Prot Paladin - levelling

[TeaLeaf]

I have been messing around with my paladin the last couple of days and just wanted to confirm that prot paladin levelling is pretty good fun and pretty quick.

Ideally you want dual wielding mobs (more procs when they hit you) and no casters, but the odd caster or two is fine if you can pull them to you (LOS) or bring the melee mobs to them.

In Howling Fjord at Niffelhem there are 4 areas of the camp that are not in range fo the frostbolt tower guards and within each area you can round up about 12 mobs.  This is doable from L70 with Karazhan gear (and probably worse gear too).  You self-heal with your judged seal and mana comes from BoSanc.  Rested XP was giving me 1750-2000xp per mob, so I was getting about 20,000-25,000 rested xp per pull.

At L73 I moved to Dragonblight and tried out the beach at Argent.  The boat gave good numbers of mobs (both decks pulled at once), but not many on the beach and in the end I moved on to Gundrak as the beach was giving only 1750 per mob and there were not enough mobs to kill in a single pull.

Gundrak seems to have plenty of areas where lots of mobs spawn and can be pulled.  My favourite so far is the northern altar where the mammoths are.  You can pull about 12 x L76-77 mobs (mammoth and humanoid) at a time and the mammoths also drop the 'chunk of mamoth' meat which sells pretty well.  At L73 I am getting 2.25k per mob (due to their high level), so a pull of 12 gives me 27,000 rested xp per pull.

As you can guess, I ran out of rested xp pretty quick, so I have parked the paladin at the Argent Stand and am awaiting a full rested bar again.  I tried levelling as ret, but whilst the single target dps is way better, I find it comparatively boring compared to riding around on your mount and aggroing the entire area!  AOE grinding is actually pretty fun when you can pull that many mobs and finish the pack with a massive pile of bodies, loads of loot and still be on a full health bar and full mana bar.

Prot paladin AOE grinding as a way to level - highly recommended!  Almost zero down time.  You spend more time collecting loot than killing stuff!

TL.

[Carr0t]

/agree, I levelled my Pally as Prot all though Northrend. However he was levelled up all the way from 52 (levelled Ret through Outland, as the jump from old world to there is a lot higher than there to Northrend so Prot giriding seems to be less viable until you've got better Outland gear), so was basically in lower level Outland quest greens and a few blues (given that he completed Outland by dinging 68 having only just moved to Nagrand).

I found at that gear level that I was better off Sealing and Judging with Wisdom, as even with BoSanc up I wasn't regenerating enough mana. This was probably because the lower end and non-70-endgame gear meant that I wasn't blocking, parrying etc as much to regen mana from BoSanc. I was also pulling slightly fewer mobs at a time, maybe 8 or so at most, but still ending the fights at pretty much full mana and only a little down on health. Once I hit level 71 that was easy to deal with - Self Heal, Divine Plea, mount, aggro the next group of mobs. By the time you've picked them all up Divine Plea has done it's job and you're ready to go again.

This should be even easier come 3.1, as Divine Plea is going to have it's duration refreshed by your melee hits on mobs (i'm guessing this is to try and make Pallys more effective in single-tank fights where they're not the main tank and thus aren't getting hit or healed much). A nice side effect of that is that you should be able to pretty much constantly keep your mana regenerating as long as you're hitting stuff, and can go with TL's suggestion of self heal seals/judgements even in lower level gear.

[evoxer]

:O TL has pala!

To the dark side he has come..

From my experience:
Pre-BC: Ret
BC: Ret
WOTLK: Prot

Dont lvl as holy ever i tried it, its just a bad idea
If you every need a hand TL just shout - be nice to see how much stuff you could take bashing you while i perma-healed (out of group from a short distance away )

Evo

[TeaLeaf]

At the moment I think the most I have had is about 20 mobs.  Difficult to find really large mob numbers that respawn quickly.

@Carrot:  if you are having mana problems you are not getting hit enough and need to pull more mobs.  With BoSanc I finish every fight with a full mana bar and am using judgements, hammers, seals, dolphins and the kitchen sink on every cooldown.  Keeping shield up and using JoL typically keeps me healed up to pretty much full health all the time.  It helps that just about everything incoming is blocked in some way.

TL.

[Azunai]

Meh. I really don't like AoE grinding. Same with my mage. Single target ftw.
AoE may be faster in reality but it just feels so much slower to me.

That and I quest as my main XP income. The right routes with that = win plus it's less boring ^^

[Carr0t]

At the moment I think the most I have had is about 20 mobs.  Difficult to find really large mob numbers that respawn quickly.

@Carrot:  if you are having mana problems you are not getting hit enough and need to pull more mobs.  With BoSanc I finish every fight with a full mana bar and am using judgements, hammers, seals, dolphins and the kitchen sink on every cooldown.  Keeping shield up and using JoL typically keeps me healed up to pretty much full health all the time.  It helps that just about everything incoming is blocked in some way.

My issue is *finding* large groups of mobs that actually retain aggro/are close enough. I don't like just AoE grinding random mobs down, I find it boring if there is no 'point' to the killing, so while I was taking on lots of mobs at a time while levelling I was doing it as per the requirements of any quests I was on, and getting the majority of my XP from quest handins, rather than just grinding random mobs for XP. This may be the whole reason I was having issues ;-) I get the impression from your post you were *just* mob grinding.

I found it very hard to pick up more than 8 or so mobs at a time while doing this simply because by the time i'd moved far enough to pick up more the first ones i'd grabbed had got bored and wandered off back to their patrol routes. I found myself wishing they'd follow me for longer without needing to be beaten on, a distinct flip from my original level 80 (a mage).

For example the Sons of Hodir daily 'Hot and Cold' (one of the few Sons dailys that isn't a penis joke. At least, I don't *think* it is... :unsure:). When trying to pick up the Frost Revenant mobs that drop the Elemental Ice I can grab 3, or if I am really lucky 4. Any more and the first one wanders off. This is with retri aura up to try and keep them insterested that little bit longer. If I have to dismount to hit them a bit to keep them interested then it's so far to the next one and takes so long to get there when walking I might as well beat down the 3 i've got then mount up again.

The answer to this might be to wait for dual spec and go Prot/Retri to get smaller groups down faster, but my guild is very small and has a very limited number of members, so i'm going Prot/Holy . That way I can replace one of our tanks or one of our healers as necessary, and bring my mage to dps if we've got enough of both the others. We've only actually got 10 people at the mo with 80s, and i'm the first to get a second toon there. As such we're boned for attempting anything if any 1 of our tanks or healers is busy as things stand at the mo, even though our DPS is good enough that we can easily 8 man Sarth and the Spider and Plague wings of Naxx (We're a social guild. All know each other in real life. We just happen to be a social guild who'd like to see more of the raiding content :narnar:).

[TeaLeaf]

Aye the trick to AOE grinding is finding the areas with mobs sufficiently close and with a quick enough respawn time to make it worthwhile grinding.  I got most XP from AOE grinding and I found it way quicker when you can pick up 2k+ rested XP per mob and round up typically 12 or more mobs at a time - it means one round-up and AOE kill is worth more than a quest hand in and takes less time.

For example, there's a nice little cave near K3 where there is a wing of the cave tunnel with about 12 mobs that respawn about 30 seconds after dying.  Round those up, kill, go to start and wait 5 seconds.  Rinse & repeat, etc.

TL.

[Jim]

another place i remember is at the fleshwerks (before you start the chain) they're loads of skeletons you can round up