Newbie MageFollow

So I've read the stickies and I've read many, many posts and I have a 'noobish' question.

Why is it that people that pick 'fire', 'frost', or 'arcane' think that they can ONLY use those specific spells? If they do, is that what 'deep frost', etc means?

I understand that if, for example, I put all of my talent points into the frost tree that it means most (if not all) of my frost spells would be 'stronger' in the sense that it improves each spell. But that doesn't mean you can't use fire or arcane as well.

I finally decided to start a mage (up to level 16 right now) and am speccing fire, but I still use spells like frost bolt to slow down a mob and then 'fire' them like crazy.

Just wanted a little clarification on am I playing my mage 'wrong' or in a smart way. Thanks!

For you first question, people are generally stupid. I leveled a Frostie all the way up, and in every fight, fireblast was involved one way or another. However, even if you were to say, spec frost at the low level you are, it won't be until 20+ that Frost is able to effectively stand on it's on. Until level 20ish I was opening with a Frostbolt and using Fireball to burn the mob down, no pun intended.

"Deep" simply means that the majority of your talent points are put into a specific school; however, this does not neccisarily mean that you're exclusive to that school. 40/0/21 doens't neccesarily mean Arcane; that was just the build I used when I was attempting to maximize my Frost dps.

Don't worry, you're not playing your mage wrong. If you were 40+ and specced into fire and using Frostbolt as your main nuke....then you'd be playing it wrong.

One spell you might want to keep on your hotbar is Frostbolt Rank 1, just for the quick snare ability.

Don't get me wrong, I agree 100% with this statement. I think a competant mage should use whatever tools are available to get the job done...regardless of spell school. At low levels I was using spells from all 3 schools on a regular basis.

But to be honest my playstyle changed dramatically when I went deep fire. Now I generally only use one frost spell. And of course that is FN when pulling more than one mob. Occassionaly I will fire off some missiles from the Arcane school. But the vast majority of the time I am using fire spells. I never use frostbolt anymore...I just don't need to slow stuff down since it will die before it has a chance of hitting me anyway.

To the OP: I think that as you level up and spend talent points you will find yourself focusing on a particular school. You may use various spells from the other schools...but they are rarely your go-to spells. I doubt any mage out there exclusively uses ONLY one school of magic...that would be borderline retarded. But I think most mages classify themselves as belonging to one school.