New Mage Talent Trees Revealed

[lemekim]

Both other trees have rage talents - ten free rage in Fury and a cheaper Bloodrage in Protection. TM is a nice talent, but I wouldn't call it essential - I know warriors that were very successful without it. I knew Mages without IAE too, but that was far more restrictive to them than a lack of TM is for Warriors and the Mage class needed a buff far more than Warriors do.
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Improved Berserker rage is not a viable alternative at all - you have to be in the Berserker stance to use it in the first place! And if you require rage in another stance, such as to use Mocking Blow in Battle Stance, when you switch stances you will end up with no rage again.

Blood Rage generates only 10 rage instantly (and takes 10 more second to generate 10 more rage), but Improved version of it only lowers the health cost - which is really not that big in the first place. The problem is the fairly long cooldown - 1 minute - and the fact that it puts you in combat for the duration.

This is similar to me saying that Mages don't have to get Instant Arcane Explosion - they can simply get Blastwave in the Fire Tree and that it's a viable alternative! We both know it's not.

Thing is, those warriors that you might know that don't have TM, really do not do much anything else outside of tanking in raids (did I guess right? I probably did). I personally do not know of any warriors that don't have TM. Outside of tanking, when Soloing, DPSing in raids, Tanking casual instances or PvPing, a warrior might change stances 5 times a minute, if not more. So the only situation where a warrior would not miss having TM would be while tanking in a raid, and even then he might need it for an Intercept or a Mocking Blow.

It's much harder to quantify TM to someone who hasn't played a warrior - the benefits of an instant AE are far more visual and obvious to an outside observer. In that situation, a better comparison would be Evocation - warriors generally don't watch mages mana, so they don't really understand just how vital Evocation is to a mage in long fights. Yet, one cannot deny that just because you don't see the apparent effect of it, does not mean that it is not very needed.

You have to remember that the warriors who will benefit the most from this change are warriors who are spending a significant amount of points into Protection tree, which is arguably one of the most gimptastic trees of any class. This will not benefit the warrior specs that you feel are overpowered (Arms/Fury, Fury/Arms), it will benefit the Protection tree above all, and promote more variety.