A Guide to 4.0.1 Fire: talents, skills, glyphs

Spoiler:

Master of Elements (2/2)
Your spell criticals will refund 30% of their base mana cost.

I suppose you remember that in WotLK Fire mages had huge problems with mana, it dropped so quickly, even without using Mana Shield. Now things are completely different - its hardly even possible to run OOM even constantly using Mana Shield. So we're going to ignore this talent.

Impact (2/2)
Gives your damaging spells a 10% chance to reset the cooldown on Fire Blast and to cause the next Fire Blast you cast to stun the target for 2 sec and spread any Fire damage over time effects to nearby enemy targets within 32 yards.

Now that's something interesting. In addition to the old stun chance effect, the talent now can reset cooldown on Fire Blast, which can be useful when you're in an intence fight.
The second effect is actually more of a PvE bonus, that can be used to spread DoTs between an AoE mob pack. In PvP, I cant think of a situation where it can be helpful.

Edit: It appears that this talent does not spread dots on targets under effects of control; also it copies all dots, including Living Bomb.

Cauterize (2/2)
You have a 100% chance that an attack which would otherwise kill you would instead bring you to 40% of your maximum health. However, you will burn for 12% of your maximum health every 1.50 sec for the next 6 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once per minute.

A huge buff to Fire tree, don't skip this talent under any circumstances. While being quite useful in both BGs/wPvP and Arenas, this is almost a cheat when it comes to duels.

Blast Wave (1/1)

This spell got reworked, and I cant say I'm happy with it. Blast Wave no longer knocks off enemies, but now you can cast it anywhere, similar to Firestarter.

Hot Steak (1/1) and Improved Hot Steak (2/2)

Simple. Instead or randomly proccing Arcane Missiles these talent change it so that our critical strikes with Fireball, Frostfire Bolt, Scorch, Pyroblast and Fire Blast will have a chance to trigger same old Hot Steak effect. For one exception: Pyroblast will no longer cost mana.

Improved Scorch (2/2)
Reduced the mana cost of your Scorch spell by 100%.

Along with Hot Steak this is the very reason Fire now has an almost never ending mana pool.

Molten Shields (1/1)
Reduced the global cooldown of your Mage Ward spell by 1 sec and your Mage Ward triggers the Blazing Speed effect when it dissipates from absorbing damage.

A rather helpful talent. Having a low GCD on Mage Ward is quite good since as Fire you will most likely have close to zero haste (which means a full 1.5 sec GCD), plus having a chance to proc Blazing Speed in fights against casters can be good if you need to escape.
Still, the old version of the talent was a lot better.

Combustion (1/1)

This spell also got reworked along with Blast Wave. And yes, at this point it's also worse that the old one.
Basically, it combines all your DoT effects on the target (without removing them) and create a new one called Combustion, dealing the same damage as all of them combined. This means that to make the best use of it, try to cast it after dealing a critical strike with Pyroblast, and make sure you also have Living Bomb on it. The damage would be pretty low though, around 3.5k per tick. Again, we're still in need of Mastery rating to make our DoTs start dealing fine damage.

Firestarter (1/1)
Your Molten Armor allows you to cast the Scorch spell while moving instead of reducing the chance you are critically hit.

A fine talent, but not as good as it might seem. There are two things that make this talent worse that it could've been: first, Scorch damage is still low. Actually, now it's even lower if compared to everyone else's; and second, you'll have to to stick to Molten Armor.

Improved Flamestrike (2/2)

Another PvE talent to buff mage's DPS against mob packs.

Pyromaniac (2/2)

And another one. Feel free to skip it too.

Living Bomb (1/1)

This spell is almost the same, except that now you can't cast it on more than 3 targets. While this is clearly a PvE nerf, there is another thing that I noticed, though it might be a bug: you can now re-cast Living Bomb on the same target, resetting it's duration. Be careful!

Now that we're done with the Fire tree, lets see where we can spend the rest of our points. On level 80 you will have 5 talent points left maximum.

Arcane:
Neither Arcane Concentration nor Netherwind Presence should get our attention as we don't have problems with mana and Haste is an unimportant stat for a Fire mage.
Improved Counterspell on the other hand is still a great talent, especially in these bursty times.

Frost:
Here we have two great talents: Piercing Ice, which simply increases our critical chance up to 3%; and Shatter, which doubles or triples (depends on either if you spend 1 or 2 talent points) our critical strike chance against frozen targets. Obviously, with our gear focused on critical rating we should have about 40%, so getting it tripled would be overkill. Therefore I'd put only one point (1/2) into Shatter.

Spoiler:

As of new patch, we now have a new type of glyphs - Primal, which makes it to a total number of 9: 3 of Primal, 3 of Major, 3 of Minor. Lets see what choices we have:

Fireball Glyph
Increases the critical strike chance of your Fireball spell by 5%.

Obviously a PvE glyph.

Frostfire Bolt Glyph
Increases the damage done by your Frostfire Bolt by 15% and your Frostfire Bolt now deals 3% additional damage over 12 sec, stacking up to 3 times, but no longer reduces the victim's movement speed.

And interesting glyph. The choice to either use it or not depends on if you mind loosing the slowing effect.

Living Bomb Glyph
Increases the damage of your Living Bomb spell by 3%.

A terrible, terrible glyph. Maybe with enough Mastery rating it would make some sort of difference, but right now the damage from Living Bomb is just too low.

Molten Armor Glyph
Your Molten Armor grants an additional 2% spell critical strike chance.

A fine glyph. If you're specced into Improved Scorch, you shouldn't miss it.

Pyroblast Glyph
Increases the critical strike chance of your Pyroblast spell by 5%.

Don't skip it.

Mage Armor Glyph
Your Mage Armor regenerates 20% more mana.

Better than it actually seems. If you're not aware yet, Mage Armor now has a very nice mana regenerating bonus, giving the mage around 1k mana each 5 seconds.

Blast Wave
Increases the duration of Blast Wave's slowing effect by 1 sec.

Definitely not the best choice. Use it only if you have a free glyph space.

Dragon's Breath Glyph
Reduced the cooldown of your Dragon's Breath by 3 sec.

Update: Currently does more damage than help.

Mana Shield Glyph

Basically it reduced the cooldown of your Mana Shield from 12 seconds to 10.
I have to admit, when I first saw this Glyph I thoight it was laughable. After doing a few duels I changed my mind: with our mana pool being almost infinite, and often use of Mana Shield would do no harm leaving us OOM like before, and it definitely helps surviving stuff.

Fire

* Fire Specialization now increases damage of Fire spells by 10%, down from 25%.