Levelling spec

[Durzah]

I've decided to level a mage and I was wondering on the best levelling spec..

I have the heirloom shoulders chest and weapon so thats an extra 20% quest and mob xp.

Once I get high enough (level 40ish I believe) is frost aoe grinding still viable?

If not, Arcane or Fire?

Got an 80 rogue and priest so im not stranger to levelling

[Deleted]

arcane is very mana intensive and does not do much damage on lower levels.
fire is also rather mana intensive, but it does decent damage.
frost is very mana intensive, and the frostbolt slow effectively makes everything slowable soloable.

overall, they are rather close together, but frost has the added benefit of being able to AOE grind at 25 and up. the only issue is that frost in instances is basically blizzard on trash, frostbolt on bosses. nothing else. the brainfreeze insta fireball is a DPS loss.

[Jonisawsom]

Even if not aoe grinding, frost is still the best. Best mana efficiency and ice shield, plus better snare effect on your frost spells. There really isn't anything else. aoe grinding is ok, but tbh I still found questing the fastest method. There isn't enough areas with no casters to steadily level all the way to 80.

I have all the caster gear (staff with 29 spell power enchant, chest, shoulders, both mana/spell power trinkets) and I went from 15-35 with a couple hours of leveling on my priest. No aoe grinding and it's still fast and easy. You can do it here and there but getting QH and just questing will be faster.

If you like dying lol, don't go frost. As far as the brain freeze proc, that's only at higher gear levels if I'm not mistaken. But you also start to lose mana efficiency if you are casting non-frost spells.

[Macanam]

arcane is very mana intensive and does not do much damage on lower levels.
fire is also rather mana intensive, but it does decent damage.
frost is very mana intensive, and the frostbolt slow effectively makes everything slowable soloable.

If all 3 specs are mana intensive, then the benchmark for them becoming intensive would be lowered.
As it goes, most casters have trouble with mana while levelling because many get no mana regen while casting.

I can't say much for the lower levels as a mage, I kind of skipped through a lot of them on my main mage, though I've had other low level ones in the past. In my limited low level experience, I would say frost is the easiest to deal with, having superior mana efficiency and generally better pvp capabilities at lower levels if you are on a pvp server. I personally levelled my mage as frost, multiboxed with a destruction warlock using recruit a friend. Frostbolt and Shadowbolt spam ftw

I changed my mage's spec when i got to outland and finally learned Arcane Blast. I personally really enjoy arcane, and had very few mana problems while levelling due to mana gems and a 2 minute evoc cooldown. I levelled all the way up to 80 as Arcane and have raided as Arcane since then.

[rathok]

leveling spec= X points frost, where X = Level - 9.

AOE grinding isn't really worth the effort and only really "works" below level ~55 as blizz caught on to that before the launch of TBC and included casters and random ranged mobs with pretty much every group to prevent this.

[Jonisawsom]

There is actually a few decent spots in NR to aoe grind, and OL too. Got about a level or so very fast at the spot in Dragonblight. Overall though it is still faster to quest imo, save for maybe a couple levels here and there that you can grind.

[Deleted]

arcane is very mana intensive and does not do much damage on lower levels.
fire is also rather mana intensive, but it does decent damage.
frost is very mana intensive, and the frostbolt slow effectively makes everything slowable soloable.

overall, they are rather close together, but frost has the added benefit of being able to AOE grind at 25 and up. the only issue is that frost in instances is basically blizzard on trash, frostbolt on bosses. nothing else. the brainfreeze insta fireball is a DPS loss.

you mean to say, frost is NOT vvery mana intensive :P

[ECZO]

I've decided to level a mage and I was wondering on the best levelling spec..

I have the heirloom shoulders chest and weapon so thats an extra 20% quest and mob xp.

Once I get high enough (level 40ish I believe) is frost aoe grinding still viable?

If not, Arcane or Fire?

Got an 80 rogue and priest so im not stranger to levelling

most people often leveled even before 2.0 or 3.0 talents, atm my mage is lvl 22 (lol I know but you can take my advice up to that lvl)

I went for the fire route using this setup:
- full bta gear (badge shoulders, chest, badge staff, double sp trinkets), I'm sporting 1700mana and 60sp at lvl 22.. meh I wish I could use leg enchants like I used to do
- old school enchants (22 int on weapon is fantastic on low levels, might swap later for 30sp, fire power on gloves, healing power on bracers, minor speed on boots), get librams if you're totally hardcore ;D
- enchanting crafted wands, those suckers are cheap as hell do sick dmg for free, really useful for finishing off mobs without wasting mana
- glyph of evocation
- addons; tourguide, jame's leveling guide for tourguide, tomtom and light headed

it's a lot of work (the badges are useless now, but I keep running dailies for triumphs) but the results are quite amazing:
- mobs die in a pyro+fireball combo or get oneshotted by a pyro crit (7 seconds of casting for each mob is pretty good, also you don't get touched), it's dull but very effective
- questing is smooth with a gps like arrow guiding you through quests, when you have doubts there's lightheaded ready to be consulted, questing with a decent guide>>>grinding
- there is no downtime, I never find myself starving for mana and when I do evocation is there from a couple of minutes waiting to be used to top my health and mana.. it's simply fantastic

if you want I'll keep you updated, but my mage is just an alt and so it won't be very frequent, also I'm eager to try arcane later in outland.. fire's sheer dmg output was its selling point, but later frost might be better if mobs' health starts to scale more than my dps

[mena]

I have a 46 mage, did the frost aoe thing from like 40 to 46 until it got boring, sadly questing is also boring as shit because you just cast Frostbolt over and over. Sometimes it crits but you're still just pressing one button. He has pretty good gear for a 46 (56 spell power without the heirloom chest and shoulders equipped, which are on a different char right now) and killing a single normal mob of the same level takes like 5 frostbolts, so I have to drink every few mobs, and the water I can conjure fills up about half my mana in 30 seconds. Basically leveling a frost mage is boring and slow.

I'm going to have some spare recruit a friend gift levels eventually (and no other char to use them on), so I will probably get him to 60 that way, and then maybe try fire just for the variety of abilities.

[ECZO]

I have a 46 mage, did the frost aoe thing from like 40 to 46 until it got boring, sadly questing is also boring as shit because you just cast Frostbolt over and over. Sometimes it crits but you're still just pressing one button. He has pretty good gear for a 46 (56 spell power without the heirloom chest and shoulders equipped, which are on a different char right now) and killing a single normal mob of the same level takes like 5 frostbolts, so I have to drink every few mobs, and the water I can conjure fills up about half my mana in 30 seconds. Basically leveling a frost mage is boring and slow.

I'm going to have some spare recruit a friend gift levels eventually (and no other char to use them on), so I will probably get him to 60 that way, and then maybe try fire just for the variety of abilities.

fire means you have to press 2 buttons instead of one ;D

[Jonisawsom]

Check out the upcoming changes if you haven't seen them already. Higher mana/health regen at lower levels, and lower level spell costs have been reduced. Finally blizz realized that leveling casters was very annoying, especially in the early levels with no regen. Might be worth waiting to level.