Which tree is right for me?Follow

Fairly new to a mage (just hit the teen levels), so sorry if some of this stuff only works at low levels. Anyway...from my understanding, fire is about doing a ton of damage, where frost is a combination of mana efficiency and chill/freeze effects. What I want to do for levelling is to simply nuke a target down before they get to me. I'm assuming fire would be good at this, as I can simply pyroblast and then spam fireball until they die. I'm assuming this would lead to fast kills but a lot of down time.
On the other hand, I could spec frost, which would hopefully give me less downtime (since I think it's more mana efficient), and I'd have at least twice as long to nuke the target down before it even hit me. So now you know my thought process, you can help me answer the following questions:

1. Would the decrease in time per target by speccing fire be more than the decrease in down-time per X targets by speccing frost?
2. Is it possible at the mid-levels (say 30-50) to nuke a single target down as fast as I want with fire spells, or do the fights last longer at those levels? If I can't, would I be able to nuke them down with frost spells?

This is the playstyle I would like to use for a while (it's worked so far) so any help would be great!

Damn, I must have missed some training, never seen that spell before.

Anyway, about the spec for you Skribs, Frost gets much more effective when you hit higher end talents which can really boost the damage output of frost. Double crit damage (Ice shards) increased chance of crit by 50% when frozen (Shatter) + Stacking extra crit% chance (Winters Chill)+ An instant cast, triple damage against frozen targets spell (Ice lance) + A really nice Oh Sh*t button when your important spells are resisted (Coldsnap) = some pretty nice PvE/PvP damage. Although for a leveling spec, I have always loved fire for my mage. Since I play a hunter as my main, all I know is pure DPS. Frost mages as you said have great slowing/freezing effects and have good longevity in battlegrounds.

Also, for me fire hasn't really got the boom boom drink, boom boom drink effect. As long as you effecient with your mana and arn't throwing down flamestrikes and hefty mana spells you should be fine. Scorch is a great mana-per-damage spell as its quick and really low mana.



Although it may work, when deep enough fire for imp. Fireball, the damage you could put out with a Pyroblast pull would be much more beneficial to your damage as Pyroblast has a pretty cheap mana cost and gets the increased damage by 10% from Fire Power with also all the crit chance/ ignite powers to it.

So to straight up answer your questions:

1. That would all depend on the depth of your mana pool. If you have a quite large mana pool, then blowing your enemy to bits then a quick drink will keep you sustained for quite a while(Fire). If you have a smaller (but not substantially) one or choose a little more Stamina or spirit above Intellect, then frost would be good. But with both their talents, arcane has better mana efficiency over both of them.

2.


Nuking down a target before it gets to you or really quicky would mean you would want a nice Pyroblast crit + Fireball crit + powerful Ignite DoT's to beat it for fire. For frost, some really good Frostbolt crits would be nice, but alas, we cannot pick when to crit. From my experiences, fire would always outdamage frost at those levels as long as both mages had even gear/exerience. Frost gets some really nice damage buffs to it at the later tiers of the tree to start closing in on fire, but you wont be maxing all those talents out at 30-50. So for a straight answer, you will get in melee range unless you get some lucky crits with either spec or you do some good frost/ Slowing with Blast wave kiting. The fights length again depends on how well your pulls go, but on the field, they will probly be longer than the ones you fight at the teen levels, but not by very long. So for a seriously straight answer, neither tree will nuke down you opponent before they get to you on a very regular basis. So you should pick a tree you would feel more comfortable in.

Fire = Kills by face-melting.

Frost = Great tricks with freezing and elemental, but less face-melting, more face-freezing the breaking that face with a Shatter crit.

All in all, it comes down to what would would prefer, Face-melting or face-freezing. Enjoy!

Haha long night... Fireball is what I meant XD

Anyways he's not high enough for Pyroblast right now so... no point in telling him that.

I did tell him that later on, though, his kill time would match up with question number 2 about knocking things out very quickly with Fire tree, where as Ice would take a bit more spells cast to pull off the same thing.

I liked to lvl up with fire until mid 30's. You get ice block and cold snap+shatter spec. It helps alot since you slow mobs and you can kite more easily. I found aoe grinding mid to upper 40+. By the time you hit outland you can find out what you like and just solo, solo, solo. I'm at 70, (still crappy mage) but if you go raid spec, 10/48/3, you barely need any hit raiding and my crit with my 2 merciless pieces is at 30%. If you like rolling ignites, go fire. If you like 3k ice lance crits, go frost. If you like 5.5k pom pyros every 3 minutes, go arcane fire. Just pick a playstyle.

Funny thing. I was debating whether to go fire or frost, and I went arcane. Simply because I'm seeing some "of arcane wrath" gear in the AH. I'll probably go frost midlevels to try and get the hang of AoEing.

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I was a Frostie up to 46, went about 46-52 as a firemage, then back to frost. Fire IS pure dps, especially when it crits, but as far as leveling/questing, I found frost to be much more effective.

Crits are more common for a frost mage, and while you may feel good about Combustion stacking for each fire spell you get off, normally you can go no higher than 50% then it's waiting 3 more minutes for the cool down to wear off. Whereas with Frost there's always the chance that a frostbolt can freeze a mob, then you get your big 50 to whatever percent chance to crit, depending on gear and talent selection. (I know at level 60 it was pretty disgusting, something like 75%). Dragon's Breath to me is a double edged sword. Yeah, you get another instacast semi-AoE spell, but it shares it's cooldown with CoC, and not only that, you have 8 seconds on CoC vs 20 on Dragon's Breath

I just saw frost as overall a more valued tree, at least in my eyes. Ice Barrier is awesome, it beats losing mana if you're fire and use Mana Shield, the Water Elemental has made soloing otherwise help needed mobs a breeze, and Ice Lance just starts to get profane when you have Shatter.

I'd rather take a constant 50%+ chance to crit a frozen target vs a stacking 3 chance....chance that goes away after the third crit.

Ultimatley, it is your toon, but I enjoyed Frost much more than fire. Yes, Fire is enjoyable, especially when ignite procs, but as many say, frost is about surviability. I'd rather sacrifice some DPS to keep the damage bill down than to just blow the hell out of everything yelling "REPAIR BILL BE DAMNED!", but that's me.

One of the problems at the lower levels is that every time you hit the next set of new skills, your mana efficiency with a certain skill changes. When I hit level 16, for example, untalented arcane missiles will do more DPM than untalented fireball...and I have no problem casting them if the mob gets to me once I talent them.