Does my spec really matter?

So I was thinking about mage talents the other day. It's truly amazing to me how they can have so many different talent specs, and yet still put out an incredible amount of damage. You see arcane mages, fire mages, frost mages, arcane/fires, arcane/frosts, and they all work exceptionally well at putting out huge amounts of DPS.

So why does it matter what spec a mage chooses? I mean, you could potentially switch depending on what gear you have. If you have a ton of +crit, it would make sense to go arcane/fire. If you don't have a lot of +hit, full arcane is a decent choice.

Other than that, does your spec really matter? As long as my damage output is the same, who cares?

Well, hold it right there. There's more to a good raider than the damage meters. You could be putting out 1000 DPS, and be a bad raider for certain fights. I'm not even meaning that you're pulling agro or anything so obvious. There are little things that can make a difference.

For example, if you're one of 3 mages, and you're an arcane mage. And the other two mages are arcane/frost. Your DPS is quite high I'm certain. But what if you went deep frost? Would that be better?

Technically, from a DPS standpoint, the answer is no. Deep arcane and deep fire have been proven to have better DPS than deep frost with the same gear. But if you went deep frost, not only do you get more survivability and utility, but you increase the crit chance of each frost mage by 10% for a boss fight. That's incredible! It won't show up on your damage meters, that's for certain. But it'll increase the raid's DPS by a lot.

Same thing can be said for what warlock curse to use. Obviously a warlock gets the most out of curse of agony. But if he uses curse of shadows or curse of elements, the raid's DPS goes up.

So now you're saying, "why don't one of the other frost mages switch?" I don't know, why don't they? This leads to one thing that I think is incredbly important for a raid. I like to call it spec-matching. Spec-matching means working with the other people of your class to determine if there are wasted talents for the group. For example, only one paladin needs imp blessing of wisdom. Other paladins could put those 2 talent points somewhere else more useful. Same thing goes for warlocks. Having shadow embrace is incredible for a raid boss. But only one warlock needs to spend those 5 points there. Everyone else can put them somewhere more useful.

Working with other people of your class can ensure that everyone is maximizing their contribution to the raid. Let the druid going deep balance get imp faerie fire, and have a second druid get imp thorns. Let one lock get shadow embrace and another get imp curse of elements/shadows. Let one priest get imp divine spirit and another get circle of healing. Working together on specs can mean a huge boost to a raid.

And boosting the raid means downing more bosses more quickly and more regularly. Which is a result everyone likes.