It seems like complication comes from that single target gearing strategy is not reflecting all kinds of raid bosses fights. Another thing is that twilight devastation and twisted appendage corruption influences gearing optimization of askmrrobot.
So, my experience in raids is following: on single target with recommended crit-haste approach I got stomped by mastery mages with wrist+font+pvp-trink-on-use. Their damage in combust phase is insane. That is possible since stacking mastery +% from corruption is a thing , and seems like most of the times it works.
In M+ I got recommended twilight devastation items and relatively even distribution between stats (crit is still high). The reliability of that solution is low since you cannot guarantee that you always land those devastations on targets. I tried full mastery approach outside of askmrrobot recommendations and it is better a bit in simc on 3-4 targets and seems like its better in real M+ (while I cannot be assured enough, its difficult to measure statistical significance in that). And it’s more reliable in terms of persieved standart deviation in actual M+.
I got relatively the same (and probably better) recommendations from askmrrobot when I customized multipliers for twilight devastation and twisted appendage reducing them.
But I still got no idea how to overcome overall confusion about the recommended gearing strategy for mages in raids. AskMrRobot was giving right recommendations all the way from WoD expansion up till now. I used to be satisfied with them and now I’m confused.
The question is whether given recommendations converge to the most efficient solution if you follow them all the way about corruption, etc or most efficient solution is only reachable with planning outside of given recommendations. There is an alternative viable gearing strategy - full crit. Maybe given recommendations for single target ocasionally converge there.
The whole situation seems a bit frustrating. I know the correct ways to press buttons and nevertheless couple times in the raid I was told that I’m bad mage since my dps isn’t good enough. And I was using recommended strategy for single target on nzoth encounter for example.