Coming Soon: Changes for mages

[Xame]

Well, Arcane Blast is a pretty terrible spell without 2-piece Tier 5, and only mediocre with,

Most fire mages pre-T6 are either in Tailor crafted which is +arcane and not frost and/or 2/T5 with set bonus. Raw spells, I would agree with you completely. But cookie cutter gearing forces other choices.

and where openers are concerned, I find it's only a concern in 5-mans. In raids, the first target to receive DPS should always get a misdirection on the pull to set them with a solid 3k+ aggro. Similarly,

Misdirection is the next 3 sources of hunter damage are moved to the tank. I play the odds here and race with the hunter+tank on damage using AB even as the tank is running in to engage the boss. The -40% to threat means I should never win this race. I would never dare to try this with fire or frost because of misses on their part and crits on mine. This move/trick is one of the few mage advantages in TBC.

I never cast Ice Armor in raids, there's no need for frost resistance, and only very limited use for frost nova.

As I said, all junk points. I PvP a lot and utility to me is PvP. Lots of frost mages here and enhancement shaman that have frost shock not on diminishing return. 20% reflect is huge fun. 5pts in improved frostbolt is also utility and has some limited raiding use as you point out. All I wanted to do in my post was point out more choices with the junk points since it will be the only differences between us new cookie cutter PvE fire mages. As we both agree, the differences here are very small and how much utility is in the eye of the individual mage's play style.