WoW Mage Leveling Guide – Mage Leveling Builds

The WoW Mage must be one of Blizzard’s favorite; the Mage is blessed with an array of unique abilities that makes her life comfortable. As mage leveling guide we will first give you the bad news about this character and then why these challenges are minor compared to the good news

Leveling the Mage to 20 can a bit of a hassle because of her Cloth Armor and limited ranged abilities in the lower level. But after that initial challenge playing the Mage becomes a “kid in the candy store” experience.

The Mage has Fantastic Abilities

The Mage can teleport herself and allies to Azeroth major cities, she makes water and food out of thin air and either freezes, polymorph or explode those that oppose her. Or when not in to mood to play she can just blink away. When you level a Mage character you’ll get a wickedly potent array of effects, buffs and debuffs to play with. Depending on the build the Mage can be great in both PvE as PvP situations.

Distance is the Key when you play Mage

The mage has cloth armor and depends on her ranged arms, and is therefore rather helpless in the beginning. All that changes when you gain Fire Blast, Frost Nova, Frost Bolt, Ice Armor, Polymorph and Blink.

When you specialize as a frost mage, your frost bolts will slow advancing monsters down, and your Frost Nova will freeze them in place. The Blink ability is perfect for the Mage whose strategy depends on keeping a distance between herself and her enemies.  Blink allows you to instantly create that space to fight effectively. With Polymorph you’ll be able to temporarily change your opponents into wondering sheep. Quit handy when you are attacked by multiple monsters at a time.

What to Level Frost or Fire

There is an ongoing debate if you should level as Frost/Arcane or Fire/Arcane talent build. Personally I love the Arcane/Frost build (21-0-59), but both Fire/Arcane and Frost/Arcane are fairly easy to level.  Leveling a pure Arcane Mage is a bit more difficult but comes with many hidden joys.

The three Main Mage Builds and How to Use Them

An Arcane Mage is primarily used in PvE because of her enormous damage dealing qualities, high spell power and intellect. The disadvantage is the fact that Arcane is very Mana intensive. The modern Arcane Mage will use a simple rotation:

1. Arcane Barrage whenever it is up,
2. Arcane Blast, and
3. Arcane Missiles whenever the Missile Barrage talent activates.

Using a Fire Mage

Fire specialization revolves around critical hits. There are two popular variations of this talent specialization, namely PvE Fire and PvE Frostfire.  PvE Fire becomes more effective once the mage starts to build high spell power.  PvE Fire or Frostfire has a simple rotation of:

1. Casting Scorch repeatedly to stack up Improved Scorch and increase fire damage on their target, making sure to keep this debuff active,
2. Casting Living Bomb whenever it is available,
3. Casting Fireball or Frostfire Bolt, and
4. Using Hot Streak as soon as it activates for an instant cast Pyroblast.

Using a Frost Mage

A frost Mage can run into problems in the endgame raiding scene

This is because the Mage has trouble sustaining any kind of high damage rotation for very long, because most raid and dungeon bosses can’t be frozen.

One of the most dangerous aspects of a PvP Frost Mage is his pet, the Water Elemental. This pet deals enough damage to be dangerous.

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The mage can also use this pet to drop a Frost Nova effect from a great distance, keeping melee enemies chain-frozen and forcing them to deal with catastrophic critical hits due to the effect of Shatter and Ice Shards.

And even on the run, a PvP frost mage can effort chip away at the health of pursuers with powered up Ice Lance and Cone of Cold spells.

When played well, a Frost Mage can be one of the most difficult things to kill in the entire game, while mixing a devastating amount of burst offensive capability in with their barrier and freeze effects.

As you might read between the lines I’m a huge fan of the Mage, and leveling the character. What helped me to really be effective in leveling the mage is the Zygors Guide, now revamped and improved to the Zygor 2.o In game Leveling Guide.

Click here for a quick visit to Zygor’s Guide