No skill just luck

Good time of the day t' you, sirs and maybe ladies?

Character name: Darkflamer

Character class: Mage

Professions: Tailoring/Enchanting

Talent specs, gear level, Armory link (advanced mode): I play fire. Talents, well, I guess the only relevant thing would be that I am comfortable with using PC, even though I hate it with passion. I use it on single target mostly, but prefer kindling on BH since in pugs he always gets moved randomly and unpredictably. Meteor is a good way to ensure half-decent combustion, so I use it when I need it at specific time - like on Operator for big adds and on Flamebender for wolves, but Ignite gets pretty high regularly without it as well, so Kindling is a viable option for other situations. On other tiers, well, the BW/FB dichotomy is pretty obvious, RoP is good only for Gruul and Kromog with IF being the default option, and while I don't use AT as much as I should and probably would take less damage overall by picking Flameglow, but it helps to negate spikes in damage which makes it easier for healers, as I heard. Greater Invisibility is too good to not use it while Floes have no real alternative.
Armory link -
As you can see, my gear is mostly best out of what I can get in HC BRF, with just two slots left to be replaced.

Respeccing: I haven't played Arcane for over a month, and never felt fully comfortable with it, but if it would be really needed I can switch to it, though the dps gain would be lower than theoretical.
Also, speaking of other roles, I have a similar-geared Blood DK, even if I'm pretty bad with it, though probably this is irrelevant for this application.

Class Info: What can you tell us about your class? I'm not sure what's there to tell. Flames will consume you? By fire be purged?
Why do you like it? To start with, I don't really like it that much. Coming after long hiatus since TBC, the Fire Mage now is the complete opposite of what it was. Bad for single target and for aoe, relying more on dots that direct damage, increasing healing to raid instead of damage to the boss, combustion requiring crit sequence instead of providing it, fireball being the weakest basic spell and even pyroblast hitting like wet noodles instead of one-shotting nasty gnomes.
With that out of the way, what I like is: highest mobility with Alter Time and Rapid Displacement (though usually hunters get picked for relevant tasks by uneducated masses), high survivability with Greater Invisibility, IB and AT (you can get hit by six trains in one go and still be the last man standing for the mass-res! Actually, forget I said that) and just a bunch of useful little things, from avoiding repair bills to dispelling curses (only useful for Auchi in WoD, but I guess it will change when Gul'dan gets on the scene) to creating portal to old Dalaran near summoning stone and asking to help summon.
Well, that and burning people alive is always pleasant. Or orcs. Or plants. Or whatever stands in our way.
Include your ability priorities I'm not sure I can give a coherent answer for that, since I am doing it mostly by feeling instead of following some fixed priority list, I mean, there are basically just four buttons in basic rotation, so it depends more on procs, buffs, IF (another thing I hate, I wish I could put huge RoP on the whole room), time on cooldowns, need for movement . Basically, just throw fireballs and pyroblasts, minimise waste of Heating Up and IB, get most out of Blast Waves and trinket procs and Pyrotechnics, spread Ignite whenever high at cleave, something like that.
info about cooldown usage Uh, use combustion at high ignite, except when mechanics say otherwise, I guess. PC and Meteor are just means for that high ignite usually, BW is just a nuke that should be used with highest potential damage and IB should always be rolling its cd as well
and your stat priorities. Crit and mastery are top, while crit has higher priority, those two should be somewhat balanced. Even though in theory mastery is better on cleave, crit also improves mobility, which incidentally is quite valuable for both cleave fights. Then come haste and multistrike, while multi is a bit higher, there is the first haste breakpoint to consider (I'm never reaching the second one, at least in this tier, I guess), which at the moment is beyond reasonable reach as well, though.
And the joke of versatility. Do I have to talk about it?

Raid experience: Back in TBC we cleared Karazhan and Gruul's Lair, not sure if it could be called "current content" since at a time Black Temple had already fallen and Sunwell was getting ready for the opening. In WoD we cleared HC HM and did eight bosses in HC BRF. I also pugged HC BH, was lucky to find a "no-Curve" group, after five hours of epic failure we finally got him down which felt really nice.

Guild history: I am ashamed to say, but I don't remember which guild I was in during TBC. While I was kind of an officer, well, class leader or something, I was dealing only with performance issues and was a bit surprised to learn that the guild was falling apart.
In WoD I joined Ad Finem after some inconsequential guild, we spent lots of good time together, but over time it divided more and more into casual and decent raiders, and now that four more of our decent raiders left for you guild, it's pretty boring to go to irregular and painful casual raiding.

Logs of your recent performances: I try to log all of my raiding for further examination, which you can find at . It includes lots of failure as well, so maybe you shouldn't dig in it too much. Most of late runs are on my DK though, so to save time here are the latest runs on my mage:


[url]https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/hAvNgBcxXwKGL41a[url]
It will sound as an excuse, but I am not really trying lately, first BH kill being the rare exception.

When can you play: I can play whenever, as long as I know of the time whenever.

Where are you from: Russia, and it's not the best place to live in.

Age: 25. I may enrage sometime, but I am not a parent, so that's fine, right? Right?

Communication: I kinda have a mic, but when I tried it last week it didn't work. And to be honest, I am bad at talking, if there is something critical I need to report I can always make a macro yell or something.

About you: I am a boring, depressing ball of gloom an self-loathing. I watch anime, play video games and occasionally read books, though this happens less than I desire lately. I am pretty slow and can'r react quickly to something unexpected, thus I have always to plan ahead in quicker games, like WoW became now, and also that's why I like turn-based games. I am also babbling a lot sometimes, which is pretty annoying.

Why do you want to join and what do you expect from the guild: Raiding, I guess? It's pretty dead where I am now, and was getting boring even before. And then there is a particular group of clingy people that wants me to follow them over there despite all I say to them.

UI and keybinds:

Anything else: I know I'm not good enough and most likely get declined, but they insisted. Sorry for wasting your time.

Hello and thanks for applying!

First of all learning Arcane would be more than ideal as fire single target can be really shit with bad rng where as arcane is much more reliable.

A few questions I have to ask you.

How do you use your prismatic crystal single target?

Do you always use the Combustion glyph? If not what bosses do you take it off?

How do you use your 2 set?

Do you track your 4 set at all?

Thanks.

After taking far too long to read through the entirety of your app, I will just say that to make this easier for all of us including yourself, you don't need to drown your statements in needless preamble and prose. The application form is there to avoid having to read through reams of text to get to the meat of the discussion. I get that you want it to look like you put some effort into your app, but a simple bullet point answer is often far more useful. In asking questions we just want to ascertain what you know and don't know about playing your class optimally. Your time would be better spent just covering all the relevant points concisely, or we end up with a serious case of TL;DR.

That said, onto the actual app. Sanky is already asking several key points you missed about fire dps, so that part is mostly covered.About you not having played arcane for a month, it is pretty much exactly the same now, and you really should get comfortable with it. This tier mages are in an incredibly strong position. With Arcane/Fire, you are THE best performing class in the game on 5-6/10 of the mythic fights, and very close to the best on the others. They use the same gear for both specs so it's not even a case of having to pick a specialisation like it was in SoO. Unless you have mythic on farm and are going for single target fire ranks, there really no reason to not play the best spec on each fight, the gain in dps is huge.

You mention there being a "dichotomy" between Blast Wave and Living Bomb(I assume FB was a typo), but don't go any further with it. Assuming you go arcane for Gruul, Oregorger, Kromog and Blackhand (probably Beastlord too on progress), which fight would you pick blast wave over LB? The choice of one over the other is not trivial, there is overlap.
Another talent you mention is Meteor. There is absolutely no situation in BRF, or any other potential boss fight, where you would ever pick Meteor over Kindling/PC. Meteor does NOT get you a bigger ignite when you have 2+4pc, PC does. And when you AoE, kindling gets you several more combustions which beats any kind of moderately large ignite that you think you can get with Meteor.
The last thing is these two haste breakpoints you speak of. You say they exist but do not mention what you gain by hitting said breakpoints or what values of haste they actually are.

About you (not) having a mic, a yell macro doesn't do shit. No one will notice it. The point of having a working mic is not 'liking to talk', it's ok if you don't want to make conversation. It's so you can make a relevant call involving you in a fight, even if that's once every 10 attempts it's still necessary. You don't have to be a raid leader to have something important to say.

I'll try and answer all the stat priority parts of your post together since they all boil down to using simcraft judiciously. The 2+ target for fire is simply mastery>haste to breakpoint>crit. You yourself agree that mastery is the best on multitarget, and in your app you mention that the haste breakpoint is worth getting. Saying that crit is much better than haste below the breakpoint is then a contradiction, since realistically, without reforging, you wont be hitting a breakpoint in your 3rd best stat.

Here's a scaling plot from altered time demonstrating that the haste softcap is worth it: http://altered-time.com/forum/viewtopic ... 370#p13029
The actual plateau is like ~670 or something, but latency and human reaction time makes gaining benefit from the 4pc impossible at that haste so ~800 is the more reasonable value to shoot for. Mastery is indeed useless for LB, but the whole point of simming it is to account for these synergies, or lack thereof. Mastery IS the best cleave stat and using a single fight example in BRF won't change your general gearing philosophy. There's no backing to your statement of crit reducing dps range, variance in damage exists and you gear around it. With that logic, half the classes in the game would undervalue crit and multistrike over a consistent stat like haste, which does the same thing every time. Logic like that doesn't get you too far in terms of performance. Sims iterate more times than any player would ever perform a fight in their entire playtime of the character, the resulting stat weights account for dps spread and RNG and whatever else. You would never want to gear for lower average dps for "more consistency" like that unless the margins were far, far greater than they actually are for fire mage. I don't agree with movement as a valid argument for crit over mastery either. There is only 2 instances of "heavy movement" in the entirety of BRF that can't be compensated for by forward planning and ice floes, and they are the mythic only plate phase on H&F and the "Rune of trembling earth" thing on Kromog mythic.

Stat weights for arcane, and pretty much in general, are there to help you decide what pieces of gear you want to go for. The overall stat weights you want to abide by wont be obtained by a single sim, or even several sims with the same conditions. If you've done any kind of non linear regression outside of a WoW context, you will know how horribly sensitive to initial parameters there are. The same thing is true for stat weights for a class with as dynamic synergies as mage. A single set of sims for your character will not give you enough reliable information to decide the stat hierarchy, aside from heavily weighted certainties, like mastery being best for arcane. What you're doing there with single sets of sims works just fine for choosing between a couple pieces of gear, but in the grand scheme of things, you need to do a hell of a lot more iterations and varying starting conditions to get a reliable priority.

About the fight specific stuff, I'll just sat it later in chat or something. Your app started off somber and aspecific but we managed to get out your class understanding with the questions. It's an accept from me.