LF Arcane Mage spec

[xyzzy]

I am currently a frost mage and enjoying it but I am thinking about giving arcane a try. Anyone have any good arcane builds and could maybe tell me how the play styles are different.

[Minischoles]

For level 80, the arcane spec i'd say you should take would be
wowhead.com/?talent=of0ic0MIzxGuGtxdfVc0o

Points can be switched around in the fire tree, getting rid of world in flames for Impact, but you've got Pyroblast and Ignite, Incineration and Imp Fireblast are probably your best talents in that tree as it improves a few of your main nuke and instants. Arcane is giving you high mana regen, high resistance, higher spellpower back on absorbing damage when you use Mana shield.

Your basic pvp play style is put Mana Shield up on yourself, put slow on your opponent and maybe do a few Arcane Barrage. Next is really based on preference, but personally i usually take a few hits, which from melee can result in a huge boost to your spellpower, then you just pop all your CDs and use pyroblast or fireball with your PoM, then spam scorch and Arcane Barrage on your target while keeping slow up.
You'll use up a huge amount of mana doing this, but with Arcane Meditation/Mage Armor and the Mage Armor glyph you've got enough regen to deal with it.

Other way is essentially kiting using slow, spamming instants at your opponent as you run away or blink away, use Frost Nova and basically keeping your distance and unloading your nuke on them.

It is very much a glass cannon kind of playstyle. You can unload a huge amount of damage very quickly as an arcane mage, especially currently when people don't have a lot of resilience on them in BGs. But you're also very vunerable with your CDs down, and even Mana shield doesn't absorb a huge amount of damage before it breaks and so you can end up facing a melee class thats just unloading damage on you while you're losing more mana.

[n0skillS]

Personally, I would go something more along the lines of Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This will give you all the burst talents that you will really need (never felt the huge need to have pompyro handy, pomfireball does almost the same amount of damage) while keeping yourself from getting locked 24/7 through 2/2 Burning Determination.

Generally I like to just bounce around and spam instant casts. Arcane Barrage, Fire blast, Ice lance, Arcane Explosion, anything to just keep ticking the opponents health away. When Missile Barrage procs, you're going to want to use arcane missiles as it is a great damage output for only 2.5 seconds of channeling. Also, I would have to say Mana Shield can be a good thing, but don't keep it up all the time. What good is a mage with no mana? Hence the one point in Mana Shielding incase you get in a sticky situation.

As for a PvE aspect, you want to do Arcane Barrage->Arcane blast->Arcane Barrage->Arcane Blast over and over and over again, until you proc Missile Barrage, which you would then use Arcane missles instead of Arcane blast. It's the best rotation I've found while playing arcane, yielding a lot more dps than other rotations that I have tried.