Coming Soon: Changes for mages

[Lissa]

My point isn't that it's a frivolous change. My point is that we don't know. So far all the information we have is that Blizzard is balancing new PvE encounters around the assumption that every mage has ice block. That sounds to me like a good reason to give every mage ice block.

It's not about mages v. other classes. In terms of PvE design, if you assume that every mage has ice block and you do not make it a trained skill, you're forcing raid groups to bring all frost mages, in direct contrast with the way they've built talent trees to this point in TBC. Again, this is why they made Innervate a trained skill, because bringing a resto druid versus bringing a non-resto druid was such a wide gulf in capability.

As to exactly what they're doing that'll make ice block mandatory? I can't say. Just because we can't think of it doesn't make it impossible to do. At this juncture I think we should all take Blizzard's word when they say "Here's Ice Block. You'll need it." Better, I think, than automatically disbelieving them.

I don't honestly see how they can introduce something and say that Mages have a need for Ice Block unless they're going to institued Nef part 2 (Nef Mage call to remove mage call effects). This is the only thing I can see them doing given what IB does, and to do that is really old and tiring. Of all the fights that they have rehashed so far, they've always added a twist to it (Lurker being C'Thun phase 1, but without the jumping death lightning and insta-kill beam for example). If they need to make it so all mages have IB, they're basically rehasing the Nef fight's class calls which would be fairly boring now matter what you try to do. If that's their reasoning to make it so all mages have IB, I say to them, go rethink your fight and come up with a better mechanism than to have a one trick solution of turning a talent into a class skill. All the other talents they shifted to class skills prior to this were necessary, but to design fights around the Nef class call aspect to justify giving a talent as a class skill is silly and wasteful time spent (and probably boring for every raider that has seen that type of fight).