Welcome to Skill Capped’s Overview of the Best Talents for Arcane Mage in PvP in Dragonflight 10.2.6
To make it easier to navigate, we’ve divided the guide into the corresponding sections, covering everything from race and talents to gear and macros. These will give you a good idea about what to expect from Arcane Mage in PvP in Dragonflight, its strengths and weaknesses, and how to get your character ready to conquer the arena. In this section, we will cover the most important change that came with Dragonflight – talents. We will go over the class and spec trees, as well as the best PvP talents for Arcane Mage in Dragonflight.
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Table of Contents
Arcane Mage Talents Overview
Since the talent system received a huge revamp going into Dragonflight, we will cover both the class and the spec tree. They both have some mandatory and some optional talents.
Mage Class Talents
Our updated talent tree gives us access to a lot of tools. The first part of it contains a lot of “no-brainers”, where we pick up Ice Block, Invisibility, Spellsteal, Remove Curse, Mirror Image and Alter Time.
Moving on, we get Overflowing Energy to access either Incanter’s Flow or Rune of Power. We suggest the former as it offers the most consistent damage. Whereas adding in Rune of Power means having to cast another ability on your already heavy-casted burst rotation. Technically, Rune of Power is more burst damage and does automatically trigger from Arcane Surge, which makes it still viable if you really want to see some oneshots.
Another decision you need to make is whether you want to play Ice Floes or Shimmer. Most of the time, you will be playing Ice Floes as it not only makes you able to cast while moving, but also gives you Blink, allowing you to get out of stuns. If you play with Shimmer, you can cast while blinking. A large benefit of this talent is it is not on global, so you can Shimmer > Dragon’s Breath a target without them being able to react.
And then you go down the tree and make your way to Dragon’s Breath, which is an absolute must-have, and Time Anomaly.
You might be tempted to pick up Cryo-Freeze, but we would only recommend doing so if and only if you are playing double DPS 2v2, otherwise you will get more value in other points.
Our biggest and most important choices are all the way at the bottom of the tree between Shifting Power, Freezing Cold, Meteor and Displacement.
When taking Shifting Power, you gain Frigid Winds along the way. This puts your slow to 60% baseline and allows your Cone of Cold to snare for 80%. You also gain the ability to have two roots, which is fantastic into double melee teams and Demonology Warlock pets. This talent could be swapped out for Accumulative Shielding depending on the matchup and can come down to personal preference.
Shifting Power itself is the same ability we had as Night Fae in Shadowlands. It is very strong as the majority of our kit is cooldown-based, thus it increases our survivability and makes our burst windows come up more frequently.
Arcane Spec Talents
Most of the talents in the spec tree won’t be that big of a surprise. But there are still a few noteworthy pickups along the way. Nether Precision is a fundamental buff to both our sustain and burst rotation.
Arcane Tempo combined with Chrono Shift will change the way you play dramatically. It will give you a stackable Haste buff, snare and sprint whenever you use Arcane Barrage.
Arcane Harmony together with Arcane Bombardment will give you your main strength of executing players below 35% with Arcane Barrage.
We recommend going for Mana Adept as this guarantee you will never run out of Mana.
Arcane Echo could be swapped out for Improved Prismatic Barrier or Impetus. Both talents are viable and can be a good option when playing in a comp where you want to avoid breaking CC such as Rogue Mage.
Arcane Mage PvP Talents
Your first default PvP talent as Arcane is Master of Escape due to its enormous number of uses such as avoiding CC and providing a damage reduction. This reduces the CD of Greater Invisibility which provides a 60% damage reduction by 45 seconds.
Temporal Shield is a good pickup if you are getting focused. It can be a life-saver if used correctly, healing back all damage done to you after the application. Due to the high damage meta, this is now a standard pick.
This gives you the default build that you will take almost every matchup. There are some other PvP talents to consider that are great on their own, but are not needed in every scenario.
Master Shepherd is a great option for extra stats, prevent healing when sheeping enemies, and can be a solid talent as Arcane due to the need to continually kite, peel, and dampen.
Ring of Fire is a great pick. In previous expansions, Arcane only had one school, making you completely useless when interrupted. Ring of Fire changes that as it allows you to deal meaningful damage with Fire school even if you get kicked. You could also force kicks with it, having Arcane school free afterwards.
Kleptomania is a situational pick into Resto Druids and Preservation Evokers, but it does make it harder to gain Clearcasting procs. Keep in mind that in 10.1 this can be kicked.
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