Spirit, worth it?

Mages only have three abilities that have to do with spirit. One of these is Mage Armor, which at the moment looks like a crossbreed of a pvp and a pve armor - with a PvE mana regen component (which arguably could find use in PvP too), and a very strong PvP element to reduce the effect of harmful magic cast on the mage.

The two others are from the arcane tree - meditation and student of mind. If spirit will feature a role this heavy, and is seriously needed for all casters, please, for the love of god, make it applicable for all mages, not just arcane ones. There's not going to be hybrid elemental mages (come "exciting" frostfire bolt") speccing deep enough arcane to benefit from meditation or student. This said, a lot of elemental mages will also prefer the second crossbreed armor, Molten Armor, over Mage armor, for it's added critical strike component. If spirit will play a heavy role, and feature heavily in itemization, mages will, in their current beta state, be @@**ed up by it.

What needs to be done? The core abilities need to be revised. We have one pvp armor at the moment (the frost/ice one), and two armors that aren't really PvP or PvE. If you compare it to the warlock situation, Fel Armor is something a combination of Mage Armor and Molten armor with a crit component scaling with spirit would look like. This would be an obvious first-hand solution - make one of the armors bluntly defensive (reduced crit, reduced spell effect), giving mages the choice of two different PvP armors (frost for chill and stronger anti-melee or molten armor for reduced crit and reduced harmful magic) and a real PvE armor (mage armor with regeneration and crit).

Second, you really have to give fire and frost trees something that scales with spirit too. Only having one base ability that has anything to do with spirit to begin with (and as such a PvE/PvP crossbreed) in an itemization and design which forces heavily into gathering spirit is totally unacceptable.

This has been mentioned before, yet nothing's happening.

Mate you should post this on the official wow forums, good read tbh.
Although I would say arcane mages NEED the spirit, whilst frost/fire mages don't need it so much.

find your spec, and stick with it, easy as that, u can easily have "arcane gear" with spirit on it, and still perform well as fire or frost, if u look at the tier items now, u will find half of it having spirit, rest half of it dont.
if u look at other classes, like warlocks,u cant have one type of gear for all specs fair enough, frost needs more haste, fire needs more crit, arcane needs more int/spirit = regemming enough?

all mages need less gnome.

oi!

/agree with ronan...Gnomes were created to be slaves of superior races, like humans and draenei and dwarves...hmm, deja-vu any1?