TB isn't lesser but he's pretty much as frail if not frailer than regulus.  He's got a lot of AoE attacks that require you to get kind of close to use properly so it's really easy to misjudge a situation with him and get owned.

From my experience fighting against him, most people just don't know how to run with him. TB should be running whenever someone starts attacking him. He just doesn't have the resiliance to survive in combat. I've made tonnes of kills against TBs that just don't know when to run.

Shitting me?

With FB you can get the recharge to 3 seconds.  That means in slighlty more time than the 10sec duration on spit(a single spit won stack.  Also you have to factor in cast time.) you can do 4050 damage from 3 fbs.  That's uh.. considerably more than spits 1150.  Not to mention fireball is 20yard range and spit is 15.

People just don't know how to play.

I assume you mean taking the favor item, the flag and the artifact weapon that gives -20% cooldowns. Well the tooltip might say 3 seconds but is not, try it for ur self. You will see on the count down timer that it will show 4 seconds, and if you time it u ll see again that is indeed 4 seconds.

So 4 secs CD + 1 secs cast, thats 5 seconds for 1050 damage or 1350 if you are fully talented. And you can and will be lock out of ur spells eventually with all the silences and interrupts that goes on. Thats is 100% it will happen. Atleast 1 every 15-20 seconds.

Now consider your white damage with max fire aura, 7-8 points in enchanced attribitues (meaning skipping the end talent of fire bolt) and ashakndor weapon. You ll be hitting for 400 damage per 0.6 seconds and u ll have a 10% to score a 4x hit for about 1.6k damage. In 15 seconds with 0.6 attack speed u will fire 25 times. 25 x 400~ = 10k damage.Am rounding up numbers here, you can get up to 600 with the right gear.

You will also have a 10% chance for a 4x hit which is 2.5 of your attacks, i ll round it down to 2. It will be 2 x  1600k hits. Basically for each crit you hit for 1.2k more. So thats 10k from normal plus 2.4k from crits, 12.4k damage in 15 seconds with no fear of a silence or interrupts (stuns will stop you though but then again so at your fire ball which will put it on a CD again with out actually casting it)

You can ofcourse spam fireball each time its off CD, it takes 1 seconds, but you can have almost 2 normal attacks in 1 second with the chance of a 4x crit hit.

I personaly like to keep it of cooldown and use fireball as a finisher when the opponent is getting low. Its a solid damage and you can cast it as you said from 20 yards and will travel even further, it can even follow teleported people.

Basically it all depence on your gear. At some point normal damage will out dps the spells which makes me thing this is a flaw in the game. Spells should get some benefits from gear damage wise.

P.S also dont forget you leech life from normal attacks which makes u stay more in the battle.

This is just my opinion ofcourse. i could be wrong

If you're going to go for an "autoattack spec", wouldn't you be better off going frost?  You can freeze your opponents, slow them, and move while attacking.  The only downside is you lose your fire aura, but I think that might be worth it.

its easy to under-estimate the Torch because he dies so easily. you really can't lead an attack on your own as TB, its just a recipe for getting a quick death. on the other hand if you're working with someone kinda tanky who can either help keep you alive or help keep enemies controlled you get to seriously abuse the massive AoE and burst damage potential of Torch's numerous damage spells. 

you will, however, surely die if your general approach is to walk up to a fight and start nuking everything in sight. Torch is a glass cannon. 

Which indicates that the UB player had no idea what he was doing.

It's hard to make judgements about DGs when so many players can't play well.

Does fire aura work on TB without switching to fire (since it is a passive skill)?

No, you need to be in the form the aura is for.

People were too busy creaming their pants at OMG 4X SHATTER 2900 DAMAGE in beta that they didn't realize frost TB has some great debuffs.  Getting your attack speed and move speed reduced so much by TB is insanely painful.. especially when they're mostly aoe's.

With the proper build, Unclean Beast can leave Spit at level 1 and shred other DGs. Mind you the build leans heavily on the correct items (and if you play in a game with Favor items disallowed, it won't work), but a UB without maxed out or high level Spit is very viable.

I see fire as more damage and frost as abit better control / surviability.

Personaly i kinda like fire more and you can stack the cooldown items and your damage is insane. I will try out some more frost builds and see how it goes.

I don't no if this is just me but when in fire mode and chasing someone TB has trouble attacking them while they run away anyone else noticed this ? and he seems to slow down quite alot.

Frost doesn't seem to pack the damage needed to really kill anyone maybe im doing something wrong with shatter but i could never get giant big ones :/