Fire Mage PvP Talents and Builds — The War Within (11.1.5)

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.

• Slow: With this talent, you can instantly apply a 50% slow to your target. This is great versus teams with melee on it to reduce their uptime on you or your teammate.
• 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.
• Blast Wave: Gives an explosion effect around the caster and slowing enemies after. This is extremely strong to use when enemies are using heavy offensive cooldowns.
• Shifting Power deals AoE damage and, while channelling, reduces your cooldowns by 12 seconds over 3.4 seconds. This is important for reducing important spells like Counterspell and Blazing Barrier.
• Time Anomaly gives you a chance at gaining Combustion for 5 seconds, Time Warp for 6 seconds or 1 Fire Blast charge.

• Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames are two of your primary damage abilities. Both of these spells will always deal a critical strike, resulting in more Heating Up and Hot Streak procs.
• Fevered Incantation: A mighty stacking damage increase for hitting critical strikes consecutively.
• Fiery Rush: This talent recharges Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames cooldowns by 50% during Combustion. This is quite strong to maximize your rotation during Combustion.
• Hyperthermia: This capstone talent enables you to get procs that give you even greater consistent damage with spammable Pyroblasts throughout matches.
• 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:
  • Master of Flame increases Mastery: Ignite damage and Fire Blast spreads Ignite to two additional enemies.
  • Spontaneous Combustion refreshes up to three charges of Fire Blast and up to three charges of Phoenix Flames after using Combustion.
  • Kindling make Fireball, Pyroblast, Fire Blast, Scorch, and Phoenix Flames reduce the remaining cooldown of Combustion by 1 second.
  • While Combustion is active, Fiery Rush makes it so Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames recharge 50% faster.
  • Unleashed Inferno is a crucial talent. While Combustion is active, Fireball, Pyroblast, Fire Blast, Scorch, Flamestrike and Phoenix Flames deal increased damage and reduce the cooldown of Combustion.

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.

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.

Glass Cannon greatly increases Fireball, Scorch, and Ignite's damage, but decreases maximum HP. This talent also seems quite volatile and could see potential use paired with Flamecannon free-casting from far away.

World in Flames allows Flamestrike to deal more damage based on how close the enemy is to the center of the radius. This talent could be especially strong in Battlegrounds where you are able to freecast Flamestrikes with Glass Cannon and Flamecannon or against classes with many minions, where Living Bomb can ignite off the pets.