Talk:Battle mage

Merge with Warmage

It's the same thing so why not merge? Aesindor, The Celestial Paladin (Leave a Message) 11:08, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

I never thought battlemage means warmage. In world of Warcraft, warmages wear a cloth and a light armor while battlemages wear a powerful and heavy armor, much like plate. Battlemages are mainly soldiers that aid themselves with magic. Warmages are mages that cast spells in the battles from range and, eventually, aid themselves with a weapon should the situation require it.Malygos Helper (talk) 10:52, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Have to agree Malygos Helper totally. I also see mainly Battle Mages in those fractions, with are mostly Soldier (Scarlets, Shattered Sun, Silver Covenant, ...). Battlemages are mainly seen as a Kirin Tor. Sutsuj (talk) 13:04, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree with my predecessors, though similar, battle- and warmages are not the same, and therefore shouldn't be merged Encaitar 13:42, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Merge with Battlemaster?

Bear with me here.

This page used to have at least some prose, although I gather that when the RPG non-canon decision came down, it pretty much became a disambig page.

My initial reaction seeing the tags was to trim it up a bit to make it more standardized disambiguation, and drop the wikification tag. Then I remembered disambigs aren't supposed to simply be lists of pages that partly include the name, which this basically is. So it should be deleted right? (See the impending deletions of Astromancer (title) and Nethermancer.)

Well, the one noteworthy element in the NPC lists is that several of them are Wintergrasp Battle-Magi, an NPC title (there are also now Tol Barad Battle-Magi), which actually serve(d) a documentable game function. So THAT's what this page should be about, right? Well, that function is basically the same as a Battlemaster. A new section there would easily cover what Battle-Magi do/did and explain the few differences, and list the relevant NPCs. Hence the merge suggestion.

Related note: We seem to love making tiny pages for different varieties of mage. I say we just put a section in the mage page listing terms that have been used for mage varieties, put em all there with whatever scant information was ever actually published (usually about half a sentence each), and be done with it. Even wizard, sorcerer and sorceress (really? two pages for those last?) don't seem to have any consistent non-RPG distinctions and could probably all be combined. Warcraft magic lore is a lot more fluid than most RPGs make it and there's no reason to chop it all up if it's not directly relating to those RPGs.

Incoming links? Not too many. The nice thing is "battle mage" is so self-descriptive already it doesn't hurt to just use the phrase non-linked.

• Under speculation for Anasterian Sunstrider (if you ask me "Warrior, Mage" works just fine), can be unlinked.
• RPG articles: Warmage links to it as an afterthought with no reference or detail; line should probably be deleted anyway. Scarlet battle mage explains itself better than this page already, needs no link. Arcanist lists it amongst a slew of paths that are actually detailed as RPG classes on their own pages...unlink I guess, assuming it's even listed in a sourcebook as a distinct class (in which case why isn't there a Battlemage (RPG) page).
• Sorceress and the WC3 unit both invoke the Bnet description - they were sent from Dalaran "to watch over the volatile Battle Magi". It's not entirely clear to me who that was, perhaps just the Mage (Warcraft II)? If a specific order can be identified for that link then great, otherwise again let's just unlink it, since this page certainly isn't clarifying anything.
• Used as character class on mob pages which simply don't need one.
• Used by a bunch of users as a class idea they wish were implemented / roleplay as. Obviously it's up to them but I'd just change it to "battle [[mage]]".

It's the last one, and the fact that someone might know the term from an RPG, that gives me pause just redirecting to the WoW-specific battlemaster. Maybe it really should be left as a short disambig after all, giving a one-line vague description (since nothing more concrete exists), linking to Battlemasters and Warmages, and saying...what, "there are a bunch of NPCs named this, search for them your damn self"? How does a disambig direct people to NPCs without making it a (frowned upon) search index?

I'm all over the place here. Direction welcome :) - jerodast (talk) 19:52, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Absolutely not. The Battlemaster page is not just about a title, but about an NPC functionality. Just because there is one NPC with the Battlemaster functionality and "battle-magi" in the name does not mean we should merge the pages together, which would result in a ton of NPCs on the Battlemaster page that definitely are NOT battlemasters. While I understand the desire to not necessarily have separate pages for every single NPC title, this is going way, way, WAY too far in the other direction. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 22:30, 7 July 2014 (UTC)