People will try 0/40/21 and 0/41/20, but for arenas WE will still be tops. As far as doing well in 2v2...good luck and let me know how you manage it. We don't have the longevity to combat druids and locks and getting enough burst leaves us without a healer.

As far as metas, I will be trying out Chaotic. I don't play 5's so half second sheeps don't seem that appealing, and in 3's I'm a significant portion of our damage output so the extra crit is looking like it will prevail.

I think 50/11/0 could be quite strong in 2v2. You've got your new Ice Block and all the talents necessary to blink and mana shield to your hearts content, and a devastating PoM/Pyro to Arcane Missiles combo that will only need initial LOS to execute.. Clearcasting and regen talents are accessible too.

I've been thinking about the meta for about week or so but im starting to think more and more that MSD is the way to go in every bracket.

Pros:
-3s evocation
-situational dps boost or faster poly (can be gamebraker

Cons:
-shittiest gem requirements

I still do think that 17/0/44 will be the best build due 3on3 having pmr teams a lot and there the imp cs with arcane focus is gold. Ofc the beginning of season will spawn loads of ap mages relying new trainable IB.

There will be some weird stuff happening in lower ratings with specs going wild which is good thing but in the end frosts will reign supreme without question.

I like the idea of Dragon's Breath, Blazing Speed, Icy Veins and Ice Block. Probably not viable in 5 vs 5 but might be worth trying in smaller brackets. DB is an extra interrupt every 20 seconds as well as a means of control, BS is great vs melee and imp scorch with 70% push back resistance is nice. Too bad the WE is just so damn good...

If WE were only the best burst damage spell there might be something to a fire build with trainable ice block. But the fact that it comes with other control and defense and is affected by cold snap is back-breaking. Icy veins adding another piece of controlled burst -- affected by cold snap, no less -- is far more interesting than some scrubby presence of skill build that can IB now.

That said, I'd like to think that there is some sort of control happy 17/41/0+ build that can work by spamming interrupts and cc at exactly the right times. Rather like a feral druid in 5v5s, it's surely a terror if you're good enough to do it right but both of those players will never find out since they're some sort of deep frost build.

I'm going to take this opportunity to ask if anyone can share experiences with 33/0/28. I think it hasn't been used since people figured out that WE hurts more than AP/pom (ugh, cold snap) but it's great fun in the way that only 33 points in the arcane tree can be. I took it for a spin in the (mostly) vain hope that my 2v2 with an undergeared shadow priest would be able to actually kill a resto druid. I like that icy veins has nice synergy with that build too, even if I am nuts for ever speccing it.

Arcane Power is one of the worst spells to have in arena. Assuming you're able to keep it up, it ups your mana usage by a 3rd when mana is something that we rarely have enough of to simply spew for some extra dmg that may or may not make a difference. However, with the prevalence of offensive dispells in arena there is simply no way in any type of high rated arena that you will be able to keep AP up for very long. It is too easy to have it dispelled by a hunter, priest, or shaman. When grouped with PoM/Pyro it simply is horrible burst damage considering how much resilience lowers crit and crit dmg. Its not going to get you consistent results by any means. Even at the low levels you will see people who are geared up with high resilience armor because it is easily purchased through honor.

While trainable Ice Block is a hell of a PVE buff for all mage specs, it really means very little for arena. The odd fire mage will have a bit more survivability but they are still going to find themselves in a world of hurt after their ice block is down. 17/0/44 will still reign supreme with the water elemental being insanely strong.

I've read around a bit and didn't really find anything about gearing. Gemming/enchanting in particular, since gear is about the same for everyone.

I'm still torn between gemming for survival or burst. Sometimes I wish I had more offensive power, but I some scary memories of PvPing as fire. Our team is ~1700-1800 only, so I rarely get focused these days.


I was thinking about going mostly for sta/res gemming.

Head: +18 sta/stun meta, dmg/sta gem, socket bonus; dmg/hit enchant.
Necklacke: sta/res, socket bonus.
Shoulders: sta + sta/res gem, socket bonus; dmg/crit enchant.
Cloak: +20 spell pen, although armour tempts me sometimes.
Robe: sta + sta + sta, no socket bonus, with +150 HP enchant probably (to keep it for a max-HP set).
Bracers: sta/res, socket bonus; +12 stamina enchant.
Gloves: +20 damage (10 sta/240 seem rather low returns, not sure though).
Leggings (sta/dmg thread) and Boots (sta/speed) have no real choice anyway.

Does anyone around gear vastly different, or am I doing anything wrong?

Thank you in advance.


Edit:
Also, I'm aiming for the silk off-pieces, a slight loss of stats for a decent crit bonus. Or should I rather go for dreadweave?

I'm playing usually in a 5v5, we usually play more defensively.

There aren't too terribly many sockets on the PVP gear so whichever way you go won't make that big of a difference. With that said it depends on what kind of games you play. If you're on a 2v2 with a paladin or SL warlock, then you probably tank a bit and would benefit from the resilience or stam gems. If you're on a 5v5 where you don't get touched until your entire team is dead then you want rubies or spinels in every slot. There are also some general guidelines that I keep in mind:

- Have a healer? Then resilience becomes much more important than stamina. If you don't, stamina is equal or a little better as long as you have a minimum of resilience.

- If you do a lot of battlegrounds stam is a good idea. You rarely get a healer and if you're like me you find yourself in a lot of 1vManys where having 12-13k hp can save you. Use items like [Commander's Badge] and [Gnomish Poultryizer] when your main trinkets are on cooldown.

One final thing to note is that currently [Chaotic Skyfire Diamond] is still requiring exactly two blue gems. That means most everyone who wants to use it with their PVP set is going to have to replace some blues to get down to 2. I personally went with resilience gems till I got 400 exactly (What? I like clean numbers) then rubies to fill out the rest.

Edit: Some things I missed: Don't use the stun meta, you have blink. Use [Mystical Skyfire Diamond] or [Chaotic Skyfire Diamond]. Also the silk honor pieces are fine - even with resilience we still need to crit and the deadweave are really for classes that don't need to crit ever.

Why people bash AP the spell in PvP so much is beyond me. A trinketed AP PoM Pyro with a 33/28/0 build with passive 900 spell damage hits for a minimum value of 4134 non-crit with two imp scorch debuffs up. This is a tremendous amount of guaranteed, on command burst. The AP PoM Pyro itself cannot be dispelled by anything but a felhunter on autocast. With smart play, the damage cannot be avoided by any class but a mage/rogue/paladin with very quick reaction speeds.

The problem lies with the build as a whole, not the talent.

because everyone and his mother has 12000hp buffed (saw locks with around 16k + soul link and hs)
so this ... omg burst is very hard to pull off , and in the moment you pop the cooldown youll get cced+dispeled in two seconds.
After the burst you are left with no cooldowns and of course no mana

What he says. Honestly, is there any mage here who doesn't see electric hands on an opposing mage and doesn't start spamming spell steal? I know I sure as hell do.

4000 damage is hardly what I'd call high on demand burst. I have shatter combos that hit far harder than that and come with a spec that provides me far greater survivability with a much lower mana cost to boot. 4k on demand damage is rarely something that is going to win the game for you especially if you're likely to be killed shortly after usage.

I also dispute your notion that it isn't avoidable. It is really easy to ice block and avoid a pyro provided you have decent range from your target and aren't experiencing lag. You also fail to account for damage absorption from spells and or abilities such as ice barrier, mana shield, power word shield, grounding totems, pain suppression, fire ward, earth shield, a warlocks void walker shield, and others. Oh, there is nothing greater than having a pyro go right into a grounding totem, is there?

I agree with this poster. My shatter combo crits are at around 5.5k average, and I can do those on a regular basis.

As mentioned, there are many ways to avoid the pom/pyro, and the damage is easy to negate.

Don't get me wrong, it can be a top-notch finishing move if it crits and such, but the tradeoff is just really not worth it given the current state of PvP gear.

As someone else mentioned, my usual sequence of events after seeing the PoM/Pyro fly is
-Counterspell
-sheep (or spellsteal).

Compare the benefit of that spell to the benefit of the water elemental (which does about 5-10k more damage and adds the frost novas)...and you see why most people say that pom/pyro falls very short in terms of PvP.

Jack and I were just talking about it the other day in guild- I really don't see how the POM/Pyro build, even with ice block trainable, will ever be a viable spec. I think more people will try it, and ice block makes it slightly more plausible, but I just don't see it being really good.

POM/Pyro is just too unreliable. I have 10.5k hp 400 resilience, and was screwing around in 2's a couple months back and got hit by two POM/Pyros at the same time that took me to 8k health after ice barrier and fire ward. And then they had nothing left and we wiped the floor with them.

I don't think blizzard intended to put arcane or fire even close to on-par with frost in terms of PvP survivability. The way that the game has changed regarding the amount of health people have has had an interesting impact on spec balance.

Just imagine having iceblock and PoM/Pyro back at level 60? Would be quite nice.

Another aspect is the balance being around groups rather than 1v1. Yes, 1v1 PoM/Pyro + iceblock can be powerful...but with the inclusion of groups and focus firing being taken into consideration when dealing with spec and class balance, those 6k+ crits just won't cut it in any serious PvP scenario (at least thats my guess).

Zure's point is that AP is better than it gets credit for because it's misplayed an awful lot. Jack's point is that it still sucks. Both can be (and are) right. Borland is apparently popping his cds when his target has 14k health still, and Falcore's best story about presence of skill involves a double-pyro opener.

I guess I didn't really have a point at all, since I'm not disputing "frost > all". I was just wondering if anyone had actual experience to share. Since no one seems to be APing in the first person, I will tell what I have observed.

Your AP in an arc/frost wants to look like a giant shatter combo with a free frostbolt on top, not a giant fiery oneshot. (Yes, this makes it even harder to protect than your pryoblasts.) Without AP your frostbolt/icelance combos on top of a frozen target will double-crit for more than in a deep frost, but not much more (5-10%?). With AP you will obviously hit harder than with PI, but again not by a lot. The new availability of PI makes AP even less attractive, obviously.

I still think pom/pyro is the dumbest build ever because you really are a sitting duck after your cools are popped. At least with arc/frost you're still half a frost mage. Why you would want more dots and fewer snares associated with your dps is beyond me. You also weaken your already low-dps unfrozen ice lances. If you insist on trying the build, you absolutely have to play around grounding totems and cc and burst heal and silence and everyone else on their team who is going to hear you AP. This is a terrible build, maybe even the worst, for a weak player: compare all that to writing an assist/attack macro for a WE.

Spellsteal on an APed mage is a waste, as I'm sure has been noted elsewhere. Just silence or sheep him. If he has other buffs on it's too risky to waste gcds; if he doesn't then someone else apparently has purges covered.

Shatter combos do not do 5.5k damage to a resilience clad target, unless you are arcane/frost or have power infusion. To average 5.5k versus a target with just 15% crit damage reduction (lower than what you'd find on even a zero gemmed/enchanted set) with a deep frost build, you would need to have 1469 frost damage. And then you would only have a 36% chance of a double crit assuming a 60% effective crit rate, after resilience.

Here's a link I suggest you follow: forums.worldofwarcraft.com. It's sad that in what used to be a safe haven from the misinformation of the WoW boards, people now won't even use accurate numbers to back their arguments.

Well, true shatter combos don't only have a frost bolt and an ice lance associated with it. You also have pet blots flying at the target as well as a fireblast. When all is said and done, I frequently do more than 6k damage when doing a shatter combo

What is your shatter combo consisting of?

Pet freeze -> Frostbolt + icelance + waterbolt -> fireblast -> CoC sometimes.

And 60% chance to crit?
50% from frozen target
15% from talents
~14% from gear/buffs

Thats nearly an 80% chance to crit. Now I am no math whiz, but I'm doubting that having full resilience cap will bring that 80% down to 60. Reducing chance to crit by 20%? I find that hard to believe.


The "PoM/Pyro" numbers given seemed slightly high as well. 4100+ damage for a gurantee on pyro? Perhaps that is correct, although rather than call him out on his numbers, I decided to actually see what his point was in his post.

There are those of you that will sit there and tear a post up because a number is off by a small (or large) percent, without even being able to comprehend whether the number given has any real point to the post.

I could have said my shatter combos do 2k damage and my point that "4k damage to a PvP buffed player is nothing" still stands and is backed by others in this thread.

Thanks for your input, but understand your knowledge of numbers is only surpassed by your ignorance in understanding overall meaning rather than dwelling on the details.

Leave it to the mods to send people to the WoW boards. If you're counting a fire blast immediately after this number isn't a stretch at all. My unmitigated frostbolts crit for somewhere around 3100 in full pvp suit, ice lance for 2100. Roughly. Take away 20% of that from resilience and you've still got over 4000 damage from the instantaneous burst. Add in a pet bolt or fire blast, or a target that maybe isn't fully geared (as not every class walks around with 400 resilience, hi warriors), or a trinket, and you can easily exceed 5.5k damage. This is not far off the mark at all.

Water elemental burst is more difficult to deliver, but it handily exceeds pom-pyro with AP and is, most importantly, able to be repeated multiple times.

Vontre, I'm really surprised you'd fall for this line of argument. All you've shown is that the theoretical maximum damage deep frost can deliver through a string of crits (as I said earlier, only a 36-50% chance) is equal to the minimum possible damage (min value pyro, non crit) "button of doom" pyroblast (99% certainty, with proper play). The frost chain takes 4 seconds to execute, the pyro chain takes 0.1 second.

Of course frost's burst can be repeated. That is its strength. But it also reveals its weakness: a given pet nova-->bolt crit-->lance crit-->fireblast is actually fairly uncommon (never exceeding 50% probability of success). It's the fact that you can try it over and over during the course of the first two minutes of a match that makes it so deadly.

So I think my exact point stands. AP delivers the biggest burst in the shortest amount of time. This is a good thing. It sacrifices the ability to repeat this burst, which means you have to be good enough to only use AP when you can be pretty sure it will cause someone to die. This is a challenge, but not unreasonable. If the arcane tree had a mana efficient nuke, immunity effect, dispel protection, efficient damage absorbsion, and persistent mana efficient snares of frost, some people would actually spec AP and give up the pet. It's the tree, not the talent, that sucks.

Vontre's right. It's been beaten to death over the past 4 months and by your posts you seem to agree, but you continue to argue some minute semantic point. Yeah, ok being able to pom/pyro is cool. It is not as cool as a shatter combo for many reasons. Serious arena mages will still be frost. Lets move on.