Ok so it cant be a guide beyond Cataclysm, but hey it has a good ring to it… 
What the opposite of beyond, (checks google) Hmm, well that was no help, and unrelated to this post anyway. So I have been leveling my new mage just lately, and going through all of the changed content and locating all of the new quest hubs etc, and i have to say its pretty cool what blizzard have done to the wow leveling flow in cataclysm. It all flows together nicely and there are a lot more connecting quest chains and they break it up with a few different and fun quests here and there, but if you just feel like grinding through the level you can do that as well. I have just hit 73 on my dranei mage and it has started to get a lot slower, 60 – 70 was a breeze and before that was amazingly quick compared to how long it used to take! Even battle grounds are ok to go in every now and again being alience i tend to win more than on the horde side overall, and wins can get you about 25% of a level in the 30′s and 40′s. not so much in the higher levels, but you can still get about 100k exp from winning an av and thats only about 20-30 minutes of game time, so its pretty comparable.
Now i have posted the following leveling flow diagram before but its so good ill post it again here:
originally posted here…
I was looking for a bit of extra advice on power leveling as well, not the bad powerleveling that you pay for but the stuff that just helps you with general leveling in wow, dont get distracted, and concentrate, try not to get bored i was leveling the other night and watching a movie, that definately slowed down my leveling process 
probably due to not being able to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, might be a male thing.
Anyway here is a few tips on powerleveling that i found:
Five golden rules of powerleveling
Minimize Downtime
Downtime is whenever you are not killing mobs or completing quests. Examples for downtime include regenerating mana or hitpoints, traveling, chatting, attacking other players, reading or dieing.
For obvious reasons downtime directly hinders your goal of leveling as fast as possible. Keeping these activities to a bare minimum is the most important aspect of power leveling.
Maximizing Burst Damage
The second most important thing when powerleveling is how fast you can kill mobs. Both single mobs and groups of mobs. Burst damage is greatly impacted by your spec (think protection versus fury), your gear level and your playstyle. And to a lesser extent by consumables, buffs and reforging/stat choices.
Play alone
To clarify right away: I do not have any math showing how grinding instances with a fleshed out 5 man group compares to leveling by questing. But if 70 – 80 is any judge, leveling by questing will be at least as fast but without the drawbacks of leveling in a group. You set the pace, you decide when to take breaks, you rely on your preparation and expertise instead of the preparation and expertise of other people. The method of power leveling purely in instances is not the focus of this text. Much rather the focus is on leveling by questing and grinding.
Questing in a group of multiple people always has drawbacks that can never outweigh the benefits. While „killing-quests“ are typically (slightly) faster in a group, a lot of drop-specific quests are much slower in groups and you will find yourselves waiting for mob respawns a lot. Not the mention the downtime is increased significantly for a group with multiple players.
Always know your next steps
Use a guide; preferably with an addon that goes hand-in-hand with the guide.
If possible use a second screen to always display the guide so you can read while you travel or grind. Always read at least the next paragraph in the guide so you know what you will be doing after the current task. This is to make sure you don’t travel unnecessarily or separate tasks that should be persued together.
Stay awake
Only read this paragraph if you consider leveling to 85 hardcore.
My personal, most important advice: Do not drink alcohol when trying to stay awake and focused for a long period of time. Alcohol will get you very, very tired very fast.
Most people (including me) will find listening to music while leveling stimulating and keeping you going.
Caffeine is your friend, but you need to use it the right way:
Caffeine works by changing the chemistry of the brain. It blocks the action of a natural brain chemical (adenosine) that is associated with sleep. Adenosine is produced by your daily activity, especially by physical exercise.
To a nerve cell, caffeine looks like adenosine. Caffeine, therefore, binds to the adenosine receptors. However, it doesn’t slow down the cell’s activity as adenosine would. The cells cannot sense adenosine anymore because caffeine is taking up all the receptors adenosine binds to. So instead of slowing down because of the adenosine level, the cells speed up. The „problem“ is, that adeonosine keeps building up while caffeine is blocking the adenosine receptors. So as soon as the caffeine loses its effect, you have a lot of adenosine around that will rapidly occupy all the receptors. This happens very fast and you will turn from being totally focused to dead tired in a matter of minutes. Drinking a coffee or an energy drink will flood the brain with caffeine for a short amount of time. It usualy takes 15-30 minutes to feel the effect, which then peaks around 30-60 minutes after consumption.
So once your body decides that you are tired, you would have to drink a coffee around every 2 hours at least to stay focused and you would still feel a lot of „ups“ and „downs“ when the caffeine peaks and declines.
A much better way is to rely on a continuous, controlled flow of caffeine that never peaks or declines but keeps a steady level to prevent you from becoming too tired. You might know the substance that provides just this effect under the name of „Guarana“. Guarana capsules usually work over several hours (typically 5-6), emitting a steady flow of caffeine (the exact same thing that you get when drinking coffee). Designed to keep you awake when feeling tired as opposed to coffee, which is good to „remove“ tiredness when you are rested; which is why coffee is consumed to wake up.
Enough of the medical lessons. You can get guarana capsules prescription free (in most countries?) at your local apothecary. I suggest you learn some more about the effects of guarana or ask your pharmacist about them before trying them out. Just to clarify again: Guarana is NOT a drug. It is identical to the caffeine chemical derived from other sources, such as coffee and it is classifed as GRAS in the United States.
Note: This rule is for crazy gamers! For you health, I suggest that Life first, Game Second! lol!
Take care of yourself
Don’t carry leveling to excess.
Make sure you always feel comfortable or immediately stop playing!
Here a few tipps:
- Always have water or tea on your desk (or any neutral beverage) and don’t forget to drink enough.
- Eat two or three times a day. You will notice you won’t be as hungry as usual simply because your body is burning much less calories. It’s only a couple days, so go all out on pizza, lasagna and what else makes you happy (and can be eaten at your computer ). I would say try to eat some fruits/vegetables too etc, but yeah, **** that.
- Again, no alcohol or drugs apart vom caffeine.
- Care about hygiene. It is much more comfortable to play after a shower.
- Make sure your Monitor is at least 50cm away from your eyes. If your eyes start to hurt, take a break or stop power leveling.
- Maybe stick around in your Teamspeak to keep some company and to motivate eachother. But it can be distracting, especially if people keep asking stuipid questions about where to find quest objectives.
- Turn off your mobile phone and lock the door if you have a toilet & fridge in your room. For a second you thought I was serious here, right? Powerleveling is nice and fun, but don’t do it at the cost of the people around you.
Now just on a small side note about leveling mages, i was arcane for ages while leveling in the low levels and that was doing pretty well for me. I switched out to frost spec at about 40 or so and have been leveling as frost all the way to 73, after reading a bit a lot of people are going fire now for leveling, i might give that a try and see how it goes.
Frost is quite easy though for leveling, Just do a Frost Fire, then ice bolt x2, and ice lance and finish with a fire blast if its still going. Then when you get the freeze spell (cant remember exactly what level thats at) has a 30 sec cd, and then u just freeze the mob and hit them with 3 ice lance crits, gonski! Anyway ill check out a fire pve build and see how that goes, leveling as ice gets a bit same old after about 30-40 levels anyway
I found a pole on mmo champ and the results about leveling mages were, Arcane (9%), Fire (71%), Ice (20%). So it seems fire is the way to level.
My mage has some rather horrid gear for a level 80. I logged onto the PTR last night to mess around with fire, and much to my surprise I pulled 5400 DPS in a fight against one of the new encounters for the pre-Cata event. This was done knowing very little about a fire rotation (Hey, I’ve been Arcane!), and without my normal bindings.
My thoughts on it? Scorch is insane. Quick little spell that you can cast while moving with talents, doing 5K a shot. Oh, and it’s free and freaking FAST. All I did was spam the hell out of it and fire of Pyroblast when it procced. I loved it. Considering the last time I used Fire on my mage (August of 2007), I will definitely have this as one of my specs. It’s just so much fun.
________ __ _
Everyone says ‘go frost,’ so that’s mostly what you see (sheeple). The best spec is the one you have the most fun with. I levelled my mage fire all the way. When dungeoning with groups that outgear you and/or the content, your dps will suffer because of the time factor mentioned above. All things equal, fire does very well. The non-fire spells in combo do very well indeed.
The Sources:
MMO Site
MMO Champ
KruXoR
kruxor on May 21st, 2011 
