Arcane Mage PvP Talents and Builds — The War Within (Season 1)

While the above table provides a generally accurate overview of the viability of talents, some finer points are discussed in the sections that follow, and we recommend you read those for a deeper understanding.

• Dragon's Breath: One of the strongest offensive crowd control abilities in the game; all specializations of Mage have access to this talent. You can easily chain Dragon's Breath to Polymorph.
• Slow. With this talent, you can instantly apply a 50% slow to the target. This is important versus any team with a melee on it.
• Blast Wave: This gives an explosion effect around the caster and slowing enemies after. This is extremely strong to use when enemies are using heavy offensive cooldowns.
• Greater Invisibility often breaks quite rapidly; however, it provides a 60% damage reduction for 3 seconds after Invisibility; use this before heavy incoming damage to negate the effect.
• Time Anomaly: Another new talent, allowing for either Time Warp for 6 seconds, Icy Veins for 8 seconds, or a Fingers of Frost proc. This talent is quite strong due to how much Mage benefits from Haste.

• Arcane Surge: This is your primary burst cooldown as an Arcane Mage. After the cast, you spend all of your Mana and deal damage based on how much was spent. Energized Familiar makes your Arcane Familiar stronger during Arcane Surge.
• Touch of the Magi: This will accumulate 25% of the damage you deal to the target for 12 seconds and then explode for that amount at the end of the duration. With Improved Touch of the Magi, Touch of the Magi will accumulate 25% of the damage you deal to the target.
• Arcane Bombardment: A strong execute effect, making Arcane Barrage deal significantly higher damage to targets below 35% health.
• Orb Barrage: This talent allows for more Arcane Orbs to be cast, and with each target orb hits, more Arcane Charges are granted.
• Arcane Harmony is a stacking buff to your next Arcane Barrage, based on how many times Arcane Missiles hits an enemy.

Ring of Fire is an important spell to use for multiple reasons. The main reason is this gives you a spell on a different casting school than Arcane. If you get kicked on Arcane Missiles or Polymorph, you can then cast Ring of Fire. It also does a lot of damage, especially in games where the enemy team is stacked.

Chrono Shift causes Arcane Barrage to slow enemies and increases your movement speed. This is another tool you have to slow enemies that might be trying to get to you. This talent makes you very difficult to kill in arena.

Master Shepherd is a talent allowing Polymorph to no longer heal enemies, as well as grant Versatility and Speed bonuses. This talent will is great for setting up kills and swaps on enemies, as well as increasing your survivability.

Temporal Shield is one of the classic Arcane Mage abilities, which allows the caster to take significant amounts of damage and heal it back within 4 seconds. The potent side to this talent is that even though it can be purged, you will still receive the damage taken up to the point it was purged. Alter Time if purged, receives no value.

If you want to have more peels for your teammates or need help getting crowd control, Master of Escape is an excellent talent to take. This should be used versus teams that have multiple ways to stop your Polymorphs or to help peel for your teammates/healer.

Improved Mass Invisibility allows you to utilize Mass Invisibility in combat and reduce the cooldown significantly. This talent is absolutely mandatory if you wish to take Mass Invisibility in any PvP Scenario, or else it will be borderline useless. This talent is a hard choice to take, as you often want the three talents listed above.