WotLK Classic Mage Leveling Guide

Welcome to our Mage class leveling guide for WotLK Classic! Mages are the masters of Frost, Fire, and Arcane spell schools. As a Mage, you can use the Frost school to chill enemies until they can’t move anymore, the Fire school to barbecue all who oppose you, and Arcane to blast all those in your way. All three schools of magic provide different utility to the mage’s toolkit, allowing them to burst enemies down or kite them from one end of the map to the other end.

Mages excel at any fight length — Arcane magic dominates short fights, the flames of the Fire school excel in longer conflicts, and Frost dominates fights that move at a glacial pace. This allows each spec to be useful in some regard! Leveling for mages is one of the best places to show the potential you have as a mage especially in the AoE (area of effect) area, allowing you two different styles of leveling.

If you’ve never played a mage before, then I suggest strapping yourself in, as we have a lot to cover! To navigate to a specific section, use the Contents button at the top of this guide.

Throughout the guide, you’ll see buttons — click them to see details on the topic in question!

Should I Play Mage?

Pros

• Doesn’t require gear while leveling.
• Reliable and consistent leveling experience.
• Great damage over an extended period of time.
• One of the best movement abilities in Blink
• Very quick leveling speed (after level 20).
• Free Food and Water to reduce downtime!
• Can travel between cities starting at level 40

Cons

• Rotation can feel repetitive
• Constantly asked for food and water (can be a pro as well!)
• Very squishy class

General Leveling Tips & Gameplay Advice

Getting to level 80 is usually quite a challenge, but mages have several tricks up their sleeve to race to the top. With our ability to kill up to 10 mobs at once we have a massive advantage over many other casters and even some melee; Mages also have a couple of ways to escape from sticky situations!

Talent Path & Training Abilities

Talents

Depending on what school you’d like to focus on, your talent path will vary dramatically:

• Leveling as Frost revolves around using Blizzard for AoE, water elemental, and frostbolt to kill mobs. It is generally the best spec to choose for leveling as it has the most survivability out of the 3 specs.
• Leveling as Fire revolves around Living Bomb for AoE, Fireball and Pyroblasts for Single target, while also getting Pyroblasts with Hotstreak. Fire, while weaker early on without the survivability of frost or aoe potential, catches up once you acquire living bomb and are able to place it on 10 mobs at a time and burst them down.
• Leveling as Arcane (level 64) revolves around Arcane Blast and Arcane Missile. This spec has the most burst potential of the 3 and can be useful for killing solo mobs the quickest.

Frost

Fire

Arcane

Abilities to Train

As mages have an abundance of abilities, most of them are worth picking up, and very few aren’t needed (Amplify Magic and Dampen Magic). Therefore, you should train all the spells you can when you visit the trainer.

Gearing

Knowing what stats to prioritize, and what sort of gear you should be looking for, can go a long way toward making your time leveling easier.

Class Quests & Rewards

When completing class quests, it’s important to pick the best rewards!

• Mirror Lake: There are only 2 rewards from this class quest, with Ley Orb being the better option due to it being a smaller version of our Mana gems.
• Celestial Power: With this quest, we have another 2 rewards. Celestial Orb is the better option due to being able to use a one-hander for more stats, as well as being a small Mana gem.
• Destroy Morphaz: With this quest we have 3 possible rewards we can grab; all three can be useful, but Arcane Crystal Pendant is better for all but Fire mages, who will want to pick the Fire Ruby.

Professions

The professions you want to choose are going to depend on your goals whilst leveling. Do you want to be as fast as possible, do you care about endgame, earning gold, etc. Whatever your goals are, you should level First Aid as a Mage, but your other choices are up to you:

• Speed leveling: Only get First Aid. All other professions will cut into your time, even something as simple as skinning adds up to several hours until you reach level 80
• Fast leveling + Gold generation: Here you can take Skinning. It will add some time, but also a nice flow of gold.
• Max two professions: If you want to max two professions at once then Skinning paired with either Herbalism or Mining is a good start.
• Endgame: Start with Engineering and Mining, then drop mining to grab Tailoring. These professions can take a while to max out and get the items you need out of them, but doing this ends up with you having the two best-in-slot professions for a mage.

Useful Macros

Iceblock + Cancel Macro

#showtooltip
/cancelaura Ice Block
/cast Ice Block

Force Pet Attack

/cast Frostbolt
/use Waterbolt

Aggro Wipe or Mob Resetter

#showtooltip Invisibility
/cancelaura Invisibility
/cast Invisibility