Been a Long Time Comin'

Yes it has. Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Unfortunately real life issues have conspired to cut into my playtime and keep me from really enjoying myself. So while I have a few minutes, I figure I'd hop on the bandwagon and give my opinions on a few things regarding the impending Patch 2.3, especially as it pertains to mages. (You can read it all here, and I highly encourage you to do so.)

• Reduced mana cost for Arcane Intellect and Arcane Brilliance. Love love love. Gone are the days of ridiculously high mana costs, especially in a raid or group situation where you also have to provide food and water. It takes forever. Speaking of which...
• Ritual of Refreshment. This is a trainable spell (no farming or paying ludicrous prices for books either!) and supposedly it works like the warlock's Well of Souls, only it makes food and water. Once I can get my password to work, I'll give it a shot on the PTR and let you know.
• Arcane Meditation improves mana regen by 10/20/30%. This doubles the previous gains, so if you are deep arcane, rejoice!
• Detect Magic goes away. I'm a bit torn with this one, as I always liked to find out what kind of buffs enemies had, but I suppose I can do without. Most folks I know never used it anyways.
• Evocation regenerates 15% of total mana per tick instead of recovering mana based on Spirit regeneration. So why mages have Spirit on our gear anyways?
• Fire Ward, Frost Ward, Ice Barrier now absorb damage based on your +spell damage. Not sure quite how it scales yet, but I'm looking into it.
• No damage tax for Improved Fireballs and Frostbolts. That's right. Blizzard is apologizing for nerfing your damage output hardcore by "obliterating" the damage tax. Hail to the DPS gods again! Thy name is Mage! Except for frosties, which get...
• Hypothermia (hate!) debuff time increased to 45 seconds. I have no idea why they did this, but it was probably an Arena thing. Silly PvP, spoiling my fun like...
• No more portals in BGs. Are you serious? Honestly, there's nothing like opening a portal to Darnassus on top of a Well of Souls to brighten up a day. Strike this one from your Book o' Portal Tricks, folks. Alas, we barely knew ye.

Those are the big things for mages. Sure engineering might not suck anymore once they get craftable flying mounts, but you're a tailor, right? And they're putting daily quests in for BGs that give you gold and exp. If you have a twink, don't do it. Otherwise, killing for fun and profit! What could be better?

Take a look at the patch notes and forums. While you're at it, take a look at the blogs I link to so you can get an idea of what you can expect from other classes. Besides, they have neat pictures and candy.