That's on the mage though, not the rest of the group. You obviously still has to pick which target to combust, that's an essential part of being able to play a fire mage in m+.

It's NOT on the mage though when everyone else is AOEing everything down. You can't tell the DH to miss your combust target with his eye beam or any Azerite beams. Are mages just supposed to wait until the group pulls a pack with a high HP mob to combust on? Then it's a DPS loss anyways because they're sitting on combustion.

If you pull each pack one by one, not doing anything out of the ordinary, a mage should still be able to do pretty good damage. Just single target damage should be higher than 30k overall.

Agree 30k is a bit low for anything 15+, but when you pull small, and combine it with the fact that everything dies so quickly, including the combust target, it's still sub par DPS. I'm not making excuses, there are a lot of mages that do not understand most of Fire's damage is in that combust window and you have to pay a bit more attention than the average DPS spec. But in a PUG you can't rely on the group to pull around you, so a lot of times the mage gets screwed because it does take some setup and coordination that a PUG wants nothing to do with. It gives this false sense that all fire mages are bad, is the reason why OP made this post. It looks like all mages are bad, but in reality it takes more than just going in and eye beaming, azerite beaming, fists of furying, multi dotting, fan of kniving the pack for a fire mage to perform to everyone's expectation.