Welcome to the RK forums and good luck

I want to echo some of the sentiments about fire. For the record, I heal quite a bit, and I will use fire or lightning depending on what is most suitable for a particular instance or raid, but given a chance to dps, I would prefer to use fire. I just like seeing all the DoTs

Unfortunately, while fire is quite workable on the landscape now, it is very rarely useful in raids and instances. DoTs take too long to build up for most trash mobs, and in places that it could be useful, you have more than 3 targets, so again, why bring a fire runekeeper when you could have a champ, AoE traited hunter, or LM burn down more targets at once.

Champ survivability is amazing, so it becomes a choice of bringing a champ, who barely needs heals and does massive dps over far more targets, or bring a fire RK and an extra off tank to keep the mobs off the RK, who while sturdier than before, still melts under multiple raid-level mobs. Or bring a hunter or LM traited for dps and let them root the mobs that are after them. Even a lightning RK is often better off since they can keep dpsing while kiting, while fire-traited either is using their lightning skills without the benefit of traits, and kiting or spamming MF.

I love the dps potential of AoE fire, but from a practical level, I feel like you have to have all the stars aligned and be wearing your lucky socks to have a chance of it doing maximum dps. The range is so limited (the AoE range) that unless you have mobs closely grouped, you don't even always hit 3. Unfortunately combined with the DoTs, it is plenty large enough to make it problematic if anything has to be mezzed. Of course you can switch to lightning skills if there are mezzed mobs nearby...but you will be doing minimally 15% less dps than if you were lightning traited, without considering the benefits of specific class traits and assuming you only trait 5 deep. Currently, if you trait to eliminate the AOE element of fire, you lose a significant amount of single target fire dps because the same traits that have the largest impact on dps are the same ones that make skills AoE.

I would love to see fire be a truly effective dps line for raids, even if it means it goes back to it being a single target line (though I do love the AoE myself). Given the inherent squishiness of the RK, AoE does not seem to be viable without much better CC, and even that is problematic because of the DoTs. One option might be to allow fire to be single target or multiple target depending on specific traits, rather than forcing it toward AoE by linking traits that maximize dps to those that increase targets. Or combine the fire and lightning lines into a single dps line, and give RKs a healing line, a dps line and perhaps a buff/debuff line. Not really sure about that, but it is a thought.