The History of Pyroblast (Vanilla WoW to Mists) -Mage

This history of PyroBlast

Pyroblast in its very first form, had a 6 second cast time, a 6 minute cooldwon, gave a 12 second dot and had a 10% chance to stun for 2 seconds.

Towards the end of vanilla in patch 1.11, the cooldwon was removed.

Back in the day, the longer the cast time on a spell the harder it hit. Since pyroblast had a 6 second cast time it hit pretty hard.

Because this single skill hit so hard, all the way up until wrath of the lich king, The 3 minute mage was a real problem in pvp.

A 3 minute mage was a mage that used a 1 shot macro with Presesnce of mind, Arcane power, a spell power trinket, and pyro blast to do a ton of damage in 1 hit, which could 1 shot almost anyone in vanilla.

The reason its call the 3 minute mage is because both Presence of mind and arcane power had 3 minute cooldowns when it was a thing.

The term though was mostly used by other players as a negative term for the no skill mage who killed them with a macro. Since all you really had to do was make a macro and take the right talents to 1 shot or deal a large amount of damage in 1 hit.

/cast Arcane Power
/cast Presence of Mind
/use 13
/cast Pyroblast

at the start of wrath, the cast time was reduced to 5 seconds

Then in patch 3.0.9 Blizz finally killed the 3 minute mage by making it so Arcane power and Pressence of mind shared a cooldown. Then with the new talent system in cata made it impossible to even take those telents as a fire mage.

at the start of cata, its cast time was reduced to 3.5 seconds and its damage nerfed healvly from its previous form. Pyroblast was basically just turned into a proc talent.

you only needed to use pyro blast when you got an instant cast one, or to refresh the dot for a perfect combustion if you had a bad streak of crits. Then in Mist you don't even need the pyro blast dot to use combustion anymore, so theres really no reason to use it outside of a hotstreak proc. Although, it is a lot easier to force a Hot streak proc in mist than it was in the past.