Each week Arcane Brilliance sits around, thinking of things to put in this opening paragraph. Arcane Brilliance considers many things. Then Arcane Brilliance usually ends up going for the easy Warlock joke, because let's face it, Warlocks are pretty low-hanging fruit, and Arcane Brilliance is lazy.

Of all the new stuff patch 3.1 brought us, perhaps this single most significant change was the addition of dual specs. Suddenly everybody and their second cousins can tank (or think they can tank), and every Druid/Paladin/Shaman has a resto/holy spec waiting in the wings. Everybody rolls on everything in every dungeon because they're "gearing up for their second spec"...or third spec...or whatever.

Mages don't have multiple roles to fill. We can't use our second talent spec slot for a tank or healer build. Our choices are and always have been DPS or DPS, just as God intended. And so, the advent of dual specs have instead opened up a different kind of door for a lot of Mages: PvP.

For the first time, we can keep our mana-efficient, DPS-maximized raiding build, and still have a second PvP-centric build on stand-by. A lot of Mages are taking advantage of this, and many are taking their first real steps into the strange and somewhat intimidating world of player-versus-player combat. For the Mage making that first foray into PvP, the culture shock can be very real, and the gear gap can seem insurmountable.

Fear not. Arcane Brilliance is here to tell you how to quickly and easily close that gap. Click the link below, and we'll have you mounting Warlock heads on your wall in no time.

Wrath of the Lich King has made PvP accessible like never before. Gear is easier to obtain, resilience isn't the absolute necessity it once was, and the options for fighting other players have never been so numerous and varied. In Burning Crusade, if you wanted to start getting PvP gear, you had two choices. You could start grinding honor in battlegrounds--a process that quickly became so repetitive and boring that a common practice was to simply plant your character in Alterac Valley and then go eat a sandwich or something while he soaked up honor--or you could try out Arena combat, which meant getting your face pounded mercilessly ten times a week until you'd gotten enough points to buy your first piece of gear, then repeating the process. In the old system, the die-hards got ever better gear, while the more casual PvPer fell further and further behind.

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