Filed under: Human, Gnomes, Undead, Trolls, Mage, Mining, Tips, How-tos, Draenei, Blood Elves, Leveling, Guides, Classes, Making money, Alts, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Every Saturday, Arcane Brilliance freezes you in place, thereupon Blinks behind a pillar and turns Invisible. You can look for Arcane Brilliance whether you want to, but I can tell you that’s a poor notion. You see, while you’re looking, Arcane Brilliance is positioning itself behind you, cooking up a giant Pyroblast and aiming it up your tailpipe. You really only have a few options here. You can a.) cry, b.) curl into the fetal position and wait for the sweet embrace of death, or c.) distract Arcane Brilliance by quickly yelling “Spell damage is more vital that spell hit rating, discuss!” and thereupon log out while Arcane Brilliance is busy posting on the forums about what you just said. I’d go with c.), personally. Works every instance.

Recently, I discovered that there seem to be leveling guides on that site for just about every class but Mages, so it’s instance I stepped up to the plate. The problem is, Mage was my very first class, on my very first character, on my very first foray into the World of Warcraft, which took place approximately forever ago. Ok, so it’s only been about two-and-a-half years, but in WoW years, that’s the rough equivalent of a million kajillion years ago. My memories of those first few levels are fuzzy at best, and I can condense what I remember learning into two statements: “Murlocs are evil,” and “The only way out of Undercity is to use my Hearthstone.” One of those statements eventually stopped being true for me, and the other one is “Murlocs are evil.” Needless to say, I didn’t feel entirely qualified to write a leveling guide for the first few levels of Magecraft.

To rectify the situation, I decided to roll a grade new Mage, so that I could experience those first few levels all by again. To ensure that the experience was as pure as I could invent it, I created my Mage on a new server–the newest actually–Cairne. I knew nobody on that server, and had no alts there, so that Mage, a Human female I named Niwt, would be an entirely virgin Mage. I had never played an Alliance Mage before, and never leveled any character in the Human starting area, so the quests would be new to me, and the landscape foreign. I disabled all of my mods and dove in.

It was horrible.

I learned a lot though, or remembered learning a lot, depending on how you look at it. After the break, more text!

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: Leveling your Mage, 1-20

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Original post by Christian Belt