Ding 70 but need some advice.

[Tombs]

Fire can be tricky, I can pull it off to some degree because I only dual box and my leader is the mage. Hot Streak would be pretty crazy to control with two mages. I've been considering switching to something a little more spam friendly but I haven't been playing my caster combo much.

[Taliesin]

That's really the crux of mages (and a few other classes) in the latest patches/talents. They rely on procs to achieve their maximum DPS. They all do good damage, but it really comes down to what is easiest for you to try to multibox with. Ideally, I would probably prefer fire spec through 3.0.9, but I realized that I wouldn't be managing my procs all that well.

Before Lich and the changes that brought Arcane Barrage, which finally breathed life into arcane specs, I was mostly arcane, but a lot of points into fire which comprised the majority of my spell casts. The damage was decent at best, but Slow was incredibly invaluable when you run outlands heroics with only a 4-man guild. I could poly one target and then kite another mob around all day. :P

Back to the OPs question...

During this time, I recall fire being the highest DPS, but frost was preferred for raids because the mana regen to the group was too good to go without. Fire was pretty easy to manage. Get Improved Scorch, stack it 5 times, then lay into the target with fireballs. Use PoM-AP-Pyro to start before the fireball barrage, if you want to maximize DPS. Refresh a scorch every 12 seconds or so (think the stack had a 15sec timer?) so the stack does not wear off.

Frost spec is usually built around the water elemental, which you need to pop, but had a fairly long cooldown back then. So every five minutes or so they could spike their damage for about 45 seconds. Damage was mostly frostbolts.

[Dotalot]

wow .. wotlk isnt out in china yet ?? O.o soz cant help with talants (as i suck at em) but if someone could link a great ele shami spec would love you long time :P

[Vmpwraith]

We run patch 3.0.5 the patch numbers are out of sink with the Us so just think early BC talents.

At the moment my leveling is stopped because of the level 70 cap so AOE is not so important and I currently run as frost with a small touch of Arcane but not deep enough for anything special. My shaman often out DPS me and i think its because of my spell rotation which I only use Trinkets >> Icy viens then /Castrandom frostbolt, frostbolt, Ice lance. Maybe I just need to play with this spec a little more.

I speced on Fire last night on the target dummys going from Ice to fire over a 1 minute sustaned casting Ice=30627 Fire=35800 DPS so I was quite encouraged but when I tryed it on mobs Ice actually out preformed it ( /castrandom fireball, fireball, fireball, scorch, fireblast) it seemed that fireball was taking so much longer to cast than frostbolt). Both have similar gear, maybe it was just down to gear except the fire mage has silghtly better sholders the rest is the same as the ice mage. I could put it down to random crits but if the ice was critting more then DPS was still decent. Now I'm confused more than ever.

Also i have vistide many links to specs and some seem to spec in a very funny way. Like deep frost then also start specing from the middle of another tree down. Is this something from 3.0.9 or have the specs just been messed up?