In general, the 'ultimate' quest of each dungeon/zone should be done at the first level it becomes available and all the rewards will then tend to be very strong for the classes that can use them.

Yeah, but interestingly enough, the two most "OP'd" weapons on my list are from simple quests. They aren't even elite. Sure, Stalvan has 12 steps, but 11 steps can easily be solo'd by a level 22. The 12th step is to kill a level 32 mob that is right near Darkshire. I found help easily and readily available.

Shaving Sharpbeak, that's a bit more complicated, but still easy if you have a second account or a guildmate.

Yah harpies and rams will give full exp

harpies are lvl 62-63 and rams 60-61

Gnolls work to, i prefer harpies because horde controls that side of the game, if your battle group turtled at IB choke, then gnolls are probably better. Harpies are also easier to single pull.

if you get reported afk, you are given 1 minute to go whack some one in pvp not to hard

as for your team loving you... your just as usefull as the 5 other afkavers, and if your high morales prevent you from afkaving, then you woudlnt do this anyway.

I'd be cautious with the new threats of suspension and being banned.

If you're ok with dicking over everyone in the battleground(DICK!), it'll work out fine. Damage you do to mobs counts for 'damage done', so you wont be at the bottom of the charts. Whenever I go down to guard the hut, I kill a wolf or two on my way so no-one(ie addons) mistakenly thinks I'm AFK'ing.

Sorry for the late response Parshath1. As you, Prinsesa, and alhill have noted, the biggest problem with using almost any class besides a protection paladin, or perhaps mage, is pushback. The non-elite berserkers pummel, the Stratholme courier knocks-down and kicks, and patchwork horrors do a knockback that will probably catch you during a cast-time spell fairly often.

I have a level 70 warlock and I've tried Stratholme with it, but it is much more time consuming and dangerous depending on your group makeup. If you're stuck with a warlock, you'll want to notice some of your disadvantages before formulating a strategy.

First, you can't pull as much as a protection paladin, because you can only grab about three groups yourself with three (if that many) seed of corruptions before they get within melee range. Furthermore, a common tactic with a protection paladin is to run around groups, pull some groups in the back of the instance, and then run back to the cleared area so that even more groups will domino-pull with them and the snowball zerg will amass until you have an entire courtyard. With a warlock, this tactic doesn't work since voidwalkers will most likely die on the way, not hold aggro if healed, or seeds will go off early (this issue gets worse as your spell damage increases) while you're pulling if you attempt to do it yourself . Warlocks can also not work around the hamstrings or the slowing-effect disease.

Next, you do not have the tanking abilities (obviously) or the cleansing abilities of a paladin. Being able to remove hamstring or the diseases is fairly important for pulling large groups.

To put things in perspective with the pushback problem, I could not do a holy wrath at the beginning of a pull even with improved concentration aura and earth shield, without either focus meta gem proc, frost nova, or a shadowfury. Anything over 1 second is simply out of the question, and even those spells will require 80% uninterruption or better to avoid headache. As of patch 2.3.2 you still do not block or parry while casting spells, which is also a big problem for damage absorption (well, for paladins at least).

Literally, for any class to aoe undead packs in Stratholme effectively, the majority of their dps must come from instant cast aoe, unless they do not have aggro whatsoever.

So, you can do this with a warlock* main, as long as you pull small, keep aggro on your voidwalker as long as possible, and attempt to keep your seed of corruptions detonating when the entire group is together. This is a lot of micro, every single pull, and you will definitely need healer support for it to work. Keep in mind that you should not use level 70 healer support, as that will cut exp for the alts in half.

*********

Anyway, this is all a lot of Captain Obvious rhetoric to illustrate the fact that you need to approach the problem with a broader perspective. Warlocks are extremely good at killing fewer, elite mobs with instant-cast dots, fears, etc. If you're stuck with warlock, a better solution is to attempt Scarlet Stratholme, Undead Stratholme (non aoe packs on your way to Baron), Scholomance, or perhaps Blackrock Spire by running around triple-dotting everything with healer support, and reapplying dots when necessary. (Remember, we didn't do Undead Stratholme aoe pulls because they are unbalanced. We did them because they worked well with the classes we had.) This goes for any other classes that works well solo or with healer support. When I got the alts to 58 using my Warrior, we instead did all of Scarlet Stratholme. I murdalized all the elite 4-packs with sweeping strikes and whirlwind, and that was plenty of kill-speed to give us a level time nearly on par with our protection paladin setup. Keep in mind that elites in say, Stratholme, give 2 to 3 times more exp than the non-elites. There's no reason to attempt to aoe when your forté lies elsewhere.

________
* Like roddo and Rasi stated, any cloth-wearer gets torn up trying to aoe Stratholme, but I think a mage might be somewhat feasible with magic absorption, blazing speed, blast wave, and a healer (or full frost of course). Just a heads up in case some mages were having problems with the slowing effects.

I can imagine things can get fun as well when all the people you are boosting at that moment are wielding a [Ravager], if they have the proficiency.
Considering you'll kill Herod plenty of times in the first place, it shouldn't be too hard to get a few of these.

I've been experimenting this weekend with my lock doing the aoe packs in Strath and I would say that gear also plays a factor. While there's no way that my lock is nearly as efficient as a pally, if you have 2 piece T5 and spec for a felguard it's far more effective than using a Voidwalker, and you don't really need a healer except for removing the disease; although having a healer obviously lessens the downtime.

The basic tactic is the same as the void walker (tab target + Felguard hitting the mob to be seeded). My felguard drops to about 1/3 to 1/4 health before the seeds detonate and then he's instantly back up to full. The added bonus is that the Felguard can help clean up the leftover elites, which are usually at 2-5%, and/or any other adds that wander in.

For the record, I was using a mix of pve and arena gear, 2 piece T5 (shoulders, pants), [Void Star Talisman], and had about +1320 damage, 23.74% crit, and a goofy 7/43/11 spec.

Don't think I saw it here, but its rather amazing how good:
[Earthen Elixir] is at level 50. Especially for Prot Paladins.

Double Post

Note: If you do use a Felguard spec to run through instances, be aware that you won't be able to loot the items unless you tap the mob with some of your own damage. It's not the optimal spec for doing stuff that drops dead in one cleave from a Felguard (35ish or below stuff), assuming you care about looting the mobs at all. It's possible this also affects XP gains, though I did not test that part. I assume this also rings true for hunter pets.

A couple of friends of mine and I are considering levelling up new characters using a method that seems a little overpowered.

The plan is Priest, Warlock, Druid, and we're going to abuse two pretty broken factors in the game:

1) Wands.
Both the priest and the warlock can use wands, and there are a wonderful series of broken wands throughout the game that usher your character up to ~level 30 before you even need to think about using spells offensively.
[Lesser Magic Wand] (available at level 5)
[Greater Magic Wand] (available at level 13)
[Gravestone Scepter] (available at level 18)
[Dancing Flame] (available at level 25)

2) _____ over Time spells.
Between the Druid, Priest and Warlock, we've got 2 HoTs and a list of DoTs a mile long. These, along with the wands, leaves us capable of dealing massive damage with next to no work. Pile up the dots and start wanding.

Should be an interesting experience.

When I twinked my mage I stacked stamina bonuses using clefthide leg armor to boe legs. I also stacked spelldamage bonuses and arcane spelldamage bonuses to solo and aoe grind. I found I was able to easily solo red mobs in the 20-30 range, and the aoe grinding was rather fast. A lot of low level dungeons had loot buffed also, so you can get more gear with built-in spelldamage bonus. This type of twinking would work for any casting class.

Not to rain too much on your parade, but druids can't use wands. He can be the designated HoTer, though, since one of his actually has a casting time.

I'm aware. If the mob is still alive after the preliminary application of Moonfire and Insect Swarm, she can pull the next mob while we wand, or wrath/starfire if it's worth it.

Or if we're still doing this at 40, she can boomkin melee. Joyous.

He never said druids can use wands, he stated the lock and priest can only.

One thing I found useful is the fact that crusader stacks off of 2 weapons (never had the enchant before) and on a character with strength providing ap is awesome. My 40 shaman mows down mobs, especially when I get a double crusader followed by a windfury proc.

I can't believe I fell into the trap of incorrectly correcting someone. And on my first post! Clearly, I need more then 4 hours of sleep before trying to be a smart ass.

Regardless, with that set up, I'd think the druid should almost be resto. The dots will do similar damage (most of the moonkin talents are based on buffing wrath/starfire, anyway), and there's very little a Spriest and warlock can't dot down, especially with extra druid dots in moonfire and roots. You can probably just never stop killing things, as both priest and lock have nearly infinite mana (spirit tap and life tap), they just need a strong healer, which a tree can certainly be. High ticking rejuvs/regrowths can keep you flush with both mana and health, and hots are efficient enough that she won't need to drink either. Thoughts?

On my warlock I partied with a shadow priest from 65-70 and frankly the grinding was rediculously broken. We just wandered from quest to quest just chain dotted up everything. Between him giving me back mana and myself and him giving me back health we just never stopped except to loot, and eventually we just had him looting on FFA and me just going on with what I was doing. Having 5-6 things dotted constantly from one end of the zone to another is a thing of beauty and our xp/hour shot through the roof. Adding in a druid to HoT, loot, and add in the group bonus would be even better I'd imagine.

It's fine. Having never played a Warlock before, I actually had to check to make sure that Warlocks used wands - couldn't remember.

The resto druid set up will definately work. We could do one of those balance heavy 34/0/27 PVP healing builds as well. Dreamstate for mana regen, plus some damage talent with resto HoTs.

Guess we'll see. I probably won't get to start til next week anyway.

I'm thinking of starting from scratch with a dou team, just curious what others would consider and why. Basically I'm looking for a pair that includes any classes but warlock, druid and shaman, as I have these already. I would consider leveling a resto druid as my current druid is feral and leveling as such. I'm not to keen on rogues for a dou either, with the need to slap on combo points they seem like to high maintenance for what I'm looking for. Fun factor is another consideration, so no prot warrior holy priest teams for me.

Fury warrior/holy priest is incredibly fun, and you'll never have trouble forming a group. The warrior can tank any instance until Outlands as fury, after that someone else will have to chime in because my warrior respecced prot at that point.

With reasonably competent DPS, a fury warrior (especially Fury + defiance spec) can tank anything short of heroics, and with good gear, probably even that.

As for good duos, any of the following are fun/rewarding

Mage/Priest
Warlock/Shadow Priest
Paladin/Shaman
Rogue/Druid (hey stealth runs)
Hunter/Druid
Warrior/Healer (especially shaman)

Both players in all duos should be spec'd for DPS. You won't need dedicated healers until 70 anyway.