Mages in 5.2?

[Akraen]

My point, which perhaps I should re-clarify, isn't that *I* am having trouble on Windlord, it's that upkeep talents make us want to shy away from responsibilities like CC on encounters, because it compounds the timing challenge.

I love a challenge and hate feeling defeated, so I intentionally chose the toughest way to fight Heroic Windlord, by being frost, with NT, and invocation. I wanted a successful parse to compare NT to FB. That's more or less a separate issue, I could've done less DPS to make the fight easier by using IW or RoP. But regardless, the true point of me telling the windlord story was that upkeep talents are dumb.

[Polarthief]

"My mage isn't horrifically OP with no effort required any more. QQ"

I never wanted that and I like how everyone just dismisses actual Mage concerns with obnoxious shit like that.

I'm not enjoying my class because Fire is crap and the fun levels are seriously lacking (blame L90 talents for that). The speccs and class overall also don't have a real identity.

---------- Post added 2013-01-23 at 04:38 PM ----------

Arcane has a really boring rotation and gets nerfed.
PVP-Nerfs with every patch.
Hotfixes that destroy a spec.
No raidutility (buffs are applied by other classes and even hunter can activate Bloodlust) like Health Stones or Cooldowns.

If You want to teleport around, yeah it's a cool class.
If You want to raid You'll feel pretty useless.

You forgot to mention the L90 talents and lack of class identity, in addition to forcing us to respecc every week or two.

Total full respeccs this expansion: about 7.

[Skadovsk]

You think it is part of their game design to have people switching classes all the time?

Not really, even tho its easy now that everything is account bound, but why use a spec and talents that under perform greatly while increasing difficulty.
If all you want is raw challenge there is always people to compete against on logs with the same "easy" spec.

[Elegiac]

I don't expect everyone to love the 90 talents and know why they find them annoying sometimes, I just personally think they add to the gameplay rather than taking them away and make the Mage rotation more challenging and rewarding.
It is also something else to track, and on already complex encounters that can leave people rather irritated!

The situation with the 90 talents goes beyond the matter of 'not being able to please everyone'. There seems to be the implication that people that don't like the level 90 talents (which, as I have seen in a number of places seems to be a majority) are somehow bad players that want a free ride. The Level 90 talents are not liked because while they may be 'challenging' (which in my terminology is a euphemism for restrictive and clunky), the reward they provide for the effort required to use them 'correctly' is not worth the hassle.

[Elegiac]

I see all these people saying "Mages are Awesome" or "Roll a Warlock" and things like that.... I'm gonna throw this out at you... just because I can. Roll a Boomkin. Why? Because no one has said to do it yet.

I main a mage and still enjoy it. I have found myself not raiding at the moment so I guess I can call myself a casual player. I have been keeping up with the potential 5.2 changes and it's a bit scary if you intend to raid so looking towards a lock or boomkin might be the way to go.

If you just wanna have fun with a class that doesn't make your brain explode from juggling DoTs or Paying attention to Lunar/Solar cycles... Mage all the way.

Also note, people saying that the mage play style is "far from fun" should be taking with a grain of salt. They may not enjoy the play style, but that doesn't mean you won't.

The "this is my opinion" caveat was already implied.