The art of zoning

I decided to give my low level (23) mage a spin the other day to see if I could get rid of my rested xp. The problem here is simply I don't enjoy playing my mage...
You can frontload a decent amount of damage but then have to somehow freeze the mob in place and get some distance in to give yourself the time needed to cast more spells.
Coming from a warlock where most spells are instant cast dealing with cast-bars that seem to take forever to fill up makes me want to pull my hair out.

The problem is aggravated by the fact that I always seem to hit a low in my available quests around level 23. The barrens is pretty barren once you tick off the usual quests from your list so you have to move on.

But to where? Thousand needles will still be slightly out of reach given the level of mobs so that leaves a quick trip to stonetalon mountain and hope that the quests there will make up for the level gap.

There are other places I could go, but since I don't have most of the flight paths on my mage I would be looking at walking the distance, something I generally try to avoid until I have some form of transportation or a stack of movement speed potions to burn.

I will have to do some research on this and see if I can't make some form of condensed 'levelling' guide that shows where to level and in a more or less consistent order including some alternatives.

Something along the lines of:

Zone / level / min level / max level / quest count

Maybe even add a quest count low and a quest count high to indicate how many lower level quests and how many higher level quests are available. There's nothing more frustrating than to walk into a zone only to find out that half the quests there are still locked or worse, try to send you someplace you don't want to go.

I wonder if I should also add the types and percentages of monsters in a zone. After all if I have a choice I'd rather send my paladin to a zone with demons and undead than one with beasts which in turn would probably be appreciated by my hunter.

Hopefully a lot of this already exists and I can just re-compile it but that remains to be seen. Any information in that direction would be appreciated.

To be continued...