There's a lot of little dings against mages in the 2.3 patch, the biggies including evocation flat return and the removal of detect magic and the idea to give EVERYONE detect magic for free. Yeah, that makes sense. Warrior cant even cast a spell but he can detect buffs on ANYONE. I feel kinda sorry for the druids more than anything.
This was all handled well by Blizzard by trying to appear fair and even handed by removing the damage tax on the empowered fireball/icebolt which was a broken idea they introduced a few patches ago. Should we be happy? Then they give us this Ritual of Refreshment shit, which again, appears beneficial for us. OH U DONT HAVE TO OPEN TRADE WINDOWS. Wow, yet another mage change that probably benefits every other class more than it actually benefits the mage.
The good news is the battlegrounds, and rules there in got some massive tweaking. Now players can cast buffs and whatnot FREE OF CHARGE before a round starts, and for a short period of time after rezzed by the spirit guide. I cant count the number of times i've ditched the Arcane Int just cause I needed the mana to fight someone not 10 feet away. Very very cool. They also created a debuff for people who like to abuse the flag drop system in WSG. You drop the flag now you get a 3 second debuff that prevents picking up the flag. Take that you cheap bastard freaks!
Oh, on the tech side they re-worked the video options and optimized the game for dual core systems finally. I was seeing a pretty big gain in WoW on two different dual core systems. Now you can run around silvermoon at 60+ fps, when normally you looked at 48/51 fps with settings maxed.
