I am thinking about starting a mage but ...Follow

Generally speaking, fire does more damage than ice. My main, Relia, leveled into the high 60's as fire, switching to Arcane once the gear was good enough to support it. I have enjoyed the time I have spent playing her and I do not think I would do it any differently if I were to start WoW all over again.

With that said, I would not say mages are the easiest of the classes to play. Compared to my Druid alt, Ronule, I have way more buttons that I have needed to keep ready for use. I use Bartender and I could not imagine playing a mage with the standard toolbar interface.

To answer your other questions:

-The mobility of the mage can't be understated. I so miss the ability to bip from once place to another when playing my Druid.

-I have found myself in more demand in 5-mans than I have in raids. In Kara, my cc abilities were non-existent, allowing me to only serve as DPS. Mages often do good DPS, but in raids I have always been in groups where there are other classes that take the top spot. For example, in my last Gruul's run, myself and another mage were in the top 5 for damage, but a ret pali had the top spot.

-As far as wands go, it may depend a bit on the player level. Later in the game, besides when silenced, the wand should never be needed.

I don't think anyone can tell you if you'd like a mage or not. We can all tell you why WE like a mage but that doesn't mean that you will like it.

But.... I will anyways.

I like my mage mainly because I don't want to spend the time lvling up another toon all the way to thousands of gold, epic flyer, epic gear, S3 gear, maxed jobs... or play on my other server with my other 70s. Truthfully, if I had a good gear'd rogue or druid on spinebreaker I'd probalby play those alot more.

Why did I pick a mage? Because, like you, I thought blowing stuff up would be fun. Leveling him was way more fun then my warrior or lock. If you plan gear right you can kill anything in your way all the way up to 70. There's some down time when you first start out but it gets better.

Fire or frost. I lvled as frost with my main mage, on my old server I lvled a mage as fire up to 25. Basiclly, frost kills slower but leaves a little more room for error. Fire kills faster but if you mess up your dead.

People like mages in raids for AI, food, and DPS. Never had a problem finding groups when lvling or guilds when I was raiding.

Wands are for stats only. The only time I use mine is to finish off a mob to save some mana.

Mages are superfun!

The class does take a bit to get used to, because you don't have much margin for error (no armor to speak of, you really can't melee at all). But the class is very, very fun if you like to either (1) deal massive damage from range (fire and, at high levels, arcane) or (2) control the entire battlefield from range (frost). You have a lot of variety of playstyle available to you -- fire and frost have a lot in common in terms of the utility spells they use, but the actual playstyle is pretty different for each of them, so you can have fun switching around playstyles.

Mages also have great perk abilities. Making your own food and water is a great perk, as is the abili8ty to port yourself and portal others. And the utility spells are amazing -- sheeping, counterspelling, spell stealing, etc.

Mages are always needed in raids for the ranged damage, the sheeping, and the water -- so you should have no worries about that. Mages are also a great soloing class, once you get used to playing them (and using all of your abilities) you can manage most situations with relative ease.

Use wands for what stats they provide, not for what their damage output might be.

And mages are fun, most fun I had playing WoW was on my mages (yes I had 2 ^^). Friend has my acct now and even he likes my mages and he's a lock.

Doesn't hurt to do it that way, though I didn't really have much trouble as frost straight from 10-60(this was way back before TBC, so I even had worse trees and no evocate til after level 50).

Both frost and fire are fine for leveling. If you have the expendable gold, try em both out(respec every once in a while) until you find the one you really love.

This is a good thread to read. I have a druid about to hit 60, but was leveling with a friend that is a fire mage. He got sick took a week off work and played a little more than I did and he will hit 69 tonight. lol.

He is telling me to start a mage once I hit 70 and go frost as the frost/fire combo would be pretty tough. I liked the damage he was doing as fire, but he explained (he's played a while longer than myself) that with frost you can kill more mobs at once, where as fire might kill single mobs a little faster. I like mages (from UO I enjoyed my mage the most) and started one that is at lvl 7. just trying to figure out if I want to go frost as he would like or if I should go fire.

As suggested here I may try both out and see what I like. I do like the sound of solo leveling as I play at weird times and don't really care to rely on others to me.

I would like to ask why does no one like Arcane mages? I never hear any talk about arcane, it's fire or frost. Just asking so I can learn. :)

The old conventional wisdom that still hovers around is that Arcane is too mana-intensive in comparison with Fire and Frost during leveling. However, more recently I've been hearing things that go against such.

I've tried it at times, and have not found it effective, often leading to much downtime. But others may have varied results.