Too slow for AoE

My blood elf mage is level 27 now, so since level 26 I have all the spells needed for frost mage AoE farming, getting the collection complete with Cone of Cold at level 26. So I followed the excellent video guide for frost mage AoE grinding, starting with small numbers of lower level mobs. And I didn't have much success. It is not that the method isn't working, but as the guide says, it requires practice, practice, practice. And you need to be very fast. Which I am not.

Now I have no problems playing a mage in normal combat against single mobs, which requires a bit of strategic thinking and not much movement. You find a good spot at maximum distance, frostbolt the mob, frostbolt some more while the mob approaches, then hit frost nova just before the mob reaches you, take a step back and continue with frostbolts or other spells to finish him off.

But AoE grinding is much different, because you spend a lot of time running *away* from the mobs while your spells are on cooldown, or while you gather the mobs up. Which means that you need in split seconds to be able to turn around, hit the blizzard spell hotkey as soon as you stop moving, and then place the blizzard target circle at the perfect spot over the mobs and slightly towards you. And that takes me far too much time. While in the video the guy manages to get two blizzards off after each frost nova, I barely manage one. Then I would need to turn and run until frost nova is ready again, but there again I'm slow and get hit too much. So with a lot of effort I manage to get 3 mobs of 6 levels lower than me killed, but then I'm already low on health and out of mana, and the whole thing isn't very efficient.

I used to be good at quad-kiting, a special druid technique in Everquest 1, which works somewhat similar. But of course EQ was a much slower game. And that was many years ago, and my reflexes haven't gotten any faster since then. Somebody half my age certainly can make frost mage AoE farming work, but I'm simply too slow for it nowadays. But what I found very interesting is that this is the first time in World of Warcraft where I found that I was reacting too slowly for something. For most classes and most situations, split second twitchy reaction speed doesn't make any difference to your success chance in WoW. For frost mage AoE it certainly does. I'll go back to my frostbolts.