Mage Leveling Talent Builds
March 3rd, 2008 by 
GoldWiki
Mage Leveling Talent Builds |
I. Leveling Builds: 1-70 is a long way to go and most players are worried about the fact they could make wrong choices that would slow their leveling : this feeling is of course totally natural. But dont worry here, tou cant really do any big mistake, provided you choose a way and stick to it. The main different ways to level your mage have been perfectly balanced by Blizzard. The first question coming here again and again is : should I go for frost or fire to level my mage? The answer is simple: both are fine. It’s two different playstyles and I would rather advise you to try both of them, as soon as you feel the opportunity for a respec. Knowing your mage deeply costs many and many respecs and nothing is better than "your own" experience as a true guide and master to follow. Fire is about high sustained dps on a single target (before you get Blast Wave and Dragon Breath two excellent aoe skills). Frost is more about control and huge dps on frozen targets. You kill faster with fire, but you run out of mana a bit faster too. You have a bit more mana efficiency and more control against one or several mobs with frost, but you’re more dependant on your nova/shatter for killing them, and on your cooldowns for survival. If as a mage you like to burst your damages very fast on your ennemies, trying to get them down the fastest you can at all costs, then Fire is made for you. If on the contrary you enjoy controlling your ennemies, freezing them, slowing them, and to have a few defense and survival tricks at hand, then you should go frost. Remember that you wont be able to fully enjoy the fire or frost way before level 40-50, when you finally get enough points to take the main talents in each tree. Some will still ask here: but which one is best? Which one will I prefer to play? There I can only answer: only you may know. Fire/frost is really a personnal choice and noone can say, but you, which way should be yours as a mage. I’d rather advise you to choose one at the beginning following your intuition, stick with it until the level 40, then go for a respec and see by yourself which one you prefer to level your character. The second question here is : should I go for a AoE grinding build or not? If you want to do alot of AoE grinding then you need mainly to go frost and take the suitable talents. However this guide is not meant to be a AoE grinding guide, and I will redirect you to AoE grinding excellent guide (first sticky on this forum). I’ll just mention later the talents you need as a frost AoE Frost mage. Notice that many mage builds may work well for AoE and not only the pure frost way (Elemental ones with shatter, or even fire mages using Flamestrike for example). But the pure AoE grinding from level 40+ is mostly done with Improved Blizzard and Cone of Cold. I’ll give here five examples of leveling builds, if you want to go : 1. fire, 2.a frost, 2.b frost aoe, 3. elemental, 4. Arcane. Leveling with arcane is a bit more tricky to my mind, but if this is really your choice and your dream tree, then go for it. Remember : nothing is impossible for a mage ! Those talent builds are intended for pure solo pve/questing. Pvp is meant to be balanced (*cough*) only at level 70, so if pvp is your choice I can just advise you to grind to level 70 faster as you can. 1. Fire leveling talent build I’ll give here just an example of talent picking order until the level 50. After the level 50 you can refer to the level 70 builds in this same guide, and should start to think which one you’re going to play. That will mainly answer to the question about what talents to pick between levels 50 and 70. Lvl 10-14 : Improve Fireball 5/5 Congratulations you got one of the best mage fire talent/skill in whole game, that’s an achievement you deserve to enjoy! You just need to get used to it as its range is not huge and it doesnt scale with Flame Throwing. For pve it will always be easier to Dragon Breath a pack of mobs on you to distract them, in pvp you need to work on the positionning and the range. Before that you will probably cast several Dragon Breaths in the air. At level 50 your fire tree should look like this one: Of course there are many alternatives to the way i just described. You can choose to skip Impact to get Master of Elements for more mana efficiency if you bother sitting alot (actually leveling a mage is about sitting alot so…). Improve Fireblast is very good to be put at max soon if you occasionnally do some pvp or use it alot in pve. But I like Impact and even in pve it has many procs that brings the whole process a bit more fun. 2. Frost leveling talent build 2.A non-aoe frost leveling Lvl 10-14 : Improve Frostbolt 5/5 Lvl 30 : Ice Block 1/1 (a good life savier) At level 50 your frost tree should look like this one: 2.B Frost aoe grinding talent build For more details about aoe grinding, refer to Grinding Guide: I’ll give just an example of build that can be suitable for aoe grinding. The build is intended mainly for blizzard and coc aoeing. AoE grinding usually starts at level 40 Lvl 10-14 : Improve Frostbolt 5/5 At level 40 your build should look just like this one: Then you can keep on by taking Piercing Ice 3/3, Ice Floes 2/2, Frost Channeling 3/3… Just skip Frostbite which is very bad for AoE kiting as it will make some mobs frozen while others keep on running after you. 3. Elemental leveling talent build The underlying idea is to get shatter as soon as possible then go in the fire tree. During your pve, you alternate between fire and frost spells to kill your opponents with the most suitable spells, according to each situation, having huge bursts of damage against your frozen targets. That’s a very good alternative to the previous 2 builds. To try it, is to love it. Only drawback : when you’re level 30 you have to forget some excellent frost things that come at hand to start to work on the fire tree again from the beginning. That’s a bit frustrating, and probably the main reason why people prefer to go either pure frost or pure fire. But if you can endure this relative "pain", you’ll love the elemental way to level your mage. Recently Frost Nova has been nerfed to avoid Ice Lance crit spams on a frozen target. This nerf was mainly intended to level 70 pvp mages but unfortunately it has also unfairly nerfed level 1-65 mages who only struggle to level their character (Ice Lance is a level 66 talent). What has changed : before you could score several crits on a frozen target. Not always but sometime, nova would break at the very first damage, and sometime it would last long as 3 crits or maybe more. Now nova will likely break at your first crit. So the elemental way to level a mage is much less interesting as before : elemental remains a level 70 way to specialize your mage for pvp experienced players. I’ll just let it in the guide as a possibility. Lvl 10-14 : Improved Frost Bolt 5/5 Now you have one alternative according you decide to go fire directly or you prefer to take Ice Block 1/1 and delay your fire leveling by one point (or 2 points if you want also Cold Snap 1/1). No good or bad choice here, just a matter of what you prefer. Assuming you wanna get Dragon Breath at 70 and go to a classic 0/41/20 Elemental Build without any respec I’ll describe here only the first way to proceed. Lvl 30-34 : Improved Fireball 5/5 (Impact 5/5 is another very good way to go here, depends on what you prefer) At level 60 your fire and frost trees should look like this: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=oZxghzf0coxoZVVG000x Then you’ll go through Pyromaniac, Molten Core, Impact… all your way to level 70. Consult the 0/41/20 Elemental talent build for more informations (the only difference being that pvp elementalists dont take Improved Fireball). But whatever happens that should end with : |
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