WotLK Mage Leveling

Leveling Stats
The primary stat you will want to focus on while leveling is intellect, the

more mana you have the more mobs you can kill before drinking. Spell

power is also a useful stat while leveling, but there isn't a whole lot of it

available until you reach Outland, so focus more on stamina as your

secondary priority until you reach Outland. Spirit can also be useful while

leveling because it will help regenerate your mana between pulls, or while

casting if you use Mage Armor or have Arcane Meditation, but do not

make it a priority over intellect.

Leveling Strategy:
The basic sequence is this:

bolt, bolt, bolt, frost nova, strafe to max range, bolt till low hp. Once the

mob is at low hp use your wand to finish off the mob and not Fireblast,

especially not Fireblast, or any other mana using ability if you can avoid it

To use a wand open your character pane (default shortcut key is 'c') and

drag the wand from your inventory to the ranged slot, then open your

spell book (default key is 'p'), click the general tab, and drag the “shoot”

ability from the spell book onto your action bar. You will now be able to

click that action bar icon to use your wand attack. More on UI set up

later.

Bolt is your bolt of choice, so if you were fire then bolt would be Fireball,

and if you were frost then bolt would be Frostbolt.

Be sure to use mage armor while leveling and make sure you glyph it as

well.

Questing
The easiest way to level is to simply complete quests. The best questing

strategy is to accept every quest from an area, complete as many as you

can, turn them all in at once, then repeat until you have completed all the

quests that you can from that area before moving onto the next area. If

a quest is too hard don't be afraid to skip it completely or save it for later.

Instances
Instances can be fun and can provide good loot to players who do them,

but they are not required content for leveling. Instances will help you

learn your role in a group setting and how to play well with other classes.

Usually in an instance your most important role is providing crowd control

through polymorph, then damage, then buffs and food/water. All these

roles are important however and if you neglect any of them you are not

fulfilling your role as a mage in an instance.

Grinding
Grinding alone is not the most efficient way to level a mage, or any class.

Grinding is when you simply kill mobs in an area over and over again in

order to level. As you might imagine this can become very boring very

quickly. Good mobs to grind for mages, single target or AoE, are melee

mobs that have no ranged attacks, abilities that affect spell casting speed,

or abilities that can prevent you from kiting them, like knock down.