I'm 33/28/0 and I made the switch from 10/48/3 as Fireball spam wasn't cutting it. My DPS for a typical boss encounter in Kara increased ~15% using Scorch primarly with only fireblast during AP "go-time!".

Raid buffed, I'm in the 850+fire range depending on how much gold I care to burn. 32% crit and 140ish hit rating. Massive mana efficiency and longevity with the Arc talents + MoE (2pts). Ignite is ~30% of my DPS on fights > 2mins - all from scorch crits in the 1400-2k range depending on debuffs, AP, PI, etc.

Spell Power + Nexus Horn is the key to the build and as many already know, it's a crit build and it works fabulously. The biggest hurdle for many to overcome is the "if I'm fire, I MUST USE FIREBALL" paradigm. I'd strongly suggest you check it out and experiment. After the 10% coefficient nerf, Fireball really lost some oomph. I'm hoping to get a good side-by-side comparison with a 10/48/3 mage soon to see where I'm really at.

A couple points:

While 33/28 is nice, it's certainly not a 15% increase over 10/48/3.

Also, spamming scorch is nice but it suffers terribly from casting lag. Think of it as though you're casting 1.75 second scorches vs. 3.25 second fireballs. Fireball pulls away even more when a flat cast time is added to both. The improved fireball nerf certainly hurt fireball spam as 33/28, but it's still better than scorch (for Raw DPS).

One thing that pushes scorch builds even closer, however, is using nexus + capacitor. Food for thought if you're set on sticking with scorch spam.

10/48/3 is pretty much optimal for a fire mage, assuming your gear is tailored correctly. Mine wasn't (130+ spell hit... making 3% elemental precision and 4% hit from totem of wrath/draenei aura much less effective), which prompted the switch. Once I fix my gear problem (even more dmg, hopefully crossing the 1000 unbuffed threshold soon, more crit and 20-30 less spell hit), I'll probably switch back to see how I do. At high levels of +dmg, empowered fireball looks pretty tasty.

(the reason fire mages use fireball is because it's our best dps spell... =) hehe)

Fireball absolutely dominates scorch. Scorch does however the second best hit frequency of any spell - trumped only by arcane missiles. It hits a lot of times for small damage instead of hitting once for large damage. This concept is extremely important in pvp (which is why scorch is the best pvp nuke... arcane missiles would, if you could get mana refunded for an early channeling-break), or for trash mobs and adds. The lower the amount of time on target you get, the better hit frequency becomes. On very mobile fights scorch could be much, much better because it allows you to be more mobile.

The correct solution, however, is to use fireball whenever your window of opportunity is guaranteed 3 seconds or more, and use scorch to fit in gaps, like right before you have to move. Scorch spamming is the easy-mode way of doing this, but the results over a long duration are unimpressive.

Assuming you get double the number of nexus-horn procs, I'm not sure how much that would make up for it. If nexus-horn procs are making scorch spam actually better, then the correct answer once again is to switch to fireball during procs so you don't waste dps while the horn is cooling down.

A thing I've been milling over in my head lately is the whole "frost/fire" debate. As a raider, we're all min-maxers to some degree. I have to admit I'm deep fire, *mostly* because it's a high DPS spec for when it counts (boss fights).

Most TC also shows that deep fire will pull ahead of say 40/20/0 at around 800-1000 spelldmg (dependening, and ignoring frost for now). With tailoring and a few Karazhan epics+heroic epics, I'm basicly sitting at that now.

But secretly, I do prefer 33/28/0 (or possibly 4x/2x/0 in some variant, haven't tried that yet), simply because the addition of a decently hitting AB makes things that much more interesting from a PvE nuking PoV.

BUT, given that we can no longer trivially boost our dmg by as much as 262 (which for me would be around a 30% boost, and that was just a quick number, I'm probably missing out on certain buffs), does anyone feel they are revising their supreme choice of deep fire, simply because the insane buffing will not be present during the raids that count?