"Frost: Recommended" on new characters.

[deadman1]

Least stat relient especially at low levels.
Pet
Roots and slows
Easiest to learn especially at low levels.

[Deleted]

Definitely the best spec for low levels. Is this even being questioned? Lol. I've rolled dozens of Mages in the last 10 years or so and always get frustrated with arcane levelling (and endgame arcane usually, but it feels fun then it isn't) and frost 4 lyfe.

[Deleted]

I wonder if some people play the game. Above person is right. Arcane is very cumbersome compared to frost for soloing and even more so if AOE is needed.

In general arcane was never hard because it is complex. It's hard because if you move or alter the rotation in an unplanned way you're done. It's the simplest spec in the game. Only 5 lines are needed to explain it. But to literally play it well you must also know the fights well because it does not forgive clumsiness.

[jason1975]

As someone who generally plays pet tanking classes (hunter, warlock), healers (disc, resto druid), or plate (prot/arms warrior, ret paly) . . . I was shocked at how weak my fire mage was. After having him languish at level 87 all throughout MoP, I got the bug to play a mage a couple weeks ago.

He was fire spec'd. Everything seemed to be a serious threat to him. Leveling was a pita. And this is all content I've done a zillion times on other toons with zero issues.

I changed to frost, and OMG WHAT A DIFFERENCE! He now explodes stuff pretty much instantaneously, and what doesn't die quickly is too slowed to do any real damage before I blink away. For rares, I pop mirror/timewarp/icy veins and it melts in no time! (pun)

I'm super excited about kicking some butt in Tanaan with him, then going into mythic dungeons at the 660 ilvl (which has kinda been my thing on alts since 6.2 dropped).

So yeah . . . frost for leveling.

[Deleted]

well since frost is the easiset spec to play why not have it like this

[thewallofsleep]

Probably because of the slows and freezes which happen by default. Leveling as frost is super easy and smooth. You don't get many pyroblast procs in fire until you actually gear up. It works fine for leveling, but it's not ideal like frost. I've never tried arcane when leveling.

Offtopic: I haven't played frost in some time, but I didn't like that water elemental was permanent last time I played it. If I wanted a pet I would play my lock or my hunter. I didn't like that it felt that you had to use that ground targeted pet nova spell to get those FoF procs to do decent DPS. Has it changed since then?

[Imnick]

The Water Elemental is still permanent, but in most circumstances you now use its new spell "Water Jet" instead of Ice Nova.
Water Jet makes it fire a channelled beam at your target, and every Frostbolt that hits the target while it is channelling grants you a guaranteed Fingers of Frost proc (and, with the current tier bonus, you also get a free Brain Freeze whenever it is cast).
This spell shares a cooldown with Freeze so you can't use both at once.

[nickseng]

This spell shares a cooldown with Ice Nova so you can't use both at once.

"Freeze" :P

[Imnick]

"Freeze" :P

Yeah whoops, I couldn't remember the name and was like "ummm... it's not frost nova... so it must be... Ice Nova!"