Mage 90 Talents are terrible

[voltaa]

The mages in my guild all tried different level 90 talents last night, and just as I suspected, they felt fairly natural, while yes I did have to channel in bad stuff from time to time (at least on stone guards) the heal from invocation negated the effects.

From the discussion I had with one of the other mages, RoP wasn't an issue on stone guards and IW felt great on Feng

[Sattori]

Put Invo up before you accept the queue to enter the CM, continue as required from there, no downtime bar on boss fights (considering the fact that most CM speedruns attempt to ignore as much trash as possible).
Alternatively take IW, passive 6% buff for trash that you have to pull, use on bosses in conjunction with Ice Barrier (IW is absorbed first) and 'soak' some damage to keep the buff up.

Don't see why either of the above wouldn't work.

Then you aren't thinking about it very hard. Invocation's buff will cost you up to 6 seconds from every pull simply because the rest of your group will get to the trash and engage it before you can finish channeling.
Mages are balanced around getting an average of 10-12% +dmg from the lvl 90 talents. If you're only getting +6% from IW on trash, you're not going to do as much dps as another class.
If anything, RoP is the most viable since it will only cost you 1.5s of DPS time, which you could probably squeeze in before pulls.

Having switched to playing my lock over my mage, it's kind of hilarious to look at the hoops they expect mages to jump through. I'll take my improved Ice Flows talent for warlock lvl90 over this mage bullsh**, tyvm.

[Deleted]

Then you aren't thinking about it very hard. Invocation's buff will cost you up to 6 seconds from every pull simply because the rest of your group will get to the trash and engage it before you can finish channeling.
Mages are balanced around getting an average of 10-12% +dmg from the lvl 90 talents. If you're only getting +6% from IW on trash, you're not going to do as much dps as another class.
If anything, RoP is the most viable since it will only cost you 1.5s of DPS time, which you could probably squeeze in before pulls.

Having switched to playing my lock over my mage, it's kind of hilarious to look at the hoops they expect mages to jump through. I'll take my improved Ice Flows talent for warlock lvl90 over this mage bullsh**, tyvm.

Actually, as I said earlier because you avoid as much trash as possible and are chainpulling anything that can be chainpulled (including any trash before a boss into the boss itself) if you Evocate just as the trash is about to die you're minimizing your downtime during the boss fights. Factoring this into it, 4% less damage on whatever trash packs you DO pull will hurt, sure, but it prevents downtime, which is sometimes preferential.
Having thought about it, yes, RoP is perfectly viable for CMs especially as there aren't really many extra boss abilities that force movement and unless you're unlucky with certain targeted abilities, you barely have to move for them anyway.

See, I switched to mage from Shadow, and compared to the newer Shadow, Mages have so much more to do (as Frost anyway, Fire is kinda meh) and I love it ^^.

[Gamdwelf]

I've been using RoP and I really like it, although I'm thinking of switching from ice floes to PoM so I can insta cast it, but on the move is ok too.

Only problem is when I forget to cast it.