Oloo

The midsummer festival provides a great way to get a lot of exp by going around and lighting bonfires. I've just finished going around the Eastern Kingdoms on my alt druid, getting all of the alliance ones and most of the horde ones - and it gave me nearly a level. This at 52/53. I'm going around Kalimdor now, hopefully get me another good chunk of exp.

 

Jheusse

I cringe to add this to the discussion, since this isnt' a "trick" per se, and is simple enough it should go without saying (but I'm pretty simple so I'll say it).

The Ribbon Poles associated with the fire festival will give you a buff to gained xp of 10% with a stacking buff. If you stay on the ribbon for a full minute, you'll get an hourlong buff to xp. Repeatable.

I add this because I wouldn't have known about it except a guildie told me. Repeatable 10% bonus to xp is nothing to sneeze at.

 

Putts

It's also noteworthy that the XP from these quests scales with level. I did these on my level 60-61 alt and gained nearly 500k xp, which is an entire level's worth. So no matter what level your alt is, these are worth doing (although it definitely helps to have an epic mount).

 

jimbo229

Been readin through this thread at work the past few days and trying some of the tips at night, and I must say, thank you for everyone who posted! Id like to share now and ask a question or two.

I have a 70 prot pally (t5/ZA gear) and i had a level 34 warrior id been leveling for fun. I found SM to be incredibly fast, if you stand outside SM for about 5 minutes you can get 2-3 level 30 ppl to join you for cath runs (i did it for free usually, unless ppl offered gold. it boosted my xp so i didnt really care). Using just the prot pally i was able to clear the entire instance in 4-6 minutes every single time, depending on runners.

Some tips for this... try to get about 300+ spell damage unbuffed, you dont need to many defensive stats because if your even close to being able to tank Kara level content u will have 100% dodge/parry/block rate against SM mobs. That being said, if you use Sporegar shield w/ a spike on it you will add alot of extra damage. The other big tip for this i have is be careful of the mage mobs, if there are 2 or more chars withen about 5 yards of them they will cast AE, which will devistate any alt (theres usually 8+ of them doing this, will kill ur alt in seconds).

My alt is almost level 50 now (34-45 in SM took about 3 hours /played), and im running Stratholme with him and my pally. I do two pulls in the place before resetting, prbly about 60 mobs or so (many of which are non elite) but my warrior isnt getting very good xp from it. the xp is much better than it would be questing, but its not even near the amount of XP i was getting in SM (SM gave me about 150,000 xp/hour using /played time). not sure what Strath is exactly but its no where near that for me. I *think* i heard somewhere that if your char is 5 levels or more below the mob level they will get severly nerfed xp from the kill, is this true? If so I guess the XP should pick up when i get to 51 or so?

thnx for any response


PS: I don think this was mentioned before, but the 5 instance lockout is NOT by character, it is by account. Not something huge but just something to keep in mind... i got screwed out of running a heroic because of running my warrior in SM and getting his whole account locked out

 

Nizghalad

YouTube - Sunken Temple Leveling Exploit

Video is not by me.

 

Nomicon2

We tried this a few weeks ago and it was definitely doable/useful, but fairly annoying due to inevitably hitting the boss accidentially while swiping, or retargeting the totems. The skellies can actually build up to a dangerous level for a 70 if you allow more than 2 spawning totems to stay up for long.

 

jimbo229

How fast is the xp with it?

 

Conn

I have witnessed about 2 levels per hour.

 

Spuddelkopf

Well unfortunately the Midsummer Festival is almost over, but here it goes:
Doing the two daily quests für torch throwing and catching costs about 4 minutes time and raises your exp bar by about 10%.
I have many twinks, so this really adds up. I have them stationed in Stormwind because of this, it's easiest there after Exodar in my opinion.

 

Junakit

If you're doing those quests, spend your blossoms! The fire festival buff food doesn't have a level requirement; ~34% hit on a level 11 rogue was pretty nice.

 

ZeroWashu

While not directly related to leveling, visiting each of the bonfires is worth about 5.5g at 70. If your in your 60s it is worth around 1.5g per bonfire and 5500xp. While the time lost to traveling doesn't counter what you could make during questing you can use it for "down time", like while staging for a raid. Its not hard to bamph right back into Shat when needed.

Also, the buff from using the flowers over writes battle elixirs. It appears the bonfire buff over writes other zone buffs too. I found the flower buff (3% critical plus fire damage) to make leveling a new character silly easy). Combine it with the bonfire buff and it makes most areas laughable.

 

Spherus

Apologies if it's been mentioned, did a couple searches through the thread and elsewhere on the forums.

Any recommendations for 66-68 aoe grind on a paladin (with some caveats)? Basically I'm powering out my paladin as quickly as possible with a dual-boxed, out-of-group T6 resto druid. I did 60-62 and 63-65 in Hellfire on the Path of Conquest (which was quite amazing given that setup - with the festival buff was pulling in ~2.5% every 4 minutes or so doing all of the main Path area and the elite mob area at the bottom in a sequence of 3 pulls).

I've been in The Heap a little bit and while it seems decent there just aren't a ton of mobs (can do 1/2 of it each pull and after it's cleared I'm stuck waiting on repop). I've heard Death's Door may be decent?

Link to paladin armory (not completely optimal but works well for my setup - very little chance of death and I've found that maximizing spell damage has really increased the speed of the pulls):
The World of Warcraft Armory

 

Prinsesa

Since you're rolling with a healer, I'd recommend the Black Temple terrace - both the Shadowmoon Orcs on the north side and the Demon Hunter Supplicants on the south side are very tightly packed, strictly melee and are at about the right level range for you.

The only decision to make is your choice of elite: The Shadowmoon side has the large Dragonkin elite, which is pure melee, but hits fairly hard. The Blood Elf side has the Demon Hunter elite, which hits much softer, but has mana burn, which may slow down your kill rate.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....63815BffMm.png

 

Addled

Maybe try the ogre camps in Nagrand; I ground out exalted Kurenai rep, and there always seemed to be a fast respawn rate. Death's Door in BEM or Legion Hold in SMV are also darn good options, although with Legion Hold you have 2 elites roaming around.

 

Grizlor

Another option if supplicants are camped would be the ruins of baa'ri in SMV. Even the shaman mobs there pretty much only bloodlust + lightning shield + melee, so no true casters to my knowledge. Mob density is very high, and respawns are pretty quick.

You could also give the ethereum staging grounds in netherstorm a shot. Most of the 'casters' there just run up and do weird electro shock stuff, and melee.

 

nevesola

Just wanted to revisit this and share my experience with it, as I've been using this place a lot recently. I use a 70 prot paladin, pre-kara blues and greens with a handful of crafted epics(not uncrushable, 12kish armor and 10kish health, so nothing special). I take 4 shields in with me, my normal and three greens for extras. No pots/flasks/enchants even.

As the video shows you just use a rank 1 consecrate to hit the skellies once, and then move to another spot so the boss doesn't take damage. However, instead of having the lowbie in the room where it shows the rogue, I had my lowbies just in the hallway outside the room.

I found that seal of light and auto attacking the skellies was more than enough to keep me healed. Once in a while using seal of wisdom to replenish mana. When I had it all down to a pattern, I let the boss create totems indefinitely. They despawn on their own, I believe the most I ever had up at once was 5, but health was never an issue.

When the boss gets near 10% health, I drop off the ledge down below. This actually resets the boss. If the lowbies are outside the room, the boss and adds will not aggro onto them, so they don't have to worry about anything at all. Just run back up, and repeat. This is helpful so you don't have to run everyone out, reset, run them in and kill mobs along the way.

I took a 42, 44, and two 46's in as one group. In the hour we were there, all of them leveled at least twice(complete 20 bars of xp). I know there was a mix of rested and non rested, so I couldn't say which was which. This was consistent with my previous runs of taking single people or 2 at time in. From 42-49 this is by far the fastest xp that I know of.

Shields break fast, thats the only thing that required me to take a break. 20 minutes per shield was about what I had.

 

Vhex

Manaforge Coruu isn't too bad either. Once you get used to the pulls it's hard to run out of mobs.

 

Nizghalad

I've read elsewhere that the Baron in strat is a very good spot to level grind in association with a protadin.
Baron heals himself quite well, there are actually fewer skellies so less durability taken

 

◊ Merple

Just as a note to those people levelling warriors, that slam is freaking awesome.

I just hit 35, having switched to 2-h slam DPS as soon as I hit 30, and guh-damn, is the playstyle ever fun and fast.

I did the standard DW fury from 20 until 30, and it was ok, but typically boring and slow.

At 30, I put my first point into Imp Slam, and had my wife's paladin quickly run me through the Whirlwind Axe quest at 30. I slapped a Crusader enchant on it, re-installed Quartz and started trying out slam.

It's pretty freaking awesome.

Primarily it's awesome becuase you've finally got an active skill that you can use your rage for that isn't called "Hamstring", and it doesn't eat your auto-attack, so rage is a lot more available. Levelling to 30 was awful, if only becuase warrior is so boring and incomplete without active skills.

Admittedly, I hadn't enchanted any of my gear (other than some white cloth boots with runspeed on them) prior to 30, so the sudden acquisition of what essentially amounts to an epic axe (at 30) with Crusader on it had no small effect on levelling, but I definitely got more enjoyment out of actually having something to do (time your slams and your swing timer) than I did with seeing Massive Slam Crits(TM) although that certainly helped.

To add to all that, my wife is levelling a elemental shaman along with me, and the addition of Windfury Totem at 32 just solidified the whole affair.

On Break?

 

nevesola

I just saw that as well. This would be fantastic as strat is only a few levels higher than where you'd be after getting all the XP you could out of ST. I'm going to test this after work. My only concern is that baron might hit harder than my lowly paladin could heal through just with seals, but we'll see.


Are you sure? I was fairly certain that slam did reset the swing timer. Check out Understanding and Using Slam Efficiently

 

◊ Merple

I never said it didn't. It resets your swing timer. It doesn't change your Auto-Attack into a yellow, non-rage generating swing.

Take a look at [Warrior] Endgame PvE 2-Hand , the standard rotation for 2H slam DPS is White, slam, instant, white. Basically you start your slam right after your white swing, and then throw in an instant after it's done.

You wind up adding ~1 (.5 second cast + lag/delay) second to each white swing, but you gain what amounts to a second white attack every swing.

To clarify, you don't spam Slam. You use it once per white swing, right after the white swing takes place. Because you're not using HS, every white swing lands, and your rage bar gets 100% of the benefit, leaving your with more rage to use shouts/hamstring/piercing howl/execute.

At this point, I'm using most of that additional rage for T.Clap/D.Shout to reduce incoming damage (as I'm soloing, so that reduces my downtime)

My standard mob-killing cycle is:

Charge->Bloodrage->Demoshout->White swing->Slam->T.Clap->White swing->Slam->Hamstring

If I get a miss/parry/dodge on any white swing, I just ignore T.Clap.

Once all the debuffs are up he should be almost dead anyway, but I just do white->slam->white->slam until it's dead.

On Break?

 

Anedris

Baron does hit kind of hard - I could solo him as a ZA-geared protadin but it usually ended with me at about 15% health. With a passive uncrushable set it's probably possible to eliminate all his melee damage and seals should keep up with the aura, but if he's actually landing unblocked hits on you he does a fair amount of damage (and he has a mortal strike). You would also have to be careful to position the lowbie out of aura range (not hard though, it only has a 30 yard range I think).

 

djhbrd

Is the aura the only damaging part of this fight for a 70 Paladin? My Retadin friend goes in there and clears it out once or twice a day for large prismatic shards and the oh-so-elusive Deathcharger, which has been a pipedream of his to have for years. He has no problem soloing it as a T5/T6 geared Retadin, wouldn't Prot spec be much better for handling both the Baron's and the skeleton's attacks?

 

nevesola

I tried out baron, he's much too difficult for my undergeared paladin to take for very long. The waves of skeletons come slower than what you would get in ST, so the xp rate isn't quite comparable. However if you have higher gear, t5ish I'm going to suggest, this is a fairly mindless method of leveling many lowbies at once.