Each week Arcane Brilliance brings you a column about Mages. This column used to be housed on Wowinsider, but now it's featured on some newfangled site called WoW.com. The url is a full seven letters shorter. It's crazy. where did those seven letters go? I don't know, but I blame Warlocks.

There's an old saying: you can please some Mages some of the time, but you can't please all Mages all of the time. Or something like that. Last week, several of you complained that I was spending too much time writing about PvP, while ignoring PvE completely. This will be the fifth PvP-related Arcane Brilliance in a row. Previous to that, you have to go back to October 25th of last year to find our last PvP-centric column. A short list of things that have happened since then:

• Wrath of the Lich King was released.
• Barack Obama became the president of these United States.
• 5 dollar foot-longs.
• Arcane Brilliance brought you 24 PvE columns in a row.

Seriously, guys. Make up your minds. I don't know what you want from me anymore. Anyway, on to Frost Mage PvP.

Frost is the most widely-used and widely-accepted PvP spec for Mages, by far, and for good reason. It offers a balanced mix of the things every class wants to have in PvP: a wide array of damage mitigation and avoidance options, multiple CC/root/snare/silence abilities, and high burst damage potential.

In fact, You'll run into a large and vocal contingent of players who won't even take a non-Frost Mage seriously in PvP. A quick glance at the official forums on any given day will reveal several "PvP advice" topics, and without fail, there will be several responses in the thread that essentially say "respec Frost, noob." Though the sentiment reflects equal parts elitism, ignorance, and extreme close-mindedness, it is grounded in the simple, undeniable fact that Frost is awesome.

The Frost tree is designed for PvP effectiveness, and if you're serious about Mage PvP, Frost is absolutely the spec of choice. You can be effective with Fire and Arcane, no question. But those two specs--Fire in particular--come with certain inherent handicaps you'll have to learn to work around. Frost has none of those handicaps.

Talent Build

Frost+Improved Counterspell 20/0/51

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