Fire Mage Battleground Blitz Guide — The War Within (Season 1)

The main role of a Fire Mage in Battleground Blitz is to use relentless damage on enemies to quickly force kills and crowd control with Polymorph. To keep your team offensive, you will use Time Warp when your team has cooldowns and follow this up with Polymorph on enemy healers or DPS if they will not take damage to break it. If teams try to setup kills on you, use Ice Block to ensure you stay alive.

In addition to damage and crowd controlling, you will also be slowing every enemy you can with Slow, Frost Nova, and Ice Nova. This is a crucial part of the Mage toolkit for Battleground Blitz. If you are able to slow enemies when they are on their way to a base and your team is able to pass them, your team will likely get the base.

Here is the talent build you will be using to maximize your damage output:

• Ice Wall
• Glass Cannon
• Ring of Fire

These are the 3 PvP talents you should be using in Battleground Blitz. Ice Wall is a fun talent that creates a giant wall, preventing enemies from getting to places they need to get to. There are many creative uses for this talent, but the most common use will be to wall of a flag and allowing your team to cap the node. Glass Cannon increases the damage of your Fireball, Scorch, and Mastery: Ignite, but decreases your maximum health. This is a large increase to your damage output, but makes it easier to kill you. Try to position far away from enemies to prevent swaps onto you. Ring of Fire gives you more AoE damage to rot down enemies that are stacked.

For a more in-depth breakdown of talents, read the talents section of this guide:

Crowd Control as Fire Mage

In Battleground Blitz, without the Arena Dampening effect, healers, when left alone, are able to sustain against many players with relative ease. The way to counter the high throughput of healers in Battleground Blitz is with the effective use of crowd control.

Mage has many tools in its kit to aid with this:

• Polymorph
• Slow
• Dragon's Breath
• Blast Wave
• Frost Nova

Note: Be careful with Polymorph! This will dispel all DoTs on the target, and you could be removing quite a bit of damage if you have an Affliction Warlock or Shadow Priest on your team.

Ice Block is your main defensive ability. If you have run out of Shimmers and have no other ways to kite or survive, use this spell. This will protect you from all damage.

Cauterize is a passive ability that gives Fire Mages a "second life," preventing you from dying on a 5-minute cooldown and instead burning your health for 6 seconds. It also increases your movement speed. This is very useful when you are about to die, and it helps you get away from enemies.

Blazing Barrier is a slightly weaker form of Ice Barrier. However, it deals damage when you are struck by melee attacks. It is best used typically off cooldown to mitigate maximum amounts of incoming damage.

Alter Time may seem like a confusing ability at first, but it is really straightforward. The first time you press this ability, it remembers how much health you have and your location. The second time you press it, it will return to the same location with the exact health you had when you first pressed it. This should be used when you feel like you are about to take damage or about to be stunned. This ability can be Purged, so be mindful.

Although Mirror Image deals damage and slows enemies, it should primarily be used as a defensive cooldown. While the images are active, you take 20% less damage. Taking direct damage will break 1 of the 3 mirrors. If the images stay alive for the entire duration, you will get this damage reduction for 40 seconds! Use this when you do not have Alter Time, and you see the enemy using their burst cooldowns.

Blast Wave is a knockback that gives Mages an additional way to get away from melee players. Use this when melee have connected you with heavy damage cooldowns or you need to kite and run. Talented into the Volatile Detonation talent allows Blast Wave to send enemies extremely far away and can even be used to knock off maps like Arathi Basin and Eye of the Storm

1. Intellect;
2. Haste;
3. Versatility;
4. Mastery;
5. Critical Strike.

The stat priority for Fire Mage is the same in Battleground Blitz and Arena. If you want an in-depth explanation and suggestions on gear, read the gearing section of this guide:

On both Warsong Gulch and Twin Peaks, if you are defending your own flag carrier, you should encourage them to take high ground on the upstairs ledges so you can protect them with Blast Wave.

Similarly, when attacking enemy bases, you should look to knock players off the high ground. You can do that either to make sure that your teammates can attack the enemy flag carrier or to separate the flag carrier from their healers.

Due to Fire Mage having incredibly high single-target damage and multiple slows, your primary goal in capture the flag maps is to play offense. This means that when an enemy player picks up your flag, you should be trying to kill that flag carrier. Quickly leave the team fight when this happens and setup kills on the enemy team's defense. Utilize tools like Slow and Ice Nova to slow the flag carrier and Polymorph on the enemy healers. For an in-depth guide to Fire Mage damage rotations, read here:

Before a Resource Race battleground starts, you should decide with your team which base you should focus on first.

• If there is an enemy healer at the base you are assigned to, then you should crowd control them as soon as possible and use your burst cooldowns to kill their teammates
• If there is no healer but there is more than one DPS enemy, you should use your crowd control on the one who your team is less likely to attack (as they would break your crowd control)

Your primary goal on resource race maps is simple: capture nodes and slow enemies. Polymorph lasts 6 seconds, and it takes 4 seconds to capture a node. This means that if an enemy is alone at a base, you should easily be able to take it. Always pay attention to who is at which base. You will also want to slow any enemies who may be trying to help their teammates at a base. Utilize your multiple slows and Polymorph to prevent any enemies from providing backup to their team.

Similar to resource race maps, your goal is to capture any nodes and slow enemies who might be trying to help if they are falling behind. The goal on this map, unlike normal Rated Battlegrounds, is to team fight at one node and try to cap both bases. This results in long 7v7 team fights, and the winner will more than likely pull ahead quickly. Trade your defensives when you get low ( Ice Block, Alter Time, etc.) and get value out of Dragon's Breath/ Polymorph on enemy players.

Note: Capping the flag will make the inactive bases active, and both teams will have to recap the nodes. Use this tactic if your team is falling behind on points or lost the team fight.

Ranged DPS specializations will always be the best orb carriers on Temple of Kotmogu, so you should be one of the first players to get an Orb if there is one available. The most important part about this map is to win the initial team fight and quickly gain momentum by grabbing 3 orbs and standing in the middle of the map. When the enemy team starts to resurrect, leave middle and kite around the center. Here are some tips for this map:

• Players take more damage the longer they hold the orb. This means that, eventually, the Orb carriers will die. Ideally, your team will only hold 2-3 orbs at a time so that you do not easily wipe when you have high stacks.
• Make sure you die on the correct side of the map! You and your team will resurrect depending on where you died. If you die on purple side, you will resurrect on blue side and vise versa. Ensuring you and your team resurrect together is crucial, this will allow you to regroup faster and quickly wipe the enemy team that will be weak.