General

If it's at Jesters, do Explosion. You'll level up in no time. Just stand at the center platform and teleport while casting explosion from side to side. You're guaranteed fantastic XP and a relatively KS free experience since you'll be doing the most dmg to the most amount of monsters at any given time.

Mist is relatively useless up until you can get to the Roids @ Magatia or Captains and Kru @ Mu Lung (This is my opinion, everyone has their own uses for it).
To be honest with you, if you have a good atk range, Explosion beats out the tediousness of having to go around a map casting Mist. And Channel Mist Surfing is not wise given that everyone is hogging the same training zones thanks to BB's wonderful ACC system and monster HP/XP ratio(Sarcasm on the wonderful part.) Reason: While you take your sweet time misting a map, you could have killed 5-6 monsters with 3-4 Explosions, maybe less if you're heavily funded. Point is that Explosion kills monsters faster than Mist ever will. You can mix the two if you'd like, but meh...

Teleport Mastery is nice to have, but not worth maxing until you have the core essentials of an FP mage (Explo, Mist, Booster and Amp).

If interested, this was my build for 3rd job in order:
1 Tele Mastery
2 Explosions 1 Booster, 2 Explosions 1 Amp (Per level, Mixed them up every other level till Booster was at level 5)
2 Explosions 1 Amp per level(Till both were maxed.)
Mist (I think I was @ Roids, so lv85ish)
Booster
Tele Mastery
Composition
The Rest.

@7heBlood: before, at max lvl it does 2.5% of the monster's hp each second for 40 seconds, thats 100% of the mob's hp, which means it kills any mob, from snails to skeles at the same speed, but now it does the same amount to all mobs regardless of their hp. it lasts 8 seconds now tho but its really good since u can do it to higher lvl mobs and avoid the miss rate with it
Happy Fire/Poison-ing

[quote=chillyprince]mist now deals the same amount of damage (depends on ur MA aka attack) to all mobs, it will still be the faster training since explosion does like a single hard blow to monsters, while u can just mist around the map, the range is the same as before so no worries there! [/quote]

So what did they actually change about it, lol

mist now deals the same amount of damage (depends on ur MA aka attack) to all mobs, it will still be the faster training since explosion does like a single hard blow to monsters, while u can just mist around the map, the range is the same as before so no worries there!