Best skill tree to use for dungeons (mage)

[tommyzetecs]

Hi All, My frist post in here 8)
Ive lvled 2 toons so far using the guide (hunter and warrior) and decided that i like the look of a mage(currently lvl 26), But im finding doing the same quest again that ive already done with 2 toons in the last 3 weeks a bit dull, so ive decided to lvl just using the dungeon finder.
My question is what to go for? i use frost at the min but wondered if fire or arcane do more damage?
Im still a total NOOB so any help would be great.

[chaos5061]

You can try this site wowpopular.com. It lists the most popular builds for any class. So far from a DPS perspective fire is the highest DPS spec unless blizzard changed something I don't know about. Come cataclysm all builds should be raid viable. They should all have DPS within 500 of each other. So it will be what the raid needs more at the moment. In the cataclysm dungeons the frost spec won't be too bad because of the need for more crowd control than other dungeons. And frost has more crowd control options the the other mage specs.

[Kamchak]

My Mage was the third 80 I leveled.
Around your level (26) frost is what I'd recommend.
The issue with fire is this; yes it has the potential to be a higher DPS output even at your level, but it is a crit-based spec. This means that low crit rating will not allow your damaging spells to proc that often (if at all in a fight), leaving you with lower damaging rotations.
But changing a spec is very cheep and easy to do. Give both a try and see what works for you better.

[duts]

duel spec only cost 100g

well i did my mage frost unthill 70 then fire
but with this new patch i would say arcane all the way

[Kamchak]

I agree, arcane is the spec I use 90% of the time.
However, the difference in Arcane power is AB. Without AB, frost is superior, based off both the math and experience.
Once you can spec into AB, dump frost spec like that psychotic ex we all had once and go arcane.