A Spec Question.....Leveling and 5-manning in Northrend

[heffner]

I run a five box mixed group - Prot Paladin, SPriest, Elemental Shaman, Boomkin Druid and Fire Mage.

I just hit 70.

I have blues and greens. From quests and normal 5-man drops.

I have not done any heroics in Outland.

I have not been to Northrend.

I was looking at my mage damage and was wondering how I might improve it. I just ran Mana Tombs and my shamans damage was ~30% higher than my mage and druid. My Shadowpriest was laughable...probably should just respec him now. I know there are a lot factors etc.. but even in the best situation I have a feeling I can improve my damage output for leveling in Northrend and doing 5-mans.

It may simply be my spell rotation. Most of my rotations use /castrandom for simplicity [and the time delays using /castsequence]. The downside to this for my mage is that I don't necessarily get a lot of Scorches off. I will likely improve my setup to use 2 different hotkeys to DPS - 1 starter and 1 for button spamming.

That being said, I was trying to get some information from the net about leveling/5-man specs since things changed so much in the past couple of months (I played a solo mage pre-WoTLK). I found a lot of info, but nothing I thought was solid with the exception of the Frosfire build for raiding. Also, the info from this community is typically far more relevant given the unique situation.

So, for those of you who run Mages, what spec are you using? I am wondering if Arcane or Frost might actually be better for 5-boxing five mans. No scorch required and the spell cast times are not as long as Firebolt (I believe, anyway).

My current Fire spec is deep fire with Icy veins. I don't think I have capitalized upon Hotstreak enough, but not even sure how to since it's a slave toon.

I can probably ask the same for my Boomkin...but, I don't really see much alternative there.

[Tonyx]

My group is still in the 40s, so nothing much to say, but I wanted to say that I have the exact same group (but my Priest is holy, which I am thinking is probably unneeded for leveling, even through instances as I am doing).

[Bigfish]

My current Fire spec is deep fire with Icy veins. I don't think I have capitalized upon Hotstreak enough, but not even sure how to since it's a slave toon.

Get crit rate as high as you can.

/castsequence scorch, scorch, fireball, fireball, fire blast, pyroblast, fireball, fireball, fireball, scorch, fire blast, pyroblast, fireball, fireball, fireball, scorch, fire blast, pyroblast, fireball, fireball, fireball, scorch, fire blast, pyroblast,

Something along those lines. You need a high enough crit rate to proc hot streak reliably. I'd say about 50% with all buffs.