Secrets to World of Warcraft Mage Leveling
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.
When specialized in frost you may not have the big punch of the other trees but you have much more control over the situation. Certain talents give your Chill effects a chance to freeze the target for a short period of time, increase your Chill effect time, lower the movement rate of the target, and stun your target. This tree is excellent for solo Mage Leveling.
A tactic that I have used often (one that works very well for me) when leveling my Mage’s is to go out to an area where there a plenty of mobs, get them around you and the go for them with Frost Nova. This will root them still in one place. You should then follow this up with Blizzard (make sure you’re out of melee range) to do massive damage.
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 the second scenario I’m facing mobs that are green towards me. This time I can take on 5 at a time so I round them up, use Frost Nova, and then Blizzard to kill them. This mob would give me roughly 100 experience points each. I should be able to kill 5 of these in the same time it took me to kill 1 in scenario 1. That’ll leave me with 500 experience points every 3 minutes coming to a total of 10,000 and hour. Don’t forget that I’ve looted each mob here as well which will definitely earn me a heap more than just fighting 1 same level mob at a time.
At first glance leveling a mage may seem like a tough process. Especially give that they lack a lot of the abilities that other classes have. But if you take the time to master the art of control you have a massive advantage in that you can wipe out many creatures in short time periods.
