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Mage Leveling Guide
You probably know that mage is a very powerful class and if you pick a right build and put some effort into developing this class, it may be a lot of fun.
As you are undoubtedly aware, mage is a fine class in World Of Warcraft and if you follow the right strategy from the begninning, you may find yourself power leveling quite easy and fast. Therefore selecting a proper mage leveling guide can be very beneficial in your leveling journey. From picking a right race, knowing how to properly utilize your mana levels, to selecting a leveling build for your mage, it's important to think through all that before starting your journey in WoW world. This guide is by no means a full mage leveling guide, but it will explore some of the mage's characteristics and show how to use them to your advantage.
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Which race to select:
One of the fist things you will have to do is pick a race. It depends on you if you want your character to
be visually apealing, but rather it would be wise choice to go for racial traits. Whether you choose alliance or horde race, it will greatly vary you power leveling strategy later in the game - pick accordingly to your preferences. Now, lets look at the possible choices:
Human (Alliance)- This is the most lacking class considering mages. There aren't that many racial traits that would help - Spirit gain is 5%, compared to gnome's mana regenaration that's not impressive. Humans gain faster reputation, they have increased stealth detection ability also they gain a bonus to sword specialization but this one in our case is useless. But then again, humans are visually the most "atractive".
Gnome (Alliance) - They get a 5% inteligence increase at the start, they can break out from certain effect
thanks to Escape Artist ability. Also their small size is a significant factor that can turn the scale in your
favour when you are able to hide behind small objects. Additionally gnomes are popular PvP mage class and they doing quite well as PvE mage. All this makes gnomes fine choice.
Undead (Horde) - They possess effective traits for all classes, but regarding our mage class the most important are Shadow Resistance and Will of the Forsaken. Also the Cannibalize ability greatly decreases regeneration time after battles.
Trolls (Horde) - Initially they were the most avoided class, but the later patches improved them a bit and now they posess one of the most effective ability in regards to mages and that is Berserking wich allows them to cast faster for short bursts of time. YES THEY ARE UGLY BUT THEY ARE FINE CHOICE FOR YOUR MAGE.
With regard to mana, it's levels can be regenerated by drinking potions or simply waiting. It also regenerates based on the Spirit ability and all the equipment bonuses that you possess. What you have to remember is that finding simple and effective rotations, greatly helps in preserving your mana and wiping out your enemies.
A simple but effective rotation may look like this: Shield->Spam Frostbolt->Step Back->Shield again->Spam Frostbolt.
Now, having looked at the preliminaries lets move to selecting a proper build for your mage. That means eiter Frost, Fire or Arcane. There are a lot of recommendations concerning this three trees of specailization, lets look at each one separately:
- Frost: if you are into leveling or PvP, you may consider this tree. This build is very efficient in using mana, it's also considered hard to kill because of it's special abilities like Ice Block, which makes you immune for a short period of time. Using slowing spells at the same time allows you to kill more mobs than other specs. However, after level 39-42 it's damage per second (DPS) drops down and it's getting cosiderably harder to kill mobs. If you choose this build remember to spend talents and glyph to enhance Ice Armor which will reduce damage from physical attacks. After all it is a powerful fealing to be able to freeze mobs and then hit them with everything you got, especially freeze+blizzard combo.
- Arcane: This one is probably most widely used, especially in raids. It has great talens like Focus Magic - it can be cast only on another player, but it increases their spell critical hit by 3%. It may seem not that much of an increase, but it adds up with other bonuses. If you are into Area of Effect spells, you seriously should consider this build. For instance, you could let around 8 mobs come up to your mage and AoE them by using Frost Nova and arcane explosion. One drawback by using arcane may be low mana level, in which case it would be wise to stack Intellect stat, which gives more mana and lets you cast more spells.
- Fire: This build doesn't focus on AoE so much, but rather on a single target. It mainly uses high criticals and Damage over Time (DoT). Since most of this build's spell are slow cast, haste is important for fire mage. But the key here is having good critical hits, which will result in greatly inreased DoT. Fire spec needs a lot much more mana than frost (altough not as much as arcane) and the fact that enemies can quickly come at close range, results in your mage taking more damage, which in turn leads to low survivabilty. But generally it's fun seeing all those big numbers.
Conclusion:
As you can probably tell by now playing a mage character in world of warcaft can be a very interesting experience and indeed it is, we know. While choosing your mage build - fire, frost or arcane - simply pick one accordignly to your preferences. If you like seeing all those AoE blasts go for arcane/frost, but if you prefer mostly single targets fire build is the way to go.
Check out also talent advisor and in-game class leveling guides from Zygor Guide and Dugis Guide.
