In this article, we present you the viable talent and glyph choices for your Arcane Mage (WoW MoP 5.3). We detail what each of the talents and glyphs do and in which situations they should be taken.

The other articles of our Arcane Mage guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the right.

This guide has been reviewed and approved by Blatty, one of the best Mages in the world, who raids in Method, the currently ranked #1 guild on WoWProgress. He has been contributing a lot to the community through his streams on Twitch and now works for Millenium, his new streaming platform.

1. Talent Choices↑top

• Performance-enhancing
• Survival
• Crowd Control
• Movement
• Utility
• Situational

There is no longer such a thing as a default build. Most of the talents are now viable. They can easily be changed, thanks to Dust of Disappearance (and Tomes of the Clear Mind from level 86 to 90). You will frequently find yourself changing talents and glyphs between encounters, in order to adapt your play style to different mechanics. Therefore, it is important to understand what each of your talents does and how they affect your play style.

2. Tier 1 Talents↑top

Tier 1 talents have been designed with mobility in mind. You have the choice between:

• Presence of Mind, which grants you an instant-cast for the spell of your choice every 90 seconds;
• Blazing Speed, which suppresses slowing effects and increases your movement speed by 150% for 1.5 seconds;
• Ice Floes, which allows you to cast two spells while moving, every minute.

The choice between Blazing Speed and Ice Floes depends on the type of movement during the encounter. Blazing Speed provides you with emergency movement, for when you need to move really fast for a short period of time. Blazing Speed is a good complement to Blink. So, if you think Blink is not enough to handle all the emergency movement, then use Blazing Speed. Otherwise, use Ice Floes.

Presence of Mind does provide a very small DPS gain on encounters that do not require movement, but these encounters do not really exist (even in LFR).

3. Tier 2 Talents↑top

Tier 2 talents have been designed with survivability in mind. You have the choice between:

• Temporal Shield, which has a 10-second effect: the damage you take during the first 4 seconds will be healed back over the course of the last 6 seconds;
• Flameglow, which grants you a passive shield that always absorbs a bit of the damage you receive;
• Ice Barrier, which absorbs a quantity of damage (the absorption effect scales with Spell Power) and prevents spellcasting from being delayed, while active;

Ice Barrier should be the default choice in Normal/Heroic difficulty raiding because it can be used to absorb huge bursts of damage (which you will take during most encounters).

Flameglow is not as powerful as Ice Barrier, but it provides its shield passively, which may be more suited to the occasional player.

Temporal Shield is a very good survival cooldown, but only take it when you actually plan on using it (for bypassing encounter mechanics, for example).

4. Tier 3 Talents↑top

Tier 3 talents have been designed with crowd control in mind. Whichever talent you will choose will depend on the encounter, but we think that these talents are mostly for PvP and will be most often be irrelevant in PvE. You have the choice between:

• Ring of Frost, which summons a 10-yard ring that lasts for 10 seconds and that freezes, for 10 seconds, enemies entering it (up to a maximum of 10 enemies);
• Ice Ward, which causes all enemies within 10 yards of a friendly target to become frozen for 5 seconds when the target is struck;
• Frostjaw, which silences and freezes the target in place for 8 seconds.

5. Tier 4 Talents↑top

Tier 4 talents have been designed with survival in mind. You have the choice between:

• Greater Invisibility, which improves Invisibility, giving it an instant effect and making you take 90% less damage while Invisibility is active (and for 3 seconds after coming out of Invisibility);
• Cauterize, which causes an attack that would otherwise kill you to instead bring you to 50% of your maximum health, after which you will burn for 40% of your maximum health over 6 seconds;
• Cold Snap, which finishes the cooldown of your Ice Block, Frost Nova, and Cone of Cold while also restoring 30% of your maximum health.

Greater Invisibility is the best choice for Normal and Heroic raiding. Combined with Ice Block, it will enable you, on many occasions, to bypass encounter mechanics and soak damage that would otherwise kill you.

Cauterize is more suited to occasional players who want a passive way of preventing a death.

Cold Snap can be useful when you need to use Ice Block twice in quick succession (though you will still get 30 second of Hypothermia).

6. Tier 5 Talents↑top

Tier 5 talents provide you with abilities that will become an integral part of your rotation.

• Nether Tempest deals damage over time to a target. Each time it ticks, Nether Tempest also deals half the damage to a random target within 10 yards.
• Living Bomb deals damage over time to a target. When it expires or the target dies, Living Bomb also deals damage to up to 3 other targets within 10 yards. Living Bomb cannot be applied on more than 3 enemies.
• Frost Bomb deals delayed damage to a target, also dealing half of that damage to all other targets within 10 yards. In addition, affected targets are slowed by 70% for 2 seconds.

In Patch 5.2, Nether Tempest was your Tier 5 talent of choice in all situations.

In Patch 5.3, Living Bomb was changed significantly, and we need to wait for a few days to see how the talent will fare in raids before giving you valid advice (there was no raid testing for Patch 5.3, so there has been no testing of these changes in a raid environment). That said, Simulation Craft currently values Living Bomb slightly higher than Nether Tempest for single-target.

7. Tier 6 Talents↑top

Tier 6 talents are mana management talents. All of them are viable.

• Invocation removes the cooldown of Evocation. After completing an Evocation, you gain Invoker's Energy, which lasts 1 minute and increase your spell damage by 15%. While Invoker's Energy is active, you passively regenerate 50% less mana.
• Rune of Power summons a rune which causes you, when standing in it, to regenerate 75% more mana and to deal 15% increased spell damage. This spell replaces Evocation and the rune that it summons disappears after 1 minute.
• Incanter's Ward places an absorption shield on you for 8 seconds. When the shield disappears, you gain up to 15% increased spell damage for 25 seconds and you restore up to 18% mana. The strength of the effect depends on the amount of damage that was absorbed. The effect is maximised when the shield disappears because it has been entirely consumed. If the shield disappears because the 8 seconds have run out, then you will only get a fraction of the effect.

Rune of Power is the only viable Tier 6 talent for Arcane Mages. This makes it very hard for Arcane to be competitive in Tier 15. Indeed, there is a lot of movement in each of the fights, so your goal is to optimise your positioning so that you move as little as possible.

8. Major Glyphs↑top

None of your major glyphs will be mandatory. Some will increase your DPS in very specific situations, others will improve your survivability or make some spells more useful.

DPS-increasing glyphs are listed below.

• Glyph of Arcane Power doubles the duration and cooldown of Arcane Power. You should take this glyph when you have the Tier 15 2-piece bonus because it allows you to line up Arcane Power with Alter Time, making it benefit from Time Lord (the buff provided by the Tier 15 2-piece bonus) for its entire 30-second duration.
• Glyph of Mana Gem will grant you more Mana Gems, which means more mana and more DPS, in long fights.
• Glyph of Arcane Explosion increases the radius of Arcane Explosion by 5 yards. It can be useful in AoE situations with a large number of enemies that are not stacking.

The other potentially useful major glyphs are listed below.

• Glyph of Blink increases the distance you travel with Blink by 5 yards.
• Glyph of Counterspell grants the ability to cast Counterspell while channeling or casting another spell, at the expense of increasing its cooldown by 4 seconds. This glyph will be beneficial every time you will be on interrupt duty.
• Glyph of Evocation adds a self-healing component to Evocation and Rune of Power. This will be a default major glyph when none of the others can provide anything useful for the encounter(s) you are progressing on.
• Glyph of Ice Block causes Frost Nova to be automatically cast, at no mana cost, when Ice Block terminates, after which time you are granted a 3-second immunity against all spells.
• Glyph of Remove Curse is not a damage-increasing glyph, as one might think when first reading the tooltip. It provides a temporary damage boost that almost compensates for sacrificing a global cooldown to cast Remove Curse.
• Glyph of Slow causes Arcane Blast to apply Slow on your target, but only if no other target is currently afflicted by your Slow.

9. Minor Glyphs↑top

Among the other minor glyphs, two might be of interest.

• Glyph of Loose Mana restores your Mana Gem mana over time, which makes you stay longer at full mana (this equates to more DPS as an Arcane Mage).
• Glyph of Momentum will allow you to blink in the direction where you are going. It can be very useful if you are moving sideways and want to keep facing the boss.

10. Changelog↑top

• 20 May 2013: Patch 5.3 update: need to wait for a few days before updating Tier 5 talent recommendations. Updated explanations for Incanter's Ward.
• 20 May 2013: Updated Tier 1 talent explanations following further testing from Blatty ( Ice Floes is viable).
• 17 Apr. 2013: Update after Blatty's review of the guide.
  • Improved advice for choosing your Tier 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 talents.
  • Improved advice for choosing your Major Glyphs.
• 01 Apr. 2013: Improved conditions for choosing Blazing Speed, Ice Barrier, and Invocation.
• 07 Mar. 2013: Patch 5.2 update.
  • Rewrote explanations for Tier 1 talents, as Scorch has been replaced with Blazing Speed.
  • Ice Floes' cooldown has been reduced to 45 seconds.
  • Rewrote explanations for Tier 2 talents, as Flameglow has replaced Blazing Speed.
  • Modified description of Invocation to reflect the changes from 5.2.
  • Rune of Power now increases mana regeneration by 75% (was 100%).
  • Glyph of Evocation restores less health than previously.
  • Glyph of Fire Blast was removed from the game.
  • Mirror Images now deal 50% more damage with Frostbolt, rendering the glyph useless.