Mage Abilities and Talents

Abilities and Talents

Arcane

There are plenty of good spells in the Arcane tree, making this a popular choice for specialization. In addition to some pure damage (Arcane Missiles) and good AE (Arcane Explosion), you have a buff (Arcane Intellect), crowd control (Polymorph), and a number of support spells to choose from. Many of the high-level support spells, such as Slow Fall, Teleport, and Portal, will require you to buy reagants to cast them, though, which require both gold and inventory space, making these a bit more unwieldy as you reach the higher levels for your character. Blink is one of the least-heralded of the Arcane mage spells, but it has a lot of fantastic uses, including getting away from gankers in PVP or breaking out of roots and snare spells.

If you’re going heavy into Arcane, you’ll need to invest most of your talent points here, especially into Improved Arcane Missiles, to make them uninterruptable, and Improved Arcane Explosion, to make it an instant-cast spell. Arcane Concentration is also useful since, when it’s maxed out, it will give every spell you cast a 10% chance to cost no mana. Thinking about it another way, you’re essentially getting a 10% mana reduction across the board. Evocation is also a good choice for getting mana back during long battles. There are plenty of talents that emphasize certain spells, though, so if you have a particular favorite spell, work towards the matching talent and beef it up a bit.

Fire
There’s no spell tree more self-explanatory than the Fire tree: if you specialize in Fire, you’re going to be the best damage-dealer in the game, although you’ll have to sacrifice buffs and specialized spells to achieve your burnination goals. You have Fireball and Fireblast as great early nukes and instant-cast spells, and will eventually be able to move on to Scorch, Flamestrike, Blast Wave, and Pyroblast, which will give you an impressive library of damage-dealer spells for any situation.

So far as talents go, many of these are self-explanatory. Most of the talents here involve increasing damage or decreasing casting time; of particular note is the fact that none of the talents involve reducing mana costs for your spells, making this the most mana-intensive tree to specialize in. You’ll need to compensate for this with extra Intelligence, or by building up Arcane Concentration or Evocation in the Arcane talents.

Frost
Frost relies is much better at freezing and slowing your enemies than is the Fire tree, but it pays for this by being less damaging. In the end, a Frost specialization is best taken when you plan on mostly playing as part of a duo or group, as your teammates will be able to take advantage of your abilities to affect the movement of enemies and will be able to compensate for your lack of pure damage.

Your staples here include Frost Armor, which is a no-brainer, and something that every mage will want to keep refreshed as often as possible. So far as damage spells go, Frostbolt will be a great way to open a fight, as it will slow your opponent as they charge in on you, letting you get in more spells until they finally get into melee range. Cone of Cold and Blizzard are also good AE spells, but Frost Nova will be usually be the most important spell here, especially for non-Frost mages, as it’s the only root spell available to mages.

The talent tree for Frost allows you to do some pretty tricky things, and has a variety of effects that aren’t seen in the Fire talents. You’ll have a lot of powerful effects to choose from, with many of them dealing with an increase in the length of time enemies are slowed by your spells, or by increasing the amount of damage that your critical strikes do (which works well with an high-Intellect build).