You've decided to level a Mage in World of Warcraft? We'll you've come to the right place to get information on the best way to level your mage. Are you leveling your mage for PvE or PvP purposes? Before you make your character make sure you choose the race that will provide you with the best racial abilities to enhance your play.
As of the last patch Blizzard made some minor changes to casting classes. They enable you to level faster because they have reduced the mana cost for all spells up to level 20. They have also doubled the amount of mana you regenerate passively up to level 15. As you get closer to level 15 the mana regenerated returns to normal.
My favorite specialization for leveling a Mage is frost. It's mana efficient, it gives you more control than other specs, and your criticals hit harder than other specs. Some of the more important talents that you need to pick up are:
Frostbite - This talent will let your frost bolt and frost armor have a chance to nova the target, rooting them in place.
Improved Frostbolt - Takes off half a second of your casting time. Huge.
Ice Shards - This will make your critical hits do twice as much damage as the normal spell (instead of 150%).
Precision - The hit rating on this skill is needed for leveling. This will make it so your miss much less.
Artic Reach - This talent lets you cast your frost spells from further away.
Shatter - Your chance to critically hit any target frozen in greatly increased. This talent is even better the higher level you are because you will have many ways of freezing targets.
Ice Barrier - This gives you a shield to place around yourself that will absorb all incoming damage. While the shield is active you can channel spells even while being hit.
Shattered Barrier - When your Ice Barrier is depleted, this will cause any target near you to be frozen in place.
Water Elemental - Summons a water elemental to fight with you. It does great damage and you can use him to cast a ranged frost nova on anything. There is a glyph you can get to make your pet permanent.
Fingers of Frost - Anytime you cast a spell that can snare, you have a chance to gain fingers of frost, which allows you to cast 2 spells as if the target was frozen. Which means you will get almost 2 guaranteed critical hits
Leveling up is easy but it can be tedious at times. The general idea is to find a monster and start casting Frost Bolts at max range. At lower levels you might have to frost nova the monster when it gets close and run away and start casting again. When you get to level 50 or so, you will tear through anything around your level. You will be killing stuff before they can even reach you. That's all there is to leveling a mage.
