Zygor's 1-80 Alliance & Horde Leveling Guide
This is without a doubt the best leveling guide available! I've used it myself and highly recommend it. It features an in-game addon to help you along on each quest. It also gives you the order of quests to do, the location of which quest to do next, and automatically progresses as you complete the quest. It even shows you on the in-game map where to go and what to do. It is a totally in-game guide. Gone are the days of switching windows to read a leveling guide!

Click Here To Visit Zygor's Site

Here is a screenshot from my personal use of Zygor's Guide and a link to the toon's WoW Armory page. (I started using this guide when this toon was Level 24 and flew to Level 70. Using it from Level 1 will make your played time much much lower than mine.)

Armory Page of my toon on Stormrage Server: Hoofman

Click the image to see the full screenshot.

Zygor's Announcement of Zygor's Guides 2.0

Brian Kopp's 1-70 Alliance Leveling Guide
Brian Kopp's Original Leveling Guide! Its a great tool for any alliance player.

Team iDemise Alliance Leveling Guide
Recently updated to 1-80, this guide is growing in popularity by leaps and bounds. This leveling guide also features an in-game interface. You never have to alt tab out of the game to look at a guide.

Tips For Mage Leveling

When it comes to mage leveling it is helpful to know that mages are one of the greatest damage dealers in the game. Also mage leveling can be tricky at times because you either move through your talent tree effectively or you end up with things you don’t need.

Mage leveling can either go well for you, or not so well for you. I personally use a mage leveling guide, you can see my own experience with it here.

For this report I wanted to focus on mage leveling 4.0 patch and Cataclysm

With the addition of Cataclysm came some awesome buffs. It propelled the mage leveling capability. But with every great buff comes a great Nerf, and yes, it effected the mage leveling capability as well.

One thing that will affect your mage leveling capability is the way you set up your talent builds. If you are unclear about world of warcraft talent then check out this post we put together.

For mage leveling consider some of limitations that come with talent builds.

At level 10 you get to pick your first talent. When you do you are locked into your choice of specialization. There’s no more of this fire playing with frost nonsense. Until you spend 31 talent points (at level 69) you will be fire or frost or arcane. After you have spent those 31 points you are free to branch out into other areas. Note that you don’t actually have to buy the top tier talent to branch out, you just need to spend the 31 points.

Obviously this means that 31/10/0 or 31/5/5 is about as far as you’re going to get into any hybrid builds, assuming that you have any interest in hybrid builds.

Mastery is a trainable skill that you have access to upon achieving level 80. Gear will come withMastery Rating, which will increase the Mastery effect much like Crit Rating does now. Whether stacking lots of Mastery is really worthwhile, compared to crit or anything else, remains to be seen and we won’t say much about it on this page.

You no longer learn several levels of spell. You buy the spell once and it scales as you level.

Mage Leveling Tips

When it comes to mage leveling you want to make sure you begin your rotation with your opposition at maximum range wherever possible and blast away.

The best thing is to use frost to keep them from shortening that gap between you and them. You also want to have a great wand with you. If you are hord there is a wand shop in the blood elf city. This allows you to do fare amount of damage without using all your mana. Especially if you are soloing.

When you are mage leveling at lower levels this is not as important, but once you hit 81 and above it seems like everyone is hitting you like a mac truck. I am consuming tons of Food in the higher levels – Keep well stocked. Regular foods are great if you need to recover a lot of HP. Beverages keep your mana up. Your Create Water & Create Food are free, use them. You can usually find beverages that will recover more mana than the spell in certain level ranges, so grab those when appropriate, but again… the spell is free.

Mage leveling First Aid - An essential skill, too bad there isn’t a “first aid for Mana.” Keep it maxed.

Mage leveling Gold: Make sure you have plenty of it. Believe it or not people are making $500 gold an hour all day long in world of warcraft. This is the WoW farming guide I use.

Mage leveling Wands - these aren’t quite as useful as with other caster classes, since they mobs will usually be running towards you, rather than away from you (fear spells,) but if your tank is holding aggro and you’re low on mana, then wands are great.

Mage Leveling Gear - Stam, stam, and more stam. With some Int if it comes with the Stam. Get the biggest bags you can afford. Carry plenty of food and bandaids and beverages.

The below section is nearly identical for all three specializations of mage, this is due to the usage of almost entirely the same stats for any mage no matter the talent build/elemental specialization.

Mage Leveling- Number Crunching

Sell Hit – 12.6 = 1%
Spell Critical – 22.1 = 1%
Spell Penetration – 1 = 1 Lost point of Resistance
Spell Haste – 15.7 = 1%/0.025 seconds off of Global Cooldown & Spell Cast Time

Spell Damage Coefficients:

Scorch = 42.8%
Fireball = 100.0% OR 115% W/Empowered Fireball
Pyroblast = 135% (or 115% intial damage/20% over duration of DoT)

Spell Hit Cap W/ (3/3) Elemental Precision = 164 For Fire & Frost/126 (Frostbolt Only)
Spell Hit Cap W/ (5/5) Arcane Focus = 76 for Arcane
Spell Hit Cap W/ (3/3) Elemental Precision & (3/5) Arcane Focus = 126 for Frost & Arcane

Mage Leveling Spell Hit, Crit, etc.

The Numbers above detail the percentage to which each point of +Spell Damage actually effects any given spell. For instance, 1 point of spell damage does not automatically equal an increase of one damage, rather it will increase it to a percentage as listed above.

If the spell you’re looking for isn’t listed above then simply take the base casting time(without talents) and divide it by 3.5. However, a different formula will apply to AoE spells.

Defacto Priority:

Spell Hit(Until Capped) – Spell Damage OR Haste – Spell Critical

What to shoot for when entering Karazhan & Heroics:

Just to make sure you are ready for karazhan and heroics try aiming for the stats below as an absolute minimum, surpassing them however is recommended.

Spell Hit: 90

Additionally, you can downgrade these stats somewhat for the easier heroic dungeons as Karazhan is definitely more challenging than most if not all of them.

Spell Damage: 600
Spell Critical: 20%
Health: 6,000
Mana: 7,000

What to shoot for when heading into 25-Raids:

These numbers should cover you for passing Karazhan into the 25-man raiding content, statistics such as spell hit will be notably harder to achieve prior to gearing up in Karazhan & Heroics quie a bit. Otherwise if you have this or higher by the time you eclipse Karazhan you’ll be fine.

Spell Hit: 10%
Spell Damage: 800+
Spell Critical: 25% or 28% W/ Molten Armor
Health: 7,000+
Mana: 9,000