3 builds - Fire/Arcane!!! Highest DPS?Follow

Best DPS from a build depends on your gear level. 40/21/0 outstrips 10/48/3 until higher gear levels. 34/27/0 is between the two at higher gear levels, but is better for PvP than 10/48/3.

You should be able to find versions of each of these in Filterspawn's sticky.

Well, for what it's worth, I don't think the guide covers a *deep* arcane spec (deeper than 40(41)/21(20)/0 build). I played a 50/11/0 build for a while and a 49/12/0 build. These differ in that they don't really use fire at all for damage, but use different primary nukes, arcane missiles and arcane blast. Now, the OPs build seems to be revolving around still using fireball for a deep arcane build, which I would suggest using the 40/21/0 ever-so-popular build until you get some good spell damage (as Pol suggested), but if you want to use AM as your primary nuke with AB weaved in for mana efficiency, 1) make sure you have a shadow priest or resto shaman with you for mana, as you *will* run dry. 2) You will be able to dish out tons of damage, more even so than the arcane/fire 3 minute mage build, but you will run out of that magic blue stuff (mana) very quickly. I generally recommend using the builds you find in the stickies until you get 550 INT (with Mind Mastery) but even then, on the longer boss fights you will run low on mana using every pot/gem/evocation possible, but your damage will be through the roof and your threat should be containable. You need to wait till you have some good gear for that though, when I was arcane spec, I had around +1200 damage, (1243, I think... but it's a bit fuzzy), and I was starting to push our main tank on aggro from time to time. This also gets into stuff like having your T4 helm, with a Mystic Skyfire Diamond and Lightning Capacitor, which you obviously won't have, so some of this is just education.

In summary (if you lived through the wall-o-text crit), use the standard builds in the sticky (I'd go with 40/21/0 if you have less than 700 spell damage), stack some +hit and go.

Have fun, HTH.

Edit: Also, remember that you don't end up using *real* money on the PTR for your respec...

Edited, Nov 12th 2007 1:52pm by ktangent