WoW Mage Leveling Guide
The Mage is the king of burst DPS in World of Warcraft and are desired by most groups due to their damage output, intelligence buff, and the ability to provide health and mana regenerating food and drink.
The Mage is very powerful but it definitely lacks hit points compared to other classes. Paladins, Warriors and Death Knights have a lot more hit points than Mages, Priests, Druids, and Shaman can heal themselves when wounded, Rogues can disappear and both Warlocks and Hunters have pets. Mages don’t have these luxuries, what they do have however is control. If you have a Mage you need to master the use of the strengths the Mages have.
Like all classes in World of Warcraft the Mage has three skill trees. These are Arcane, Fire, and Frost. The first two can inflict massive amounts of damage but lack control. In the Fire and Arcane trees there is little in the form of crowd control. Of course all Mage characters have the infamous “sheep” ability but only Frost gives even more control.
While frost may not give you the massive hit that Arcane and Fire can, you will have a lot more control of the situation. Some talents allow your chill effects to actually freeze the target for a short time, you can also increase the time the chill lasts for and stun your target. Frost can be very effective to use when levelling solo.
One of the tactics that you might use to level is to pick an area with a large number of mobs in a general area. To be safer you should pick an area where the mobs are green to you. Start gathering them up and when you have a number around you pop your Frost Nova and root them in place. Jump back out of melee range and cut loose with Blizzard. This is a tactic that I have used on a number of Mage characters that I have built over the years and it really works.
Some players may argue that you should always go for mobs that are your level, I don’t see it like that however, lets play out two different scenarios.
In the first scenario we will head out to a zone that has mobs which are my level. Since they hit way too hard and I have tissue paper for armor I am not going to be able to area of effect hunt and will be forced to kill one at a time. Since they are my level they have more hit points and it takes longer to nuke them down, and after each kill I need to sit down and gulp some refreshments before I can engage the next one. For each of these kills we will say that I gain 200 experience points. For the sake of argument let’s say I can kill one mob every 3 minutes, so that would be 20 per hour. Total experience per hour would be 4,000.
In scenario 2 we will head out into a zone where there are a heap of mobs that are all green to me. I start rounding them up 5 at a time and going at them by freezing them and then using Blizzard. I’ll earn about 500 experience points for each group of mobs that I kill. I kill these off at about the same time it took me to kill 1 in scenario 1. I can therefore make 10000 experience points per hour compared to 4000 in scenario 1. I’ll also get to loot a heap more mobs meaning I’ll be able to make a lot more cash.
Leveling a Mage in World of Warcraft can seem like an arduous task, especially given that Mages don’t have the abilities to heal themselves, don’t have pets, and have low hit points. It’s not as tough as it seems however. If you take the time to practice the art of control, you’ll see that you can do massive damage in short time periods.
