Sgather combat/mage problem question

[dergaten]

The first question is:

Whenever I go in combat, my mage goes in melee range and starts auto-attacking the mob with melee, and when it starts casting the spells in the sequence I have set, there are fairly long delays between the spells (around 3 seconds). This looks very bottish, especially on a mage. Any idea how to fix the delays, so that it'll stop the meleeing aswell?

Oh, and another thing I would like to ask is a good cast sequence for a frost mage.
Or just tell me that it doesn't matter.

thanks