Frost mage!

[Xame]

A few personal opinions from playing with my build on the test server as an ice mage and other tests. As an ice mage you stand much closer to your target. You typically don't try to squeeze in the extra spell cast. Thus it is frost bolt, fire blast, nova (escape). Repeat with kiting, (I like to mix in a cone of cold and a blink for fun when dropping elites to take zero damage).

Thus, I would consider moving Flame Throwing to Ignite, since extra damage is always good and the extra range in fire isn't where you will be casting from. As a fire mage I use Cone of Cold quite often since it is an instant cast with a chill effect. It is also the way you solo two mobs (both as a fire or ice mage). Consider it a frost nova replacement while the frost nova cool down is still running (along with blink as your 3rd escape). I would definately move some points into Improved CoC since you will casting it every fight.

Things that I've never used (rarely used) are Artic reach (I stand well within the frost bolt range when I start a fight, no temptation to try to squeeze in one more cast), Cold Snap (you die because you run out of mana or pulled to many mobs, a free Ice Barrier won't save your life) and frost channeling (the frost line is already mana trifty, it might let you swap some int for stam but you really should try not to get hit in the first place, it's a pvp server consideration).

For gear for both yourself and your friend, I would go with gear that generates a 2:1 mana to health ratio for PvE. 5:3 for PvP questing with some damage specs. And 5:4 for battlegrounds or very dangrous PvP areas with lots of +dmg numbers. The PvP numbers are somewhat style based, but I found it hard to dump my mana to damage before a real life player found a way to beat the life out of me. Thus in pvp you need to stay alive long enough to kill them and stam is the only thing you have that works against all forms of attack (dot, fear, stun etc.).

From a dual mage questing persective, the arcane mage will pull agro no matter what you do. The AMs generate more damage/sec then any other spell you have until you get some +dmg to frost spell gear. I've found that the mage is designed to drop any mob at level with pure AM (no other spells and poor gear) with zero kiting. All the rest of the tricks in the spell box are for droping multiple mobs and elite/instance questing (you won't have enough mana to run AM constantly or you will be drinking after every fight).

Also a rule of thumb for soloing is 1pt of mana = 1pt of damage in Arcane, 1pt of mana = 2pts of damge for fire and 1pt of mana = 3pts of damage for frost. My rational for this is that a Arcane and Fire mage needs to spend mana for mob "control" and the ice mage gets this for free. The difference in the fire and arcane builds is that the fire mage gets talent points to increase the fire damage but the arcane mage is stuck with the base damage (his talents are to deliever the damage faster).

Hope this helps. I've wanted to do a pure ice mage but the loss of arcane would hurt the party too much. It would be nice to generate the completementing arcane and frost in two seperate players without the compromises. With more rich builds in both arcane and the frost trees like you and your friend are doing, it should be a lot of fun.