Originally Posted by Pintofbrew

Webbers: You insisted your fellow mage "stay within 2% of me"? Sorry to sound patronizing, but that's rather excessive demands. A fluctuation of 2% can happen naturally, and most certainly does happen on any boss-fight when you're not standing-and-casting alone. I wouldn't be surprised to see a discrepancy of 7-10% until your caster got the "feel" of the new spec, let alone optimized gear/raid setup/decision-making process for it. Unless you meant "over the whole raid" which is a good normalizing sample to gage overall performance, but suffers immensely from having trash in it. Arcane will eat alive any spec you care to throw at it on trass. from 100% AB time on trash to massive AoE damage, if you're comparing two mages over a whole raid, one fire and one arcane, both performing correctly, and the arcane mage is -only- 5% ahead at the end, he's probably seriously under-performing on the bosses. On trash it's perfectly normal for an Arcane to pull out at the very least 15% ahead.