Fire mage pve

[Nirinia 0]

I know this will probably get a few groans, but as a fire mage in zg/aq/naxx is it worth stacking scorch on trash or is it best reserved for bosses?

[Ram 11]

On trash only usw scorch if mobs die too fast for fireballs to hit or if you wanna be the ignite lucker (scorch scorch fireblast = 3 chances on a crit before the first fireball Hits).

[Kaben 0]

In my opinion you should stack scorch even on trash. Atleast one mage in your raid. The buff to every mage dps in the group is worth sacrificing a bit of dps on one mage for. I would ask my class leader though, since the decision should be up to him/her at the end of the day.

[quasexort 4]

If you got 5 or more mages you can just have each mage scorch once then fireball.

[Ram 11]

The problem is always "does the boss live long enough so the scorch ia worth it?"

That is because:

- scorching 5x can cause a low dmg ignite.

- it requires every mage to think (yes, this is often a problem)

- applying scorch and dropping the scorch ignite from that costs at least 6s. In that time you can also fireball to build the ignite and scorch when the ignite is up. If that is worth it depends on the number of mages, how buffed they are and the lenght of the boss fight to justify losing two fireballs per mage vs a slight ignite dmg upgrade during x seconds.

 

[quasexort 4]

How does it cost at least 6s?  ignite only lasts 4 seconds.  You just scorch wait 1 second and fireball.  

[Ram 11]

You scorch 1.5s if ALL mages are perfectly syncronized. But they aren't. So it will be rather 3-5s to have 5 stacks up.

Then you wait for the ignite that will in 99% of cases be caused by scorch to drop off, because 40% of a 1400 scorch crit is less than 40% of a 4k fireball crit and you do not want your scorch ignite to waste your fireball ignite.

So in the end it is better to have a 3.5k fireball instead of a 4k fireball (these numbers are just quantitative) instead of scorch crits for ignite and apply scorch when you have a nice 5stack fireball ignite. This is OFC for short fights.

You want to apply scorch before the fireballing when the fight is long enough to make the ignite dmg (remember, 40% of a 15% higher fireball crit) with scorch debuff worth the fireballs you could not cast in the scorching time.