in Higher up gear, frost quickly falls behind fire and arcane.

she should give arcane a shot, cause its a good way to improve your DPS.

i think frost is like 20% behind fire and arcane at higher gear levels.

For frost a good start would be to look for 18/0/53 talent spec and use that. Maybe tweak it a bit for personal preference. I have nixed talents regarding proc of free fireball and moved those points into improved blizzard.

alright thanks for the input.

She should play the spec she enjoys playing the most. Period.

DPS is irrelevant if you don't enjoy how you're producing it.

I've been Arcane for a while, and I was loving it--in my usual raid compo, much less 5-mans, I don't have the people and buffs I need to really support Fire/TtW and I found it boring and unfun. With Arcane I have more mobility, more flexibility, and just plain more fun.

Doing 5k DPS on the 10-man Onyxia fight (where I usually expect to average out at around 3.5-3.8k DPS on a non-gimmicky (i.e. XT, Hodir, etc.) fight sealed the deal for me. Now I just have to wonder if the 4-piece T8 bonus is potentially worth losing my T7--while I don't use the mana gems as often as I used to, I -do- still use them and that 250 spellpower boost is handy for propping my damage up just a little more (I often pop that sucker on XT just before the heart comes in, then the Shaman Heroisms, I hit IV/AP and go insane).

But the bottom line is, yes: Do what you want, do it so it's fun, and while you should always be receptive to advice about your build, don't take anyone's word for granted. Personal experience and enjoyment trump all.

@Kanap: Vendroid's right about getting Torment the Weak, but I wouldn't take his advice on dropping the fireball proc's for better blizzards. Granted, that would increase your overall dps numbers through trash AoE and make her look like a better contributor in certain fights; however, single-target DPS is where frost struggles the most, not AoE. If your wfie neglects talents that boost her single-target DPS, she will fall behind badly on the majority of boss fights and will find raid invitations quickly drying up. If a raid is struggling to do enough damage to down a boss, the first place they look to place blame is at unconventional specs like frost mages.

@LilBanshee

Brain Freeze (the free fireball proc talent) currently sits between "very little DPS gain" to "DPS loss". Best way to use it is on the "third ghost charge" of Fingers of Frost, and that's not very reliable as it depends on lag. Of course, it can be useful in movement fights.

Improved Blizzard is taken more for utility than anything. If you're raiding frost, you may as well take the talent that other mages may dual spec into frost for certain fights. You've resigned yourself to the fact that your single target DPS is going to be poor: shift that 0.5% DPS gain from Brain Freeze and put it somewhere that will make your healers happy on Freya hard mode...

I was frost my entire life until WotLK. In BC, i did alright in T4/T5 raiding because of the awesomeness that was the Frozen Shadoweave tailoring set (and a couple other frost-specific pieces/enchants) but Blizz pretty much did away with that type of stuff in WotLK so I was forced to finally switch. (Luckily, they also added duel specs so i can easily switch back to frost for soloing and PvP :D )

But the spec i decided to go with and recommend to you is FFB (frostfire bolt). The reason i chose it is because, at the time anyway, Arcane, Fire, and FFB were all pretty equal, and I figured FFB would be the most similar to what i was used to since it included a lot of frost points. 0/53/18

It is more difficult to play because we have 2 Dots to worry about keeping up at all times, and a Hotstreak proc to watch out for which grants us an instant pyroblast, but once you get the hang of it its a lot of fun. If you didn't see a DPS increase with a different spec before it may just be that you weren't taking advantage of all the new spells. It took me a while to get efficient with all the new FFB toys. Frost was so easy in comparison, not alot to worry about beside spamming frostbolt. =P

Thundrpants
Aerie Peak

It is a very valid point that you should play the spec that makes you happy.

However, I have a counterpoint, and it's going to come out rude, i really don't mean it to.

Please don't be upset if other people won't play with you because of your decision, that is also their decision.

A couple of things about a FB/ttw spec. Any fireball specs needs a crapload of hit. A crapload as in 446 to reach the hit cap!

Unless she switched gear as well (since arcane only needs 289 and frost or frostfire needs 368) and was hitcapped any such test would not reflect the damage.

Also, fireball and especially a frostfire bolt spec seem to vary a bit due to focusing on crit, so it would take quite a few timed tests to get an average... and would "level out" a bit over a longer fight. This has to be taken into consideration when testing as well.

In short, I hate to say it, but the longer the fight the farther frost will be left behind in the dust. I love frost myself, don't get me wrong, but it is just not competitive single target damage.

It will do great on AoE trash, sure, but the thing to compare is your dps on a boss fight.

Gonna agree with Vandersveldt here
You can play any spec you like but that doesn't mean other players would
agree with that.
If you plan on raiding the mechanics of frost just do not allow it
to be viable. Since frost dps relies on shatter crits on frozen targets it becomes useless
since bosses cannot be frozen by frost nova and talents or stunned by deep freeze.
fingers of frost do help but still come low compared to other specs.
If you plan or PVPing most of the time you play then frost is a great spec to choose
since it has lots of survivability options
If you plan on leveling then stay frost it's easy leveling although i would suggest trying arcane leveling
it was really like a breath of fresh air for me after 70 levels of frostbolting stuff
Nevertheless endgame raiding specs would be either fire/frostfire build or arcane build
Well that about summs it up
Good luck

Arcane's good for mages who've just started raiding, Fire's a lot more gear-demanding due to the higher hit cap (the TotW build anyway, she could also try out "frostfire", go figure). If she's getting as much dps in fire and frost then she's not getting a good grip of the awesomeness of Hot Streak and Living Bomb, or is just undergeared (my guess is her dps is around 1500-2500?). If she's just undergeared, tell her to go arcane. Hope that helps.