3.3 fire

So, how does fire pvp stand in 3.3? It's... still really bad. Check the end for TLDR.

Now, having said that, alot of stuff is better. Or perhaps, "less bad". With dragon's breath and blast wave both reduced to a base mana cost of 281, mana feels alot more manageable as fire now. At least, most 1v1s don't carry a ridiculously high threat of running oom without touching mana shield.

The new glyph of scorch is very nice. A quick test on a ret paladin wearing 887 resil revealed these numbers for scorch:

1770
2629 crit
1762
1791
1770
2609 crit
1754
2552 crit
1761
1789
1757
1787
2557 crit
1824
1794
2565 crit

This is with the glyph of scorch, 5/5 burnout, 5/5 fire power and wearing 2564 spell power (copied over earlier in the season with not so amazing gear).

I know it's a small sample size, but we should get a very rough idea from this. I got a 2582.4 average scorch crit damage, which is okay (if not amazing) considering the lowish spell power and a highish resil target for a 1.5 sec cast. Average hit of 1778.1

So, scorch spam works out to roughly 1200 dps in "decent" gear in 3.3. Now, it's pretty clear that 1200 dps is not enough to make anyone fear a freecasting fire mage. Throwing in hot streaks changes this somewhat, but at the end of the day, it's still too low. However, replacing fireball or frostfire bolt with scorch spam in pve with the glyph actually doesn't result in a particularly large dps loss, from what I understand it's around 400-500dps below fire when accounting for increased mobility.

The problem here is living bomb. Living bomb is quite alot of damage, and if you're keeping living bomb up while you spam scorch, along with the occasional fireblast you will put out pretty respectable (though certainly not over the top) dps. Enough that freecasting dps actually feels about right. However, living bomb has some serious issues in pvp. I'll post more on this later, just expect to spec living bomb if you want solid freecasting damage even with the glyph.

Firestarter is not particularly amazing. The general clunkiness of targeting it along with its poor single target damage make me hesitate to put more than one point in it. I do feel it's situationally useful enough to merit one point, being obviously very efficient dps that you can use while on the move. Also, you can do a few neat los-related tricks with it. Still, I feel you will usually have it when you need it with only one point.

TLDR:

Burst unreliable but fine
Sustained damage requires living bomb but is okay with
Mana is okay
Survivability is still pretty meh.