Mage of Frozen Wrath

When I rejoined World of Warcraft and started leveling up my new mage, I commented on how little effect twinking had on that mages performance. The usual mix of gear that everyone is wearing, between quest items, loot, better loot from instances, and gear bought from the auction house mostly adds to your base stats, like intellect or stamina. And while intellect determines the size of your mana pool and has a small effect on your crit chance, the overall effect of such stats on a mage isn't large. Even my heavily enchanted twink mage with all the gear he couldn't have bought with his own money was performing barely better fully equipped than running naked.

So when thinking about it a bit more, I started to come to a radical conclusion, and a crazy idea: As all the gear that adds to basic stats is of very little added value to my mage, I should simply forget about it, and only look for the only secondary stat that really counts for a mage: spell damage, or particularly for my frost mage, frost spell damage. So every time I logged on my bank alt, the one who gets send all the stuff to sell and who is doing all the AH buying, I searched the auction house for "frozen", and bought all the gear "of frozen wrath" up to 20 levels higher than my mage level.

A month later I'm level 35 and I'm nearly completely equipped with gear which is either "of frozen wrath", or which gives a general bonus to spell damage. And the result is astounding: I have a frost spell damage bonus of "up to 169". Now I'm not a theorycrafter, I need to find a mage theorycraft guide comparable to the warrior guide I linked to today. But the base damage of my current frostbolt rank 6 is 174 to 190. And the simple trial and error experiment of shooting mobs with and without my frozen wrath gear tells me that without the gear I do about 200 points of damage with my frostbolt, and with the gear I do about 300 points of damage, a huge 50% more. That results in me needing one or two frostbolts *less* to kill the same mob. I can often kill mobs of my own level with frostbolts before they even reach me! That constitutes a huge gain in kill speed and mana efficiency, as not only do I need less mana to cast less frostbolts, I also don't need to spend the added mana on freezing the attacker with frost novas. Though although I have less mana as I forewent all the +int bonuses (except for enchants), I don't have more downtime, because the added mana efficiency makes up for the smaller mana pool. And of course if I'm running low on mana there is always free water, and a smaller mana pool is faster to fill up again.

I'm sure going to continue like this and concentrate on spell damage gear and consumables. I've started using self-made Lesser Wizard Oil, and soon I'll be able to use Arcane Elixir potions from my warrior alchemist. I'll keep looking for frozen wrath gear on the auction house, but I'll have to find out the other code names for the general spell damage gear. I think there is "of the Invoker" and "of the Sorcerer", but those only seem to exist on Outland gear. Of course once I hit the level cap and start joining groups I'll need to balance that better. Maximum dps doesn't make the best mage for groups, it only messes up aggro management. But for soloing and leveling up, maximizing spell damage is sure the way to go for a mage.