If living bomb keeps its 1s GCD, it's actually superior DPSC for a single target than nether tempest until extreme amounts of haste.

Not to mention glyphing fireblast gives 3 bombs for two gcd's, which, depending on what specialization we're talking about, allows more time to use that spec's AOE. For arcane, AE+ABarr, for fire, infernocleaves, for frost... well, nether tempest multidotting might be better for frost. Maybe take glyph of cone of cold, too.

I need to test this better, but it seems like glyphed fireblast for nether tempest just deals damage equal to 1/2 of one of the 12 ticks on all targets? Seems fairly weak, given how little the individual ticks are.

After having finally reveived a beta invitation I have gotten a chance to start some theory crafting.

Level 15 Talents
Presence of Mind: If a fight contains zero movement Presence of Mind provides the greatest dps increase because it allows for an instant cast Pyroblast every 1.5 minutes.
Scorch: For fights with heavy movement Scorch will be the strongest choice because it benefits from Mastery. Scorch no longer puts Critical Mass on the target so this talent is not mandatory and instead situational.
Ice Flows: For fights with a mediocre amount of movement Ice Flows will be a strong choice because it allows you to do as much damage as you would stationary for a few seconds. The disadvantage is the 1 minute CD which limits the use of this talent. Chances are strong that if you have to move at all, your will have to move more frequently than once per minute.


Level 30 Talents
Temporal Shield: The utility from this talent is insane. Because the spell is off the GCD it does not cause you to loose any dps to cast and has potential to prevent you from death during periods of extensive damage.
Blazing Speed: Since this talent is easily activated by any melee or spell hit for more than 2% of the casters health the spell provides a consistent speed boost. If you do not need the utility from Temporal Shield or to help healers with Ice Barrier this will likely be the go-to talent.

Level 45 Talents
None of these provide any advantage to PvE (unless there is some very unusual circumstance where targets need to be frozen). Very disappointing tier in my personal opinion.

Level 60 Talents
Greater Invisibility: This talent is situational and could potentially become useful in circumstances where you need to reduce the damage you take for a period of time, but there's also other mechanics that do that (Temporal Shield, Cauterize, Ice Barrier). I doubt the compelling perk of this talent will be the instantaneous loss of threat. Mages already have an arsenal of abilities that prevent death, delay damage taken, or reduce damage taken.
Cauterize: The ability to die and be brought back to life without consuming a battle rezurection is uncanny. Cauterize is now, and will be an overpowered spell that nearly all mages will spec into because of how well it can ease progression. On a side note, the ICD on Cauterize is now 2 minutes.
Cold Snap: This talent serves to restore health and resets the cool down of Ice Block. I foresee this being a highly situational talent and not as compelling as Cauterize.


Level 75 Talents
Living Bomb does the most single target damage.
In AoE situations the choice gets complicated so I will elaborate in a future post. Lhivera has done some fabulous testing on this and you can view her blog to read more.

Level 90 Talents
Invocation: Because you can aquire the buff stationary and then proceed to move and retain the damage increase Invocation will surpass the strength of Rune of Power on fights where heavy movement is required.
Rune of Power:I think we will need to be able to level to 90 before we will understand how strong this talent is. I suspect that for Patchwerk Style encounters Rune of Power will be the strongest choice.
Incanter's Ward This strikes me as a PvP talent, but if you can consistently proc the damage bonus I could see potential for it's use in PvE. Again, we will need to level to 90 before testing can confirm or deny the strength and utility of this spell.

Potential Fire Mage Rotation Single Target

Living Bomb > Hot Steak proc > Inferno Blast (with one crit active) > Fireball

Rotation While Moving:

Living Bomb > Hot Streak Proc > Inferno Blast (with one crit active) > PoM Pyroblast* > Scorch* = Icy Flows Fireball*
*Depending on current talents

The rotation may seem rather simple, there are a few finer details that make the spec more complex and dynamic. True skill and mastery of the fire spec will be elicited by how players handle the Inferno Blast 8 second CD and utilize it to create a large ignite for Combustion. I'm am currently unsure of what the best method for doing this is, but I have a theory:

While one crit has landed on the target and Inferno Blast is off CD, begin casting a Pyroblast (hard casting). Then use Inferno Blast to initiate the second crit which will land before the Pyroblast. Then you can cast the instant cast Pyroblast! right after. The end result is two Pyroblasts within 2 seconds that will hopefully yield a large ignite for Combustion. In the best case scenario, if both Pyroblasts Crit you will get a third Hot Streak proc and will be able to cast a third Pyroblast! at the target before Ignite Ticks.

Feel free to add in your thoughts.

Temporal shield doesn't absorb the damage, it simply heals you for the damage taken during the duration. If you eat the Hour of Twillight, you will die before and healing can be done.

IMHO, Greater Invisibility is actually better than Cauterize because in addition to saving you from death, it also drops your threat, and remove 2 debuffs. The only time Cauterize would be better is when 90% damage reduction is not enough to save you from death.

For the Bombs, Living Bomb may not be the most obvious choice for a Fire Mage. Lhivera has calculated that the bombs are pretty equal in a single-target scenario, and depends on the number of target for AOE fights.

Temporal Shield gives healers 10 seconds to heal you up which includes possible hots on you before you take the hit. It's a rather pointless argument, but I will update my post to reflect what I intended to convey.

I disagree here even though I understand your point. First of all, I do not believe the threat reduction will be useful in many situations. It's easy enough as it is now to time Mirror Images with periods where you are concerned about threat and if something happens and Mirrors are on CD you can Blink away and use Invisibility or Ice Block for a few seconds. Second, you have to activate Invisibility and interrupt any damaging abilities you would have cast to prevent damage taken. To do this you have to know you are going to take a lot of damage as well so this does not do well at mitigating mistakes like getting hit by Lava Waves on Ragnaros. Because Cauterize works as a passive I believe it will be a better talent for progression fights that do not require the utility of Greater Invisibility or Cold Snap.

I have read Lhivera's posts and I realize they are close, however, my post was intended for single target situations. Living Bomb does the most damage single target. I will clarify and add in additional details about each bomb and their specialties. I ran out of time earlier and didn't get a chance to add in AoE information yet.

For the Bombs, it's clear if you test it that the 3 bombs are doing equivalent damage on a single target. On cleave, Frost bomb is a little behind only because it's limited to one at time.

For the shield choice, it will be situational choice:

• Temporal Shield is good on fight with constant little damage. It's make to be healer's friendly. It's also good in combo with Cauterize because it will heal back the DOT.
• Ice Barrier is made for fight with big damage to absorb (all packed with a lot of survival cooldown).
• Blazing Speed is usable in raid for exiting those black pools, gas fog and all the other "fire is hot" stuff.

We also have the 3 talents for survivability:

• Cauterize is still good in the learning phase, when you forgot to click the button and for specific use. It's help a lot that it don't kill now.
• Cold Snap is a health stone on a 3 minutes CD. Always use full.
• Greater invisibility has 2 majors use. It's a debuff CD and it's a very big damage reduction. With this part, we can now help the tank to absorb some nasty cleave but it's limited by the fact that the invisibility part will restrict is use.

Here is my explanation for why Living Bomb does more damage single target than Nether Tempest. On a side now I interpreted the Temporal Shield spell text to mean that it prevented damage for 4 seconds and then healed you back for that amount. I hadn't gotten a chance to test it and I realize the major flaw in my previous argument. Apologies for my previous fallacies.

Living Bomb functions on a 1 second GCD while Nether Tempest has a 1.5 second GCD. This is illustrated by the following combat log that illustrates me repeatedly refreshing Living Bomb and me repeatedly refreshing Nether Tempest. Keep in mind that server lag causes the numbers to be slightly off, but the data should be conclusive at demonstrating that Living Bomb requires less DPET than Nether Tempest.


On the contrary here is a data set for Nether Tempest:
The damage of each of them is very similar if you calculate damage per one cast, but when you calculate DPET Living Bomb pulls ahead.

Living Bomb Damage (0 Spellpower @ level 90) = 2781
Nether Tempest Damage (0 Spellpower @ level 90) = 2785

This is where you can see that Nether Tempest does slightly more single target damage than Living Bomb, but the conversion to DPET reveals the true damage.

Living Bomb: (2781)/(1) = 2781 DPET
Nether Tempest: (2785)/(1.5) = 1,856.67 DPET

I am not sure if this is merely a bug in the beta or if it's intentional, but as of the current beta build Living Bomb does the most Single Target damage. I would't be surprised if Arcane talents into this for single target fights as well. I realize I could have been more concise with this post, however, I wanted to be thorough.

Can anyone else confirm or deny this?

Your calculation is wrong. You don't have take in account spellpower scaling, duration of the spell effect and haste.

I already calculate damage some post before.

For the haste's scaling:

• Living Bomb and Nether Tempest scale with haste like the actual Living Bomb.
• Frost Bomb scale normally with haste: %haste = (base_cast / new_cast) -1

For the duration:

• Living bomb and Nether Tempest have a 12s duration before haste. Your next spell will began after the GCD but the spell is already in effect, like all instant spell.
• Frost bomb have a 11.5s durations before haste (1.5s cast time + 10s cooldown).

To conclude on the bomb part, we will have to wait for more data. What haste cap can we obtain in pre-raid gear and in raid gear, and with what spellpower.

This is why I have stated it will be situation choice and I have list some examples of this situation. But it's clear that temporal shield will be the standard. The duration of Ice Shield is long enough to be cast will moving to a pack point, for example, reducing is DPS lost.

I'm interested to know what will be the result between cauterize+temporal shield versus Ice Shield absorb, for big damage.

Can someone tell if there will be a way to be immune to push-back in MOP. If not, Ice Shield can be interesting for this.

From what little testing I did, intuitively I would say single target fire rotation will be something like...

Living Bomb
Cast Fireballs till you get crit (You are chain casting so before you get notified that you critted you will be half way though the next Fireball cast)
As soon as Fireball starts flying you cast Inferno blast and proc instant Pyro
Cast Pyro

Not sure if that is what you meant, sorry if I just repeated it. With recent Inferno damage nerf I am not sure if this will be better then just chain casting Fireballs and not forcing instant Pyro proc with Inferno blast.
Concerning preparing for Combustion, I agree with you only disagree with stopping mid cast Fireball (as you are chain casting) to hard cast Pyro. First it might be quite hard to do as you want to be far away from boss, and secondly it might be DPS loss.

No addons on Beta make me sad panda, have to get numbers from combat log

This won't be possible in practice.

You will be chain casting Fireballs for the majority of the rotation, meaning by the time your last Fireball crits you will already be casting the next (and you will use Inferno Blast before this next Fireball hits to get the hotstreak proc). To 'begin casting a Pyroblast' you would have to cancel your currently casting Fireball with a stopcasting macro and start your Pyro. There would be a lot of dps waste time.

With the increase to Pyroblast's tick duration (still the same tick damage) is it possible that now hardcasting Pyroblast for the DoT itself may become incorporated into the (Patchwerk) Fire rotation? (Assuming there is no DoT already from a Pyroblast!.)