DLL Articles

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.

Mages, like all other WoW classes have three skill trees. For Mages, the skill trees are Arcane, Fire, and Frost. Frost is the skill that has most control out of the three. Arcane and Fire both lack a lot in terms of control but can be devastating for opponents.

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.

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.

Many people argue that you should focus on mobs that are your own level, but I see it differently, let’s look at 2 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.

Leveling a Mage in World of Warcraft is not as difficult as you might think. Sure they have low hit points, cannot heal, have cloth armor and no pet but if you learn to exercise the art of control you have the ability to destroy a large amount of creatures in a very short time.