Mage Leveling Guide 1-120 Battle for Azeroth (BfA) 8.1

Table of Contents

• 1. General Battle for Azeroth Leveling Tips
• +2. Leveling 1-120 as a Frost Mage
  • 2.1. Gear Options
  • 2.2. Level by Level Rotation and Talents
    • 2.2.1. Talents to Level Up as a Frost Mage
    • 2.2.2. Rotation to Level Up as a Frost Mage
    • 2.2.3. Summary of Unlocked Abilities for Frost Mage
  • 2.3. Frost Mage War Mode Talents for Leveling
    • 2.3.1. General PvP Talents
    • 2.3.2. Frost Mage PvP Talents for Leveling
  • 2.4. Legendary Options
  • 2.5. Quest Rewards
  • 2.6. Consumables
    • 2.6.1. Gunshoes Macro
  • 2.7. Congratulations!
• +3. Leveling 1-120 as a Fire Mage
  • 3.1. Gear Options
  • 3.2. Level by Level Rotation and Talents
    • 3.2.1. Talents to Level Up as a Fire Mage
    • 3.2.2. Rotation to Level Up as a Fire Mage
    • 3.2.3. Summary of Unlocked Abilities for Fire Mage
  • 3.3. Fire Mage War Mode Talents for Leveling
    • 3.3.1. General PvP Talents
    • 3.3.2. Fire Mage PvP Talents for Leveling
  • 3.4. Legendary Options
  • 3.5. Quest Rewards
  • 3.6. Consumables
    • 3.6.1. Gunshoes Macro
  • 3.7. Congratulations!
• +4. Leveling 1-120 as a Arcane Mage
  • 4.1. Gear Options
  • 4.2. Level by Level Rotation and Talents
    • 4.2.1. Talents to Level Up as a Arcane Mage
    • 4.2.2. Rotation to Level Up as a Arcane Mage
    • 4.2.3. Summary of Unlocked Abilities for Arcane Mage
  • 4.3. Arcane Mage War Mode Talents for Leveling
    • 4.3.1. General PvP Talents
    • 4.3.2. Arcane Mage PvP Talents for Leveling
  • 4.4. Legendary Options
  • 4.5. Quest Rewards
  • 4.6. Consumables
    • 4.6.1. Gunshoes Macro
  • 4.7. Congratulations!
• 5. Changelog

1. General Battle for Azeroth Leveling Tips

Welcome! While this leveling guide is specifically made for the class and specialization(s) listed, we also have a general Battle for Azeroth leveling guide that focuses on the specific features of the Battle for Azeroth expansion including preparation of your mission table that will be used to unlock new areas, progressing on your faction's War Effort to save time at Level 120, and a reminder to keep ALL of the gear you find for the Scrap-o-Matic 1000 or Shred-Master Mk1, which will greatly increase your resource generating capabilities. Please visit our 110 to 120 leveling guide for this information and more (including Heirloom and War Mode advice that also applies to players who are not yet Level 110.

2. Leveling 1-120 as a Frost Mage

2.1. Gear Options

When leveling up, you should always choose the piece of loot with the highest item level. The only exception to this rule is if you have a Ring or Necklace with a slightly lower item level, but 2 secondary stats on it instead of 1.

2.2. Level by Level Rotation and Talents

Move the slider below to make the guide update to your level!

2.2.1. Talents to Level Up as a Frost Mage

Your first talent row unlocks at Level 15.

Your talent set up should be as follows.

• Level 15: Bone Chilling or Lonely Winter depending on if you want to have a pet or not.
• Level 30: Shimmer
• Level 45: Incanter's Flow
• Level 60: Frozen Touch
• Level 75: Frigid Winds
• Level 90: Splitting Ice
• Level 100: Thermal Void

2.2.2. Rotation to Level Up as a Frost Mage

Starting at Level 1, you only have one main attack ability: Frostbolt.

1. Cast Fire Blast on cooldown.
2. Use your Icy Veins cooldown when possible for more damage.
3. Cast Frozen Orb, preferably into multiple mobs.
4. Cast Flurry only when you have Brain Freeze.
5. Cast Ice Lance any time the target is frozen, such as after a Frost Nova if the mob gets too close.
6. Cast Ice Lance to spend your Fingers of Frost charges.
7. Cast Ice Lance to spend your Fingers of Frost charges, or directly after casting a Flurry empowered by Brain Freeze.
8. Cast Frostbolt.

2.2.3. Summary of Unlocked Abilities for Frost Mage

You unlock your first ability of interest at Level 3.

• At Level 3, you unlock Fire Blast. It can be cast while casting Frostbolt, as well as hitting harder.
• At Level 5, you unlock Frost Nova. It can be used to freeze mobs in place, allowing you time to run to safety or time to kill one without being hit. Damage will break this effect.
• At Level 8, you unlock Polymorph. It will turn a beast or humanoid into a sheep, essentially removing it from combat until it either expires or the mob takes damage.
• At Level 10, you unlock Ice Lance. This replaces Fire Blast. It should only be cast into a target that is considered frozen, such as with Frost Nova.
• At Level 12, you unlock Summon Water Elemental allows you to summon your Water Elemental pet. It will fire Waterbolt at whatever you are attacking, allowing you to get a bit more damage if you have to kite.
• At Level 13, you unlock Conjure Refreshment which allows you to create level-appropriate food to eat after combat. This food can be traded to friends, saving money on food and water while leveling. This is the only form of healing a Mage has access to.
• At Level 14, you unlock Shatter. It causes any spell that hits a target considered frozen to gain increased Critical Strike chance.
• At Level 16, you unlock Blink. This allows you to teleport forward 20 yards, or until you hit a wall or cliff. It also breaks you free of stuns and roots, allowing you to kite even more effectively.
• At Level 17, you unlock the ability to teleport to your faction's major cities. Unlike other spells, this is not automatically granted to you, and you have to find a Portal trainer in a city, usually found near the Mage trainers.
• At Level 18, you unlock Blizzard. It is your primary AoE damage spell, and should be cast when you are fighting multiple enemies.
• At Level 20, you unlock Flurry. It is a powerful damage spell with a 3-second cast time. It has a 70% slow attached to it, but the duration is not long enough to cover casting it again.
• At Level 22, you unlock Counterspell. It allows you to interrupt enemy casts on a 24-second cooldown. You cannot interrupt spells that have a shield around them on the unit frame.
• At Level 24, you unlock Fingers of Frost, your first proc. Frostbolt will now generate Fingers of Frost, which empowers your Ice Lance, granting the triple damage bonus and benefit from Shatter.
• At Level 26, you unlock Ice Barrier. It provides a shield that will hold 22% of your max Health for a minute, on a 25-second cooldown.
• At Level 28, you unlock both Remove Curse and Brain Freeze.
  • Remove Curse allows you to remove curses from friendly targets, or annoy them with a sparkly swirl in town.
  • Brain Freeze is your second proc, allowing Frostbolt to make your next Flurry instant cast and deal extra damage.
• At Level 32, you unlock Freeze, granting your Water Elemental the ability to cast a ranged, damageless Frost Nova at the target location.
• At Level 34, you unlock Cone of Cold, a powerful close-range AoE slow.
• At Level 36, you gain the second rank of Shatter, adding an extra 25% chance to Critically Strike against frozen targets.
• At Level 38, you unlock Slow Fall, allowing you and your party to safely jump from great heights.
• At Level 40, you unlock Icy Veins, your 3-minute DPS cooldown. It increases your Haste by 30% for 20 seconds, and damage taken will not push back your cast timer.
• At Level 42, you unlock Invisibility. This allows you to drop aggro, run past mobs (at least the ones without Truesight — the blue glowing eye above a mob while invisible will act as if you are not invisible, and aggro accordingly), and escape certain death.
• Also at Level 42, you gain the group portal version of the teleports you got at Level 17. Again, you have to go find the trainer in town, by the Mage trainers.
• At Level 48, you gain the second rank of Brain Freeze, which makes the instant Flurry apply Winter's Chill to the target, letting any spells impacting while afflicted benefit from frozen status.
• At Level 50, you unlock Ice Block. This allows you to become immune to damage and clear most debuffs, but become incapable of moving or casting while active.
• At Level 52, you unlock Cold Snap. This is a 5-minute cooldown that resets a handful of defensive and utility abilities, but is mostly utilized to reset Ice Block so you may immune something twice in quick succession.
• Horde Mages also gain Teleport: Stonard at Level 52. This can be trained from the same place as the other teleports and portals.
• At Level 57, you unlock Frozen Orb. This is a 1-minute cooldown that deals a fair bit of damage in single target, and an absolute ton in AoE. The initial impact will generate one Fingers of Frost, and each tick every half-second has a 10% chance for another.
• At Level 58, you unlock Arcane Intellect. This is your raid buff, it applies a 10% Intellect increase to the entire raid for an hour. It is your job to keep this up.
• At Level 60, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Teleport: Dalaran - Northrend, which will take you to the Dalaran, in Northrend.
• At Level 62, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Teleport: Shattrath, which will take you to Shattrath, in Outland.
• At Level 63, you gain the second rank of Blizzard, which reduces the cooldown of Frozen Orb by half a second every time Blizzard deals damage.
• At Level 66, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Portal: Shattrath, which will take you and your raid to Shattrath, in Outland.
• At Level 70, you unlock Spellsteal. This allows you to offensively dispel magic off of any enemy and, if possible, steal the buff for yourself for up to 2 minutes. Buffs that will be granted to you are shown with a glowing aura on the enemy's unit frame, but you can use it to remove anything classified as magic, regardless of if it glows.
• At Level 71, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Teleport: Dalaran - Broken Isles, which will take you to Dalaran, above the Broken Isles.
• At Level 74, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Portal: Dalaran - Northrend, which will take you and your raid to Dalaran, in Northrend.
• At Level 78, you unlock Mastery: Icicles. This will generate an Icicle above your head when you cast certain spells. This can be ignored as it is entirely passive. It also increases Frozen Orb's damage, drastically improving your AoE output.
• At Level 80, you unlock Time Warp. This is a raid-wide DPS cooldown, increasing everyone's Haste by 30% for 40 seconds. It can be used once every 5 minutes, although it will apply a 10 minute debuff that disallows benefiting from it again.
• Starting at Level 85, you gain the teleports and portals for Tol Barad (Level 85), Vale of Eternal Blossoms (Level 90), Stormshield or Warspear (Level 92), and Boralus or Dazar'alor (Level 110). As always, see your portal trainer.

2.3. Frost Mage War Mode Talents for Leveling

2.3.1. General PvP Talents

• Relentless is a passive ability, but it does not automatically remove crowd control abilities. Instead, it reduces the duration.
• Gladiator's Medallion is an on-use ability that removes all movement impairing effects and all loss of control effects.
• Adaptation is recommended; it is likely your most passive choice since it will automatically remove loss of control effects over 5 seconds.

2.3.2. Frost Mage PvP Talents for Leveling

1. Concentrated Coolness increases Frozen Orb's damage by 30%, and allows it to be placed on the cursor. This allows you to place it in such a way it will tick on all mobs you are fighting, and significantly increases your AoE output.
2. Burst of Cold causes your Frost Nova to increase your next Cone of Cold's damage by 400%. Another significant AoE output increase, at the cost of playing fairly close to mobs you can likely lock down with slows from a distance.
3. Deep Shatter makes your Frostbolt hit significantly harder against frozen targets.
4. Frostbite is a useful kiting option, causing every chill effect potentially freeze the target in place, allowing for a Shatter off of it.
5. Ice Form changes your Icy Veins into a 1-minute cooldown that only improves your Frostbolt damage.

Chilled to the Bone, Dampened Magic, Kleptomania, Netherwind Armor, Prismatic Cloak, and Temporal Shield have limited use in PvE content in terms of increasing your damage in the open world, but they can be situationally useful. Notably Temporal Shield can be utilized for, functionally, an extra 6 seconds of combat time against large elite mobs.

2.4. Legendary Options

If you are just coming out of Level 110, you will probably have a number of different Legendary items to choose from. Your Legendaries' special effects will stop working at Level 116, but until then they can be a very powerful addition to help you level up quickly. These are our Legendary recommendations for leveling as a Frost Mage in Battle for Azeroth:

• Sephuz's Secret is a must, giving you passive movement speed and Haste. Frost can proc the active effect on it through any given freeze effect, including Freeze and Glacial Spike.
• Shard of the Exodar functionally halves the cooldown of Time Warp by removing the 10 minute debuff.
• Ice Time could potentially be useful, especially combined with Concentrated Coolness, but there is a real chance that mobs will be dead by the time the explosion goes off.

The rest of the Legendaries have effects that are best realized over the course of a raid encounter, not the mob-to-mob gameplay of leveling. Either they have timed effects that can fall off during travel or looting, they are defensive, or they are simply bad for reasons they were bad in Legion.

2.5. Quest Rewards

You should equip new quest rewards when their item level starts beating out your previous set of gear. If you are currently wearing Tier 21 gear, it is best to let the quest rewards significantly beat your existing item level before using them. While a Tier bonus is worth a fair chunk of damage, the stats will quickly fall behind. Azerite gear additionally is another 1-3% per bonus, on top of raw stats.

If possible, we recommend holding on to all Quest Rewards you do not use. They can be scrapped at Level 120 for material resources for profession crafting.

2.6. Consumables

There are several consumable items that can be purchased that will help you with your leveling speed.

• Skystep Potion increases your movement speed by 150% (more than a mount!) for 8 seconds. It has a 1-minute cooldown. This is extremely useful and should be used often and aggressively for any travel that is more than ~100 yards long.
• Gunshoes are an Engineering item that increase your movement speed by 200% for 25 seconds. These will make you almost as fast as a Flying mount. We recommend having a lot of these, and using them whenever you are traveling more than ~250 yards.
• Goblin Glider Kit is very useful for covering long distances from high places.

2.6.1. Gunshoes Macro

The Gunshoes will not let you stop moving for as long as they are active. Using this macro twice will click the buff off and allow you to stop.

• #showtooltip
• /cancelaura Gunshoes
• /use Gunshoes

2.7. Congratulations!

Congratulations on reaching Level 120! Now that you have hit Level 120 we recommend looking at our Easy mode page and Talents section to learn how to play at max level. To get yourself prepared for the end-game content ahead, we strongly recommend this Battle for Azeroth Raiding Lexicon/Spreadsheet by Medivh. It is a gold trove of information that will help you when gearing up in Battle for Azeroth and more.

3. Leveling 1-120 as a Fire Mage

3.1. Gear Options

When leveling up, you should always choose the piece of loot with the highest item level. The only exception to this rule is if you have a Ring or Necklace with a slightly lower item level, but 2 secondary stats on it instead of 1.

3.2. Level by Level Rotation and Talents

Move the slider below to make the guide update to your level!

3.2.1. Talents to Level Up as a Fire Mage

Your first talent row unlocks at Level 15.

Your talent set up should be as follows.

• Level 15: Firestarter
• Level 30: Shimmer
• Level 45: Incanter's Flow
• Level 60: Flame On
• Level 75: Frenetic Speed
• Level 90: Living Bomb
• Level 100: Meteor

3.2.2. Rotation to Level Up as a Fire Mage

Starting at Level 1, you only have one main attack ability: Frostbolt.

1. Make sure to keep the Arcane Intellect buff up on yourself at all times.
2. Cast Combustion when available to kill strong enemies.
3. Cast Meteor when available.
4. Cast Living Bomb on groups of 3 or more enemies.
5. Cast Fire Blast on cooldown.
6. Cast Fire Blast when you have Heating Up to turn it into Hot Streak.
7. Cast Flamestrike when you have Hot Streak, if there are 5 or more enemies.
8. Cast Pyroblast when you have Hot Streak.
9. Cast Dragon's Breath when there are 5 or more enemies.
10. Cast Scorch while moving. Only do this when there is a good reason to move, as Fireball does more damage.
11. Cast Scorch while moving or when you have Combustion active.
12. Use Fireball as your main filler.

3.2.3. Summary of Unlocked Abilities for Fire Mage

You unlock your first ability of interest at Level 3.

• At Level 3, you unlock Fire Blast. It can be cast while casting Frostbolt, as well as hitting harder.
• At Level 3, you unlock Fire Blast. It can be cast while casting Fireball, as well as hitting harder.
• At Level 5, you unlock Frost Nova. It can be used to freeze mobs in place, allowing you time to run to safety or time to kill one without being hit. Damage will break this effect.
• At Level 8, you unlock Polymorph. It will turn a beast or humanoid into a sheep, essentially removing it from combat until it either expires or the mob takes damage.
• At Level 10, you unlock Fireball. This replaces Frostbolt.
• You also unlock Critical Mass at level 10, giving you additional Critical Strike chance.
• At Level 12 you unlock Pyroblast, but you should not use it yet.
• At Level 13, you unlock Conjure Refreshment which allows you to create level-appropriate food to eat after combat. This food can be traded to friends, saving money on food and water while leveling. This is the only form of healing a Mage has access to.
• At Level 14 you will unlock Hot Streak. When you get 2 Critical Strikes in a row, you should cast Pyroblast.
• At Level 14 you will also unlock Scorch, which you can use to cast while moving instead of Fireball. Only do this when there is a good reason to move, as Fireball does more damage.
• At Level 16, you unlock Blink. This allows you to teleport forward 20 yards, or until you hit a wall or cliff. It also breaks you free of stuns and roots, allowing you to kite even more effectively.
• At Level 17, you unlock the ability to teleport to your faction's major cities. Unlike other spells, this is not automatically granted to you, and you have to find a Portal trainer in a city, usually found near the Mage trainers.
• At Level 18, your Fire Blast will always be a guaranteed Critical Strike, so you can now use it when you have Heating Up to turn it into Hot Streak.
• At Level 20 you will get Flamestrike, which should be used instead of Pyroblast when you have Hot Streak, if there are 5 or more enemies.
• At Level 22, you unlock Counterspell. It allows you to interrupt enemy casts on a 24-second cooldown. You cannot interrupt spells that have a shield around them on the unit frame.
• At Level 26, you can use Blazing Barrier. This should be used when you fight strong enemies to reduce the damage you take, or while you are moving towards the next enemy.
• At Level 28, you unlock Remove Curse. It allows you to remove curses from friendly targets, or annoy them with a sparkly swirl in town.
• At Level 32, you will unlock Dragon's Breath, which should be used on 5+ enemies, or when you need to disorient the enemy to be able to make distance between yourself and the enemy.
• At Level 35 you will unlock Enhanced Pyrotechnics. This counteracts bad luck by giving you extra Critical Strike chance every time you do not Critically Strike with Fireball.
• At Level 38, you unlock Slow Fall, allowing you and your party to safely jump from great heights.
• At Level 40 you will unlock Combustion which you should use to kill stronger enemies or groups of enemies. During Combustion you should cast Scorch instead of Fireball.
• At Level 42, you unlock Invisibility. This allows you to drop aggro, run past mobs (at least the ones without Truesight — the blue glowing eye above a mob while invisible will act as if you are not invisible, and aggro accordingly), and escape certain death.
• Also at Level 42, you gain the group portal version of the teleports you got at Level 17. Again, you have to go find the trainer in town, by the Mage trainers.
• At Level 48, Fire Blast will go up to 2 charges, so you should use it more frequently.
• At Level 50, you unlock Ice Block. This allows you to become immune to damage and clear most debuffs, but become incapable of moving or casting while active.
• At Level 52 you will unlock Cauterize. When you would normally die, you will instead get healed up to 35% Health and then burn you for 28% of your maximum Health over 6 seconds, and also gives you a movement speed boost. You can use this to quickly run away in situations you would normally die.
• Horde Mages also gain Teleport: Stonard at Level 52. This can be trained from the same place as the other teleports and portals.
• At Level 58, you unlock Arcane Intellect. This is your raid buff, it applies a 10% Intellect increase to the entire raid for an hour. It is your job to keep this up.
• At Level 60, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Teleport: Dalaran - Northrend, which will take you to the Dalaran, in Northrend.
• At Level 62, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Teleport: Shattrath, which will take you to Shattrath, in Outland.
• Level 65 improves Critical Mass to not only give a flat 15% Critical Strike increase, it also increases the Critical Strike you get from all other sources (like gear and buffs) by 10%.
• At Level 66, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Portal: Shattrath, which will take you and your raid to Shattrath, in Outland.
• At Level 70, you unlock Spellsteal. This allows you to offensively dispel magic off of any enemy and, if possible, steal the buff for yourself for up to 2 minutes. Buffs that will be granted to you are shown with a glowing aura on the enemy's unit frame, but you can use it to remove anything classified as magic, regardless of if it glows.
• At Level 71, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Teleport: Dalaran - Broken Isles, which will take you to Dalaran, above the Broken Isles.
• At Level 74, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Portal: Dalaran - Northrend, which will take you and your raid to Dalaran, in Northrend.
• At Level 78, you will unlock Mastery: Ignite. This causes most of your abilities to burn for additional damage over 9 seconds, and also spread to nearby targets.
• At Level 80, you unlock Time Warp. This is a raid-wide DPS cooldown, increasing everyone's Haste by 30% for 40 seconds. It can be used once every 5 minutes, although it will apply a 10 minute debuff that disallows benefiting from it again.
• Starting at Level 85, you gain the teleports and portals for Tol Barad (Level 85), Vale of Eternal Blossoms (Level 90), Stormshield or Warspear (Level 92), and Boralus or Dazar'alor (Level 110). As always, see your portal trainer.

3.3. Fire Mage War Mode Talents for Leveling

3.3.1. General PvP Talents

• Relentless is a passive ability, but it does not automatically remove crowd control abilities. Instead, it reduces the duration.
• Gladiator's Medallion is an on-use ability that removes all movement impairing effects and all loss of control effects.
• Adaptation is recommended; it is likely your most passive choice since it will automatically remove loss of control effects over 5 seconds.

3.3.2. Fire Mage PvP Talents for Leveling

1. Tinder is great because there are often times where you are not casting Fireball for prolonged periods of time due to moving from area to area. This talent will make your first Fireball on almost every new encounter do more damage, and be extremely quick. Combined with Firestarter it is a guaranteed Critical Strike, giving you Heating Up, which you can then follow up with a Fire Blast giving you a Hot Streak instantly on almost any new target you fight.
2. Firestarter is great for giving you Combustion much quicker than otherwise possible. It allows you to use Combustion very often, giving you a huge damage increase over the course of leveling / world content.
3. Temporal Shield is off the Global Cooldown, so it can be used without sacrificing any damage, and is very strong for when you know damage is incoming. You can simply tank the damage and heal back to full Health when the shield ends.

Chilled to the Bone, Dampened Magic, Kleptomania, Netherwind Armor, Prismatic Cloak, and Temporal Shield have limited use in PvE content in terms of increasing your damage in the open world, but they can be situationally useful. Notably Temporal Shield can be utilized for, functionally, an extra 6 seconds of combat time against large elite mobs.

3.4. Legendary Options

If you are just coming out of Level 110, you will probably have a number of different Legendary items to choose from. Your Legendaries' special effects will stop working at Level 116, but until then they can be a very powerful addition to help you level up quickly. These are our Legendary recommendations for leveling as a Fire Mage in Battle for Azeroth:

• Sephuz's Secret is a must, giving you passive movement speed and Haste. Fire can proc the active effect on it through a multitude of crowd control effects, like Dragon's Breath and Frost Nova.
• Shard of the Exodar functionally halves the cooldown of Time Warp by removing the 10 minute debuff, so it can be useful for dungeons or elite monsters.
• Darckli's Dragonfire Diadem can be useful, especially combined with Alexstrasza's Fury, to do a lot of damage to groups of enemies, and proc Sephuz's Secret at the same time.

The rest of the Legendaries have effects that are best realized over the course of a raid encounter, not the mob-to-mob gameplay of leveling. Either they have timed effects that can fall off during travel or looting, they are defensive, or they are simply bad for reasons they were bad in Legion.

3.5. Quest Rewards

You should equip new quest rewards when their item level starts beating out your previous set of gear. If you are currently wearing Tier 21 gear, it is best to let the quest rewards significantly beat your existing item level before using them. While a Tier bonus is worth a fair chunk of damage, the stats will quickly fall behind. Azerite gear additionally is another 1-3% per bonus, on top of raw stats.

If possible, we recommend holding on to all Quest Rewards you do not use. They can be scrapped at Level 120 for material resources for profession crafting.

3.6. Consumables

There are several consumable items that can be purchased that will help you with your leveling speed.

• Skystep Potion increases your movement speed by 150% (more than a mount!) for 8 seconds. It has a 1-minute cooldown. This is extremely useful and should be used often and aggressively for any travel that is more than ~100 yards long.
• Gunshoes are an Engineering item that increase your movement speed by 200% for 25 seconds. These will make you almost as fast as a Flying mount. We recommend having a lot of these, and using them whenever you are traveling more than ~250 yards.
• Goblin Glider Kit is very useful for covering long distances from high places.

3.6.1. Gunshoes Macro

The Gunshoes will not let you stop moving for as long as they are active. Using this macro twice will click the buff off and allow you to stop.

• #showtooltip
• /cancelaura Gunshoes
• /use Gunshoes

3.7. Congratulations!

Congratulations on reaching Level 120! Now that you have hit Level 120 we recommend looking at our Easy mode page and Talents section to learn how to play at max level. To get yourself prepared for the end-game content ahead, we strongly recommend this Battle for Azeroth Raiding Lexicon/Spreadsheet by Medivh. It is a gold trove of information that will help you when gearing up in Battle for Azeroth and more.

4. Leveling 1-120 as a Arcane Mage

4.1. Gear Options

When leveling up, you should always choose the piece of loot with the highest item level. The only exception to this rule is if you have a Ring or Necklace with a slightly lower item level, but 2 secondary stats on it instead of 1.

4.2. Level by Level Rotation and Talents

Move the slider below to make the guide update to your level!

4.2.1. Talents to Level Up as a Arcane Mage

Your first talent row unlocks at Level 15.

Your talent set up should be as follows.

• Level 15: Amplification
• Level 30: Shimmer
• Level 45: Incanter's Flow
• Level 60: Charged Up
• Level 75: Chrono Shift
• Level 90: Reverberate
• Level 100: Arcane Orb

4.2.2. Rotation to Level Up as a Arcane Mage

Starting at Level 1, you only have one main attack ability: Frostbolt.

1. Make sure to keep the Arcane Intellect buff up on yourself at all times.
2. Cast Arcane Power to quickly kill a strong enemy or group of enemies.
3. Use Presence of Mind to cast Arcane Blast while moving.
4. Cast Arcane Missiles when you have Clearcasting
5. Cast Arcane Barrage if you are close to being out of Mana, or you can finish an enemy off with the ability and you do not plan to fight any other enemies within a minute.
6. Cast Arcane Barrage if you are close to being out of Mana, or you can finish an enemy off with the ability and you do not plan to fight any other enemies within a minute, or there are 3 or more enemies and you have 4 Arcane Charges.
7. Cast Arcane Explosion if there are 3 or more enemies.
8. Use Arcane Blast as your main filler.
9. Cast Evocation when out of Mana.

4.2.3. Summary of Unlocked Abilities for Arcane Mage

You unlock your first ability of interest at Level 3.

• At Level 3, you unlock Fire Blast. It can be cast while casting Frostbolt, as well as hitting harder.
• At Level 5, you unlock Frost Nova. It can be used to freeze mobs in place, allowing you time to run to safety or time to kill one without being hit. Damage will break this effect.
• At Level 8, you unlock Polymorph. It will turn a beast or humanoid into a sheep, essentially removing it from combat until it either expires or the mob takes damage.
• At Level 10, you unlock Arcane Blast. This replaces Frostbolt.
• You also unlock Arcane Barrage at level 10, which you can use when running low on Mana to reset your Arcane Charges.
• At Level 12 you unlock Arcane Missiles, but you should not use it yet.
• At Level 13, you unlock Conjure Refreshment which allows you to create level-appropriate food to eat after combat. This food can be traded to friends, saving money on food and water while leveling. This is the only form of healing a Mage has access to.
• At Level 14 you will unlock Clearcasting. When you get a Clearcasting proc, you should use Arcane Missiles.
• At Level 16, you unlock Blink. This allows you to teleport forward 20 yards, or until you hit a wall or cliff. It also breaks you free of stuns and roots, allowing you to kite even more effectively.
• At Level 17, you unlock the ability to teleport to your faction's major cities. Unlike other spells, this is not automatically granted to you, and you have to find a Portal trainer in a city, usually found near the Mage trainers.
• At Level 18, you unlock Arcane Explosion. You should use this instead of Arcane Blast on 3 or more targets.
• At Level 20 you will get Evocation, which should be used when you are out of Mana.
• At Level 22, you unlock Counterspell. It allows you to interrupt enemy casts on a 24-second cooldown. You cannot interrupt spells that have a shield around them on the unit frame.
• At Level 26, you can use Prismatic Barrier. This should be used when you fight strong enemies to reduce the damage you take, or while you are moving towards the next enemy.
• At Level 28, you unlock Remove Curse. It allows you to remove curses from friendly targets, or annoy them with a sparkly swirl in town.
• At Level 32, you will unlock Slow, which can be used on hard-hitting enemies to slow them and avoid getting hit.
• At Level 34 Arcane Barrage will hit an additional target for 40%.
• At Level 38, you unlock Slow Fall, allowing you and your party to safely jump from great heights.
• At Level 40 you will unlock Arcane Power which you should use to kill stronger enemies or groups of enemies.
• At Level 42, you unlock Invisibility. This allows you to drop aggro, run past mobs (at least the ones without Truesight — the blue glowing eye above a mob while invisible will act as if you are not invisible, and aggro accordingly), and escape certain death.
• Also at Level 42, you gain the group portal version of the teleports you got at Level 17. Again, you have to go find the trainer in town, by the Mage trainers.
• At Level 48, you unlock Displacement. This is not very useful while leveling because you almost never want to go back, only forward. It can however be used to Blink away from an enemy, and then when the enemy gets close to you, cast Displacement to go back to your original position, to avoid getting hit.
• At Level 50, you unlock Ice Block. This allows you to become immune to damage and clear most debuffs, but become incapable of moving or casting while active.
• At Level 50, Horde Mages gain Teleport: Stonard. This can be trained from the same place as the other teleports and portals.
• At Level 54 you will unlock Presence of Mind. This can be used while moving to allow you to cast Arcane Blast on the move.
• At Level 56, Evocation's cooldown will be greatly reduced.
• At Level 58, you unlock Arcane Intellect. This is your raid buff, it applies a 10% Intellect increase to the entire raid for an hour. It is your job to keep this up.
• At Level 60, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Teleport: Dalaran - Northrend, which will take you to the Dalaran, in Northrend.
• At Level 62, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Teleport: Shattrath, which will take you to Shattrath, in Outland.
• Level 65 unlocks Greater Invisibility. This can be used to instantly escape combat with any enemy, or reduce the damage of big hits by 90%. Keep in mind, when using Greater Invisibility, you will drop combat, and lots of enemies will start evading and healing back to full Health, so do not use this on low Health enemies if you would survive the hit.
• At Level 66, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Portal: Shattrath, which will take you and your raid to Shattrath, in Outland.
• At Level 70, you unlock Spellsteal. This allows you to offensively dispel magic off of any enemy and, if possible, steal the buff for yourself for up to 2 minutes. Buffs that will be granted to you are shown with a glowing aura on the enemy's unit frame, but you can use it to remove anything classified as magic, regardless of if it glows.
• At Level 71, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Teleport: Dalaran - Broken Isles, which will take you to Dalaran, above the Broken Isles.
• At Level 74, you can visit the portal trainer to learn Portal: Dalaran - Northrend, which will take you and your raid to Dalaran, in Northrend.
• At Level 78, you will unlock Mastery: Savant. This will give you additional Mana and Mana regeneration, and cause your Arcane Blast and Arcane Barrage to do more damage.
• At Level 80, you unlock Time Warp. This is a raid-wide DPS cooldown, increasing everyone's Haste by 30% for 40 seconds. It can be used once every 5 minutes, although it will apply a 10 minute debuff that disallows benefiting from it again.
• Starting at Level 85, you gain the teleports and portals for Tol Barad (Level 85), Vale of Eternal Blossoms (Level 90), Stormshield or Warspear (Level 92), and Boralus or Dazar'alor (Level 110). As always, see your portal trainer.

4.3. Arcane Mage War Mode Talents for Leveling

Suggested PVP talents for Arcane Mage

4.3.1. General PvP Talents

• Relentless is a passive ability, but it does not automatically remove crowd control abilities. Instead, it reduces the duration.
• Gladiator's Medallion is an on-use ability that removes all movement impairing effects and all loss of control effects.
• Adaptation is recommended; it is likely your most passive choice since it will automatically remove loss of control effects over 5 seconds.

4.3.2. Arcane Mage PvP Talents for Leveling

1. Temporal Shield is off the Global Cooldown, so it can be used without sacrificing any damage, and is very strong for when you know damage is incoming. You can simply tank the damage and heal back to full Health when the shield ends.
2. Master of Escape allows you to use Greater Invisibility very often. This can be very useful for quests that require you to pick up certain items, as Greater Invisibility allows you to drop combat and quickly mount up after looting the required item, without having to kill off any enemies you have have aggrod while getting to the item.
3. Mass Invisibility is good for the same reasons as Master of Escape is.

4.4. Legendary Options

If you are just coming out of Level 110, you will probably have a number of different Legendary items to choose from. Your Legendaries' special effects will stop working at Level 116, but until then they can be a very powerful addition to help you level up quickly. These are our Legendary recommendations for leveling as a Arcane Mage in Battle for Azeroth:

• Sephuz's Secret is a must, giving you passive movement speed and Haste. Arcane can proc the active effect on it through Frost Nova.
• Shard of the Exodar functionally halves the cooldown of Time Warp by removing the 10 minute debuff, so it can be useful for dungeons or elite monsters.
• Kil'jaeden's Burning Wish can be useful to kill large groups of enemies quickly.
• Mystic Kilt of the Rune Master is decent while leveling, as it basically removes the need for using Evocation, although due to the downtime of combat often involved in leveling, sometimes the extra Mana is not needed because you regenerate enough Mana out of combat.

The rest of the Legendaries have effects that are best realized over the course of a raid encounter, not the mob-to-mob gameplay of leveling. Either they have timed effects that can fall off during travel or looting, they are defensive, or they are simply bad for reasons they were bad in Legion.

4.5. Quest Rewards

You should equip new quest rewards when their item level starts beating out your previous set of gear. If you are currently wearing Tier 21 gear, it is best to let the quest rewards significantly beat your existing item level before using them. While a Tier bonus is worth a fair chunk of damage, the stats will quickly fall behind. Azerite gear additionally is another 1-3% per bonus, on top of raw stats.

If possible, we recommend holding on to all Quest Rewards you do not use. They can be scrapped at Level 120 for material resources for profession crafting.

4.6. Consumables

There are several consumable items that can be purchased that will help you with your leveling speed.

• Skystep Potion increases your movement speed by 150% (more than a mount!) for 8 seconds. It has a 1-minute cooldown. This is extremely useful and should be used often and aggressively for any travel that is more than ~100 yards long.
• Gunshoes are an Engineering item that increase your movement speed by 200% for 25 seconds. These will make you almost as fast as a Flying mount. We recommend having a lot of these, and using them whenever you are traveling more than ~250 yards.
• Goblin Glider Kit is very useful for covering long distances from high places.

4.6.1. Gunshoes Macro

The Gunshoes will not let you stop moving for as long as they are active. Using this macro twice will click the buff off and allow you to stop.

• #showtooltip
• /cancelaura Gunshoes
• /use Gunshoes

4.7. Congratulations!

Congratulations on reaching Level 120! Now that you have hit Level 120 we recommend looking at our Easy mode page and Talents section to learn how to play at max level. To get yourself prepared for the end-game content ahead, we strongly recommend this Battle for Azeroth Raiding Lexicon/Spreadsheet by Medivh. It is a gold trove of information that will help you when gearing up in Battle for Azeroth and more.

5. Changelog

• 10 Dec. 2018: This page has been reviewed for Patch 8.1 and no changes are necessary.
• 23 Aug. 2018: Added Meteor and Living Bomb usage to Fire rotation.
• 12 Aug. 2018: Consistency updates to give all leveling guides a similar feel.
• 11 Aug. 2018: Added Leveling advice from Level 1 to 120 for Frost, Fire, and Arcane.
• 02 Mar. 2018: Updated Blazing Barrier tooltip.
• 28 Nov. 2017: Updated to reflect current usage.

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