So, yesterday I got my bard to 53 from scratch in about 4 hours with a 75 druid. But, with the patch today, I see serious problems with going further. My technique was low level ae while druid tanks with DS to kill.

Pre-Fabled trouble:

1. Sebilis has too many healing gating mobs.
2. Griegs the mobs hit hard enough to force me to reduce pulls to 8 mobs or so. This makes the exp too slow to be worth it compared to previous exp gotten in this method.
3. CT has too many healers.
4. Splitpaw hits too hard to make large pulls remotely possible.
5. KC, while not a hotzone, is slow as hell - I used this zone to pl my necro when it was a hotzone up to 63.

Post-Fabled trouble:
All of these zones will have hard hitting named fabled mobs making this technique entirely impossible to pull off in any zones mentioned.

Any advice? I'm looking to get the bard 60 or 65 as quick as possible before grouping up in PoFire/Nest/RS/Etc.

Thanks in advance for any positive feedback.

*response deleted because I couldn't give positive feedback*

<---- points to the discussions on pling and monster missions relating to player skills and groupablity.

Possible solution: shroud your bard down a bit and use the old method at the old zone. There are two problems. First when you shroud down too much your exp is diminished. Second when shrouded the bard cannot AE nuke -- you need to PL him as a non-AE class.

Thank you both for the replies. Monster Missions won't suit my needs unfortunately. They are a tad too slow and require 3+ people. I'm looking for a way to continue on with DS PL'ing past 53 up til about 60 or 65 to group with certain people.

The skill issue I have dealt with on prior pl characters. I can easily afk sing on the bard to raise those skills. Lock pick and disarm trap take only about 5 minutes to max. I have played an epic 2.0 bard before, not mine, and pulled etc with him so I am familiar with the class. I understand the negatives to taking the fast track, but I am veteran enough to be able to work around the short comings.

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Thank you very much for pointing out the shroud business. That is a brilliant way to tweak exp gain. The two problems are huge for me though. I really like the ease in which ae'ing tags all the 15+ mobs I pull, but I suppose I could work around that.

The real problem is that I would have to stay in the current hotzones. And, after the patch today, all of those zones will have 1000+ hitting fabled mobs screwing up the 15+ pulls with way more dps than I can handle.

It looks like possibly The Hole will not have fabled mobs, but that will probably only take me to 55 abouts.

Invite a friend(even a bazaar mule) get a DS instance(fire pit or watering hole) continue on. as before. you can shroud to get better selection of instances. also once the bard is 55 or so, just group PL him(HoH, NC, WoS murks, etc).

Thanks, I'll give that a try. It won't complain about the level difference with having a 75 druid in the group?

Edit: I should qualify that my goal is to get him high enough to group him with people in fire(yes I know he can now) and Nest missions / DoDH missions.

GE is without doubt the best bet up to around 62 in my opinion.

Yes pulls are limited in size (I was doing my rogue there so slightly harder than just ae), but the xp is still pretty damned good. I was pulling 12 mobs on average, self buffed (I self buff to about 10.5k if memory serves), keep reptile on, usual self and vindiflora ds (96 DS total in my case) and Barkspur. I found anything over 12 mobs reptile wasn´t refreshing fast enough and had to rely on adrenaline surge etc which can get hairy sometimes.

As an aside, pathing there is screwy so often if you get real low health, run straight along a wall and mobs take a different route to follow you, often allowing enough time for a heal etc.

Also, in GE make sure you keep your ds spells memmed as mobs like to dispell and its a pain trying to kill mobs with no ds :)

After 62 life gets tougher. I went to POV and CoD. Mixed having rogue tank out of group and druid just healing, with being grped and druid tanking/dps´ing...Not sure which was better. In CoD ds pl works again but I didn´t try over 5 mobs at once....

65 Rogue now and in Split Paw......a lot slower...

How are you going to get him into Fire? If he isn't flagged you need 5 other folks in group to get him and and stay in.

GE was doable with lesser pulls, but my concern is the patch today. Fabled Luclin is going live and I am sure they will be putting fableds into GE. From past fableds...they have put fabled mobs pretty much at every named spot...which will make it very very hard to pull groups of mobs and not end up with 1k+ hitters.


How long did it take to level the rogue in GE? In lguk I was getting a level every 15 minutes or so.

How are you going to get him into Fire? If he isn't flagged you need 5 other folks in group to get him and and stay in.

I have access to plenty of fire flagged accounts. Probably single group Fro if I can get it coordinated soon so I don't have to worry about it though.

In terms of time in GE I didn´t really notice time Im afraid. With lesson on I was gettin over an aa per pull from level 52-60 more or less. I basically was doing aa´s, level and changing % allocations the whole time so I have no meaningful data. I also had to cycle mobs on rogue meaning I could not concentrate so much on druid (ie with an AE you could probably pull more).

Not sure about the fableds, you may well be right. All I do know is that powerlevelling gets harder and harder the higher your "pupil" (Splitpaw Im doing one mob at a time :( ).....could always find a friendly war with an Earthshaker :)

You said over an aa per pull, can you try to guess about what percent of a normal level you were getting per pull? It seemed to me that I was getting maybe 20% of a level per 10-12 mobs, but I might not remember correctly. Probably less, because I think it was starting to take closer to 45 minutes per level.

Adding to the argument of shrouding: starting from one point, where you are at the maximum mob level to effectively kill them en mass, you should consider shroud your PLee so that he never gains any level until he reaches the final desired level.

For example, suppose at PLee's level 50 you have a perfect place to PL, then you should shroud the PLee to level 50 and keep him shrouded that way (for a full 20 hours maybe) till you are confident that he has reached level 70. Before unshroud, your PLee remains at level 50 so he gets better exp per kill.

If you are at level 53 and you think level 50 is the best PL level, you can do suicide to get down to level 50, shroud, then after PL is finished, you unshroud, then use the 4th year veteran reward to get those corpses back. Be careful if you have purchased some AAs that has level restricts. You may lose their effects.

The drawback is that you no longer can AE nuke (for some classes).

GE took me to 61 with no problems, didn't run into any fabled mobs and I got the hang of tossing in adrenaline surge here and there.

do you have skin of reptile? we leveled my sk and my friends ranger and a clr bot to 51 then grouped them with us in tss (of course my sk just fd or something will nuke/shoot arrows....but having big boom 75 wizzy helps speed things up).

skin reptile druid shaman ds druid ds and dont forgoet to pop druid aa for ds and even the tss bp every 15mins.

sk has been on back burner since tbs went live but tss is godsent for leveling.

you could always grp with the twink and just do normal exp in zones that are good exp for the twink but not for you. Can't remember what lvl it was good at but charming a frog and clearing the normal trash while it was still red to one of my twinks was great exp.

Adding to the argument of shrouding: starting from one point, where you are at the maximum mob level to effectively kill them en mass, you should consider shroud your PLee so that he never gains any level until he reaches the final desired level.

For example, suppose at PLee's level 50 you have a perfect place to PL, then you should shroud the PLee to level 50 and keep him shrouded that way (for a full 20 hours maybe) till you are confident that he has reached level 70. Before unshroud, your PLee remains at level 50 so he gets better exp per kill.

If you are at level 53 and you think level 50 is the best PL level, you can do suicide to get down to level 50, shroud, then after PL is finished, you unshroud, then use the 4th year veteran reward to get those corpses back. Be careful if you have purchased some AAs that has level restricts. You may lose their effects.

The drawback is that you no longer can AE nuke (for some classes).

Does it really change how much exp you get at your level if you unshroud? I have never heard that before.

Duzter, would you mind sharing how you got from 1-53 in four hours? I'm really looking for a guide like that so I can do it for my alts. I too am trying to get an alt from 1-65 asap.