I cannot for the life of me figure out what the hell Alter Time is.

"Alter the fabric of time, causing the caster to return to their current location, health, mana, and conditions after 4 sec."

So...you cast it...and then you end up where you were the way you were...what?

You cast it. All damage, mana you use, debuffs, and your position get reset to the place where you were when you cast it. If you die, it stops the effect.

It's kind of like rewind time in one of the new 5-man instances.

Yes lots of pvp implications, you notice Deep Freeze is listed under all Mage specs too?

Also Arcane looks like its getting its own orb, though I don't really see the point now. Alter Time looks great.

It's a lot like the main mechanic in the upcoming Murozond fight. When you cast it, it "remembers" your location, health, mana, and conditions. Four seconds later, as long as you're not dead, you get all of those restored. So you need to make good use of those four seconds. You could avoid evil debuffs if you knew they were coming, or Cauterize to survive anything with full health.

But if "conditions" includes cooldowns, you could use Alter Time, use up to four other cooldowns, and then get them reset after having used them. It'd be like Cold Snap, but requiring very intelligent use. I'm thinking twin Fire Orbs, using Combustion on a target that already has Combustion on them, and some other fun combos. Yeah. It's gonna be a party.

hmmm if it includes CDs, that's a really powerful ability. would that remove satiated debuff too? mages, in theory, could get +4 secs of bloodlust/timewarp. might even be OP. but i really like this spell for mages. it feels so arcane rather than elemental.

Alter Time sounds crazy!! though I still want Summon Pheonix :( one day we'll be worthy of that spell, I just know it!! They still need to fix the Blast Wave/Dragon Breath/Slow tier.. soooooooo boring!! I want a tier with exciting new abilities too, like Avatar or Ursoc Vortex!! ;O;

I must admit when i first heard of the new talent system i was very sad.

However, seeing this has got me excited that everything might just be okay :)

What most interests me is that many class abilities that once any spec would have are now becoming certain specs only.

(For example: Only Holy Pallies will have Holy Wrath, only Ret Pallies will have Exorcism)

It will be sad to see some of these abilities go but it will be nice to clean up my bar a bit.

I'm still pretty excited, but I'm surprised by the absence of one spell in particular: Fingers of Frost. Managing FoF is the only thing that makes the Frost Tree engaging and the spell allows Frost Mages to take advantage of our mastery in PVE.

As it stands, it looks like we're back to casting Frostbolt until Brainfreeze procs.

Also, I'm a little disappointed in how mages look like they will play in lower levels. I re-leveled a mage in the Cata beta and I was very pleased with how engaging it was to play a lowbie mage. We had an opener (Frostbolt), a nuke (Fire Ball) and a finisher (Arcane Missiles). All of this is going away and it looks like from level 1-10, a new mage is spamming FFB.

@Boozard

I think if you use it to try and get more Bloodlust, it will end up hurting you. Cause if you use it before the satiated debuff, you'll only have BL for 4secs. If you use it during BL, well wait....that's a horse of a different color isn't it! Good call sir!