Fire, frost?

[MongoJerry]

I can see that in a big zerg you can move into a massed group of enemies, aoe until they focus on you, iceblock to get them to stop focussing then aoe again. So it's like 2 goes at aoe-ing. If your main killing tactic is aoe-ing packed enemies then iceblock probably beats anything in fire

Iceblock is also (annoyingly) good for removing dots on a mage. You can step forward to use a ranged aoe attack and then when you get hit by 5+ dots, step/blink back and iceblock out of all of it. A quick jump in and out of iceblock can also cure a lot of crowd control spells/skills used on you. Plus, if you're dying, you can iceblock and frequently find your opponents switch targets so that you can switch out of iceblock and blink away to safety. And if that doesn't work, you can cold snap and iceblock again. Plus, you can be healed while in iceblock.

Most of the mages in the Offenders are switching to ice builds for three reasons:
1. A lot of them like to play CTF, where crowd control is critically important.
2. They like the survivability and disruptiveness that ice builds provide.
3. They do a lot of Molten Core and Onyxia, where mobs tend to have a lot of fire resistance and are more vulnerable to cold attacks.
4. Players also tend to have more fire resist gear than cold resist gear, so the seemingly increased damage that fire mages can deal is partially (but not totally) mitigated.
5. They love the fact that they can shred apart any melee class, and they do quite well against other classes as well.

I'm not saying that fire mages don't have their use. They certainly can deliver a punch. I am saying, though, that I see many high level mages switching from fire to ice, because they like the general utility that being an ice mage provides. And when ice mages are talking about having 1.5-2.1k ice bolts against players, that shows that they're not lacking in dps either.