LF advice: Warrior PvP and Mage PvE

[STBU]

I've been in and out of the WoW loop recently due to training in the US Army, and I'm also bad out of loop with the warrior class since late Wrath(due to powerleveling a mage prior to leaving for Basic Training in October of last year). Now, I am about 4.5 or so weeks shy of finishing up my AIT(Army's job training), and being National Guard, I get to go back home.

For warriors, is Arms still viable despite the changes it underwent, or is PvProt the fotm? And in any case, for arena teams, who should the warrior's battle buddies be, and how does he complement their skillsets?

For my mage question: I noticed that the two choices for pve mage was Arcane and Fire. I also noticed that while fire relies heavily on critting for hot streak procs, most gear out there for casters is loaded on haste and short on crit, and besides fireball(which I'm not sure why I'd use it since fire mages are mobile casters by nature), the only spell in a fire mage's arsenal that can benefit from haste is Scorch, and mine is at like 1.34 sec....which makes haste the one stat I don't look at with the fire build. I tinkered a bit with Arcane, and notice while the dmg output was far more consistent(especially while maintaining my mana pool), I wasn't as mobile as I am in fire, and well I've heard many dungeons require you to move around a lot. In the end, is it a matter of personal preference which spec I choose to pve dps with or is there a hands down decision on either spec(probably unlikely). Furthermore, if I do go fire, will I ever start building my crit like I need to or is blizz intending for hot streak procs to be rare?

Please reply soon, thanks!

[sifuedition]

Actually, frost and fire are winning out. Arcane just suffers too much due to mobility.

Having said that, I still see a lot of arcane mages. You will need to learn a fairly new strat with burn phases and maintenance phases.

Fire still values haste, often over crit because we can't get enough crit at current gear levels to make hotstreak even close to what it was at the end of wrath. Haste gives fireball/frostfire bolt better cast times and these are frequently 35-50% of our dps.

[STBU]

So then there are times in fire pve that fireball is used?

[sifuedition]

Fireball is our spam. The last update I saw on EJ (about 4-6 weeks ago) it slightly edged out frostfire bolt but very slight.

Get critical mass up with scortch. Get living bomb up and don't refresh until it explodes. As long as those are up, fireball spam. Switch to scortch when moving and MAYBE to fish for a hotstreak proc if the RNG gods are being stingy (more casts = more proc chances at the cost of short term dps). Hotstreak will not proc that often though so if you are used to Wrath HS, be prepared to adjust your expectations. A single boss fight I usually get 5-8 HS procs.

[Tschus]

Though scorch is a faster spell, fireball has a higher crit chance and better dps. I seldom cast scorch just for fishing HS procs, but for moving/mana conservation/refresh critical mass etc.

[sifuedition]

You're right and it may have been careless of me to state it the way I did. I have had times when HS refused to proc and I switched to scortch and got a proc within three casts....which is actually meaningless and probably had nothing to do with using scortch. It's anecdotal, but I'll probably do it again if RNG is failing me. I won't maintain it long (5 or so scortch max before giving up) but there it is. That's why I cap'd maybe in my statement but as a matter of advice, I probably shouldn't have said it at all.