Well, first post, figure I’d better introduce myself. I play as Velinath on Gul’dan, a currently-level-54 fire-spec mage aspiring to join <From Ashes We Rise>. I’ll get into that more later. I also have some alts: Oriannicus on Gul’dan is a high-20s lock and Velinath on Doomhammer is a 29-30 paladin. I’m mainly gonna talk about my mage here.
Fire mages are, in my opinion, the absolute best spec for a mage. I love seeing those 1500-1600 crits coming up 
Of course they have their good points (mobs die before they can get to you!) and their bad points (Aggro draws in groups sometimes, those ridiculous fire-immunes in BRD). I personally don’t mind, as I found that even using Frostbolt (4% crit chance, blargh!!) I was still out-DPSing everyone else…
A couple days ago, I was running ZF (yes, at level 54!! I had a quest chain to ST…), and we had a tauren warrior named Handyn tanking for us. I found that rather interesting, as I’ve run into him a lot recently in instance groups from Mara on. I’ve stayed about 5 levels above him, but I’m not gonna lie, he’s an awesome tank Keeps aggro awesomely! So shout outs to Handyn for being so great.
Yesterday I was running BRD for the first time; I’m a little behind on instances right now, I spent a lot of time in ZF not getting the Bad Mojo Mask. Kinda sad. I’ve been thinking about getting Eye of Flame, but that’s gonna be hard to find…Fortunately I did pick up the +crit headpiece in BRD, so I’m a lot better off than I could be. We didn’t finish the run, but we did get pretty far. I’m mining/JC for professions, so I had my stuff ready to learn the Dark Iron smelting recipe; unfortunately we didn’t make it that far.
I have an…interesting spec, so I warn you: the noise you’re about to hear is the thousands of other fire mages laughing at my “pathetic” spec. I actually chose not to use Scorch until 70! Here’s why: if you’re soloing or doing instances, for the most part Scorch is AWFUL even with the +15% damage. Mobs will go down before you’re able to start Fireball spam on them. The only time when Scorch is a viable option is for bosses; other than that, it hurts your DPS as far as I can tell. Right now I’m moving towards my modified version of 2/48/11, but I do plan to switch back over to a more traditional build (and retool my action bar) once I hit 70.
Another big downside of Fire is the mana burn rate. If I’m in a group with a good healer and tank, my DPS will be hurt by having to drink while the rest of the group takes out the next mob. Frost/arcane have it much easier IMO.
I’ll try to keep posting regularly. EDIT 3/18: It looks like I’m posting twice (!) a day, and also editing most posts once after they originally are posted. This will probably change to once a day or less as I get used to the blogging.
[...] in! ; my new habit 19 11 2008 As some of my VERY long-term readers may recall. . .I originally set out as a player wanting to join From Ashes We Rise. Currently, I’m in Cloudy Day. I made a [...]