It has been approximately 2 years since my last PoM Pyro. Patch 2.0 introduced new talent trees, I respecced frost, and left my beloved blastwave and pyro behind...
Plenty has happened since then, including various dabbling in various specs, deep fire, icy veins fire, deep frost, arena frost and the 'oops i spent too many points in frost and missed improved counterspell - lets see what I can do with this spec now'... spec. (very shortlived that one)
Despite all this tinkering, experimenting and excessive gold sinking, I still cannot settle on a single spec for more than a week.
The main issue here is I have one spec for staying alive when someone is trying to kill me (17/0/44) and another for doing massive damage to someone who isn't trying to kill me (2/44/11). The Fire + IV spec, along with all my haste gear and the Hyjal trash neck is simply the best thing to do for any kind of progression raid. I can keep up the same kind of DPS as deep frost most of the time, and certainly have less mana issues as a frost spec, but you really have to work for it as frost...
Doing huge DPS with fire is easy mode, especially if another mage has already volunteered for scorch duty! Its really a matter of spamming as much as possible, not being stupid when it comes to timing your cooldowns, spamming more fireballs, and trying not to go OOM on the third boss in Hyjal where going OOM is a painful experience.
On the other hand, to keep up with frost, you have 2 elementals and 2 icy veins to manage, and if you mis-manage these cooldowns there is no chance of keeping up with the fire mages in terms of damage. If your elemental goes splat shortly after casting or if you somehow waste an icy veins, thats a good chunk of the frost mage's DPS gone.
But what about arcane? I have been looking forward to trying out arcane just as soon as I get 2 pieces of Tier 5 loot. Any day now. Maybe.
Until Vision decided enough time had been wasted on Tier 5 instances, and from now on we would have one night farming Hyjal, and the rest of our raid nights will be dedicated to BT progression (which is going nicely, BloodBoil down this week, RoS next)
So it looks as though that day may never come. I am dealing with it, although I do cry myself to sleep at night.
The thing is, there's so much more to the arcane tree than just arcane spam. Take a read of this article by Krizzlybear, where he has taken advantage of the arcane mages mana regeneration abililtes, without actually using an Arcane blast rotation spec. How very interesting? Could a spec such as this actually be raid viable? Surely the points spent in arcane are going to cut into important DPS talents from either the frost or the fire tree, gimping the spec in terms of damage?
After all, between pots and mana gems, even the most inefficient fire mage can still pump out a ton of damage before going OOM. Give him a shadow priest or a shaman, and he will never look back.
So lets have a play with this. I want PoM Pyros. I want raid viability. I want PvP viability. I want it all in one spec.
I have a sneaking suspicion that it's not doable... I mean, surely everyone would be doing it if it was doable?
Time to play with the talent calculators!
This is what I've come up with: Starting with Krizzly's Arcane Frost tea total spec, purely for the required arcane talent, the key one being arcane meditation (bonus 30% mana regen while casting) You gotta take a few talents to get down to that as it's a fourth tier talent, but that's the important one. Is that all we need from this tree?
Hell No, we want PoM Pyros dang it!
This is what I've come up with. 39/22/0.
I dropped a point out of mind mastery to grab blastwave because I <3 blastwave.
I am sorry to be missing out on; playing with fire, critical mass, combustion, dragon's breath, molten fury, fire power and empowered fireball.
Actually thats possibly way way way too much to be missing out on. Perhaps I should drop mind mastery, spell power and Arcane Potency in order to pick up more fire talents? Can I really survive without molten fury?
I'll give it a go as it is to begin with, head straight to a battleground, and see how many people I can light up :)
7 comments:
I tell ya, meditation frost has all of the dps talents that the other raiding frost talents have. The only thing I give up is a little bit of survivability by not picking up ice barrier (which can be alleviated by taking a point away from winter's chill, which can reliably refreshed anyways with ice lance spam), and not having shatter. It doesn't have the trash/adds power that deep frost has, but hot diggety I have never had to eat/drink in 4 heroic pugs so far. I only evocate after I get rezzed.
Oh, and about your spec. Sweet. If I could, I'd take points into Master of Elements to further my mana efficiency even more!
I SWEAR I WILL STOP SPAMMING. I meant, taking points out of the fire tree and incorporate it into meditation frost.
This is great! It gives me hope of some balance in the war. Looking forward to see your reports.
Larisa talks of Pyro.
You talk of Pyro.
Guess I better talk about Pyro too!
A single spec for both high end raiding PvE and PvP probably wont happen.
I spec 33/28 for PvP, and some spec 34/27 for some more oomph at the expense of pushback resistance. Impact and molten armor is a must to RNG your way to victory against hard to kill targets.
If you try to cut out too many +crit talents or +damage talents from fire just to raid, you end up with mediocre fireballs and scorch spam just wont cut it. Fire's strength is with its ignites coming off of high crit fireballs.
Lastly, if youre going to gear for PvP PomPyro, many top mages gem for crit, sporting around 30%+ base crit with molten armor, which leads to firespells such as scorch and fireblast having a much higher chance to crit. Raiding mages will probably never gem for crit, as raid synergy will give them that crit boost.
Well I'm gonna draw the line at gemming for crit in my PvP gear, as It's already gemmed for stam, resilience and damage at the moment.
I am going to give PvP fire a serious go, however.
I find it takes a while to adjust from the frost playstyle to the fire playstyle.
One is about staying alive for ages and being really slippery, the other is about going BOOOM everybody die now.
Which talents do you mean that give the oomph and the pushback resistance Chu?
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