PVP - I'm a total F'ing noob - Plz helpFollow

Spell pen counters resistance. For example, magic absorption gives 80 resistance to each school of magic. Therefore, you need 80 spen to counter a mage w/ MA. Not being spen capped causes you to miss out on a lot of damage. If you're just doing BGs, you can get away with less. You want to aim for 130 spen for totems and resist auras but most mages stop gemming for it after you get over 120. You get 35 spen from the back enchant (unless you're a tailor, in which case you should use lightweave). You have to gem for the rest. When gemming,the three gems you'll use are a blue - Stormy majestic zircon (25 spen), a green - Shattered eye of zul (10 haste/13 spen), and a purple - mysterious dreadstone (12 sp/13 spen). Mysterious dreadstone (12 sp/ 13 spen) is better than runed cardinal ruby (23 sp) in reds if you're not spen capped. Luckily, there are a lot of blue slots in pvp gear so 120+ spen is easy.


No. Only healers tend to gear for stam in arena. You'll find that mages will tend to have the lowest hp but we have a lot of survivability, especially frost. All your stam, int, spirit, and resil should come from your gear. If you have 23-24k unbuffed in your pvp gear, you're pretty good.


It's not just a mage stat. It's a pvp stat. Everyone has a different preference for the amount of resil on their gear. In general though, if you're wearing less than 600 resil, you will die quickly, especially this late in the expansion. My suggestion is to find the level of resil you feel comfortable with and then use the rest of your gear to buff up your offensive stats. In general, you want more resil in 5s and 3s than in 2s. It also varies depending on comp. For example, most mages in mage/ret comps wear more resil than in mage/lock or mage/priest as the mage is normally a better kill target in mage/ret. The more resil you can get from your pvp gear, the more pve pieces you can mix into your pvp set. For example, you'll see a lot of 1800+ mages with 900+ resil and 2pc t10 (normally from head, chest, or shoulders as they have the best offensive stats) since the t1 weapons open up a lot of gear combinations. The only slot where you're pretty much always see the same piece is gloves. The pushback reduction on poly from pvp gloves is amazing in arenas.


sp and haste once you're comfortable with your survivability. You need between 4-6% hit for pvp. 4% is the minimum. 6% is the racial hit cap. After that, hit only helps against specific class/race combination like BE rogues w/ heightened senses and is not worth gearing for. As long as you have 4%, how much more you need is personal preference.

Haste is a great pvp stat because it affects the GCD. It also lowers the cast time of all your spells instead of affecting only damage like sp does. Some mages gem for haste over sp but that's personal preference. How much haste you want is a matter of personal preference although I would suggest getting at least 600. I'm sure you know what spell power does. As of right now, most serious pvp mages have 3k+ unbuffed as frost. It's not that hard to get at the moment.

You gem just like in pve after you're spen capped. You can use rawr to help optimize your gear for pvp although it's not as good from a pvp standpoint. Set the mob level to 82 and the resists to 120 for arcane, fire, and frost. When optimizing, you can set it to only consider gear sets with your pvp trinket or to maintain specific amounts of haste or resil.

You didn't give much indication of your mage's gear other than you're using extra badges. If you're just starting out, you can buy furious w/ triumphs and relentless with frost. Aim for the 4 pc pvp bonus and then switch in pve pieces as you get better gear. The bad thing about the mage pvp set is that they give crit instead of haste. Buy the wrathful pieces of alacrity for honor for your offpieces. For trinkets, use your best dps trinket. If you're human, use two. In arena, you can get away with not using a pvp trinket in some comps if your dispels are good. If you need a pvp trinket, it's either the haste trinket from wg (titan forged rune of alacrity), the sp trinket from wg (titan forged rune of audacity), or the resil trinket for honor. That comes down to personal preference and what you need in your gear.

You didn't say what spec you pvp in but there are only 2 popular choices: 20/0/51 frost and 60/0/11 arcane. For frost, you go to DF in frost and get TTW and imp CS in arcane. For 60/0/11, you have a lot of freedom but most people avoid the mana talents in the arcane tree. You need slow, Abarr, and TTW. You go down to IV in the frost tree. Most mages pvp as frost and I'd recommend frost over arcane if you're serious about pvp. You trade damage for survivability, longevity, and control. Minor glyphs are always fire ward, frost ward, slow fall. Major Glyphs vary based on comp. If you're frost, take Ice Barrier. The other normal choices are evo (for 2s, 3s, bgs) and Poly (if your comp has any class that dots or bgs). You'll also see IV glyph a lot in lower brackets (2s and 3s), BGs, and duels. Mana gem is popular in 3s. For arcane, major glyphs are normally evo, poly, and mana gem. Again, you'll normally see some use IV glyph.

Easiest way to get used to pvp is find a 2s partner and jump in. Popular 2s comps are mage/rogue, mage/ disc priest, mage/lock (normally destro but aff has become more popular recently), mage/spriest and mage/ret. Mage/spriest and mage/ aff lock became more popular after the changes allowing haste to affect dots. In my experience, most people looking for arena partners will expect you to be frost unless you say otherwise so make sure you let your potential partners know if you're arcane. Both mage/disc and mage/ret work well for arcane. Good luck.

Edited for spelling.




Edited, Apr 3rd 2010 1:13pm by Isior

Let me add just a tidbit regarding resilience;

If you're not doing high-rank arenas as a double DPS team, it's actually quite possible to BG in PvE gear. It turns you into the ultimate glass cannon with SICK DPS but quite literally no survivability, but this can work pretty well if you adjust your playstyle (don't go in solo, 3-shot people from secluded/hidden spots). That said, if you're indeed new to PvP, you'll probably want to go all out on resilience, all the way up to 800-1000. While PvPing in PvE gear can work, it means every fight you start is going to end in about 5 seconds because you either 3-shot or get 3-shot - if you're wearing loads of resilience you can drag fights out more and will have an easier time learning to kite, how to use CC, etc, etc.

Very helpful post! I am just starting battlegrounds centered PvP with my mage and the timing of this post was erie. I was going to ask almost the exact same questions. I have a few PvP pieces and have jumped between Arcane and Frost just to flesh out the differences (mind you with 450 resil and still odd gear). Arcane (PvE spec) hits like a truck, when you hit. You go down like a sack of bricks when you are gibbed though. Frost is very nice for survivability so far, but I keep coming back to Arcane for the haste/hard hit factor.

Learn to kite, or die. Your poly spell is the most rediculous battle changing tool you have, at least I think so. Many (most) BG battles are fought with groups that don't use thier cooldowns properly and forget they can pop out of a poly. For that matter those people that have the ability to decurse you or or enemy as you are polyed usually won't either. A 2 or 3 mage poly chain on a healer is glorious.

Thankyou Isior and Mozared, continue on.

Not a bad idea. I think Filter said he was gonna completely redo the thing, though.

If he doesn't say anything about it in the next couple days or so(and if someone reminds me) and if they haven't changed the password to the sock account, I'll pop that in there.