Mages once again got buffed, as Ice Block has been removed from the frost tree and is instead trainable for all mages at level 30. Cold snap was moved to the 21 point talent and the new "Icy veins" was added as a new 11 point talent.

Mattyo, the SK Gaming mage was kind enough to give us his view on the changes.

So what's your thoughts on Icy Veins now after the first day?
SK|Mattyo: It's definitely a huge buff to the class. I don't think that it is a spell that is meant to be only used offensively, but defensively as well. Of course, you have an on-demand way to speed up your casts, but say you were kiting a rogue or warrior in the arena. You could pop it, and even if you can't get off a R1 frostbolt you still will get a frostbite proc. That will make a rogue blow CDs (they are precious now as HARP is basically dead), or give you an easy poly on the warrior.

With Iceblock being trainable, does that mean that we'll get to see more arcane/fire mages or maybe even elemental? Or is frost still the way to go?
SK|Mattyo: You know, I was thinking about this for a while..What other specs become viable with a trainable iceblock? Immediately I am thinking that for 2s, Arc/Fire could work with another DPS...I haven't tried it yet, but I am eager too. That's one new possible option. As far as 3s/5s, I still can't see myself dropping ice barrier..the anti-pushback that it gives you is huge. We just got a nice new PvP talent in icy veins, and you can capitalize the most off of that cooldown using frost spells. So I think that if you are taking icy veins, you are going to be using frostbolt. And if I'm going to be using frostbolts I want talents that are deep in the frost tree, such as empowered frostbolt, and other things like piercing ice, arctics winds, etc, and of course water elemental. So I'll probably stay frost for a balanced 3s/5s. However, for a 4DPS 5s I could see an arc/fire mage fitting in. Same with a tri DPS 3s. Really, I haven't had a chance to experiment with specs, but these are my initial impressions. One spec I definitely want to experiment with is a 0/41/20 though.

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In opposite to mages, the rogues got nerfed quite bad as preparation no longer resets the cooldown on adrenaline rush, which makes the extremely popular HARP spec a lot worse. The infamous SK rogue Neilyo shares his thoughts about the patch:

One less AR, and the whole rogue community starts speaking of new specs... is HARP really dead?
SK|Neilyo: It is dead for everything except maybe double dps 2v2 and tri dps 3v3, for everything else it will be back to how it was season 1 and 2 where standard combat maces (20/41 in my opinion with 4 poison talents) was the strongest spec followed by mutilate (41/20 or 44/12/5) the only new contender is shadowstep which might be viable for some line ups, but probably not as strong as the previously mentioned. The problem is the increase in shadow step rogues actually hurts the mutilate and standard combat rogues in that they have no stealth talents when fighting a team with a shadowstep rogue.
And not to mention rogues are back to how strong they were in season 2, but a lot of other classes still retain their buffs making us weaker than before against those classes.

So what spec(s) will you be using/trying now?
SK|Neilyo: Since I have the maces it will be 20/41 maces and maybe some shadowstep tests 20/0/41 (3 poison talents) until I finish my gear and get the daggers which I will probably try 44/12/5 to test it's strength against standard combat maces.

Do you think the HARP nerf was justified?
SK|Neilyo: Absolutely not. The first nerf to help was justifiable, but the second nerf which was a murder of a spec wasn't.

Ming says that SF/Hemo will be the way to go, what do you think about that spec?
SK|Neilyo: I think imp sprint is a must unless you have shadowstep.

SK|Neilyo's upcoming specs
Combat Maces (20/41/0)
Mutilate (44/12/5)
Shadowstep (20/0/41)