Need to get my numbers up in raids! Plz help!

[Laurachan]

I am a fire mage, and my guild has started raiding BoT. Last night my numbers varied from 10k dps to 15k. According to my raid leader, I should be pulling upwards of 20k dps on boss fights while moving. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong and how I can improve my dps? It won't let me post my armory link right now, says I need to post a few more times, but my character name is Chitiwok, realm Area 52, Blood Elf Fire Mage

Rotation: I always try to make sure to keep Living Bomb up on the target, and 3x Scorch, 2x Fireball, and of course using pyroblast and impact when it procs, and Flame Orb

General questions:
1) Should I be using aoe moves such as Blast Wave and Flamestrike on single target bosses or only on multiple mobs?
2) When pulling trash in raids, is it a waste of time to apply Living Bomb to all targets, or should I rely on Impact to spread Living Bomb? Or should I just be worrying about one target at a time?
3) I am at 3% haste, and I know the soft haste cap is 12.5%, but how important is the soft haste cap as compared to mastery? Which should I focus on more?

Thank you!

[nerfproof]

Well for starters your haste is super low. With talents your only siting at 6% haste and you really should be around 12-13% haste. Try to get to hit cap from just gear and regem those spell hit gems to int. The only other thing I would suggest would be trying to use FFB over FB. Get the FFB glyph and give that a shot. But like I said you need alot more haste than what you have right now. Unfortunetly Ive been subjected to raiding on my pally right now, so my mage is only lvl 84, but from everything Ive read up on and from taking to my Mage sect in my guild you really need atleast 12% haste.

[Dacomp89]

20k is ridiculous, tell your raid leader to stop pulling stuff out of his ass. Your spec is fine, your gear is pretty good, though I'd replace the crit gem in your belt with int and those gloves kind of suck even if they are epic. Get 516 haste, 17% hit, and then forge all your secondary stats to crit. You could do some of this by replacing the mastery enchants on your boots/gloves. Don't BW or FS bosses, for trash if there are only 2 or 3 mobs sure you can LB them but I don't consider it that important, you can spread it by impact if it procs. 3x scorch 2x fireball, eh, spam fireball whenever you can, gem and evocate on CD and as soon as possible, just save mana for <35% or during increased damage periods. You can scorch if you have to move a lot or if you need to conserve for a burn phase.

[Tirsten]

nerfproof has no idea what he's talking about, ignore his advice. Also ignore Dacomp89, because you aren't spec'd correctly and you generally do not need 516 haste while the pyromaniac bug is active. [edit: also ignore his post below, which is also incorrect.]

1. Read this: elitistjerks.com/f75/t110326-cataclysm_fire_mage_compendium/
2. Read it again.
3. To answer your questions: (1) blast wave and flamestrike are for multi-target only, not single target; (2) generally, use impact to spread lb rather than applying multiple lbs manually, because impact will also spread your other dots (and spread them to more than 3 targets, too); (3) the haste cap is trivialized due to the pyromaniac bug: if you are spec'd correctly (i.e., 1/2 pyromaniac) and have 5% haste from the raid buff, you're automatically above the haste soft cap.
4. If you're doing 10-15k on halfus, you're doing it wrong. Cleave off halfus. The damage taken debuff he receives affects your dots, and those increased dots will be spread to each and every whelp/drake for absurd numbers. Mages should generally be 2-3x higher than everyone else for the first 45 seconds of the fight, then about 30-50% higher than everyone else by the end, unless you get terrible RNG or screw up the opening. A geared mage can easily spike for 300k+ early in the fight.
5. If you're on the later BoT bosses, make sure you're keeping living bomb up on multiple targets (use a mouseover macro or a focus macro), make sure your dps uptime is 100%, and make sure you've got enough mana to use fireballs in the burn phases of council and cho'gall. On valiona, anticipate movement (don't start casting a fireball right before you need to move for blackout, e.g. -- casting scorch is MUCH better than interrupting a fireball).

[Dacomp89]

Oh sorry, I forgot to take into account a bug which will be fixed in the next patch (if not hotfixed sooner) and allows you to get 1 point into the lowest dps increasing talent. Everything else I said was correct, but do go read the Fire Mage compendium at Elitist Jerks, as it includes a good deal of other useful information.