Burning Crusade Mage PvP Questions

[MildlySaucy]

Hello fellow Warmaners!

Let me start off by saying I never played a mage in TBC, but I always wanted to. Fast forward, hit 70 a few days on my fresh new shiny frost mage, only to be a little confused about stat priority. Since haste gear isn't in the game yet, it feels like frost pvp is ..... I don't know....slow to me? I feel like going full crit isn't all that great with shatter, but I am open to any and all suggestions here. Am I doing something wrong here? I appreciate any and all feedback.

[Speakeasy]

Cheers & congrats on your shiny new mage!

In all honestly, all casters are going to feel clunky and slow in comparison to melee classes. World of Warcraft as a whole moved much more slowly in vanilla and TBC. What might feel clunky to you, is everyone's worse nightmare because mages are some of the top threats in player versus player. First thing first, Hit cap for PvP (which I believe is like 7% or something among those lines. I'm trying to remember off of 10 year old memory) and spell penetration. Since haste is so rare in the game up until SWP patch, crit is more than adequate. Frost mages offer a lot of control and utility in a PvP environment, however you'll see a plethora of mage specs for PVP such as Arcane, PoM pyro, Elementalist (from what I remember).

[Zeebface]

Not sure if I should make a new thread or post it on here but,

I see a lot of mages with talents that leave out the second last frost talent that adds 10% spellpower to frostbolts. It looks great to me but apparently its not as good as I think it is. Would anyone mind explaining why people pick other talent traits over it? Or explain the common frost tree in general so that I could get a better understanding of what my thought process should be?

Thank you in advance

[SKNN]

You won't use Frostbolt a lot in arena in most comps so it's not a very useful talent (except if you know you'll be able to use a lot of FB, like in some 3s comps). Beside that there's isn't much to explain about the standard PvP frost spec, you take key talents, additional range, reduced CD, Imp Blizzard for the additional slow (synergies with Permafrost), Winter's Chill to make dispelling harder for your opponent,...

To answer OP: you don't really have a choice, PvP gear has crit and you need PvP gear for the resilience. Even with S4 gear you won't be able to get much haste if you don't have SW gear too, so even back then most mages didn't go for haste.

[Vallismed]

1° hit cap: 3%
2° spellpen: 25 is enough most of the time, get spellpen offhand/wand to swap if needed
2° haste when implemented (fast poly !)
3° spell
4° crit

The skillcap is really high, spam poly, spam blizz and good luck.