Fire Mage turns critical strikes into damage. Fire Blast on cooldown and a filler spell, Scorch or Fireball, build crits, and each crit lights Ignite for 40 % more damage over four seconds. Three crits stack Heating Up, which cuts your next Pyroblast to a cast of 1.5 seconds. Mana is the limit, and Combustion is the one cooldown. The build below scores 773.9 DPS on a one-minute single-boss fight, 11th of 25 damage specs.

Strengths and weaknesses

Strengths

• Three bosses at once. Flamestrike burns every boss in its area and does 60.4 % of your damage on a three-minute fight against three bosses, where Fire ranks 6th of 25. Read the warning below before you trust that rank.
• A crit pays three times. A Scorch, Fire Blast or Fireball crit hits for 150 %, starts an Ignite and adds a Heating Up stack. Ignite alone is 13.5 % of your damage.
• A short priority. Two spells, Scorch at 41.3 % and Fire Blast at 23.6 %, make up most of a three-minute single-boss fight, and Combustion is the only cooldown to time.

Weaknesses

• Mid-table on one boss. Fire ranks 12th of 25 on a three-minute single-boss fight. Forever cut the base damage of Scorch, Fireball and Pyroblast by about 27 to 30 % from Classic, and Fire Blast by 7 %.
• A long way to the hit cap. Our simulator keeps Classic's spell table, where 17 % of your spells miss a raid boss before any hit, and Elemental Precision covers only 5 % of that. A missed spell starts no Ignite and builds no Heating Up, which is why hit tops your stat weights.
• The best robe needs Tailoring. Robe of the Archmage binds when picked up, so you have to be a tailor to own one. The next chest costs 12.7 DPS.

On every fight

Fire climbs on three bosses, where Flamestrike hits all of them and a free spell from Arcane Concentration can be a Flamestrike, which costs 990 mana. On one boss it sits mid-table at every length, and the filler changes with it: Scorch on three minutes, where mana runs short, Fireball on one and two. Choosing a fight below sets it for every page of this guide.

Races

Human leads the Alliance on every fight. Sword Specialization in Forever is 2 % crit with spells too, and Sageblade in this set is a sword. Gnome is second or level with High Order, whose Read Ley Line the rotation never casts.

For the Horde, Undead lead on most fights. Touch of the Grave gives a landed spell a 10 % chance (once a second at most) to drain Shadow damage from the boss equal to a twentieth of your health pool. On a one-minute single-boss fight the benchmark picks Troll, but Troll, Orc and Undead finish level: Berserking's 10 seconds and Blood Fury's 15 cover more of a one-minute fight.

What a Mage brings to the raid

Arcane Brilliance gives the whole raid 31 Intellect, and the table shows what it adds for every spec it helps. Fire Vulnerability is no longer a raid debuff: in Forever it raises only its own mage's damage, so a second Fire Mage keeps its own stacks.

Changes

The table lists every simulator or game-data update that moved Fire's score here, and Updates has the story of each.