- Author: Amery
- Date: July 8, 2022
- Updated: July 23, 2022
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
As Fire Mages, we want to focus on a balance of Haste and Critical Strike, while maximizing Spell Power and taking care to remain hit capped.
Stat Priority
- Hit rating
- Cap: 446 rating / 368 if your raid has Misery or Improved Faerie Fire / 342 if there’s a Draenei in your party as well
- Spell Power
- Crit rating
- Haste rating
- Spirit
- Intellect
Stat Explanations
Hit rating is your most important stat. If you can’t hit your targets, you’re not dealing damage. You gain a 1% increased chance to hit with your spells for every 26.232 hit rating that you have.
In WotLK, you have a 17% chance to miss bosses (level 83 targets) with spells, meaning you need 446 hit rating in order to never miss. In raids, you will likely have either a Shadow Priest for the Misery debuff, or Balance Druid for the Improved Faerie Fire debuff, increasing your chance to hit with spells by 3% — they don’t stack. This will push down the amount of hit rating you need to 368 (14%).
Fire has no talents to help with hit, unfortunately. If you’re a Draenei, or expect to have one in your PARTY (their aura is party-wide, NOT raid-wide!), you require 342 rating (13%) so you never miss with spells.
It’s a good idea to have some items with hit rating as backup to increase your hit chance to 17% if you know that your raid’s mind melters or owlkins cannot attend the raid that night.
Spell power is the most straightforward stat, as it simply increases the damage of your spells. Each spell gains a different amount of bonus damage based on your spell power stat.
Fireball, Frostfire Bolt and Pyroblast get 15% increased spell power bonus, meaning they get a lot of extra damage from your spell power stat. Living Bomb, Scorch and Fire Blast and other spells do not get any special increases, unfortunately.
Crit Rating is amongst your most important stats as a Fire Mage, increasing the frequency of your Hot Streak procs; therefore it’s your most valued stat after hit, competing with spell power. You gain 1% increased critical strike chance for every 45.91 crit rating that you have.
Your DPS increases exponentially the higher your critical strike chance is. You’ll want to aim for about 50% crit chance to begin with, so you’ll need another ~30% from your gear, after the ~22% crit chance increase you have on Fireball from talents & raid buffs. In later tiers, you’ll ideally want to have 70-80% Fireball crit chance, at which point you should focus on increasing your haste instead — this will typically be when you’re using BiS T9 or T10 gear.
As a fresh level 80 Fire Mage, getting that 30% crit from gear will be your top priority — Arcane will be out-DPSing you until you manage to get your crit that high.
Haste increases your casting speed. You gain 1% increased cast speed for every 32.79 haste rating you have.
Haste is a very strong stat for fire, reducing Fireball‘s massive 2.85 second cast time (after talents). However, as Fire, we rely on repeated crits above anything else, so we cannot focus on haste until we have enough crit. Each tier has a different “ideal” balance of crit and haste.
Ideal haste pre-T9 heroic gear is ~12% (+8% from raid = 20%).
Spirit increases your mana regeneration when not casting. For a Fire Mage in particular, it also increases your crit rating when using Molten Armor: 35% of your Spirit gets converted to crit rating baseline, 55% of your Spirit if you’re using Glyph of Molten Armor, and 70% of your Spirit if you have the 2-piece set bonus of the Tier 9 set, Khadgar’s Regalia. Greater Blessing of Kings increases your Spirit by a further 10%, improving the value of Spirit even more.
Spirit is an okay stat as a result of this, but even at a 70% conversion rate, it’d be better if Spirit on your gear was any other stat instead. For that reason, you’ll probably not want to use items with Spirit, swapping them for items with any other stat instead.
Intellect increases your maximum mana, and more importantly for us, your spell critical strike chance. You gain 1% increased spell critical strike chance for every 166.67 Intellect you have. Greater Blessing of Kings increases this by a further 10%, giving you 1.1% spell crit chance for the same amount of Intellect.
This conversion rate might not seem great, but a lot of items have upwards of 100+ Intellect, meaning they end up giving you a very nice amount of crit, on top of the crit rating they already have. However, it’s significantly worse than raw crit rating’s 45.91:1 ratio, meaning you will almost never want to socket or enchant this over pure crit rating, when they come at comparable rates.
About the Author
Doesn’t Arcane Focus in the TTW build give 3% hit, thus reducing the hit requirement from gear?
Sadly, Arcane focus only affects Arcane spells, “Increases your chance to hit and reduces the mana cost of your Arcane spells by 3%” the only hit talent that affects Fire is the Precision talent in the frost tree “Reduces the mana cost and increases your chance to hit with spells by 3%” which we can’t get as TTW Fire as we go into the arcane tree instead of frost
i dont undestand why you put spirit like a last stat?
you can get 55% from molter armor into your crit + 15% of bonus from T9 + 20% of glyph so totally 90% of your spirit ll be transferred into crit str rat.
remember that spirit is a stat which can proc. so if you use arcane talent you can increase you spirit by 10% + if you get bok then is another 10%
you can get finally from 100 spirits => 108 critical str rat.
not bad? why we should replace it a soon as possible?
You only get 35% of your spirit into crit from the base spell, with the glyph that’s upped to 55%, with t9 bonus it’s only 70% and sadly spirit isn’t procable. Also bok (blessing of kings) doesn’t increase spirit -> crit by a flat amount, as it only increases spirit by a set % and not crit directly and Student of the Mind which I think is the arcane talent you’re mentioning, only increases spirit directly.
Since spirit is essentially a weaker form of crit, having haste, pure crit, or hit stats is better than spirit.
How much exactly the haste cap is? You say you need 32.79 haste for 1% but never said what the cap is (soft or hard)
For fire the hard cap is 50%, but isn’t really worth trying to get as other stats are better to stack
Thank you for putting together this excellent guide, and being responsive to everyone’s questions! My planned talent build differs a little from the TTW suggestion, taking two less points in Playing With Fire and a different selection of Arcane talents (my guild is a bit on the casual side so fights tend to run a bit longer).
https://wotlkdb.com/?talent#o0xw0u0fZ0EcbRhuhVubhct
Why would you remove Playing with fire (pure dps upgrade) over World in flames (crit chance) and why skipping on Spell impact (again a pure dps upgrade)? seems ur focusing on lowering ur damage instead of increasing it?
I don’t understand why you’d want to remove World In Flames over Playing With Fire. Crit chance is much more important to Fire.
For your build, I have a couple of critiques. I wouldn’t go into Arcane Missiles as it’s not used in a fire build, and should also grab Spell Impact as it’ll add 6% crit chance to Fireball which is needed as Fire in order to proc Hot Streak more often. As Fire Arcane Meditation isn’t as needed since Mana won’t be nearly as much of a problem like it was in tbc, so you can put 2 points back into Playing with Fire for 2% spell damage increase which in turn will result in higher ignite numbers.
Hope this helps!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Spell Impact reads as a 6% damage increase, not a 6% crit chance increase?
Im thinking of a build like this: https://wotlkdb.com/?talent#of0Vcu0cZ0EzbRhIhVubhct:Viw0m I miss some on world in flames but I gain so much more damage done % instead and on my sims flat damage done % is worth more then the 4% il miss from that.
For your build make sure you use the Living Bomb glyph as it can proc ignite, also I would move 2 points from Student of the mind (Increases spirit by x%) and move them over into World in Flames as it’ll add more crit than student of the mind would.
are you sure it does in raidenvironment? With the buffs from raid (kings, spiritbuff/scroll,gotw)? Prob with World in Flames is that it only works on Pyro and LB. It wont help FB while student talent works on all spells and since ul use fb the most feels like a waste to not boost that spell the most?
I’ll have to do more testing but in practice, it should be a dps increase since spirit (before t9 bonus) can only ever translate into 55% (with glyph 35% without glyph) spirit becoming critical strike rating making pure critical strike rating more valuable over spirit
it is but World in flames only give crit to pyro while student give to all spells. all spells is better since u need to proc hot streak to even benifit from world in flames
I ran a bunch of simulations with wowsims and found out the priority list above isn’t accurate for many players unless they are deep into phase 5. A more accurate priority list would look more like:
The reason behind why haste is so beneficial before soft-cap is that it benefits your Hot Streaks, Living bomb and Scorch. When you hit Soft-Cap, it only benefits your Fireballs.