Combustion was also hotfixed to work with mastery today. I tested on a dummy with my arcane set with mostly full mastery and ticked around 130k over 16 ticks.

So T3 and T4 cross over at about ~34% crit chance. That is, below ~34% crit, T3 is more valuable, above that point T4 is more valuable.

Is this 34% would be what is shown on my character info, or things like 5% critical strike debuff counts in to it too? Also how do these talents work when you have both, is it possible to have a HS proc from T3 talent if I have T4 one as well? Will Molten Shields proc Blazing Speed if I dont have Blazing Speed talented? : ) Thanks in advance.

Currently i'm looking at the 'standard' level 85 Fire build to be 6 / 32 / 3 as follows: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This is for Raids. Things you'll notice immediately:

- 3/3 Arcane Concentration was picked up. Now that mana matters at 85, and Fire needs more mana/efficiency to cast more Fireballs, start thinking of this again as a DPS talent. This will be a minor boost to DPS, allowing you to (slightly) alter your Fireball VS Scorch ratio in favour of Fireball. Recent simulcraft suggestions appear to put this in the range of several %
- 1 point in Improved Fire Blast only. This will allow impact to be used at 35 yards range, more than sufficient.
- Pyromaniac was skipped. It's very situational, deemed by many to be too situational for a standard build.
- Cauterize is skipped, but can be picked up. It really depends on how you value the talent. From this build you could drop Improved Flamestrike and pickup Cauterize (for no DPS loss if the fight you're doing has 1 mob). For fights that have 2 mobs, Blastwave+Improved Flamestrike is quite handy, especially given that Blastwave is good damage (with its free Flamestrike included) for very cheap mana. For fights with 2 mobs where you wanted to keep Improved Flamestrike, you could shuffle 2 points from Netherwind Presence or Arcane Concentration for Cauterize - which is definetely a minor DPS loss - and your decision to assess whether it's worth it. ***

In short, this sort of build keeps maximum single target DPS. It retains all of the AOE power Fire has for fights with 2 mobs, or fights with more mobs (but they die so quick Pyromaniac still isnt worth the investment). However, if you come across a fight where Pyromaniac will see compelling use, you'll definetely want to pick it up by tweaking this spec by shuffling 2 points from Arcane Concentration (Or Netherwind Presence?) back into Pyromaniac.

Another situational variation of the above spec is: Invocation. In any non AOE fight where you can get interrupts off yourself, you could drop Improved Flamestrike and pickup 2/2 Invocation. Something like this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft . Relying on Invocation is problematic, as we need to get the interrupt. But the +10% damage bonus is huge if you can get it. Notice that in this build I put one point into Molten shields. This is because Improved Flamestrike, Blazing Speed, Cauterize and Pyromaniac are pretty much 'all or nothing' talents. No point putting 1 in them. Given that 2/2 Improved Fire Blast is unnecessary - this leaves Molten Shields as the only option to drop the last point.

*** Remember that Cauterize has niche, situational uses for aggressive DPS. Think Festergut, Sapphiron, Algalon etc. It might let you avoid spending those ~20-30 seconds moving to get Spores, or into Black Holes over the course of a full-length Cataclysm encounter. If you wanted to tailor your spec for fights to take advantage of mechanics like this - Cauterize can be considered a surprisingly strong DPS talent - more valuable than Netherwind Presence or Clear casting. But Cauterize being used in this manner, is even more situational than Pyromaniac.

After some feedback on the aforementioned, before it's edited into the OP as a reference in the builds section.

Having two specs like this: One of which picks up a pretty situational talent which is amazing when it gets compelling use - while the other avoids it like the plague for minor DPS gain with those 2 points elsewhere. There's only going to be subjective answers to this discussion, when it comes to answering the question, "Is this exposing a design problem with the Pyromaniac talent?" Currently: i'd say the answer is yes, it does.

Using Blackwing Descent raid as an example: I don't like the idea of having Pyromaniac literally be useless for Atromedes (1 dragon fight with no adds), but amazing for Maloriak (constant adds, being alive and offtanked for long periods). Should I just accept that i'll need to respec between each fight, because Pyromaniac swings its pendulum between useless <-> amazing?

I see no reason for 1 point in imp fireblast as the 5 yard range can easily be fixed by running in as you hit LB and instant FS without any loss in dps.
Also there are no fights where ranged must stay 30 yards or more.

The eternal argument of how useful range is, it was argued time and again; if you remember pre 4.x when we were taking Flame Throwing for range, it's basically the same if you're going to use Impact you will want to take it. It's not just 5 yards it's 5 yards adding a lot more surface you can be standing on.

To me the least useful AoE points are actually Blast Wave and Imp. Flamestrike, for DPS Flamestrike is only useful on big packs of mobs and even then it's not like you can spam it; you'll cast it once every 8 seconds at best. Your AoE damage even in big pack scenarious is going to be 80+% comprised of Ignite and various other dots spread via Impact. Yes it's extremely nice to be able to insta cast Flamestrike and even cooler having it proc of of Blast Wave but in my opinion it's much less useful than Pyromaniac which works at 3+ mobs and Impact which no Fire mage should be without. That's 3 points that could be placed elsewhere.

I would personally pick Cauterize and Pyromaniac, I'm still missing one point to place in Arcane Concentration.

Or on the other hand have two Fire specs one that ignores AoE and the other that doesn't which would probably be better.

At this point, I think that's the way to go. Trying to find this middle ground (between the best AOE spec and the best single target spec) is serving to dilute both.

I'm heavily updating the OP over the next few days. Ultimately it might suggest people approach specs as follows:

- Maximum single target spec
- Maximum AOE spec
- Balanced Spec (Wont be optimal at both of the above, might have some utility for small DPS losses etc)

Some questions I need answered before I include them in the OP:

1 - Does Glyph of Mirror Image allow the Images to take advantage of Fire Specialisation? (Can it be considered a DPS Glyph, even if very small)

2 - Frostfire Bolt as main nuke, for all intents and purposes, basically can be summed up as "Exactly the same as Fireball as main nuke, except you're casting a different looking spell". Essentially: Cast whatever spell you like more, it really doesn't matter which. My understanding is the only changes are (With FFB as main) that you use Glyph of Frostfire, and cast a prettier looking spell. You get some flavour from having an extra DOT on your target, which might make Combustion slightly better, but nothing else worth noting. The DPS difference between Fireball and Frostire Bolt as main nuke, according to latest simulcraft, is so small it's virtually irrelevant. Is all of this accurate or true?

3 - What are the best approximations for stat weightings for fire mage? Not sure which sim is most accurate that I should looking at. Should we consider Simulcraft the most accurate at this point? Simulationcraft Results .

Please have a quick read through the (largely edited) OP - and let me know if you spot any errors or mistakes in anything I said. In a few days the EJ mods will close all these spec threads, and new threads (with updated OP's) will be created for Cataclysm release.

Glyph of Mirror Image is currently lowering DPS as fire spec.
Off the top of my head the numbers as arcane as it's getting the AB stack buff is 1200 dps and about 40,000 damage.
With no glyph about 900 dps and 28k damage and with the glyph as fire spec it drops to about 750 and 24k damage.
Enthorn did huge test with all the results which i can't seem to find any more, if anyone has the link i'll edit this post.

Thanks, made a bunch of edits/changes based on points mentioned in the above posts. Currently looking to suggest the 'standard' level 85 spec now be as follows. Quoting from the OP:

For comparison sake the difference between the two specs 1 point in Netherwind and 3 in clearcasting are worth 2% dps. Of which Netherwind Presence is about 1%.

When the talent changes hit Live servers I thought the same way about Cauterize... it seemed like a no-brainer.

But in practice what I found was that is is ineffective for the mechanics that killed the most - Infest, Valk drops, runaway Defile, Unbound Plague, even Bone Spike or Blood Beast / LDW melee swings. Since Cauterize doesn't clear your debuffs or threat, you simply just take another lethal tick of the dot or another 1-shot melee hit.

I found it to only be situationally useful for a limited number of things... most notable cheesing Pungent Blight. But even there I was already used to ignoring all spores and /cast Ice Block followed by /cancelaura Ice Block after the cast completes. Cauterize saves maybe a GCD or two at most there.

I haven't had the good fortune of playing in beta, so are there really opportunities for Cauterize to shine now? I was very disappointed with the ability in ICC, but would love to give it another chance if there is good reason to.

He's not missing the point, he's just commenting that he doesn't know enough about the "stuff that kills you" in the new content to say that Cauterize is a must-have. You'll see at the end of his post he's basically asking for an explanation of the mechanics that Cauterize will give us a do-over on.

Going point by point for ICC content, he's correct. Each of the things he listed is a mechanic in which Cauterize might keep you alive, but you're still in a situation to die instantly again anyway. Cauterize would seem to be situationally great for allowing you to screw up or ignore mechanics, but only if the mechanic doesn't involve threat (which it doesn't wipe), a damaging debuff (which it doesn't clear), or an area effect (which it doesn't move you out of).