Maybe the color of the bolts we're shooting is important to some people? God forbid someone have some kind of aesthetic sensibility to go along with their min-maxing and gameplay. In a balanced game the choice would be one of preference. And I didn't mention anything about pvp - my complaint is that raiding wise, 17/31/3 really does "have it all". You get combustion for your ignite team, clearcasting/moe for mana efficiency, improved scorch for your raid-enhancing debuff, blast wave for aoe burst, and elemental precision, the only "elemental" type talent that really has an impact on raid dps. Even if you care about NOTHING except raiding, you can take that spec and not have to make any hard decision, or personal choice. I would like for there to be some variety among fire builds, as well as among frost and arcane builds.
There's no "hate" for fire, it's just currently unbalanced and I'd like to see it fixed up a little bit. There is more than one facet to raiding, survivability is not entirely useless and strong survivability talents may be worth a 2-3% loss in dps - they're just not worth a 15-20% loss in dps and that's where the imbalance comes into play. We also have utility and mana efficiency to worry about and while I feel for the rogue's plight of "single target dps is all that ever matters", hopefully Blizz will fix up encounter design to be more like the AQ-C'Thun stuff and you guys will have some choices to make as well.
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Just as a counterpoint to 17/31/3, I am currently 18/31/2 for full AM, based on Patchwerk mana consumption. So I guess I'd argue that 17/31/3 isnt completely perfect. Depending on gear, you can get away with less and less EP etc.