Read through Eyonix's post at Cataclysm Stat & System Changes for the context of this, if you haven't already.
Obviously there's some great stuff for casters here: No more trying to make spirit work for casters and less healer/caster gear contention.
But I think there's some significant concerns as well. This is just my first set of impressions after reading Eyonix's post.
All casters still on the same system
The biggest is that, of course, we're still all locked into identical stats as casters. Other games had INT casters versus WIS casters, like melee have AGI versus STR. We're all INT casters here.
So all the common items, including trinkets, are still in high contention by a large subset of your raid. Blizzard has so far been unwilling to adjust drop rates to reflect this, resulting in very low caster gear averages relative to their melee, tank, and holy paladin counterparts.
They also talked about making haste more valuable for melee (a good move) but nothing about crit for casters. I wonder if we'll see talent changes to make crit more attractive to casters: higher multipliers, dots critting as baseline everywhere.
I think the only caster who even approaches liking crit is fire mages, and there it's, at very best, equal to haste.
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