By tradition, Mages are known to be the glass cannons. Mages excel at dealing massive burst damage while paying the high price of poor mana conservation and regeneration. Characters specced as Mage PvP are in no way different. Mage PvP may be able to dish out some really powerful burst damage but they are often threatened because of their very low survivability.

Arcane Mage PvP By the looks of it, the Arcane talent tree offers the best talent combinations for PvPing, given of course that you are investing much of your points in this tree. Deep into this talent tree, you will gain access to some really useful talents in PvP. These talents include Improved Mana Shield, Arcane Power, Arcane Concentration, and Presence of Mind which can all help with inflicting solid damage.

A talent under this tree, Slow, is also very valuable for Mages who are faced with melee damage dealers. This spell forces your enemies to stay within the range of the Mage.

Rolling an Arcane Mage will likely lead you as deep as Empowered and Improved Arcane Missiles and Explosion. These may sap out your mana like crazy, yes, but by the time you’re done casting your spells, your enemies would have taken enough damage already.

If you’re not planning to be a deep Arcane Mage, however, you could at least try to go as deep as Arcane Power to gain access to this very powerful talent.

Fire Mage PvP The Fire talent tree presents the second best set of talents for PvPing Mages. This tree provides for some really impressive nuking capabilities as well as melee ranged spells and some crowd control talents.

When rolling a Fire Mage, your main challenge is to control your mana use. If you won’t be careful, you could easily run out of mana.

Frost Mage PvP Crowd control is the signature skill of a Frost Mage PvP. This may prove quite a difficulty in solo encounters since it offers no single target damage spell. Still, with your chill and freeze talents, you’ll annoy the hell out of your opponents. While you won’t have the same abilities for effective nuking as other Mages, you can nevertheless count on your DPS and your ability to survive long enough to make your DPS attacks count. PvP-wise, a Frost Mage always work very well in group PvP.

During the initial stages of your Mage PvP career, you’ll have to content yourself using gears that you find in PvE. As you advance in PvP, you should focus on getting gears that give your Intellect and Stamina some boost, no matter which talent tree you are following.