I forgot to add in my earlier post, one of the toughest things I found about starting from scratch in WoW is how wealthy/established the playerbase is - this makes items not affordable at the auction house since everyone else is so wealthy (unless you already have a max level char farming for gold via daily quests or gathering ore/herbs/whatever I suppose).

In LoTRO, I got by making decent money by just questing and selling stuff. I didn't having to farm ore to sell at the AH for money to just play the game. But in WoW, it is hard to even afford bags so you don't have to stop and sell stuff every 15 minutes, much less buy skills or a few needed gear upgrades, without taking frequent breaks to gather resources for sale.

@stark1

I'm not sure about the specific boss you had trouble with, plus I have minimal experience with mages... I just go around picking the low hanging fruit of the available quests - the easier "kill/gather X items" types.