Celtic Heroes

My experience with ice mages is that it might evade your skills, or you might cast both skills on a high star mob and you will have a tiny bit of hp left and have to wait for ice shards cool down to get that little hp gone. It happens when I am firebolt but with my mage focused with 50/35 firebolt and its six seconds cool down I see finishing off the mob more productive and faster at leveling. I know there is cool down items for ice but so is there for fire so even faster fire spells too would result in much better dps.

1. Fire is more bearable imo. It has better dps in longer fights and I'd say it's better for leveling. MY OPINION
2. Both
3. Shield

As an ice Mage since level 140, i say... Use Fire.

As of this update, fire mages have been given a DPS boost, and the slight edge they had over us icers before became huge. Don't get me wrong, Ice was not nerfed, in fact all mages were boosted. But the fire bolt speed boost means that there is no longer a comparison in DPS. OTM said they would look into further ballance after Gelebron was out, so it might change. But for now the best speed leveling build is:

Fire attune
Fire bolt
Fire lure
Fire storm
E-shield/e-boost

In that order. More boost if you need energy, more shield if you can't survive.

The most important thing for a fire Mage to remember if you don't want to use energy lixes or rest pots, is to take a break sometimes! When your energy gets low, back off and regen, then keep burning down the world! The reason I like ice is the natural pauses built in to the cooldowns that let me regen. But with fire I always ended up at 0 energy mid lix.