Pyros

First, I guess you mean duo.
2nd, depends if you're playing both chars or if it's 2 persons. If you're playing both, you either want "mirror" classes, or classes that can benefit the other without needing too much input(healers). I'd say something like warrior+any healer. Rogue too, and I fail to see how pressing a different key every 5sinister strike is hard while leveling. You could use a warlock+spriest and just dot stuff up, or mage+hunter and just one shot stuff from range. Any combo works really, it's all a matters of what you want to end up with.

 

◊ Merple

Anyone have any finesse tips for Warlocks? The basic Pet->Dot->Wand thing I get, I'm talking more about tips to increase efficiency, deal with adds or such.

-I'm not sure Darwin accounted for this...

 

Octaviann

I was wondering if it's more effective to level as a duo or seperatly if the 2 classes aren't entirly compatible. The combination that my brother and I are currently using is Shaman/Warlock, which doesn't work entirely too well, although we do destroy things when he dots them up and I melee them as they run towards him (I'm enh, he's afflic). I do sometimes dual-box them when he isn't home, using Voice Commander so that I can control his warlock through voice commands and make him dot stuff and use his wand, etc.

Is it better for us to stick together or level seperatly?

 

◊ Gryth

I've done quite a bit of leveling with my girlfriend, and it's almost always been better for us to stick together, regardless of how much synergy our classes provided. It seems especially true now that the best XP rate comes through completing as many quests as possible. With two people there are very few quests that are difficult, and the kill quests get completed twice as fast. The "gather X bear ass" quests can seem to take longer, but given the generally higher kill speed, they really don't.

Another non-mentioned duoing combo that we used at one point (pre-TBC) was Demo Warlock/Mage for AoE grinding. I used the warlock/voidwalker to gather up mobs and play AoE tank, and she'd burn them down. A prot pally is probably a better choice, these days, but the idea was the same.

 

• Havelcek

If you are using a Warlock to powerlevel your alts then the best spec is deep affliction, in my opinion, for a couple of reasons:

1) You want Siphon Life...this allows you to tank multiple mobs at once without downtime
2) Felguard hits too hard - in the lower levels, the felguard will one-shot an enemy, giving your alt no exp. In the higher levels he doesn't have enough armor/mitigation to tank anything.

With the changes to exp gains there is no reason to "grind" anymore up to level 60. You do quests and run instances. I typically will run with the voidwalker because of the physical mitigation, the taunts, and the shield get-of-jail-free card for emergencies. I typically will pull the first mob with UA and dot him up, then apply the 3 instant dots to additional mobs so that I have as many running at the same time as possible. If you are twinking a healer, then you can use him to heal yourself and your pet which is always handy. I macro those two things to easily reachable keys on the 2nd keyboard, usually the movement arrows.

You can see how for quests to kill 12 of this or get 14 of this drop, this technique is extremely fast. There is no downtime whatsoever except for your alt looting, which can be skipped if you have enough money anyways. Now that I have my alt in Outlands we cleared all the Hellfire Peninsula quests in about six hours and I was able to solo Ramparts to do those two quests. I had a Shadow Priest friend join me (best mirror class for warlocks) and we did Blood Furnace together with my pally alt throwing heals.

This is the technique that you might want to follow. Do all of your alts crafting while you do not have rested exp, this gives you downtime to recharge. To you other question I don't bother with my wand as it triggers the GCD, so I just finish off a mob with Drain Life if it isn't quite dead. By having a healer alt there is absolutely no concern for mana usage because he is like a portable mana battery.

 

Macblade

If you are playing together enough to warrent this you might consider speccing the shaman to resto. Just let him dot everything and either drain life or life tap as warrented and you are always there to back him up with heals. It sounds to me that your frustration is more from your wanting to take the front seat with the shaman, when the 'lock, with ranged damage and the ability to attack multiple mobs very easily, is the much better choice for the primary DPS role. An affliction lock can solo 2 or 3 mobs at a time, if you were backing him up with heals you could probably pull packs of 5 or 6 no problem and the hardest part would simply be tabbing through all of them to get your dots up.

 

Harmann

Fastest duo I've personally taken part in was Feral + Enhance. With WF proc rate being 36% due to the internal cooldown and SS being on a 10s cooldown, a Shaman frontloads a ton of damage onto a mob with an SS opener and an almost guaranteed WF proc. Druids obviously use the energy mechanic which frontloads by nature as well. Because of this, we would drop most mobs within 3-4 seconds. LotP would keep us healed fully all the time.

Usually I'd SS, get a WF proc, Earth Shock and by then it was dead.

Any (group) quests we had in Outlands, we could easily duo... especially once I got my Earth Elemental Totem. Bear tank the elites, Shaman gets on DPS, heals the Druid to full, pops SR and gets his mana back.

 

Octaviann

He really only plays the warlock because it's the highest level character he has on my server, so maybe I could convince him to play a druid or something with better synergy. I considered speccing resto, but when he's not home to type in his password (Lol he trusts me playing but not with his password), I have to play the shaman solo, and I definently would rather be enhancement specced for that. Plus, with enhancement+dots, we burn through mobs really fast. I mean really fast. I'm sure there are much faster things, but pulling by using dots + me meleeing them down = dead mobs before they get to him or switch aggro to me. Kinda fun... I'm also wondering if a different warlock spec is better for him or if afflic is the way to go?

 

Rorus Raz

This heavily depends on the drop rate of the items. The bear tongue quest of Hillsbrad (along with the mountain lion blood quest) took my brother (feral druid) and myself (fire mage) two hours to complete. Our kill time was faster, but we tended to "extinct" bears too fast and had to run back and forth for respawns.

Outland, however, is much more reasonable on the drop rates, so grouping should be fine. Especially on a PvP server.

 

Eyago

Have you thought about trying elemental? He dots and grabs initial aggro on a mob, moves on to the next, you start LB spam on the first, move on once it gets low, etc? Seems like you could stay relatively stationary and nuke from a distance while he gathered mobs via dots. Plus you're a capable healer in a pinch.

 

Octaviann

Hmm... it seems like I'm pretty much forced to switch specs if I want our duo to be efficient... but the reason that I rolled a shaman in the first place is to play as enh, and playing with him is just a bonus. I guess I'd prefer to stay as enh and be less efficient... I don't really care about leveling as fast as possible anyway.

I'm also thinking about having him switch to a druid, since that seems really efficient. He probably won't mind switching, since the only reason he ever plays his characters that are on my server is when he plays with me.

 

◊ Merple

Here's a question for you:

If you've got a white weapon, can you hand it to a high level character and use a Wizard Oil on it?

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm talking about using a high level ([Superior Wizard Oil]) oil on a low level ([Worn Mace]) weapon

-I'm not sure Darwin accounted for this...

 

Pyros

Unless it was changed some time ago, you can "enchant" oils via he trade window, so you can do it on any weapon as long as you have someone apply it for you. I'll edit after I'm done with MH and try it.

 

Lavode

oils check the level of the weapon, not the character - This can be somewhat obnoxtious while leveling, if you happen to not upgrade your weapon for a while..

 

◊ Merple

Probably better for game balance, but BOO!

-I'm not sure Darwin accounted for this...

 

Beaglemage

I was doing the dot-and-run-out leveling of a shammy with my lock in SM Armory last night. I saw a behavior that I had never seen before, and wondered if any other people have seen this happen.

For the first few instance resets, everything behaved normally. Then I made a usual four pull, but after I zoned out while dots were up on the rest of the mobs, I noticed two of the four had half health, dots were gone, and were coming right for the shammy. I zoned back in and killed them, and wrote that off as odd behavior.

Thing is, it kept happening, even after resetting. I made sure there were no resists (the visual on SL makes it almost impossible to miss), made sure the shammy was in combat when I zoned out. A few of the mobs would intermittently shake off their dots when I zoned out and home in on the shaman in combat.

I don't think anything has been fixed, when I got perplexed I made a few smaller pulls of 2 mobs just to be able to watch them more closely and it worked fine. But larger packs were less predictable. Anyone seen anything like this?

I suppose on the bright side, he's 37 now, and this method has really run it's course. Time to start the STV gauntlet of quests I suppose.

 

Himmel

to be honest everything goes wrong when I try to follow some levelling guide so I prefer improvisation, and soon I willl have 4th toon on 70

Just few general rules a) spec for max DPS b) buy healing/mana pots of highest level wich can be used
nothing special

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

Oscar Wilde, "The Remarkable Rocket"

 

Himmel

Oh, and another thing atm I levelling horde paladin (My main and most alts are on alliance side of same server) and I figured that alot of quests can be done with help of your main.
.
Plaguelands comes in mind: Yesterday I cleared a way to cauldrons and guard towers in Andorhal to reach it safely after relogging on alt. It works with quests as
a) Escort NPC through area full of mobs
b) Reach/take object guarded by mobs
c) Clear "cave/castle/settlement" full of X to kill Y

It saves alot of time only if the quest has considerably higher level than your alt, otherwise better not to bring main for clearing as killing experience will be handy for alt.

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

Oscar Wilde, "The Remarkable Rocket"

 

Starfire

I found two rogues to be amazing. I know, sounds like rogue/druid or rogue/enh. shaman or even rogue/warrior would be better, but the thing that really rocked was the incredible amount of stun time for elites and raw burst damage for non-elites.

Not very many mobs live long after two consecutive ambush crits. For elites, Rogue-1 cheap shots, 5 seconds later Rogue-2 cheap shots, 5 seconds later Rogue-1 kidney shots, 5 seconds later Rogue-2 kidney shots. If more time is needed, you also have two evasions to work with.

Eventually though, I got bored of ambushing, and I just went to straight cheap-shots, while my partner would do the ambushes. Oh yeah, 2x sap is really nice for Shadowmoon Valley quests ^^.

Gear-wise, leveling up wasn't to hard. There are very few drops we need and we were mostly concerned with weapons. Luckily most of the good weapons are easily farmed and/or quests. ([Toxic Revenger], [Thrash Blade], [Vanquisher's Sword]).

She went leatherworking/skinning, I went herbalism/alchemy. Which worked out nicely, she was able to farm the leather while we were leveling to craft most of the leather-gear we would use. On the other hand, I'd farm the herbs and make us pots to speed things up.

 

Olz

I've been using this method to level alts for a little while now, SM Lib seems to work very well up to about lv35 (haven't tried Arm). Only time I experienced any problems was when I tried to pull too many mobs. I found that if I pulled no more than 5 at a time, I would never get mobs evade or drop DOTs when my lock zones out.

After level 35 I take my alts to Ulda and do a similar thing until about level 40. You could probably keep doing this through ZF/Mara and beyond, but I like to play from about 40 onwards (once I have a mount).

 

lichdawg

you should stay in the monastery up to lvl 40. It still gives good xp with the dot and run technique.
do not got to maraudon: bad xp, hard mobs and bad mob concentration.

regarding the bug of mobs loosing the DOTS when you zone out:

You get a couple of flukes, one or two mobs that repeatedly do that: kill them outright
Let your DOTS tick at least one per mob BEFORE you leave the instance, and they wont disapear.

 

Beaglemage

Yeah, it's defintiely not that - I pull all of the mobs with SL, only 4 at a time. And then I SL all four, and then drop a downranked curse on all four. That may not be optimum, but it works for me, and there's just no way they don't have active ticks from at least SL on them when I zone out. But it's a very good point. If I ever do this method again, I'll watch that closely.

I found SM to be a bit more tedious than Stockades, although still of course worth doing. Stockades was just an incredible windsprint from 15-30. Just a few hours, absolutely amazing. And the ease and convenience of sitting in a city while doing it.

 

flergh

It's definently worth it going once to Maraudon and Zul'farrak if you grab all the quests (you can do it at 41'ish for ZF, last quest is available at 45 for Mara IIRC). The Maraudon quests gave me around 10k xp each at level 46 when I was leveling my paladin.