Mythic+ Mondays / Thursdays

[Welsper]

TD (and back in the days, EV) is a special case mind you, its 18% hp regardless of ilvl instead of flat dmg. personally, i was so disappointed in my stars2 performace even on a 475 that i cleansed it off.  it mightve been the superior choice for raidbosses - but lets face it, with LFR as the highest lvl raidcontent i can do, ill stick with TD for m+ where it utterly outperforms stars. 

i wouldnt even rely on sims for this, on multi-mob pulls (i.e. all of em) you will never get more than 1 stack on a random target - extreme case here was the final UR boss where, during the entire 6min fight, i had a single star hit the boss, the rest hit random 1hp adds. its just not practical to use. tentacle wouldve actually been damn amusing here, as it retargets with ai speed and precision each time it instantly overkills the 1hp adds, one of those mightve wiped the entire add wave. 

[Fyria]

I think stars is just a bit too good for fire mages compared to the other options, but I will keep the 470s around in case some combination of gear otherwise permits me to use it somehow. 😕

[Fyria]

That said, you may have a point Welsper and I might keep an eye out for how well it's actually stacking in practice as I may be better with the 470s anyway.

[Tim]

I’ve got the rank 1 6% TD and it’s still better than everything else I’ve had in that slot. Go random world quest reward!

[Kryton]

55 minutes ago, Fyria said:

I think stars is just a bit too good for fire mages compared to the other options, but I will keep the 470s around in case some combination of gear otherwise permits me to use it somehow. 😕

When you ran your sims, did you give the sim the option to swap out other pieces to avoid breaching your corruption cap? I don't know what rank mindflay you have but the sim will ignore it if it would push you over your set corruption cap unless you give it enough other options to shuffle pieces in and out

[Fyria]

4 hours ago, Kryton said:

When you ran your sims, did you give the sim the option to swap out other pieces to avoid breaching your corruption cap? I don't know what rank mindflay you have but the sim will ignore it if it would push you over your set corruption cap unless you give it enough other options to shuffle pieces in and out

The tool does warn you if that's the case. Also I can see the actual numbers for both of the simmed items under the final gear picks so I can see what they generated.

The stars option has higher corruption anyway (50), the alternatives only have a corruption of 35.

With the 50 piece I'm at 33 overall which is fine.

 

Edit: Oh, you mean other slot corruption pieces? I only have one other piece of corruption that's usable (i.e. not bracers) and I'm using it.

[Dave]

Any preferences for this week?

[Nacey]

As you can imagine we're very busy going out and doing things this week. 

[Kryton]

19 minutes ago, Nacey said:

As you can imagine we're very busy going out and doing things this week. 

Back to that construction site again is it? Some people will do anything to go out!

[Fyria]

So out of interest and advice for trying to improve my AoE, I elected to try a couple of dungeon runs yesterday swapping out my Hyperthread Wraps and the Lucid major for Focusing Iris major and higher iLvl wrists with actual stats rather than the on-use.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of helpful advice online for 8.3 fire mages that don't take this combo, so I'm trying to figure out the best rotation for AoE without it.

When taking the wrists/Lucid essence, it favours single target burst as you can basically chain Fire Blast + Pyros for the duration of Combustion (Lucid, Combustion and then wrists on a Fire Blast-Pyro-Fire Blast), it's pretty fun/nukey. However the AoE playstyle as a result seems to basically just be, single target rotation still, but Flamestrike on proc instead of Pyro. Flamestrike doesn't guarantee a crit however, so you can't chain it as efficiently, but I'm still learning the best rotation in this scenario. When you're not bursting, you're effectively back to the classic fire Pyro fishing, Fireball (or Scorch) until crit, then proc the second crit mid-cast with Fire Blast, and Pyro off the back of the Fireball, same as usual.

Without wrists/Lucid, I'm basically Pyro fishing the whole time, hitting Combustion when it's off cooldown (but no combo/chain with other abilities), and Focusing Iris beam off cooldown as well. I took Phoenix Flame so if I crit and ran out of Fire Blasts, I could crit off a Phoenix Flame instead and Pyro. Phoenix Flame has the added benefit of a bit of AoE damage.

Now I feel that maybe that rotation could be different, maybe there's another talent that would help, but suffice to say, my dps when trying that was pretty poor and I'm obviously doing something very wrong with it. There aren't really any useful guides/information online for a decent no-bracer/lucid burst alternative AoE fire spec.

Until I can figure out what, I'm inclined to stick to my original setup/what I'm used to as I /feel/ like I do a lot more dps and can line up bursts when needed - things are on the same CD. Plus it's more interesting to play than fishing for Pyros aaaall fight if I can get some solid firey-chain nuke time out. Having used Phoenix Flames yesterday though, I would be interested to see whether that generally works better for more flexible procs and added AoE. I've also been considering switching my haste enchants/gems to mastery for the added general AoE damage without really detracting too much from the single target nuke.

General thoughts? I'm really feeling like I'm not playing/figuring out a non-burst spec very well and want to find some way to improve so that timed 15s can be a thing for groups I'm in.