Respec my Mage
I'm in the same boat as everyone else on WoW with Tuesday's release of patch 2.0.1 I have to respec all my characters. I did this for my Mage back after patch 1.11 when she was around level 27. That build worked out pretty well for me but then around level 39 or 40 things really got tough for me. I liked the idea of doing AoE grinding but I'm just not very good at it. It's nice to knock out six murlocs at once and get that burst of XP but most of the time I get swarmed and flattened. The long runs back to the corpse end up taking up too much time for me to really learn to AoE effectively. If you have a partner to heal you then I'm sure AoE grinding can work out really well for a pair of a mage & priest. I solo with my mage 99% of the time. With that in mind I respec'ed to mostly Fire around level 42.

It only cost me 1 gold at the mage trainer (though the price goes up if you respec again). The difference was amazing. I could kill things one-on-one, which was the case for most of my PvE questing. Now after patch 2.0.1 I'm going to go back to pretty much the same build. Here's a link to my new build, now a level 48 human mage. Read on for the explanation.

I know that most of my points are going in to Fire for the fast PvE kills and some PvP survivability (though I've yet to do much real PvP with my mage). With that in mind the first thing I did was choose the essentials from the Frost and Arcane trees so that I wouldn't come up short.

In the Frost Tree, 2 points in Frost Warding seems like an obvious choice. The armor bonus of 30% to Ice Armor translates into about 100 armor for me and on Mage Armor it means another 3 for resistances and 10% of your mana regeneration (to continue while casting, that is). I also took 3 points in Elemental Precision in the Frost Tree. It looks good to me since it applies to both Fire and Frost spells and the minor mana savings add up. I've got some choices later on that are about mana efficiency as well. I had found before that with all my points in Fire, I could kill things but I spent more time drinking than blasting.

On to the Arcane Tree. Arcane Subtlety is worth 2 points to prevent your spells being resisted. I find that my spells were resisted most often when fighting mobs that are a higher level than me. It also happens when there's some inate resistence. This goes with the Elemental Precision I mentioned earlier. After all, it's great to do big damage, but if your spells are resisted repeatedly then you've got nothing. The other talent that I want from the Arcane Tree is Arcane Concentration - all the way to rank 5. With 5 points, In combat Clearcasting will basically give you a free cast 10% of the time. Over time that means you reduce your mana usage by 10%. It's similar to reducing the cost of all your combat spells by 10%. That means you can go longer without drinking and maybe even just keep on grinding until your Evocation comes up.

Now in the Fire Tree I spent the rest of my 39 points. At the first tier I spent 5 points on Impact for a 10% chance to stun with any Fire spell. Since I always open a PvE fight with a fire spell, this means that once out of every ten times I have a chance to get an extra Scorch in before they return my attack. I didn't bother with Improved Fireball since the 0.5 second reduction in casting time still leaves a Rank 9 Fireball with a 3 second cast time. It doesn't sound worth doing since Scorch is fast enough that I don't have to worry about losing casting time when I'm hit. I can also mix Scorch and Fire Blast more often with the shorter casting times.

My normal fights open with a Pyroblast then rely on Scorch and Fire Blast. So I took Improved Fire Blast for 3 points to bring the cool down to 6.5 seconds. Getting Pyroblast costs one talent point for the first rank then I have to visit the mage trainer to get it up to rank 6. In order to get Pyroblast I had to spend a few more points earlier in the tree. I could've taken 4 points in Ignite to get Pyroblast (and also for access to some talents further down the tree), I think I had 5 points in Ignite before the patch. Instead I decided on 2 points in Ignite and 2 points in Flame Throwing to increase the range on my Fire Blast and Scorch. I think Flame Throwing was only for Fireball before the patch so I almost didn't take it.

Level 37 build with heavy Fire damage

Okay, so the talent build that I've described so far looks like this. I think it'd be pretty good for a level 37 Mage focused on fire. As a matter of fact I wish I'd had this build then, I wouldn't have complained so much about mages being weak and drinking non-stop.

Presence of Mind and Pyroblast at Level 48

I know I said that I've played a Fire mage all this time and I like that. But everyone always goes on about the Presence of Mind (PoM) followed by Pyroblast combo. If you want that then here's a nice PoM / Pyroblast talent build for level 48. If you're not familiar with it the idea is that you do a Pyroblast, then use PoM to make your next spell instant, then do another Pyroblast. At level 48 the combination is about 1000 to 1200 damage. The other nice feature of this build that differs from the level 37 build earlier is the silence effect on Counterspell (thanks to Improved Counterspell).

On with the Level 48 Fire Mage Spec
Picking up from earlier with the build up to level 37, the next thing I added was 2 points in Incineration. Incineration increases the critical strike chance for two of the spells that I use most often by 4%. Master of Elements takes 3 points to give back 30% of the mana cost of any spell that causes a critical stike. I only put 2 points into Improved Scorch where I used to have 3 because I wanted to save 3 points for Critical Mass. For every point in Critical Mass you get an extra 2% chance of a critical strike with your fire spells, so it's worthwhile even if you're at level 45 or 46.

After all that I'm left with one more talent point and I'm not sure what to do with it. Blast Wave is pretty cool, so I'll take that. I think the Daze effect on Blast Wave may be new with the patch. The other things I considered all involved changing my points allocated to Ignite and Improved Scorch but I ended up leaving them as-is. So once again, here's the build that I finally decided on, though it was hard to choose between this and the PoM / Pyroblast build.