WotLK Mage leveling guide - Best Frost talent spec and glyphs for Classic

picture of Jaina Proudmoore

picture of Jaina Proudmoore
September 26, 2022: Wrath Classic launches today!

Are you looking to get into World of Warcraft's latest Classic expansion, Wrath of the Lich King Classic? Do you want play the role of the powerful sorcerer or sorceress? Well, our WotLK Mage leveling guide should help you quite a bit!

Leveling in World of Warcraft is a pretty lengthy process. Regardless of what class you play, knowing what the best spec, talents and even professions that you roll with can make that process much smoother. Our guide will cover all those details and more as you venture into Northrend.

While you're here, if you're interested in other Wrath of the Lich King Classic content, then check out our DPS Tier list, our Healer Tier list and our Tank tier list. You might also be interested in our dungeon guides, such as our guide for Utgarde Keep.

Best Mage leveling spec for Wrath Classic

First thing's first. We will be going to be taking a look at the pros and cons of each of the three Mage specs, and give you a recommendation at the end for the top leveling spec.

Fire

  • Pros
    • Strong for long fights
    • High single target and Aoe Damage
  • Cons
    • Extremely dependent on Critical Strike
    • Weaker in short fights

Arcane

  • Pros
    • High burst DPS
    • Consistent AoE
  • Cons
    • Suffers in longer fights

Frost

  • Pros
    • Consistent damage output regardless of fight
    • Good for PVP
  • Cons
    • Lowest DPS of all three specs

Our recommendation for leveling as a Mage is going Frost. The spec offers great survivability and crowd control compared to the other specs. While your damage suffers a bit, you will be able to kite mobs the best.

Talent tree for Frost mage leveling
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WotLK Frost Mage talent tree

For our Frost tree, For the first 60 levels, you'll take everything that shows up in the frost tree, except Deep Freeze. Here's what you'll take from 61 on.

Level 61 - 70

  • Level 61: Deep Freeze
  • Level 62 - 63: Arcane Subtlety (both ranks)
  • Level 64 - 66: Arcane Focus (all ranks)
  • Level 67 - 69: Arcane Fortitude (all ranks)
  • Level 70: Arcane Concentration (first rank)

In this spot, an alternate thing you can do is swap the first 10 points in Arcane tree for spots earlier in your leveling process, in case you feel like you need the extra armor, but this shouldn't be super necessary.

Level 71 - 80

  • Level 71 - 74: Arcane Concentration (remaining ranks)
  • Level 75 - 77: Spell Impact (all ranks)
  • Level 78 - 80: Arcane Meditation (all ranks)

At this point, you're going to probably respec into your build of choice.

Best Mage leveling professions for WotLK Classic

As far as professions go, there's a couple of good options for you. First off, we'd recommend Herablism. As for crafting professions, Tailoring is very good, as we can craft our own gear and we also can embroider our cloaks for more stats. Otherwise, Engineering is always a good choice as it provides many useful tools.

Best Mage glyphs for WotLK Classic

For our glyphs, we have three major and three minor glyphs to consider. Here are our recommendations for those.

Majors

  • Glyph of Evocation
  • Glyph of Ice Barrier
  • Glyph of Mage Armor

Minors

  • Glyph of Fire Ward
  • Glyph of Frost Ward
  • Glyph of Arcane Intellect

Our major glyphs here are big on survivability, with the first two giving us some more layers of defense and healing. The Glyph of Mage Armor refunds some of our mana while we cast, so this lets us cast more spells and kill things more.

Our minors are defensive in nature, but don't offer a ton or consistency. You could take Glyph of Slow Fall if you like using that ability a lot, as well as glyph of Frost Armor. Glyph of Arcane Intellect is definitely one that we would recommend though.

And that's all that we have for you! The Mage is a great class overall. It starts out a bit rough because you need quite a bit of stats, by the end of the expansion, they are very good to have. While you're here, definitely check out our Wrath Classic PVP tier list, as well as some other dungeon guides, for the Nexus, and the Culling of Stratholme.