Guide Fire Mage Talents

Talents are additional abilities added to your character. Usually they compliment your already existing fire spells in some way, shape, or form. A couple of them are skills all in themselves. Choosing the right talent can be a very important decision. One of the problems I’ve seen with a lot of mages is a lack of knowledge of talents. While I won’t go into specific builds, a slight tweak to your current build may help maximize your DPS and fix a few of the kinks you may be having.

Improved Fireball - This is a must have talent. This talent decreases the cast time of your fireball spell by 0.5-seconds. Now you may be asking your self -- only 0.5-seconds? What good is that? Believe me, when you’re raiding, 0.5-seconds is a lot of time. Actually, any aspect of this game that is a lot of time. This allows you to get more fireballs off per encounter, maximizing your DPS.

Impact - While many will disagree with me on this, impact is almost useless in PVE. I haven’t talented into this in a very long time and quite frankly, I don’t miss it or ever been in a situation where I wish I had it. It has its uses in PVP, but since this guide is aimed at the raiding mage, this talent shouldn’t have much importance to you.

Ignite - Ignite gives your critical hits 40% (fully talented) more damage. Ever hear of rolling ignites? Its not uncommon to get multiple ignites from using scorch and yes, they do stack. Ignite is important because there is no extra mana cost when it procs on your target.

Flame Throwing - Another must have talent in my opinion. The further you’re away from the action, the better. And this talent gives you an extra 6 yards of casting distance. This talent is incredibly useful in encounters that require you to stay at a certain range. With more encounters being implemented that have fears and other ranged damage, you can easily be out of range with flame throwing.

Improved Fire Blast - If you have extra talent points, I’d definitely toss them into this. Fully talented, this can reduce your cool down on your fire blast by 1.5-seconds. It will allow you to use your fire blast more often, but its not something I would consider a must have if your points are spent better elsewhere. Good way of getting deeper in the talent tree if you need to spend points.

Incinerate - This talent will increase your critical hit chance of your scorch and fire spells. Remember back when I mentioned rolling ignites? This is the talent that helps that out. This is an integral talent to any PVE fire build.

Improved Flamestrike - Increases your critical strike chance of your flamestrike spell, but not really worth putting the points into. I’ve never used flamestrike enough in a PVE situation to need this talent.

Burning Soul - This talent does two things. It reduces the threat generated by your fire spells and it also gives your fire spells a high chance to avoid interruption. In PVE, you’ll be more worried about the first part than the second. Threat is everything to a mage. The less threat you cause, the more damage you can do. Pull agro from the tank is going to get you in some hot water. So this gives you more of a comfort zone when it comes to putting on the hurt. The interruption avoidance is good for PVP, but you’ll rarely need that part of the talent in PVE since you shouldn’t have things beating on you to begin with.

Improved Scorch - One of the best talents offered in the fire tree. Increases fire damage done to your target up to 15%. More damage is always a good thing and this also benefits the warlocks in the raid. The more mages with this talent, the quicker it can be applied. It lasts for 30-seconds, but the timer is reset whenever a new scorch hits the target.

Improved Fire Ward - No real use for this talent. Mainly a filler talent that has no real use in PVE. You shouldn’t be getting hit by fire spells and if you are, the mob casting them on you is most likely immune to fire damage (ex. Vaelestrasz in Blackwing Lair).

Master of Elements - This talent goes back to the whole mana conservation. This allows any of your fire or frost spells that critically hit to restore some of the mana used for the spell.

Critical Mass - Increases the critical strike chance of your fire spells. Critical strikes can be a good thing while raiding, but can also be a bad thing. Critical strikes proc ignite, which increases your damage, but it also causes more threat. The more critical strikes you cause, the more threat you cause. Its good to learn how much damage you’re doing, so you have an idea of the amount of threat you’re causing. More on this later.

Fire Power - Your goal as a fire mage is to at least get to this point of the fire tree. Fire Power is a much needed talent for any raiding fire mage. It increases your damage by up to 10%, depending on how many points you put in it but you should max it out. Your goal as a fire mage is to do damage, so anything that gives you more damage is definitely something you need to pick up.

Combustion - Much better than the previous combustion. This is a good talent to go for to increase damage, but one you can still live without. Even with it being one talent point, that point can most likely be used in the arcane tree for something much more useful.