AoE Grinding.. wha?Follow

Sorry to seem rather n00bish, but I am not entirely comprehending how the AoE grinding works, exactly. I've been doing Rogue/Hunter/Shaman for my entire WoW career now (sig out of date) and rolled a mage some time ago to mess with.

If someone would be so kind as to kind of.. walk me through (via reply) a few normal AoE grinding sessions I would be eternally grateful.

Edited, Aug 4th 2006 at 6:55am EDT by Denielle

I'd suggest practicing up on lower level groups until you get the hang of it. I used the dwarves from the pit in South Barrens to really get the hang of it. Or you can do the Cave Yeti's west of Tarren Mill. I didn't see the topic that explained this, but here's a brief list of instructions:
1. Mana shield
2. Gather x amount of mobs into a tight group, keeping mana shield up.
3. Frost Nova
4. Blink to get distance
5. Cast blizzard, placing the back edge of blizzard where the group is.
6. Place another blizzard right where group is going to be
7. Start again at number 3 until everyone is dead.

As far as talents go, max out Improved Blizzard. Avoid the talent that has a chance to freeze things in place, that will ***** up your grouping.

Edit: oops you got in before I did.
Edit2: Found the topic I used as my reference. Here:
http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/class.html?wclass=7;mid=113592100345022069;num=22;page=1


Edited, Aug 4th 2006 at 7:37am EDT by jquick

To group up the mobs:

If you're already lvl 40:
Use your mount and just ride around aggro'ing whoever you want to kill til you have all the ones you want, then just demount.

If you're not lvl 40:
Throw up a mana shield and you can use arcane explosion a couple of times to aggro whichever ones you want.

Then:
Frost Nova and follow the instructions of the posts above this one.

Reading strategies on how to do it is one thing, actually getting the feel for it is another. The basic premise is to keep the mobs grouped, moving slowly, always through you casting a blizzard, how you go about that is up to you. Like the posts above me said, DO NOT PUT TALENT POINTS INTO FROSTBITE. A little more detailed explanation of this is as follows. When you have a group of 5-10 mobs tightly packed walking toward you, through a blizzard (with reduced speed) if you have 3 points in frostbite a mob will freeze 15% of the time, or 15% of the mobs will freeze (same thing.) When a mob freezes he will be snared in his current position while the other mobs continue to move toward you. This creates a gap in the group of mobs and your blizzard will no longer be able to hit all the enemies and thus you will probably run out mana. Regrouping them without running out of mana takes some practice and skill, but it's not impossible.

Skills that are necessary/helpful for this tactic:
1) Imp. Blizzard
2) Permafrost
3) Arctic Reach
4) Shatter (not that it will crit with blizzard, but it will crit w/ Cone of Colt)
5) Imp Cone of Cold

The thread linked in above posts is good, but it really helped me to actually SEE it in action.

I don't have the URLs handy on me but go to video.google.com or www.youtube.com and search for AOE Frost and watch the vids that come up. There are two, one on some farm and one grinding southsea pirates or something. Very good watch, and enlightening :)

I'm trying to practice and get the hang of it right now. It's pretty hard if you're like me and for the first 40 levels of your mage life you solo'd mobs one at a time and joined PUGS in instances. But it really does have great potential. I'm hoping to get good at it so that I can actually get my mage to 60 without pouring in countless hours or going from one crappy PUG to another :P