Going into Sanctum of Domination, Fire had been heavily nerfed and was looking unplayable in progression for top guilds due to its low single target damage; however, the damage of its single target spells was increased significantly just before the raid was released. This puts Mage in a very interesting position where all three specs are viable to play in this raid and have different strengths and weaknesses. Fire still does lower overall single target damage compared to Frost and Arcane, but is close enough that the strongest spec for a given fight tends to be based on how well the damage profile of each spec lines up with when you need to do damage on each fight. Arcane can use
Arkane Macht between every 90 and 100 seconds depending on the number of
Freizaubern procs you get for
Arkanes Genie. Fire can use
Einäschern around every 70 seconds thanks to
Zündeln (sometimes more often with
Kampfrausch and/or
Seele der Macht), and Frost does consistent damage throughout the whole fight, but requires high uptime with
Rutschiges Eis for pure single target situations to be competitive with Arcane. Each spec has a different ideal covenant to take full advantage of its strengths, so switching for progression on each boss was not feasible for us. For Fire you want to be Night Fae, for Frost you want to be Venthyr (but any covenant is fine for AoE heavy fights like Kel'Thuzad), and for Arcane you want to be Kyrian (Venthyr is also fine for single target fights). We used mostly Kyrian Arcane because it has both single target and AoE burst damage for situations like Sylvanas' Phase 2 burns and Painsmith's end of intermission adds, strong overall single target damage for fights like Guardian of the First Ones, and gains extra priority target damage when adds are stacked with the priority target thanks to
Resonanz and
Arkane Harmonie (Arcane Infinity).
Dorovon 