Playing with Fire

Being relatively new to the mage class in terms of playing I basically jumped the bandwagon of Fire. In 1 sentence this would be: Spec 10/48/3 and craft spellfire/spellstrike. Having finally completed this mindnumbling grind (thank god for questing money at 70) I’m filling up the final slots with some heroic upgrades or drops from kharazan and ofcourse, the insane season 2 dagger. Having saved up 3k points in season 1 I got it the second week increasing my spelldamage with 95 over the greatsword of horrid dreams. The final items I need are relatively small upgrades which leaves me with the current stats: 1038 fire damage, 31.52% crit, 10.05% hit. When raiding I usually switch a minor amount of crit for some +hit trying to get to the 16% threshold. Lest not forget that with these awesome stats my hp is only a shy 6393. This hasn’t proven to much of a problem yet with the exception of unlucky Gruul combo’s (shatter > cave-in ahoy). If our arena team gets any successful, getting some high stamina pieces to switch in on various encounters should solve that.

Anyway, having some experience now with the ‘spec of all specs’ it doesn’t feel as awesome in raiding as it does while grinding. Grinding or questing is absolutely brilliant, my fireballs are hitting for around 2100 which basically makes it possible to 2 shot any non elite mob in outland if you get 1 crit. If nothing crits finish up with a scorch and its down. Aoe-ing with a healer is better then frost AoE and solo I can get an easy 5/6 down as well with a basic nova > flamestrike > dragonsbreath > blastwave > Arcane explosion till dead. Because of the insane damage I really don’t find myself drinking that often if I just have a few seconds between the mobs and don’t try to AoE all the time. However, having been to Kharazan and Gruul’s lair numerous times now I definitely get a different feel to it. I can brake it down into 2 things.

1; It feels very much based on luck. I'm just standing away at 36y shooting fireballs and hoping to get a crit. Sometimes you get a streak, sometimes you don’t get some a few times. Even though I put up respectable DPS when not critting it just feels so out of my control to just wait for the crit. Popping combustion if an option but there is no way to force it.

2; It is soooooooo boring my god. There are exactly 2 buttons, and 2 bars I need to watch.

Bar 1: KTM; ensure I don’t get over the threat of the tank and use invisibility if needed.

Bar 2: Fire vulnerability; make sure you hit scorch once every 30 seconds

Button 1: Mana pot cooldown: Click the first one after you lost 2k mana, and then everytime again when the cooldown is up.

Button 2: Mana gem cooldown; Identical to mana pots.

So there it is, my limited role explained. A trained monkey could do it and probably do equal dps. Although in TBC there are quite a few mobility fights where I actually need to walk around a few times it’s a 2 button game for 4 hours in a row. It makes me wonder, apart from the social aspect ofcourse (good times on ventrilo). Is the raiding game any fun at all while not playing a healer or tank. A different spec (Arcane cycles looks promising) and time will tell. And if it gets boring? Theres always Arena.