Mastery: Ignite

Mastery: Ignite is the Fire Mage Mastery, improved by the mastery secondary stat. Whenever the Mage hits with Fireball, Fire Blast, Scorch, Pyroblast, Phoenix Flames or Flamestrike, the target burns for additional damage over 9 seconds. Ignite also procs off Meteor if the Mage is talented into this spell.

Additionally, when Pyroblast or Flamestrike are cast under the effects of Hot Streak, Ignite's effect from these spells is doubled.

Talents

 * Conflagration (mage talent) causes targets affected by Ignite to sometimes flare up, causing the target and all other nearby targets to take instant fire damage.

PvP Talents

 * Controlled Burn causes Ignite to deal its full damage 100% faster, but it no longer automatically spreads unless Combustion is active.

Azerite Traits

 * Blaster Master causes Fire Blast to increase mastery rating for 3 seconds, stacking. This significantly increases the value of Ignite.

Artifact traits

 * Everburning Consumption increases Ignite's damage done by 4% per rank (4 Base Ranks, up to 7 ranks with appropriate Relics).
 * Phoenix Reborn causes targets affected by Ignite to sometimes take additional instant fire damage.

Spread Mechanics

 * Ignite will attempt to spread itself to any nearby enemy within approximately 8 yards, regardless of whether or not the enemy is in combat. This includes Neutral mobs.
 * If an Ignite is attempting to spread itself to a target that is already affected by an Ignite of lesser damage by the same Mage, it will overwrite that Ignite.
 * If an Ignite is attempting to spread itself to a target that is already affected by an Ignite of greater damage by the same Mage, it will fail and be overwritten by the larger Ignite.
 * Ignite can spread to multiple targets at once, and has no limit on how many targets it can spread to so long as they are in range.
 * When Ignite spreads to another target, it matches its remaining duration from the target it spread from.

Trivia
Before becoming a mastery, Ignite used to be generated from critical strikes only. However, it dealt 40% damage from the triggering spell, and was triggered by all Fire Mage direct damage spells. It ticked every 2 seconds and lasted 4 seconds, but did not spread itself.

Prior to patch 2.0.1, Ignite stacked up to 5 times. This was due to the now removed debuff limit, and consequently only one Ignite could exist per target. Once an Ignite was triggered on a target, any mage talented into Ignite could add stacks to and extend the duration of the Ignite on the boss, "rolling" the Ignite until it expired due to a lack of critical strikes or was forced to expire due to threat generation (all damage and threat generated went to the mage that triggered it). Ignite did not recalculate its damage, it simply dealt damage based off the spell that triggered it. Consequently this made Ignite the highest damage spell in the game, due to the fact that it could deal up to 200% damage of a spell critical strike for as long as it was "rolled." The term "Rolling Ignite" comes from this era.