Not portals, but teleports. Still super useful!
Either are fun classes. Personally, I want to bang my head in less as a lock - but if you're playing with friends (especially healers) you can't go wrong with either.
giving mages teleport to all the azeroth capital cities really redeemed the class JUST a little bit when mop came
they nerfed our damage, made our cc a bit weaker (with frostfire bolt being the only snare for non-frost spec) and even took away blanket cs and improved blink etc etc...... /cry
HOWEVER now my mage is just super useful for doing world events, oh i need to be in silvermoon aka middle of nowhere ghosttown? TELEPORTTTTTT : SILVERMOON!
OH, i need to be back in damn Orgrimmar for the next section of this stupid event quest? No worries, no need to mount my ass back to the Orb of Translocation to translocate back to UC then wait 10 min for a zepplin to take me back to org........
TELEPORT: ORGRIMAR!!!!!!!!!!!!
its super damn useful, i freakin love it (in fact it was one of my fav things about my Lv85 p2p mage too)..... so FREAKIN CONVENIENT.
I was able to do all of Eastern Kingdoms / Kalimdor candy buckets during Hallowed End in about like 2 hours or so????? i forgot, i did it SO FREAKIN FAST cuz i had teleport. didn't even need to bring out the hover-hack