So the new talents are coming a bit early and I was interested in bouncing off some thoughts about respeccing. As most of us would agree, fire has very clear advantage in the endgame dps (even more so with the new talents). In fact, I am strongly leaning towards a 0/48/3 build ATM. A few considerations that came to mind however:

1. Tradeoff between Empowered fireball and Clearcasting:

How much would we miss CC? With the new talents, we get 6% mana cost reduction to our fire spells, but how adversely would loss of CC and 10% regen from meditation affect dps on some naxx fights?

2. Agro issues:

Is fire going to be able to manage agro enough to sustain it's max dps advantage in practice. Fire does have higher max dps than frost/arcane or arcane/frost but if you can't utilize most of it due to agro, then that's a big consideration.

3. Debuff slots:

If all mages specced fire, and with individual ignite stacks (correct me if I'm wrong here) and the silly fireball debuff, this is going to be very painful use of the 16 debuff slots. How much dps would be lost to ignite being knocked off or mage knocking off someone else's damage DoT.

4. The competition:

Builds like 41/10 frost/arcane or 41/10 arcane/frost or 35/16 arcane/frost come to mind here. Elemental builds IMO would be reserved to PvP.

Anyways just some thoughts. Since I can't get onto PTRs right now, nor will I able to for a while due to the anti-P2P policies of my network, I just wanted to just bounce some thoughts off the PTR mages and others here.

yeah sorry, i read those threads but there were all classes clumped togather with the mage discussion to the extent of "more points in fire is better." Sorry gurg if this is a not a useful thread then feel free to nuke it.

Ok.