Mage Hero Talents — The War Within (Season 1)

This page is specifically about Hero Talents in The War Within. If you want to learn more about the best regular talents for Arcane Mage, check out our Talents page:

Sunfury is our strongest Hero Talent for all PvE scenarios. It provides both the highest single target and highest AoE DPS.

Spellslinger is currently simply worse than Sunfury in all PvE scenarios.

Sunfury is our strongest Hero Talent for all PvE scenarios. It provides both the highest single target and highest AoE DPS.

Spellslinger is currently simply worse than Sunfury in all PvE scenarios.

2.

Best Hero Talent Builds for Arcane Mage

Sunfury Hero Talent Single Target Build Sunfury Hero Talent Cleave / AoE Build Spellslinger Hero Talent Build

Below we list the standard single-target setup for Sunfury.

In AoE situations, the only change you make is swapping from Savor the Moment to Sunfury Execution.

Spellslinger currently has one setup for all situations, as it simply provides the best DPS in both AoE and single-target situations.

Sunfury has meaningful impact on the rotation for Arcane. One of the reasons why it impacts the rotation is the same reason it is such a strong Hero Talent Tree. It gives Arcane multiple additional ways to quickly get 4 Arcane Charges back. The way this plays out in the full rotation is quite complex, but at a high level, it allows you to dump Arcane Charges more often with Arcane Barrage and then immediately get the charges back again.

The main rotational change comes from Burden of Power and Glorious Incandescence. Burden of Power is a simple damage increase to either Arcane Blast or Arcane Barrage, but Glorious Glorious Incandescence, which procs immediately after consuming Burden of Power, makes your next Arcane Barrage immediately give you back 4 Arcane Charges. This allows you to quickly dump Arcane Charges via Arcane Barrage and immediately get them back again. There are various small optimizations around this, but generally you simply use Arcane Barrage whenever you have Glorious Incandescence.

The other rotational change is around Memory of Al'ar. This causes a bunch of passive benefits to Arcane Surge, however, it also gives you the Arcane Soul buff when Arcane Surge expires. This buff gives you effectively infinite 4 Arcane Charges for the duration. While the buff is up, you simply want to spam Arcane Barrage until you have 3 Clearcasting stacks, at which point you want to consume a stack of Clearcasting to avoid overcapping on it, and then go back to using Arcane Barrage. If Arcane Soul is about to time out, you can ignore the rule on 3 Clearcasting stacks and throw out an additional Arcane Barrage even if it would overcap Clearcasting.

Spellslinger has one main rotational change, and one minor change.

The main change as Spellslinger, is that you always want to double-dip Nether Precision. This means, any time you have Nether Precision, you want to Arcane Blast -> Arcane Blast -> Arcane Barrage. The Arcane Blast + Arcane Barrage on the final stack being cast at the same time, not only makes Nether Precision's damage bonus apply to both, it also applies Splintering Sorcery twice, increasing the amount of Arcane Splinters created by 50%. (6 instead of 4)

There is one other minor rotational change when running Spellslinger. Normally, Shifting Power is only used outside of cooldowns. However, due to Shifting Shards, you actually want to do the opposite, and cast Shifting Power during Arcane Surge and Touch of the Magi. In practice, this means whenever Arcane Surge and Touch of the Magi are ready, you want to use them like normal, and then immediately cast Shifting Power while both Arcane Surge and Touch of the Magi are active. This also means you want to align your uses of Shifting Power with Touch of the Magi and Arcane Surge + Touch of the Magi.