So my guild is struggling on the Big D heroic. Quite a few of us have PuG'd AotC but we are just kinda getting to about 9% and unfortunately wiping.
Overall it's a boomer guild, we enjoy playing with each other and have always done heroic, but frankly CN has been a cut above and the assignment of random abilities/debuffs onto various folks that take weeks of farming to learn a mechanic has been really rough.
Anyway, enough whining.
My friend is an arcane mage, sims at 4.5k dps, loves the arcane spec so getting him to go frost or fire isn't in the cards.
His actual raid DPS though often tops at 1.5k.
I think a lot of the loss is due to two things; movement and having to target swap to the adds.
Because of this I'm encouraging him to play an off-meta build - going with incanter's instead of rune (might even have him go focus magic since he sometimes dies to massacre or impale and that way the 5% crit buff would go on.)
I've also told him to stop target swapping and instead just tunnel Big D.
I think he's losing a lot of dps just in moving from one side of the walkway to the other even if he blinks and as such would be better off just pumping into Sire.
So are my suggestions off-base at all? I don't really play mage, I'm just going by what I can read in the logs.