Thought I'd start this for hints and tips (sorry, no DPS stories tom!) on Ulduar bosses for us squishies - particularly since the fast moving fights aren't the best for mages. If you have any tips to add for bosses please edit this post rather than start a new one, so we can keep everything in one place.

Hodir

1) Although this is a fast moving fight, it should be still possible to get good dps with ttw/fire spec. Keep molten armour up in preference to mage armor to take full advantage of the npc buffs.

2) Never stay standing still long because of the Biting Cold debuff - try cast and move, cast and move. Its a pain for fire mages due to the long cast time on fireball - never stay still to cast two in succession.

3) Save frost ward for when Hodir does frozen blows - the healers will thank you...

4) If you can, stack the buffs from the NPCs - Toasty fire (mage/s Missy/Sissy Flamecuffs), storm cloud (shaman Elementalist xx, increases crit), Starlight (druid Ellie xx, increases haste). Sometimes though you can lose more dps than you gain by having to move constantly, due to the runes. If you're finding this and/or struggling with health, focus on freeing the mage npc/s and standing next to the Toasty fire. This increases your spellpower dramatically (it stacks) but also prevents the Biting Cold debuff, which means you don't have to keep moving.

The highest DPS spec for Hodir is Frostfire because of how the Storm Clouds work:

Storm Clouds are cast on players by the Shamman NPC. Being close to a player bearing this buff grants us Storm Power.

135% Increased Critical Strike Damage

This makes FFB spec the highest DPS for this particular fight due to the high crit multiplier this spec is based upon. With Arcane Blast I have crit for 64,000, I'm pretty sure we can get higher crits with FFB if we take Ignite into account.

Billÿ

I'm not a mage specialist, but, some time ago i went in a raid and missed hodir hard mode on 10-man with 3 seconds, and there was a mage with about 10k dps (he had i think more with heroism) and he was arcane specced, but this was a 3-minute fight, similard to OS 3 drakes zerg strategy and as such arcane may only be good for hard mode as the fight is relatively short. Maybe arcane may help as well, i dunno it's probably worth giving a try (if you haven't already that is )

Thing about arcane is that it's very good with Burst DPS, scales very well with heroism and doesn't create much threat. However, a Frostfire mage will still destroy an arcane mage. With Fire/TTW spec I've hit for over 100,000 damage with a 2.4sec cast crit. It is also important to take into consideration that arcane's cooldowns are great... if used with the buff you'll do massive damage but not for long... it'll look good on the DPS but not on the damage done.