In regards to the frag belt, as opposed to simply building the individual bombs.
If you want to use the cobalt bombs every minute instead of the belt every six, go right ahead. The belt is far cheaper in the long run, which is the only reason I consider it superior to using individual bombs.
I have not run into any situation where the six minute cooldown on the belt has hurt me. I simply do not use it more often than that. I have some individual cobalt frag bombs sitting in my engineering bag, but they have never been used. The belt has proven to be enough.
It’s also worth noting that the belt and grenades only partially share cooldowns. If you use a grenade, this puts both the grenade and belt on cooldown for one minute. If you use the belt, the belt is on cooldown for six minutes, but the grenades are only on cooldown for one minute.
I say, use both. Default to the belt if it’s up, if not, then use an individual frag. Best of both worlds and it will save you some cash.
In regards to lightweave embroidery.
Bear in mind you are going to need spell penetration. You must have a lot of it, and it needs to come from somewhere. If you have 1800 arena rating or more, fantastic, grab the spell penetration gear and you’re basically good to go. True gladiator’s have a set of regular caster weapons and spell penetration weapons, and swap between the two as needed.
If you do not use the +35 spell penetration enchant, that must be made up for somewhere else, more than likely in gems, thus costing you spell power you would have otherwise socketed.
The embroidery itself is worth roughly 73 spellpower, assuming it procs nearly immediately whenever the ICD is up. Which is rather likely, mind you, with a 35% proc chance. Lightweave is a fantastic enchant (tailoring is considered the best raiding profession for a reason, and this is it), but bear in mind that it, ultimately, is a random proc.
+35 spell penetration will be with you for every cast, no matter what. Lightweave will not. It could easily proc right when you most need it; it could easily proc right when you’re forced to ice block to avoid death. The one upside is that you will, essentially, always initiate combat without it being on cooldown, thus you can basically always count on it to proc in the beginning moments of combat.
What would I personally do? I’d take lightweave, and just bump a couple spellpower gems for spellpower/penetration hybrids.
In regards to WG trinkets.
The spellpower trinket is the best one for any caster of any class. Whether you are a resto druid, shadow priest, or fire mage, you want the spellpower trinket. None of the others compare in any situation.
In regards to the resilience buff.
In case you missed it, the damage reduction provided by resilience is doubling in effect. Say you got 8% reduction before, now it’s going to be 16%. This means resilience is INCREDIBLY valuable, as in you could make a strong case for socketing pure resilience no matter what class or spec you are. PvP gear is even more important to wear now than it was before.
In a general sense, what this will do is slow down WoW PvP combat, something I approve of. However, this also means that it will accentuate the strengths and weaknesses of every class and spec.
For fire, this means that the tree’s inherent weaknesses (few and uncontrollable defensive cooldowns, no snare, etc) are going to be even more painfully obvious. If you pined for a snare before, now you will be in physical pain from not having one.
Killing healers will be much more difficult, and you will likely need to use every one of your interrupts to get close to scoring a kill on a decent healer.
In regards to why you want crit.
Yes, resilience reduces both your chance to crit and how hard you crit. However, there is no such thing as “stam/int/spellpower/resilience” gear. There just isn’t. All caster gear comes with some other stat on it, one of haste, crit, hit, spell pen, spirit, or mp5. You MUST choose one of those for every piece of PvP gear you wear, crit being the best option for fire PvP.
Note that you do require hit rating as a PvP mage. At least 4%, though 6% is better (as for some stupendously strange reason spell hit can overcome the passive spell miss chance racial abilities offer (less important for horde mages as we don’t have to fight oodles of blood elves)). If you cannot get the hit you need from weapons alone, you are going to need to use a hit piece somewhere. A neck, ring, or cape with hit is a good choice. Do not socket for hit if you can avoid it! You are wasting spellpower if you do.
In regards to glyphs.
The only glyphs I consider using for fire PvP are as follows: scorch, LB, evocation, polymorph, IV. I cannot fathom a use for anything else.
Polymorph is a strong contender and a very good glyph in its own right, and I definitely do recommend it if you’re looking for good glyphs. Ideally, you’d never have to polymorph something you have LB ticking on, but since when does PvP follow ideals? It can be especially good in situations where some DK decides pestilence is the coolest button ever, i.e. every time a DK does anything.
It isn’t my personal preference to use Poly, though I would seriously consider it for arenas and definitely take it if one of my partners was a warlock or death knight. You never know.
If you are using a fire PvP build that includes Icy Veins (absolutely nothing wrong with that) GLYPH IT. If IV is in your PvP build, no matter what spec you are, glyph for it. Always always always.
In regards to trinkets for you damn overpowered humans.
Pick the two most powerful DPS trinkets you have access to. Use those.
Raiding trinkets are excellent, use the resilience/on use spellpower WG trinket too if you don’t raid all that much. Put extra emphasis on trinkets with crit or spellpower, for example Muradin’s Spyglass is godly for fire PvP and Reign of the Dead is even better.
If you have access to 25man ToGC (heroic mode) using two RotDs is the best possible trinket combo. The regular and heroic version of this trinket stack, in the sense that each simultaneously proc fire motes, though they stack separately. This means you can’t have a pillar of flame firing every 4 seconds, but you can have two pillars of flame firing every six seconds.
And you wonder why I think raid gear needs to be banned in PvP.
I’m both excited for and scared of the resilience changes. I do think wow pvp is too fast paced. Caster vs caster for the most part is slower because of all the counters and silences and whatnot, but melee vs caster can end entirely too quickly. As fire, rogues and hunters can pretty much instagib me even with 700+ resilience. That needs to be fixed, but so does fire’s lack of snares.
Also, blazing speed needs to be a cooldown instead of a proc. On a 45 second to 1 minute timer or something. Too random to be real useful most of the time.
Less QQ!!!
I’m a mage and i completely disagree. Fire is not supposed to be great at staying alive, its supposed to be great at doing damage. If you need snares and panic buttons, play frost. Its the only thing overpowered enough for someone like you.
Hey man, chill. : /
Not saying I should have counters to everything, but i’m a free HK to good physical dps players. I personally agree with Rip’s idea of a flamestrike desecration style snare, since that syncs with Firestarter. Definitely not saying we should have, say, Slow or something.
I love the playstyle and living on the edge of certain death. It’s quite exhilarating!
All specs have strengths and weaknesses. Arcane does very well against casters but is weak to melee. Frost trades several anti-caster tools for increased longevity and survivability. Fire? Fire does fine against melee, IF you have a healer or get the jump on said melee. If you’re being focused and nobody’s keeping you alive, you die a quick, awful death.
I would really like to see either the disarm or Blazing Speed become less RNG. Ideally a cooldown; if not then a better proc chance in some situations. Maybe with Molten Armor up, or an increasing chance as you take damage.
Thanks for the answers. I love doing Fire in BG’s and I can’t wait for rated BG’s. I really think that Fire will better for the team as a whole than Frost in rated BG’s. Being able to blast wave a whole group of people away from the flag when they are trying to cap is incredibly useful. Putting LB on a group at the Workshop or Docks when there are 20 on each side fighting for them is highly enjoyable. I don’t cast anything but LB until I’m sure I’ve hit everyone and every pet with LB in the Isle of Conquest or AV at the choke point.
Yes, thanks for the answer from a damn overpowered human. I’ll make up for it with underpowered trinkets, since my mage is no longer my raiding main, thus access to trinkets is limited. (He’s still wearing 2pT7).
hi!!, great blog 😀
I have a dude about this trinket
Darkmoon Card: Berserker!
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=42989
with scorch, you have 3 stacks of the proc maybe all the time, a good amount of critical strike rating and resilence…
Thanks for your last two posts. Talk about giving your audience what they want. I’m on the verge of respeccing my PvP spec to fire, but there’s one small problem: I’m scared.
Yes, that’s right. I long for the blazing inferno of PvP glory already achieved by my blogging and mage-a-licious mentor (please note: sometimes mentors aren’t aware that they’re actively… mentoring). But I’m, well… a wuss.
I can’t fathom giving up my snares as yet another OP Rogue bares down on me. But then again, this PvP thingamajig is a whole new world to me. I briefly flirted with it as BC came to a close. But I didn’t start spending any real quality time in BG’s until about two weeks ago.
But I think I have a solution that will leave me fulfilled without getting repeatedly roflstomped: Realm Transfer. I could make my way over to Duskwood, queue up for BG’s, and put Euripedes on follow. And every time you make crispy critters out of those annoying Rogues, Pallies, and Warriors, I’ll be right there to belt out, “You got pwned, bitch! What’s up NOW, son?!? That’s my BOY!!!”
Thoughts?
It may be just me, but I’ve actually found fire better against melee, especially prot warriors. With them putting up spell reflect all the time and charging. Living Bomb, Blastwave, Dragons Breath and Instant Flame Strike are golden since they can’t be spell reflected, Well Living Bomb can if you cast it while reflect is up, but if it’s already on it keeps ticking. Blast wave then blazzing speed, blink or engineering boot enchant have save my butt plenty of times. Given me time to invis or evocate. Also both Dragons Breath and Blastwave have a shorter cooldown than deepfreeze and don’t rely on something else being proc’d to work.
It’s harder against other casters since they don’t wanna get close to you. I find myself switching to mage armor if I’m up against another caster.
Mage Armor + Magic Absorption is great in BG’s where most people don’t have the spell pen to actually hurt you. Boomkins, SPriests, and Afflocks are miserable when they’re doing 25% their normal damage. Unfortunately none of those specs are very common, at least not on my battlegroup. Pallies of all types, warriors, Destro Locks, impossible-to-kill Disc Priests and the ever-popular Rogues and Death Knights are easily 80% of enemy PvP combatants.
I don’t see the resilience changes being good for Mages in general; all specs rely on burst damage to score kills, and sustained damage will always be shaky if your main nukes have a cast time and can be LOS’d. Fire suffers less from the cast time, but most from its reliance on burst, and I’m not sure Fire is really arena-viable anyway.
I hadn’t seen anything about this change until today.
So that Resto Druid in the Full Relentless Set i couldn’t get close to killing last time out…. Immortal now i suppose
I agree about resto druids. Blizz said they had something else they would implement if killing healers became impossible. I don’t know what they are waiting for. We have healers with 1000+ res in our battlegroup. With this change they could just stand there put a few hots on themselves and let you go to town for about 30 mins and never go below half health.