Fire Mage PvP Talents and Builds — The War Within (Season 1)

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 Slow; with the Mass Slow talent, it applies as an AoE slow as well.
• 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.
• Ice Nova: A strong root that you can utilize to keep enemies far away. Typically, combining a Blast Wave into Ice Nova will grant you some additional time away from your enemies.
• Shifting Power: The Previous Night Fae covenant ability is now near the end of the Mage tree; this is an exceptional talent as resetting cooldowns, especially for Fire Mage, is quite strong.
• Time Manipulation: Another new talent which makes Fire Blast reset the cooldown of loss of control effects by 2 seconds. This works especially well with Dragon's Breath, making it a significantly shorter cooldown.
• Time Anomaly: Used for strong, consistent damage, giving procs of Combustion, Fire Blast charges, or even Time Warp.

• Firemind: Grants bonus Intellect based on consuming Hot Streak.
• Flame Accelerant: A replacement for Tinder, granting the next Fireball increased damage and a reduced cast time.
• 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.

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.

Ring of Fire is a new PvP Talent for Mages and can provide high sustained damage if enemies are stuck in it. Typically, pairing this ability with a stun to get maximum value is where this ability shines.

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.

Pyrokinesis reduces the cooldown of your primary burst cooldown, Combustion, every time you deal damage with Fireball. This is important because this will make Combustion a shorter cooldown than the enemy trinket. If an enemy does not have a trinket when you have Combustion, you can kill them in a stun.

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 could be good in Arena or Rated Battlegrounds. This ability has a lot of creativity, and you can use it in many different ways.

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.

Flamecannon is another great choice if you are able to keep large amounts of distance between your enemies. It will primarily be used when you can free-cast spells from long distances. You will also be able to cast fire spells from further away.