best mage spec to begin

[darckills]

Hi i'm a beginner on vanilla and i want to know what is thé best mage spec to begin
Thank you

[kjre1313]

I would recommend going full frost while leveling as it's the easiest and most mana-efficient build.

[PanTheSatyr]

Frost.

See the pinned post on How to Mage in this section.

[Dalayne]

People tend to say frost while at the end also fire works out, depends on what you like to play and how you like to level with your mage.

[Kdg]

I think fire is actually better at the start, both are good tho

[ShaqPack]

Frost is definitely better, fire is alright, but I'd only recommend it if you're just bored of frost. Fire's damage may be slightly higher but with frost you typically are using cheaper spells (which means less down time drinking), but the real big things is the ability to kite, which Fire just doesn't do as well. After picking up certain talents in the frost tree early on, you are able to some extent to solo elites, which is A LOT more helpful when questing.

Of course, killing the elites won't be fast or easy, it's worth that alone just to go frost. We've all been in situations where you need to kill an elite for a quest but you can't find a group, with frost, this won't be a problem. Beyond that, frost kiting means that you very rarely will ever take damage, which means you don't have to worry about stam for anything besides world pvp (which can be covered by getting ice barrier eventually).

Iceblock alone is also worth going frost, on a server where high levels will often try to gank you, you can often just pop nova, ice block their debuffs off, blink and you actually have a chance of escaping, whereas you'll be dead in the water as a fire mage.

[Kdg]

Frost is definitely better, fire is alright, but I'd only recommend it if you're just bored of frost. Fire's damage may be slightly higher but with frost you typically are using cheaper spells (which means less down time drinking), but the real big things is the ability to kite, which Fire just doesn't do as well. After picking up certain talents in the frost tree early on, you are able to some extent to solo elites, which is A LOT more helpful when questing.

Of course, killing the elites won't be fast or easy, it's worth that alone just to go frost. We've all been in situations where you need to kill an elite for a quest but you can't find a group, with frost, this won't be a problem. Beyond that, frost kiting means that you very rarely will ever take damage, which means you don't have to worry about stam for anything besides world pvp (which can be covered by getting ice barrier eventually).

Iceblock alone is also worth going frost, on a server where high levels will often try to gank you, you can often just pop nova, ice block their debuffs off, blink and you actually have a chance of escaping, whereas you'll be dead in the water as a fire mage.

He said "to begin". Obviously frost is better once you are 40 but when you start out fire has much better dps