Welcome to Skill Capped’s Guide on the Best PvP Talents & Hero Talents for Arcane Mages in The War Within 11.2.0

All sections for Arcane Mage PvP have been divided into corresponding sections for the most optimal hero talents, class talents, spec talents, race, stats, gear, enchants, gems, and macros. This will help you have a good understanding of Arcane Mages in PvP for The War Within, the strengths and weaknesses associated with this specialization, and help you conquer the arena. This section will guide you on the best Arcane Mage PvP Talents in The War Within.

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Hero Talents: Sunfury
Class Talents
Spec Talents
PvP Talents

The War Within expands our arsenal of talent options, which include our new talent hero talent trees, Sunfury and Spellslinger.

Hero Talents: Sunfury

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This will be your default Sunfury build for a majority of matchups. Most of these talents listed in this hero tree are enhancements to your primary damaging spells. You’ll be naturally receiving these buffs as the match plays out.

Here are some talents that require a bit more explanation in terms of how they work in order for you to optimize your gameplay.

Spellfire Spheres to passively increase your damage after using 6 Arcane Blasts or Arcane Barrages.
Glorious Incandescence for some heavy direct damage after using Burden of Power, which will naturally occur as you play. You’ll be able to double Arcane Barrage back to back upon consuming this buff and if combined with Nether Precision and even our new Nether Flux PvP talent you can land some devastating Single Target damage.
Memory of Al’ar is both a quality of life improvement to generating your Haste stacks from Mana Cascade, while also providing you with more opportunities to throw out Arcane Barrage due to Arcane Soul. Additionally, each consecutive Arcane Barrage you throw out will become stronger. This spell only comes into effect after your Arcane Surge ends and lasts at least 2 seconds. This will vary depending on how many exceptional spells your Phoenix threw out.

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Mage Class Talents

In the Mage Class talent tree, most of your talent choices will be mandatory when advancing onto each tier. Some of most noteworthy mandatory talents are:

Dragon’s Breath acts as an additional Crowd Control initiator, which can be followed up with Ring of Frost or Polymorph. This will be primarily effective on healers.
Diffusion Barrier helps us reduce the cooldown of all our barrier effects once one breaks. As Arcane, this applies for Prismatic Barrier and Mass Barrier.
Time Anomaly allows you to randomly proc Arcane Surge, Clearcasting, or Time Warp. All of these spells will enhance your overall performance as an Arcane Mage, while also helping you apply some unpredictable burst.

Our updated talent tree gives us access to a lot of basic tools. Most of your toolkit contains a lot of “no-brainers”, where we pick up Ice Block, Spellsteal, Remove Curse, Mirror Image, and Alter Time.

Additionally, there is another talent selection between Ice Floes or Shimmer in the second tier that can be flexible depending on the matchup faced or preferred playstyle.

Shimmer is your most recommended option, as this changes your Blink ability to be instant, and can be used while casting. This does not remove Stun effects like the original Blink, but can allow you to avoid getting stopped on important casts.
Ice Floes allows you to freely cast while moving, but reverts your Blink ability back to its original counterpart. Blink now becomes a spell that removes any Stun effects and requires a global to use. Make sure to choose this against compositions that prioritize stuns on you, especially into Subtlety Rogues.

Then there will then be a few flexible talents that can be moved around depending on the composition that you are facing.

In the first tier you have two flexible talents; Remove Curse and Arcane Warding. If you plan on playing double DPS 2v2, you can swap either flex talent in exchange for Cryo-Freeze to boost your survivability.

Remove Curse against Shamans to remove Hex or Warlocks to get rid of Curses that are buffed by Amplify Curse.
Arcane Warding reduces the amount of Magic damage that is dealt to you. This will be typically chosen in most circumstances.
Cryo-Freeze periodically heals you while in Ice Block.

Arcane Spec Talents

For our spec talents, most of these will be mandatory as you advance onto each tier. Some of the most noteworthy talents are:

Nether Precision in combination with Leysight is your primary damage modifier on both Arcane Blast and Arcane Barrage. This requires you to consume Clearcasting in order to benefit from its effect, to which you’ll obtain this buff naturally as you attack. Thankfully our Sunfury tree has quality of life improvements such as Arcane Soul that will increase our Nether Precision uptime, and if you’re able to time Nether Precision with Glorious Incandescence or even Intuition you can dish out ridiculous Single Target damage coming out of Arcane Barrage.
Touch of the Magi accumulates a portion of the damage you deal to the target and releases its damage once it expires. This talent gets replaced by Nether Flux, which is our new 11.2 PvP talent, for more direct burst coming out of Arcane Blast or Arcane Barrage.
Arcane Debilitation and Time Loop to constantly increase our damage on our core damaging spells. This applies to the target we hit from each tick of Arcane Missiles. If optimized properly, we can deliver some massive burst damage with our Arcane Barrage thanks to Arcane Harmony.

If you’re playing RMP or another composition that enables you to land a bunch of Arcane Blasts without constantly getting interrupted, then consider opting for Leydrinker and Consortium’s Bauble instead of Charged Orb and Time Loop. This build will make it more difficult for you to generate charges, however you’ll be able to deal even more direct Single Target during specific windows where the damage really matters.

Arcane Mage PvP Talents

As for your best Arcane Mage PvP talents, Overpowered Barrier, Chrono Shift, and Nether Flux will be your default loadout in most games.

Overpowered Barrier slightly changes how you should use Prismatic Barrier. Prismatic Barrier becomes double its original absorb, however the tradeoff is its 4 second duration. This means you’ll want to use Prismatic Barrier during massive on-demand burst in order to receive its additional effect; temporary damage immunity and Invisibility.
Chrono Shift slows the target we use Arcane Barrage on and increases our movement speed by a solid amount for 5 seconds.
Nether Flux is our newly introduced PvP talent in 11.2, and replaces our Touch of the Magi spec talent for more direct burst coming from our next spell. If you aren’t familiar with the functionality of Arcane Barrage, you can technically snapshot it with this damage modifier before it lands on your target. This means you can throw out an Arcane Barrage followed by a Presence of Mind + Arcane Blast, causing both to benefit from Nether Flux. You’ll typically be using this to buff your Arcane Blast or Arcane Barrage depending on the procs you currently have up, with the most common being Nether Precision.

For your flexible talents, these can be swapped with Chrono Shift based on the composition you are playing or facing.

Ice Wall is unique as this allows you to remove line of sight from any location. This can be utilized offensively and defensively, allowing you to peel for yourself or allies, or to prevent enemy healers from connecting to their ally in order to score kills.
Kleptomania is super useful against Restoration Druids, allowing you to remove their HoT effects before you deal heavy loaded burst.
Master Shepherd is great for a bracket like Solo Shuffle, as this removes the healing effect from Polymorph, and provides us with a boost of Versatility when enemies are affected by it.