Fire Mage PvP Talents and Builds — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

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.

• Temporal Realignment is an amazing defensive passive. When dropped below 25% health, you cast Alter Time and instantly return to 50% health. This is great for preserving Cauterize and preventing you from using Ice Block when teams focus you.
• Dragon's Breath: One of the strongest offensive crowd control abilities in the game; use this to setup crowd control on multiples enemies with Polymorph or Ring of Frost.
• Inspired Intellect, Tome of Rhonin, Charm of Aegwynn, and Charm of Medivh are all small modifiers to stats that help greatly in arena.
• Alter Time, Blazing Barrier/ Improved Blazing Barrier, and Mass Invisibility are all great defensives offered in the Mage Tree.

• Fire Blast is your primary damage ability. This spell will always deal a critical strike, resulting in more Heating Up and Hot Streak procs.
• Firestarter makes your Fireball and Pyroblast always critical strike on targets above 90% health. This is a great way to start ramping up your damage or do hard swaps to targets that are not expecting it.
• Fevered Incantation: A mighty stacking damage increase for hitting critical strikes consecutively.
• Combustion is your primary burst cooldown. This increases your spells' critical strike chance by 100% while it is active. In addition to this affect, there are several other talents that increase your damage while Combustion is active:
  • Spontaneous Combustion refreshes a charge of Fire Blast after using Combustion.
  • Kindling reduces the cooldown of Combustion by 60 seconds. This is great for making it difficult for enemies to line up trinkets with your burst damage.
  • While Combustion is active, Fiery Rush makes it so Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames recharge 50% faster.

You can choose three of the following PvP talents; each has use, but some are better for certain strategies than others. The top three choices are the most useful but can be replaced with other PvP talents depending on your team's goal.

Overpowered Barrier increases the absorb of your barriers by 100% and have an additional effect, but last 5 seconds. Blazing Barrier reflects 100% of damage absorbed. This makes Blazing Barrier an incredibly important defensive cooldown to help increase your survivability.

Ice Wall is a talent that allows you to place a wall of ice in a specific area for 15 seconds with 40% of your maximum health. This wall obstructs the line-of-sight and can be used to block enemies from running away or block a line of sight from a healer to a damage class. This is great for extending crowd control chains on enemy healers when they finally have time to heal.

Master Shepherd is a new talent allowing Polymorph to no longer heal enemies, as well as grant Versatility and Speed bonuses. This talent will be highly opted for, making Polymorph not heal your enemies to full health.

Greater Pyroblast has a long cast time, but deals 30% of the target's total health. This has potential to be good if you are playing against teams that do not focus you with very few interrupts.