Jadedfox

As requested, here's my levelling guide for mages (Human/Alliance) and talent progression. A quick note, you will NOT enjoy WoW at all doing this. In fact you'll be missing 99% of the quests and instances and you will never ever group with anyone. You will not explore anything, you will not get a good feel for the amazing environments that exist. This playstyle is meant to level you as fast and efficient as possible, not to enjoy the game (until 60). You will not waste time on travelling around, getting professions, hanging around Ironforge chatting. You will power level and that's it. The only time you visit a major town is to buy new skills and some new gear off the AH. I do NOT recommend first time players doing this.

1-12 Elwynn Forest

Regular lowbie quests in Elwynn forest. You usually run out of quests when you hit level 9-10 but just grind some gnolls/spiders/wolves etc until 12.

12-20 Westfall

Do the defias series of quests. Kill quests so you may as well get the bonus xp from the quest while grinding. At 14 start grinding Harvest Watchers lvl 15 (?) found on the farms. Do these until 18 when you can comfortably finish the last defias quest. As you're doing the last defias quest, don't stop until you're 20 and keep grinding those Highway bandits.

20-22 Redridge/Lakeshire

Tons of easy kill quests here and you should be able to get 2-3 levels off them alone. At 22-23 kiss this place good bye and move to my favorite zone in the entire game Duskwood.

22(23)-32 Duskwood/Darkshire

This place is grinding heaven at these levels. First of all you have the nighwatch line of quests, then you have the worgen quests, and sven, and the hermit and god knows what. Great great xp . If you find yourself "stuck" i.e. a level too low to do the next quest, just grind undead at Raven Hill according to your level. A lot of these quests involves running from Raven Hill back to darkshire and back again. A quicker way, if you are at Raven Hill and need to go back to Darkshire, is actually to run west back to sentinel hill in westfall and fly to darkshire and vice versa. Heads up, stay away from undead that put a disease on you which slows cast time, drain mana etc. Ghouls will usually give you this.

32-34 Arathi/Refuge Point

OK, these two levels suck. I'm not sure what is a good spot here. It used to be Yeti's in Hillsbrad, but then the honor system came and ruined that, and now we have BG's so Hillsbrad may be safe again. I don't know. To be safe, I just went and killed raptors around refuge point in arathi. You can also do Witherbark Village. Either way these two levels are relatively slow and painful.

34-38 Desolace/Naga Island (20-25k xp/hour)

An annoying run to get to Desolace but well worth it in the end.

Naga Island. This place is great. If you look at the map for Desolace you'll see an island in the top northwest corner. Swim out there. Here you'll find Naga's that little HP and die really fast. Also, you'll never run out of spawns if you grind circles around the island. I love this place. Heads up for the occasional horde and a level 40 elite giant that rumble accross the island sometimes.

38-39 Swamp Of Sorrows (20-25k xp/hour)

One more painful level here. There are lvl 35 green dragonlings in the southwest corner of the map. Grind those for one level and do some quests in this area.

39-43 Swamp Of Sorrows (20-25k xp/hour)

Swamp elementals, top northwest corner of the map. Elementals in WoW tend to have a weakness against fire so if you follow my talent build (See below) you'll gain xp very very fast off these. Usualy grind in a circle pattern works out well.

43-48 Feralas/Feathermoon (25-30k xp/hour)

Run south from Feathermoon until you get to the island south of...the island feathermoon is on. Isle of Dread I think it's called. Anyway, kill some naga's and make way to the cave. You want to grind the naga's inside that cave since they are the shammy/caster variety and have significantly less HP than the warriors outside the cave. They are also higher level, go figure. This place is the bomb. Fast xp, tons of pearls drop from the clams, lots of greens and in my case an epic as well, the gut ripper which promptly sold on the AH for 60g.

48-50 Tanaris/Gadgetstan (25k xp/hour)

Go to the southwest corner of the map, thistleshrub valley and kill the elementals here. Again, they are vulnerable to fire so you'll kill fast.

50-52 Un'goro crater (25k xp/hour)

Do the silly fedex quests available from the npc's at the top/mid map (forget what the camp is called). That should get you a quick 50k xp. After that perpare for fireball crit heaven. Tar elementals lvl 50-52. Believe it or not, these things are so vulnerable to fire, even if one fireball is resisted they STILL get a small DoT on them. My highest crit was 1362 at level 50.

52-60 Dire Maul East (50k+ xp/hour)

This is why everyone and their mom rolled a mage after the dire maul patch came out. Not only does it take you 2-4 hours to level, but the drop rate is supposedly great for epics and blues (I didn't find it that amazing). But let me tell you, there is much money to be made in these 8 levels from this place.

OK so basic idea is to aoe grind the 7 lashers right at the entrance. They are lvl 54 so at starting this at 52 proved more difficult that I thought at first. I actually had to repspec to get blastwave to pull this off at 52.

The build that worked for me in here at 52 was:

Arcane:

Arcane Focus 5/5
Arcane Concentration 5/5
Evocation 1/1
Improved Arcane Explosion 5/5

Fire:

Improved Fireball 5/5
Ignite 5/5
Flamwthrowing 2/2
Pyroblast 1/1
Improved Flamestrike 3/3
Burning Soul 3/3
Incinerate 2/2
Blastwave 1/1
Critical Mass 3/3
Fire Power 2/5

This worked fine for me. People also say a frost spec works wonders in there, but I never played a frost mage and probably never will so I played what was comfortable to me. Basic strategy was:

Flamestrike
Flamestrike (around you so it hits when they reach you)
Cone of Cold
Blastwave
Arcane Explosion until dead.

A few times at 52 I was forced to use a health pot if the initial flamestrike pull got messed up. This doesn't happen very often. At 54 and onward you'll have no problems. You will the bulk of your money during these 8 levels selling greens on the AH. Especially Living Essence which is required for Hide of the Wild epic pattern. I AH'd these for 5-10g a piece and they sell. Note, I killed nearly 7000 lashers during these 8 levels which means I reset the instance almost 1000 times. I used a macro for this:

/invite [nameofpersonalreadyinagroup]
/script LeaveParty()

This way you can do a /who molten core and a pick a person that is in an mc group (or other high end instance) and put that name in your macro. This will reset the instance for you and you don't have to bother with a friend accepting your invites. The person you send an invite to won't even notice that you are using him.

Total time /played 1-60: 7 days 20 hours. I'm sure it can be done faster.

Have fun!

--jaded

EDIT: Oops, forgot to include talent progression as you level. You want to go down the fire tree since that's where you most efficient dps is. Faster kills = faster xp. Here's how:

Levels 10-14: Improved Fireball
Levels 15-16: Flame Throwing
Levels 17-21: Ignite
Levels 22-26: Improved Arcane Missiles
Levels 27-31: Arcane Concentration
Level 32 : Evocation
Levels 33-34: Incinerate
Levels 35-38: Burning Soul
Levels 39-43: Impact
Levels 44-46: Critical Mass
Levels 47-51: Fire Power

52 Respec to DM aoe build (see above)

Before you go: What no Pyroblast? The spell quite frankly sucks in my opinion. 6 sec cast = 2 fireballs in the same amount of time. And when you're in a grind mode you don't want to be casting a spell for 6 seconds.

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