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I am 43/18 with emp. AM, imp. Fireball, ignite, imp. scorch, and flame throwing. I think arcane/fire is a fun and interesting spec. It may not be the best single target dps spec in most boss fights, but it sure isn't far behind.
Basically what I do in boss fights is:
Medium dps/dpm rotation: 2xAB, as many scorches as I can fit in with stopcasting macros, then back to 2x AB (before the debuff runs out.) AM on clearcasts. You can last very long with this, you keep up fire vulnerability most of the time, and the dps is pretty good, but not spectacular.
High dps/low dpm: 2xAB - AM - Scorch -repeat
This rotation can get pretty insane when you are lucky with procs. Clearcasting with full arcane potency and emp. AM is extremely powerful. with 30% base crit you shoot up to 60% crit per missile, for the entire volley. Crit trinkets are guaranteed to proc, adding extra burst. Also, you take full advantage of the 40% threat reduction and 10% hit, meaning you can start nuking right away (and after aggro resets) and despite all burst you are hardly prone to ever pulling aggro
Range: classic fireball spam. That's what I use on gruul. The average hit of the fireballs is lower than that of a 10/48/3 mage, but not by such a big amount to warrant calling the spec useless. Only sub 20% the fire mage pulls away, but you can put up equal burst with arcane blast spam if you got the mana for it.
All in all the point of arcane is not single target number crunching, but having unique perks.
- You have the luxury of gearing completely towards +dmg and crit, and you can ignore +hit almost completely. Even if you use an AB/Scorch rotation you can still ignore gearing +hit when you have the eye of magtheridon.
- Unlike other specs, you benefit a lot from stats, you get damage out of intellect and mage armor+arcane meditation makes spirit actually useful. Not to mention the full regen tick when you use a clearcasted AM volley (you exit the five second rule).
- You can abuse the hell out of mystical skyfire diamond (2.5 second AM volley, then stopcast macro and fire another before the buff runs our = almost 2 full AM volleys for 50% cast time, out of one proc. Again a much bigger benefit than for fire and frost. If this proc gets paired with clearcasting, the burst gets even higher.
- You have pretty much the highest crit per second count out of all mage specs, so you can get the most out of crit trinkets such as the lightning capacitor and the nexus-horn. 33/28 mages can get higher crit per second in theory, but not really at bosses because they'd have to sacrifice crit for hit.
- Playing arcane spec is actually challenging beyond one-button-spam, as you have to pay a lot of attention to procs and react accordingly. You have to weave them into your spell rotations while utilizing the your AB timers to the max. At the same time, this is also the bane of arcane, because if you are unlucky with procs, the baseline damage and efficiency is not that great.
- By far the best burst damage in the entire game. Burst damage is not as unimportant as many people think. One-shotting illhoof's demon chains with a pom-pyro, do so much damage during curator evocations that you actually out-threat tanks who had minutes to build it, bursting down a boss with AB in the end. All this might not make a big impact on damage meters and statistics, but it sure does make a difference for your raid.
- Slow: Mostly useless in raids, it's a lot of extra utility in all other aspects of the game. Solo elites while leveling, soloing elites in heroics (I can solo the felguards in heroic blood furnace and the coilfang defenders in heroic SP), harldy useless there.
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