Balance when leveling is irrelevant to end-game raiding balance. As prot-warrior I out-DPS anything that moves when I level, even when I have no heirlooms and the DPS:ers do. I tank and stand at the end of the run with no less than 40-50% of dmg done every single instance.

This doesn't make prot warrior a viable DPS-spec for raiding, does it?

That dps equality does not continue in the upper levels and becomes quite drastic. Right now, if you play arcane in Raids... you will be asked to change to fire. If you go frost, they DEMAND you change to fire immediately or you will be banned forever. I've even said you shouldn't run frost in a raid, not because I hate frost (I love it, its FANTASTIC pvp), but because it then becomes too impossible to accomplish the greater fights.

Its not fair, we have one pve spec, I still play arcane, but if this patch wasn't coming I'd be asked to change. It's frustrating to work so hard and in the end it being meaningless, I feel you frost mages, though we are about to get out of that hole. Even when there was JUST arcane changes people were complaining about frost mages.

I'm convinced that no-one(all those people who QQ on forums and just really can't play pvp) will be happy with frost mages until they can simply beat them to death with no competition at all.

I agree with Necromann: I am in a casual raid guild (we're at 5/12 normal right now). I am consistently even with the other ranged DPSers in my guild as a frost mage. I don't have any recount logs to look at, but I believe that I range between ~14k to ~18k on most of the fights if my memory serves.

I have to assume then that my guild is doing terrible DPS if frost is keeping up with the rest of them, but what sort of numbers should we be getting?

I ran Fire last week and got very similar numbers, but then I am a bit out of practise, so I suspect that I could likely get a bit higher, but I didn't think it would be a massive difference, certainly not enough to offset the utility that I love so much.

Thoughts?

I was a strict PVPer after my guild couldnt and wouldnt clear ICC. I now am almost full geared in PVP vicious gear but still run raids/heroics with my new guild. i am dropping 14-17k myself. i was called out in guild chat for raiding in my pvp gear but i threw it in the persons face that i was beating them in dps so to stfu, and to learn his toon.