Hello Mages, I just wanted to ask you why you're choosing to spec Fire and Arcane in the coming 4.1 patch.
Okay, the obvious and first answer would be that Arcane brings incredible single target damage compared to Fire. But I don't feel that is a good enough reason to IGNORE the fact that Arcane requires different itemisation than Fire.
If you take a look at SimulationCraft (Don't flame, it provides excellent and usually very accurate results when comparing specs) you'll notice just how much Fire and Arcane are different in terms of stats and scaling. What the community hasn't seemed to even consider is the 4.1 buffs to Frost and just how much it has been brought up with other PvE raiding classes and specs.
Frost
Sure, it has it's problems but as does other. Arcane suffers greatly from movement. Frost is a little more forgiving having Ice Lance, Deep Freeze, Pet's Freeze and Brain Freeze procs thus giving us better mobility to Arcane Barriage spam.
Frost on a Patchwerk style fight is around about 1.5-2K DPS under Arcane. Patchwerk assumes no movement and DPSing one target at any one time throughout an encounter. That 1.5-2K DPS difference would be lost if you are geared to play Fire which; in current content is the most viable spec due to excellent AoE, fair single target damage and very good mobility.
I ran a few Simulations on the latest version of SimC (406-19 Developer Version) for both types of fights: Patchwerk and HelterSkelter. HelterSkelter in case some of you didn't know assumes single-target fight but with movement. Here are the results:
Patchwerk: http://robula.co.uk/wowshit/sim/caster_patchwerk.html
Helter Skelter: http://robula.co.uk/wowshit/sim/caster_helter.html
As you can see:
Patchwerk (single target, no movement)
#1: Arcane 30106
#2: Frost 28624
#3: Fire 25846
Helter Skelter (single target, movement)
#1: Frost 22876
#2: Arcane 21761
#3: Fire 21328
Looking at these results I would personally be using Frost for single target fights like Chimaron and using Fire for fights that include AoE and/or multiple targets over Arcane because of the loss of DPS to itemisation and movement. To me, Frost is a clear cut winner over Arcane, not to mention Frost is an INCREDIBLY fun spec to play over Arcane in a PvE environment.
What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks for reading, want to know how all of you fellow Mages feel about this.
Added
EDIT: For those who hasn't realised, my topic refers to the choice between Arcane & Frost as a PvE offspec for single target fights. Never at this stage am I worried about Fire when it comes to single target encounters. The purpose of this topic is to get an understanding of which dual spec combo would be most suited for current and upcoming content. Currently, Fire is not going to be replaced due to it's great mobility and AoE capabilities. That goes without saying.