Focus Magic: Frost Leveling

Episode 3 of Focus Magic exhorted my fellow mages to please Level Frost!

Intro

Hello guildietypes. Once again, this is Dahkar, also known as Old Man Franks, here to bring you a dose of mage goodness. This time around, we're doing recommendations for leveling. So conjure yourself some bread products and make your water elemental turn up the volume, because Focus Magic starts now!

So I'm getting word that many folks are dusting off their old mage alts, or are starting up new ones entirely, and they're asking my advice on how to level best. After all, one must get through 80 levels worth of questing before one can start pwning the DPS meters and making Friscos cry for nerfs!

The Challenges of Leveling

Leveling a mage can be challenging for folks not used to it. After all, mages have a lot of things working against them.

• We can only wear cloth armor, which means we typically have the weakest armor values for mitigations. Our armor doesn't usually have much in the way of Stamina either, so we tend to have very low numbers of HP.

• We have no healing spells or other methods for in-combat regaining of health, outside of pots and bandages.

• We have no Pet to take aggro from us and give us a modicum of survivability.

No other class has all these disadvantages. What this means is that we must develop an entirely different playstyle for our mage, if we're coming from another class.

I like to call this playstyle "Kill them before they even get to you". And luckily, we're rather good at it.

Which Tree to Level In?

So lets examine our three talent trees and determine what's best for leveling for us.

• Arcane: I'm only going to say this once, so please listen. DO. NOT. LEVEL. ARCANE. AS. A. NEW. MAGE.

Arcane is NOT, I repeat, NOT a truly viable leveling spec until you get enough talent points to get to the lower tiers, which is where the central meat of the spec's power comes from. Early on you DO NOT get enough good talents to make Arcane worth it, and you don't have the spells Arcane needs to be awesome. You don't get Arcane Blast (the spec's primary nuke) until 62. Slow, Missile Barrage, and Arcane Barrage require many many points deep in the tree to get. These spells talents are the meat and potatoes of a good arcane spec, and without them, your arcane mage will suffer, and frankly, suck. Don't do this until you get to 62 and can have Arcane Blast (and by that level you should have enough talent points to get the others). Stay away from this tree when leveling.

• Fire: Okay, here we go. Now we're talking. Fire's a great spec, it's all about causing raw damage, death, and destruction. Let's watch our enemies BURN, mwahahahah!! Fire emphasizes our playstyle in the best ways, it's all about putting enough pain into the enemies before they even touch you. So is it a viable leveling spec? Oh most certainly. There's plenty of good stuff for the leveling mage all throughout the fire tree, talents which increase your damage, help out with your survivability.

But is it the best choice? The answer there is no, it's not. Fire suffers from 2 problems early on.

1. Until you get to a certain gear point, where you've accumulated lots of spellpower and crit rating, you simply won't be capable of killing things fast enough to where they won't be able to close in on you and start whacking you around a bit.

2. While fire does have SOME good survival options, it isn't even close to the best at them. As survival is our main problem when leveling, You are much better off going with our third talent tree option. And so we move on to...

• Frost: Here's the answer to the question I get asked often: "OMF I just made a mage, what spec should I level?" Frost frost frost frost frost frost frost!!! Glorious frost. Why, you ask?? Because of 2 game terms, my friends: Snares and roots. Snares are defined as any spell which slows a target's movement speed down. Roots are any spell/ability which prevents targets from moving at all. Frost mages, we have these bad boys in SPADES. Our main nuke, Frostbolt, comes with a 30% movement speed reduction built right in. We've got one of the best root spells in the game in Frost Nova. Our talents can add snares to other spells, give them a chance to freeze mobs in place, give us a 50% chance to crit on frozen mobs, and much much more.

Frost is the spec you want, because it gives you a ton of options for keeping things away from you, and later on you will have the chance to bring extreme pain down on large numbers of them at once.

Don't Make Me Beg Here. Oh Wait...

So please, I'm begging you: Level frost. I swear, you'll like it. If you want to level something else, please do it later on when it becomes much more viable to do so. I spend several levels in Northrend leveling Arcane. Once I hit 75 and acquired Frostfire Bolt, I finished leveling to 80 using a 0/53/18 Frostfire Bolt build.The other specs can be used for leveling later on with a good degree of success. But FRost is still the best choice at that point, and early on it's really your only choice to do well with.

How to level well as Frost

So let's talk about what to do. When you first start, you've only got fireball, so use it a bunch. You get frostbolt at level 4, so start off fights with a frostbolt to apply the snare (or chill effect as they're also called), then finish things off with fireballs and Fire Blast.

At level 10, you get frost nova. This is the point you can officially start using Frostbolt exclusively. You don't need fireballs anymore. Your sequence is simple. Cast frostbolts until the mob is almost to you, then Frost nova them, move away, and start casting more frostbolts. Get used to turning and running, then turning back, it's faster that way. Use Fireblast a lot as well since it's instant cast. Your style will start to modify itself as you continue leveling and gain more spells and talent points to use them.

Spend your first five points in Improved Frostbolt, a reduction in casting time means you get off more frostbolts in the same time. After that, hit three points in Permafrost to make your chill effects slow that much more and last longer too. Then put 2 points (yes, 2) into frostbite. This is where you see the beginnings of the greatness of frost. This gives you a random chance to have any spell with a chill effect a 10% chance to freeze a mob in place for 5 seconds. Awesome.

A third point would up that chance to 15%, but your point at level 20 needs to go into Icy Veins. This spell prevents any hits you take from increasing your cast time, and makes your spells cast 20% faster to boot. It's a great "oh crap" button for when you're fighting mobs from range or melee mobs that your frost nova didn't hit. It lets you burn them and burn them down FAST. At level 21, put that final point in Frostbite.

22-24, we're going to start building to something awesome. Stick these three points into Ice Shards. This will increase the extra damage caused by a frost crit by 100%, or basically double it. You might be thinking "Wait why not Piercing ice? That's 6% more damage on every cast, crit or not!". Trust me, the answer will become apparent shortly.

25-27. Shatter shatter shatter. Now you will see the true power of Frost. Against a frozen target you now have a bonus 50% chance to crit with any spell. That's almost a guarantee you're going to see it crit, and with the bonus damage thanks to ice shards. it's going to crit big. Now you'll want to be more proactive in using Frost Nova (though don't start fights with it) to see those giant numbers come. You can and should also start experimenting with Shatter Combos as well. The idea of a Shatter Combo is based on the fact that Frozen mobs have almost a guaranteed chance to break the root after they're crit once. A shatter combo is using a frostbolt against a frozen mob followed immediately by an instant cast spell. If timed right, both spells will hit a mob considered frozen before the root breaks and receive the bonus crit chance, so you get 2 crits. So what you'll want to do is when you have a frozen mob cast frostbolt, then immediately follow it up with Fire Blast or Cone of Cold if you're close enough Eventually you'll get the timing down and see double crits a lot. Normally one does a shatter combo with Ice Lance as the second spell, but you don't get Ice Lance until the mid sixties, so you're stuck for now.

Grab Arctic Reach at 28 and 29 for the extra range for starting off those frostbolts, and then get your ultimate "Oh CRAP!" button at 30 in Cold Snap. Oh and grats on your mount as well!

Where to go after 30

From here, you can start to take your mage in any number of different ways. You've got a good grasp of how frost works enough to choose for yourself. Talents you should definitely pick up are Ice Barrier at 40 (and Shattered Barrier shortly thereafter) and your water elemental at 50. This link should go into great detail of a good single target DPS leveling build for you.

AOE Grinding

Bear this in mind: That path is only one way you can go, and the author states as much. One of the strengths of frost is the ability to effectively AOE through large numbers easily while soloing. It takes some work to master, and it requires certain talents in the Frost Tree to be effective. You may want to consider respeccing at some point to give it a try.

You will need the following talents for sure to do this well. 1. Frostbite and Shatter 2. Permafrost 3. Improved Blizzard - this adds a chill effect to your Blizzard, meaning you can easily aoe Frostbite/Shatter groups at once with some luck! Plus thanks to Permafrost, they'll move very slowly 4. Cold Snap 5. Ice Barrier (and Shattered Barrier as quick as you can)

I also recommend you have the following, though they aren't needed, they will help immensely. 1. Ice Floes (reduce the cooldown on Frost Nova) 2. Ice Shards and Piercing Ice (for the extra dmg on your Blizzards) 3. Improved Cone of Cold (you'll be using that spell a lot for this and more dmg on it cannot hurt) 4. Winter's Chill (Blizzard will very quickly apply the debuff to full and the extra crit chance will help)

The Idea with AOE grinding as frost is to round up large numbers of mobs at once (make sure your ice Barrier is up) and then freeze the group in place. Dump a Blizzard on them. It will hit hard and apply the snare, possibly freezing them in the process.

Now if they aren't dead, they'll slowly start coming after you. Now you've got to play keep away for a bit until you can Frost nova them again. Use Cone of Cold to keep the snare up if necessary, and if you've got Shattered Barrier, you can use that as an extra Frost nova. Continue dumping Blizzards on the mobs until they all fall to your chilling might. You'll burn through those "Kill XX number of mobs" quests with extreme speed now.

So with all those talents, the earliest you can do this is about level 40, or 42 if you want to get Shattered Barrier. Try it, and if you don't have much success, try it again later, because it's very effective.

Outtro

That's it for this edition of Focus Magic! For the next episode I want to do a Q&A with your questions about mages. If you have a question, please send me a PM in the AIE forums or post it in the thread I'll start to accompany this segment, and I'll try to answer it on the next show! This is Dahkar, aka Old Man Franks, reminding you to help control the gnome population, roll a troll (mage) today!!