first off this is NOT a guide, its a interesting read but its ranting and boosting arcane mages. I have nothing against you but this sould not be called a guide if you plan to just rant and be biast to one spec

My main is now a lvl72 fire mage (bin fire since lvl10 3 years ago lol) and I am a hardcore fire mage... eaven when it wasen't the popular choice for all the "cool kids".

All 3 mage trees have their up and downs and its al labout personal preferance now. If you are good you can do the DPS, but you have to know your spec and what your weakpoints are. Arcane is the lowest AOE capability spec so AOE lvling is not so much a option here as it is for the other specs. Frost is the easy AOE mode but fire got some awsome new boosts that bring it up there. The biggest diference is that frost has the defencive and slowing effects making the AOE grp controlable trough slowing them and giving the mage a extra armor to negate the damage and pushback. Fire on the other hand now carries its traditional "I kill you before you kill me" burst AOE capability in a splender of a rotation that will force eaven a good pally tank to put on their A game. The addition of Firestarter (100% chance to get intant flamestrike after you damage ANYTHING w/ either dragon's breath or blast wave) must be the single most usefull addition to a hugh-burst damage AOE fire rotation. Run around and gather the mobs w/ arcane explosion, go backwards once you have your group to funnel them in front of you for a dragons breath (aply living bomb when you start gathering your grp w/ arcane explosion). Once the grp is in front of you use your Dragon's Breath which now gives you 5 sec of time to refresh your mana shield if you must, pop a mana gem etc. use the 5 sec to your advantage to get some time off Living Bomb and time your instant flamestrike so that it hits when the bomb explodes or when the stun is about to fade off. Use Blast Wave once the mobs run to you which trows them avay from you and slows them down, just wait for the AOE grp to start going towards you again and they will be in flamestrike radious again so pop it and FN them as they reach you. At this point your Living bomb alredy exploded and you delt over 10k damage to your whole grp... if the mobs are still alive you have a FN grp in front of you so charge another flamestrike on them and spamm arcane explosion for 2-4 sec to get your Dragon's Breath rdy again adn stun the whole grp once more and instant flamestrike.
If the AOE grp is not dead by then then you pulled elites or something and you are gona die lol (after this full rotation you sould have done close to or over 15k damage to al mobs in the AOE grp and since you are using mostly instant spells it takes little time once you actualy start it after you gather up the mobs and there is no spell pushback)

The down side to this is that the little contact you do have w/ the grp and the beating you take while gathering the mobs is heavy on your HP so somethimes if I mess up my own rotation I find myself questioning if I am about to die but it only takes a bit of practice and you can fully controll your AOE grp. Also you are spamming a LOT of instant spells in a short time so if you are sportng a mana shield you might run out of mana depending on your pool but I manage to kill a set of Shoveltusk herd (4-6 mobs on pull) w/ 1/2 of my mana and HP... at full mana/HP I usualy pull 2 bulls and 2 herbs totaling to around 10 mobs and end up w/ 30-40% HP and 60% mana (I avoid mana shield usualy). Etleast after all of that mass genocide upon the poor Shoveltusk my cooking skill jumped up and I made a load of critter bites haha

This AOE farming style is not for everyone but I enjoy it because its so much burst DPS and its a chalenge because you lack the defencive frost talents so it makes it fun and involving (chalenge myself to execute it better and better to have a better Hp/mana outcome and kill more mobs in a AOE pull)

Sorry for ranting only about fire but I gave my 2 cents to give some fire prospective to this "guide"

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