T4 vs Spellfire/strike vs S1Follow

Hey dudes. My mage is fast approaching 70, and I am curious as to which way people would recommend me to go.

My main objective with this character, is to mostly do Heroics with raids thrown in maybe once a week or so, if RL permits the time. I do enjoy PvPing as well however, and will most likely be doing BG's more so than arena.

Overall though, the objective would lean towards PvE, despite still mixing it up a bit.

Now, I fully understand that PvE gear, generally doesnt work for PvP, and vice versa.

Overall however, I have been told that S1 vs T4 is pretty close, and you can take either or for entry level raids.

So Ill sum it up in points just to simplify answering things...

1) I know the spellfire/strike is on par for T5ish, but would it be recomendable to get these sets over the S1 first?

2) Would people recommend getting straight PvE blues from end game dungeons to hit up kara, or is it more beneficial to grind out that S1 stuff to head into Kara?

3) Would it be more recomendable to get the Spellfire/strike gear, and complement the rest of my (non epic) gear with the S1 gear, so that i can balance out PvE and PvP (as said I would enjoy doing both? OR should I keep PvE gear for PvE and PvP gear aside only for PvP? aka 2 gear sets?

4) Kara being pretty low end raiding, is it acceptable to keep my PvP frost build and still be effective dps at this level? I know fire would generally be the way to go for sure, but Im curious if its not going to gimp me TOO much at this (low)level of raiding or not? (Of course if I progress further I will without a doubt get a fire spec going, but if Ill be ok with frost for kara, i would rather not pay respec costs so I can pvp and pve with the same spec)


Thanks in advance

I, too, wanted to be a raid mage but with some pvp mixed in.. so here's what I ended up doing.

When I hit 70 I just farmed/gold grinded till I made my spellfire set. Then I went battlecast instead of spellstrike for the stam so PvP was a bit better. The only real differenc is I had to get 2 sets of trinks. 1 set boosts my spell hit up to 102 for raids and the other is horde trink and a crit trink for pvp. Then all I did was raid/heroic and BG. I also started a 2v2 with a friend where we just do our 10 games a week for some points. Right now i'm spending honor and arena points to get rid of my spellfire set for PvP. Then I can respec when i feel the need to frost if I wanna arena for a week or so. Also since the battlecast/spell fire sets don't give you boots and bracers I got the BG epics to fill in those slots. I also use the S1 spellblade and the wand and offhand from badges as well as the BG epic neck, ring, and cloak. Once I get arena robe, belt, and gloves I have my 2 starter sets for either raiding up to Gruuls (doing that now and have 2 T4s actually) and Arena.

I know it sounds like alot of work but I like always having somthing to do whenever I log on. My guild raids Kara and ZA twice a week and Gruuls once a week so raiding is covered. During the day I can either BG or do heroics.