and they still act like gods just because they kiilled 15 year old TBC boss that barely has any mechanics and requires 0 mechnical skill because of that (outside of the ones with custom changes in HC SWP).

[Someone]

On 7/9/2024 at 7:50 PM, Hugmancer said:

I think it depends on personal preferences, I used the instant aoe's quite a lot on trash mostly etc, blazing speed was just fun to have, dragons breath can interrupt some nasty casts or save healers. The clearcasting is good, but I had shadowpriest all the time so it made no sence to have it, reducing resistances is useless in pve and getting extra hit on arcane made no sence to me either in full bis.

But as I said, it depends on gear and playstyle 🙂 thing is I tried both full bis arcane and full bis fire on excalibur server (R.I.P.)  and i figured out it made no sence to play arcane there, mana hungry and lower dps, im not sure whats the scripting here, nor i know how the two compare outside of swp, since i played those instances rarely 🙂 sometimes arcane mage outdpsed me in dungeons on 30 sec fights, thats it. All i can do is some funny math and it tells me its trash, anyways people should play what they enjoy.

With scorch as a filler I know its an unorthodox idea, but scorch is the most mana efficient dmg spell in tbc and purpose of a filler spells is to save mana, so you can spam more ABs, but I dont recall how it compared to frostbolt filler to be honest, its been more than 6 years since i played mage and tbc seriously in general 🙂 

Lock or mage superiority is for discussion, I have never played lock. But you can leave them easily behind you on fights like kalec, felm, brut, muru.. on twins you get threat capped and on kj is a lot of movement so locks have advantage with shorter casts and better aoe in my opinion. On KJ I tried to stay in the stacking spot as much as possible since mages can iceblock out debuff or blink away, but still I did pretty bad there. 

If we want to min-max shit then "fun to have" is not a good reason to waste your talent points on. Spell penetration is useless in PvE for the most part but on some bosses like Supremus you could stack like 200 spell penetration with items like PvP book and wand to completely ignore his resistances so it's not 100% useless.

Excalibur was a dogshit server where you could buy everything in the shop (including Glaives) and existed on life support for years with 700-1000 online TOPS and it didn't have any buffs to content so it should never be used as an example of anything. Everyone I've met from that server was absolute pisslow, trash player. I can imagine Exalibur players being too dumb to use Innervate on Arcane.

Arcane is better once it gets 2/5 T5 set bonus, there's no going around that. This set bonus is just too good and is abused for pretty much the rest of the expansion. Befor that Fire can easily challenge Arcane but then becomes weaker until SWP gear. On some longer bosses like Vashj Fire could also be better. Befor anyone says that it would be too much of a hassle to invest into Fire gear just to respec Arcane once you get your set bonus - both specs use pretty much same gear during T4 so it's not really a problem. When it comes to dungeons there's no way Fire can compete with Arcane because bosses die way too fast and Arcane has better burst damage.

There's no way Scorch would EVER be better filler than Frostbolt. With Frost Channeling talent Frostbolt will always be way more mana efficent.

Warlocks should always outperform mage in SWP cause they scale well. Normally mage should never be above warlock in SWP, you can sim both warlock and mage in SWP gear and see for yourself. On buffed Netherwing content mage in SWP is pretty much useless class and that is why most decent guilds used only 1 there and others not even that (at least that's how it was on Karazhan if I recall correctly). In good guilds where tanks aren't dumb threat should never be an issue in SWP + you have Invi. On KJ actually Fire should have an edge because you have way more instant casts which you can use during moving and 2 of them are AoE so they should deal really good damage on the reflections.

Edited August 19 by Someone