Our mages need to have a fire spec for heroic ICC 25 modes.

First, fire is able to do more overall and consistent dps than arcane in almost 90% of the fights in ICC. Arcane is useful for extremely high single target burst damage and slow, but rarely do they compare to living bomb and hot streak procs on multiple targets.

On certain fights, like Valithria, fire falls behind, mainly because each add isn't alive for the complete duration of living bomb, which makes the encounter much more suitable for arcane's high single target damage.

So whether you want to keep arcane as a secondary spec with a few pieces of gear to swap out for the hit difference, is up to you. It may also be useful to have an arcane spec for 10 mans where slow is more important in some encounters, but you need to have a fire spec.

You can armory me and copy my spec if you wish or you can make your own. A good fire raiding guide can be found:

http://www.empoweredfire.com/2009/10/05 ... guide-3-3/

You can also read my second post, which will go into detail on how to create a good fire build.

http://www.stratfu.com/kamigami/H_Festergut.html

The top numbers are all coming out of fire now, but I'd be interesting to see where the scaling breaks are that had fire pull so far ahead since 245.

There were a lot of changes made to fire:

Pyroblast Ticks benefits from Empowered Fire as well. It quadruples the scaling actually, from 5% to 20% (5%+15%) per tick, with 4 ticks in total per cast.
Combustion Cooldown reduced to 2 minutes.
Burning Soul threat reduction improved to 10%/20%.
Glyph of Fireball reduces base cast time by -0.15s, like all other talents/effects. Haste applies afterwards.
Pyroblast will be affected by Torment the Weak (+12% multiplier) and Empowered Fire (+15% SP scaling, up to 130%).

http://elitistjerks.com/f75/t30655-wotl ... _3_3_live/

The main change that made fire pull ahead of arcane was the fix (nerf) to Incanter's Absorption, which was the real reason arcane was so far ahead a month or so ago. (But our mages weren't really abusing that much anyway).

Didn't you just say less than 2 weeks ago



?



(the callout)

It's a woman's prerogative to change her mind.

Not really. Absorption pre-nerf was nice, but it wasn't a game changer. All of us were using it pre-nerf but we didn't have a pocket priest to constantly shield us.



Yep, I should've done more research on fire. I was under the impression that they powered the spec up just to provide a possible raiding alternative to arcane, but i never thought it would be able to compete with it. Many people felt the same way until some of the top guilds were getting to LK hardmode.

Shoot, 95% of the mages on our server are probably still raiding arcane. Again, we're not talking about night and day differences, but mainly greater versatility.