Hello mage fellows

Some tricks I found out while raiding the last weeks:

I dont know if this is unknown so far, but on Omnitron defense system, when Toxitron's shield is up, u can spam scorch to deal 10k extra damage every cast without even taking damage.

On the Conclave of Wind, if you're at the wind mob (I don't know his name anymore), u can cast scorch while you're whirling around in his cyclone, if you turn your camera fast enough.. This needs a bit of training, but after a few tries it works pretty well.

Another tricky thing I found on the Manaflask forums:
If u still got ur T10 Set, u can equip it and right before you enter combat, pop your Mirror Images, switch back to your normal gear and go drink 2-3 secs to regen Mana up. You'll then have around 25 secs of 18% extra damage. This is very effective if you combine it with the double-pot trick. (Especially on Wyrmbreaker, where Bloodlust is used in the beginning of the fight this can be a kickass of dps increase).

hf at trying out

Hmmmm... actually, I found that during Rohash's "Hurricane" ultimate ability, all spells with any casting time are interrupted midcast rather than pushed back, regardless of my orientation while spinning.

As a fire mage, I could only really use Living Bomb and Combustion... I had no luck with Fireblast (but perhaps if it were talented to increase its range...) I had good success with getting DoTs set up for a Combustion immediately beforehand and popping it during the Hurricane, so I recommend that. Put your Slow Fall on once you've done everything you can, and you can resume Scorch spam et al as you descend.

I'm sure some of us have seen logs like this by now: Impact Combustion Peaks at 800 000 DPS

Not looking at his average DPS, but the Impact Combustion DPS: peaking at 800 000 at the start. I'm interested to know, with the gimmick conditions this fight entails, tips/tricks people are using to leverage these absolutely monster Impact Combustions. But first, we should be mindful of the raid format and strategy used:

Most 25 man guilds seem to be releasing 4 Drakes initially (3 drakes + whelps). A subset of 25 guilds are releasing all 5 right away. Guilds releasing all 5 simultaneously are better positioned for that monster Combustion - that's a guild strat issue which might be beyond your control. However, with that in mind, we can still talk about ways to leverage Impact Combustion for the way your particular guild does the fight. I think we can safely assume most guilds are trying to group the initial released items together for incidental damage (Thus Impact Combustion should be spread to everything).

First of note might be using [Theralion's Mirror] specifically for this fight - which ordinarily might be swapped out for other fights (in favour of Bell + Volcano). Timing your Impact Combustion to coincide with this item proc should be one way to dramatically increase the AOE dps of your Combustion.

I found myself hardcasting Pyroblasts on the pull - with the rule of thumb being I wouldnt use Impact Combustion until I saw a ~100k Pyroblast crit. (We release 4 Drakes at once). However by doing this, and with a Volcanic Pot used, my initial Impact Combustion 'only' peaked at 350 000 dps. This is miniscule compared to what's possible, as other logs are showing.

How are you going about leveraging your Impact Combustions on Halfus 25 Heroic? Is there anything (gear, rotation, timing etc) you do differently - specifically for this fight to leverage it?

This fight is Fire Mage AOE heaven. It's a fun opportunity to scheme to leverage class mechanics, to the point where they become obscenely powerful. Situational? Yes. But we can still look for ways to make the most of it while it lasts.

The short answer is "No. There isn't anything that you should do differently in this fight than any other to see these numbers."

You should be using the T10 bug on every fight (equip 4pcT10, cast MI, change gear back) for 18% increased damage. That, coupled with the Flame Cap that you should be using with your prepot at the start and Halfus' vulnerability makes it almost trivial to reach those "astronomical" numbers considering all your procs should be up at the start as well. The only factor playing a role is RNG. In the log you linked we can see the lack of Ignite munching before the Combustion that makes the difference. That mage has 28k Ignite when he pops Combustion, so he might have not even waited for Pyro or LB, seeing how his Combustion ticks are around 30k as well.

So the only "trick" is to stay on Halfus with all those buffs up and hope that the RNG gods will be kind and a Fireball crit won't suddenly drop your Ignite from 30k to 12k for example.

While the size of your Combustion is largely dependant on your raid's approach to Halfus, you do have some degree of control over how to maximize the damage it can do in any given strategy:

The first debate posed forward, and one that will significantly reduce the randomness of your ignites, is usage of Fireball or Scorch in the seconds building up to the usage of Combustion:

* Use of Fireball will give you a slightly larger ignite, whilst opening yourself to the risk of having your ignite fall off.
* Scorch will still yield a large ignite, with a higher chance of pulling off a great combustion, at the expense of not achieving your theoretical best Combustion.

Although neither approach will give you a certainty of getting the Combustion of your dreams, based on the cast time & travel time of Fireball compared to that of Ignite the argument leans towards Ignite being used as the filler nuke. However, one is always free to 'take the risk' with Fireball in the hopes of achieving a higher damage output, bearing in mind that there will be an inherent higher risk of losing your ignite.

Again there is still a chance of simply having a lack of crits with Scorch, just that there is less of a chance of it within the given time window compared to Fireball due to the lack of a travel time and shorter base cast on Scorch.

Delaying Flame Orb usage until after Combustion has set sail should also yield better results.

I hadn't seen of hard-casting pyroblasts, other than the single pre-pull. I'm surprised this didn't yield satisfactory results as it is more likely to satisfy two out of the three Combustion requirements (and the two RNG-based ones at that). A quick log browse from the top parses show both Ignite and Fireball fillers before the Combustion. Could this be elaborated on? It seems counter-intuitive that our hardest-hitting spell isn't yielding superior results to the two alternatives given the circumstances.

I also agree with Tyrian that mastery stacking will yield excellent results. Assuming a four drakes released at the start approach the same can be argued for haste effects on pull, to allow for more Scorch/Fireball while building up the ignite. These are slightly harder to control and outside of your direct control, both falling under the category of preparing outside of combat. Also included are the obvious consumable/buff stacking associated with any min/maxing: T10 set bonus, volcanic potion, flame cap, dark intent. Are there any other pre-fight improvements to be added? During ICC the Might of Malygos buff from Dragonblight could be obtained to achieve extreme numbers during Blood Queen, and would not disappear after zone-in. This could possibly be added as it will still be effective, if it has not been fixed. Fel-Infused buff from Desolace has also been mentioned.

Lastly, once the Combustion is away your most effective approach should be to Blast wave, and use Impact procs every time they come up to spread your damage increased DoTs on the drakes. This cleave damage should yield superior results than single target damage on Heroic given a four drake strategy, as well as contributing to bringing Halfus himself down. Do not delay Impact spreading for a Hot Streak to proc, as just the ignite itself ticking away on all targets will make it worthwhile. Flamestrike wouldn't benefit from the increased damage on Halfus, and as such wouldn't be worth using compared to the above other than to 'force' Impact procs once a large ignite is reached if one isn't up already. The same can be argued for Blast Wave. Speccing into Improved Fire Blast would be worthwhile as well, to get more chances of a crit Fire Blast out of the GCD you are using anyway.

During the Atramedes encounter we used this mechanic:

As soon as he goes into the air phase and targets the first victim a mage will bang the gong and wait to be targeted by moving into the opening of the corridor with the "bell" which get destroyed after the initial animation (to be even more clear, the place where he lands before the pull).

When he targets the mage, you can gain several second by blinking on the bottom of the corridor, and using Iceblock/Invisibility (according to the cooldowns) to have him target a new one.

At this point you gained enough time to avoid wasting more gongs and the added bonus is that you usually end up with a nearly clean room.

apparently mage tier 10 4 piece bonus still works even if you remove your t10s. made a really simple spreadsheet.

first column, im in my regular lvl 85 gear. spammed ice lance 10x; those are the damages

second column, added 18% (a+a*.18)

third column, ice lance damages with t10 4pc. what i did was equipped 4 pieces of t10, cast mirror image, put on my regular lvl 85 gear, then spammed ice lance.


last two rows are crits

obviously, we can't swap gear during combat, so consider this a sort of pre-pull ritual. let me know what you guys think.

I have been playing around with 4pcT10 -> MI -> Gearswap pre-pull to leverage the quad-core buff and was curious what others are doing to fill the mana pool drop this creates. It leaves me with a deficit of 15k mana and my thoughts are either:

a) Ignore it and just burn to evocate point as normal
b) Pop a mana gem
c) Try and get a few ticks of food in (concern here is need to pop MI quite early and they're at least 2/3rds brain dead and will pull something)

I'm leaning towards (b) but would love to hear what others are doing.

When I do use it, I use option c). The key (in my experience) is to keybind both your your main gear set to something easy to hit, as well as your water and mirrors. It takes about 3-4 seconds to get to full mana after re-equipping your gear, so (assuming you countdown the pull) it shouldn't be too hard to be max or close to max mana on the pull.

With the last changes from PTR Fireball mana cost changed to 9% base mana you can consider option a) and b) both as very valuable and cast the Mirror Images at about 3 seconds pre-pull.

Mirror images seem to bug out the Nefarian encounter when precasted before the pull. It happened to me 3 times in a row. The images themselves didn't start casting, but the boss aggro'd and the encounter started.