More Mage Arena Thoughts

On Castbars:

I use Quartz for my castbar as well as focus and target bars; I do this mainly because I use it with macros for /stopcasting + frostbolt and /stopcasting + ice lance. This takes a LOT of getting used to in arena play, but is huge when you get used to it. I know this sounds like PvE nonsense, but it will dramatically improve your play once you get used to the clumsiness.

I also use a /stopcasting and CS my focus macro; for both this and for normal stopcasting + CS, I find Quartz great as you can sometimes squeeze in a cast you normally coudln't if you stop it during the latency and still snag the spell lock.

/focus target and /stopcasting/cast[target=focus] Counterspell are the two main focus macros I use

On Specs:

I do believe 17/0/44 is the strongest overall spec, and I don't feel that what you get in deep frost makes up for Imp CS. I believe in taking Perma and Winds but passing on Empowered Bolt; I don't see much benefit in investing further in frost unless you want talents like Frost Channeling or Improved Blizzard -- both are talents that I feel are overrated. Silence can win games a lot, spell locking isn't what it used to be, and clearcasting makes up for any efficiency gains of deep frost. Improved Missiles is actually quite useful too especially with the focus gem as you can still cast missiles when you get the proc and then recast missiles right as the buff fades to get 8-9 missiles in about 4 seconds, which is quite a lot of damage that can't be LoS'd or frost resisted.

Advanced WE Control:

You NEED a macro that does /stopcasting /petpassive. You should use it for your fakecasts instead of trying to move or (please don't do this) jumping. It is a much safer way of baiting interrupts as it is much faster, can bug the interruption display (the spell will appear as interrupted on their side, but you will not have your school locked) and using one key to do both these actions allow you a quick way of turning your pet's autoattack off in case of it being midcast on a target being CC'd. The best part of this is that your pet will return to your side when you return him to passive. This lets you move your pet toward you quickly away from danger. Say you have a rogue snared and he is heading toward your pet, simply passive your pet and run so as to path the pet far from the rogue's direction. As you play with this, you can also get much better at pinning players behind pillars as you can get your pet to go one direction as you go the other.

This isn't going to always protect your pet from aggressors in arena and a lot of healer heavy, melee matrices are going to gun for your pet especially if you're on a traditional type matrix. There isn't necessarily a lot you can do, but avoid summoning your pet and attacking with him in the middle of the fray. On a DPS heavy team, you should definitely be doing enough offense to make going after your pet simply infeasible in the face of the damage and CC you are putting out.

Decision Making:

Every class lives and dies in the arena by decision making; you cannot plan everything out and execution is only part of the game. Should I Ice Block this fear after just trinketing poly? Is this HoJ worth blinking or should I eat the stun and not risk getting intercepted after Blinking?

Every game I try to think about not what happened, but what choices I made; I find that on days when I feel I'm playing well I can remember the choices be they mediocre or solid, but on days where I'm sucking, I can't even really recall what I was deciding between during the game. I'm very much the type to go against my planned strategies with on the fly improvisation, it's very alluring to play the flashy game and you tend to remember the games where your fancy play paid off better than the ones where it risked games that your conventional strategies would have locked in.

Status Update:

An interesting night of arena where we played some pretty good teams, lost a ton of points, got pissed off and emo about it, then recovered it all back with our best play of the season. Magdain's healing heavy team is going to be a perpetual nuisance, but the surprise has been that we play much better against 4DPS and 2.5healer teams than the classic matrices as of late. I wonder a bit if perhaps the classic teams have been sold a bit short in how viable they can be.