Thanks to Zaldinar, Roywyn, angayelle for helping me explain and collate some of the points which form this post. Some of their comments/suggestions were edited into this post after theirs was made. If there are mistakes let me know.

Combustion

This talent essentially sums up the individual DPS of all your existing DOTs on a target, creates a new debuff with that value, and has the new debuff tick every second for a 10 second total duration. Remember that the wording in DOT tooltips is not necessarily their DPS value. If a DOT debuff says, "1500 damage every 3 seconds" or "5000 damage over 10 seconds" - its Combustion value is 500 DPS. These values are what Combustion combines when consolidating individual DOTs, to calculate the new DOT's value. For example, if you have:

- Ignite ticking for 500 dps
- Pyroblast ticking for 200 dps
- Living Bomb ticking for 300 dps
= Combustion would create a new DOT which ticks for 1000 dps over a 10 second period, for 10 000 total damage.

Optimal use of Combustion needs to account for several factors. Not doing so can result in a potentially large DPS loss. Be mindful of:

• Travel Time of Spells: Using the above example: If you cast Combustion with Pyroblast at 40 yard range, while the pre-existing Ignite and Living Bomb DOTS each had only 1 second left - both DOTs would wear off completely before Pyroblast strikes your target and Combustion kicks in. Combustion will then create a final DOT of a much lower value, as those other DOTs wore off early due to you not taking Travel Time into account.

• Duration left on existing DOTs: You need to be mindful of existing DOT's and their remaining duration. You want to make sure that Combustion consolidates as many DOTs as possible.

• Which spell to activate Combustion with: You might assume it should always be Pyroblast. But in Cataclysm, remember that Crit ratings (and thus the occurance of Hot Streak Procs, which make the usual long-cast Pyroblast an instant) will be considerably lower. In Cataclysm (unlike WOTLK) you will not have the luxory of Hot Streaks every other spell. Thurs, you can't rely on Pyroblast to be an instant cast every few seconds. Those adds might already be up and need to be killed immediately. You could always cast a full 3.5 second Combustion+Pyroblast without Hot Streak, or opt for the quicker Combustion+Scorch - and Impact Fire Blast spread afterwards.

• Interaction with AOE Spells: (To be confirmed. Want this part to answer the question, "How exactly does Combustion interact with Flamestrike / Blastwave?)

• The Fire Blast + Impact + Combustion Interaction: You might be tempted to use Impact Fire Blast with Combustion: Spell. This won't result in Combustion: Dot being spread, see below for more details.

Pyromaniac and Combustion: What DOTs work?

• The rule of thumb: If a given DOT applies an actual debuff to the target, aka a tooltip you can mouseover and read, then it counts towards Pyromaniac and Combustion. If no debuff is applied, that DOT doesn't count.

• Flamestrike's DOT does not count towards Combustion or Pyromaniac, as no actual debuff is applied to the target

Impact + Combustion Interaction

Impact does spread Combustion. However, there is one scenario where it won't: When using Fire Blast to activate Combustion and Impact simultaneously. This is because the server simply doesn't handle the interaction the way you'd like.

Impact will only spread Combustion only if the latter was applied first. This can get quite confusing. It helps immensely if you think of "Combustion" separately in terms of its two effects: "Combustion: Spell" and "Combustion: DOT". You cast "Combustion: Spell" which guarantees your next spell to crit, consolidates all DOTs, and leaves behind "Combustion: DOT" on your target. In order for Impact to spread the "Combustion: DOT" correctly, it needs to be present on the target before you Impact Fire Blast.

• Correct Use Example: You use "Combustion: Spell" and cast Pyroblast. Pyroblast crits, and leaves "Combustion: DOT" on your target. Now you cast Impact Fire Blast. Impact spreads "Combustion: DOT" correctly to all nearby targets.

• Incorrect Use Example: You cast Fireblast while both Impact and "Combustion: Spell" are up. You would like the server to process the Combustion: Spell -> DOT first, then spread it via Impact - but the server doesn't do that. Instead, the server spreads all DOTs from that original target to nearby targets via Impact Fire Blast, then applies single Combustion: DOT on your target. It is not spread. The server processed the Impact Fire Blast spread mechanics first, before "Combustion: Spell" applied "Combustion: DOT" to the target.

Avoid using Impact Fire Blast + Combustion together. Use Combustion with other spells first to generate "Combustion: DOT", to ensure Impact Fire Blast spreads it correctly afterwards.

Calculating the Intellect-to-Crit conversion requires differentials. Your Link only shows that 2913 Intellect provides 6.34% crit for a druid, but the crit that 0 Intellect provides may be any arbitrary number (even negative). Coup provided the values at naked, naked+143Int and naked+286Int (adding 0.22% and 0.23% crit there) which gives us the 635Int/1%Crit figure.

If druids have the same Intellect-Crit scaling as mages (those values were actually different for all classes in Vanilla/BC, maybe even WotLK), that would mean that druids have 1.75% spell crit at 0 Int while Mages have 1.23% crit at 0 Int. Those values always were all over the place.

One little thing worth noticing about the correct use of Combustion+impact is that we must take in account the travel time of the Pyroblast that will consolidate all dots on the target. In tyrian example, we have 3 dots running but if one of theses dots end before the Pyroblast hit the target we will have lost between 20% and 50% of the max expected damage.

One possibility for a bad timing of the Pyroblast would be if the target moved, be it due to the tank moving or any mechanism as charge, thus lenghtening the fly of the Pyroblast and then letting one of the dots end.

Miss-read the post involved, strike what was here.


An important question still to be answered is how combustion interacts with AoE spells (Blastwave / Flamestrike), as that could change things not insignificantly when you have multiple targets available. I'll see if I can get that information to this thread soon (or another beta mage reads this and tests it)

On the same subject of Combustion (oh yes, i love this talent), i had an idea for a combustion addon but i'm way better at photoshop than Lua, so here is what i thought about.



It show dots timers, both in bars and text style with a small light wether it's on or not (maybe the lights are useless). The hot streak icon would light up when buff is up with both text and clock timer. Travel time show up for information (i don't know if it can be calculated in some way by an addon). The color around hot streak icon would change depending if travel time > lowest dot duration, green for ok, red for bad.



Tell me what you think and sorry if i should have posted it in the addons forum.

Was it one particular dot that consistently kept running out before pyro hit if the traveltime was to long?
If so it should be easy to just calculate output compared to refreshing that dot or simply trying to be at
close range when setting up combustion.

Last time I was throwing fire at the test dummies Combustion would roll into itself the ignite and the DoT from the spell it is cast with. Granted, this was back before they removed flashburn and the fireball DOT, but my guess is that you should still cast the spell with the biggest ignite potential to roll forward - Pyroblast if its DOT is not already up via hot streak, else Fireball.

The above was posted on the cataclysm forums. Even if it could activate on multiple mobs it would probably be most effective to spread a very potent single target Combustion to the group rather than trying to get as many DOTs on as many things going and then combusting them all, our DOTs are relatively short, after all.

The travel time theory has been brought up without ingame testing so there is no particular dot which caused problems. This problem is maybe more likely to happen with the Ignite dot because with its 4 sec duration, a small window time without any crit would lead to losing it. That's maybe another reason to be able to use the very high crit chance of scorch while moving : to keep ignite up, so we have a full power combustion.

Ignite would maybe be the most important dot to take care when using combustion as it's likely to be highest DPS contributor.

You can't not have ignite included because the spell combustion affects is given 100% crit chance. Hence why it should be Fireball or Pyroblast.

New build up. Combustion is revamped and seems to be a damage dealing spell of its own now.

I like the hot streak change, especially for low level mages. Pyroblast as our defining tree spell without hot streak seemed a bit silly. Bbut the necessity for improved hot streak evades me. Is it there to provide better scaling with gear?

[quote=Logix;1742655]Indeed, it seems they have addressed a lot of Fire's concerns in one fell swoop.

While I do agree with the things you said, namely the hot streak problem and so on, I have to disagree on the fact that it solved all of fire's problems.

First of all, it did not addressed the issue we have on dealing an effective DPS on a single target then on multiple targets. I still agree with the opinion that in fights where movement and AOE will not be a factor, that fire will have a much harder time to shine in its role of DPS. I am also a bit worried about the rotation fire mage will use on a single target. Will it still be FB spam ( with proper refresh of LB ) till HS procs or will we be adding fireblast with its improved crit rating, and also cast on the newly improved Fire orb