One downside of RAF gifting.

[shaeman]

I now have a 59 prot pally with poor gear (all I could by on the AH wasn't great), who I don't know how to play properly.

I took him outside thrallmar to try and kill a 61 boar.... after a few minutes of hitting it and it hitting me I realised I would be in danger of dying in the next ten minutes. So dragged it back and had the guards kill it.

I did this for another boar and the same story.

Guess I'll boost with the team through some quests and upgrade his gear a bit and read up on how to kill single targets as opposed to how to tank.

[NoobShammy]

gifting a class with physical dps will always be an issue. Best is to get a good weapon and do your quests.....That being said with my x5 60 shamans now im going to GIFT x4 locks and 1 spriest to 30 and they will STILL rape everyone

[Naylix]

I sincerely hope you're not gonna boost a team from 1-30 ...

I'd suggest you level them to 30 instead (5-10 hours ?) and then giftlvl them from 30-59 ...

seeing as 30-59 takes 30-40 hours...

:)

[KvdM]

The gifted levels probably don't level your weapon and defence skills, do they?

[zanthor]

The gifted levels probably don't level your weapon and defence skills, do they?I don't believe so.

The easy solution here is to do the same thing every melee player in the world does when they get a new weapon type late in life... Go to Ragefire chasm and clear it.

For defense, get a few mobs and put your back to them. No dodge/parry will help guarantee they hit you and will drive your skill up faster.

[turbopinto]

For weapon skills, I usually take my team to blasted lands. Right by the portal are the "servant of Razelikh" they don't die, they just go into an unhittable state, and don't attack you anymore while in that state. BUT your weapon swings count towards your gaining skill. It worked well on moving my huntards up in both polearm, and 2handed axe skills.

I'd recommend finding the fastest white weapon you can to gain skills tho. The 3.6 speed weapons take FOR EVARRR (it seems) to level up.

[Shuri]

The gifted levels probably don't level your weapon and defence skills, do they?They don't. Check out my Paladin ('http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Akama&n=Michinosuke') that I've gifted to 59. I'm going to go outside org and pull 15 raptors later this weekend to start to level my def. After I get it over 250 I'll head to blasted lands to level my sword skill on those mobs that can't be killed.

[brontes]

To level defense, go to the "silithid swarmers" south of Camp T in the barrens. Kill the one "swarm" bug but leave the scorpid alive. Wait for 50+ tiny bugs to spawn, then kill the scorpid. They will all hit for 1. If you have any sort of heal interruption protection you can heal yourself. If you don't mind potting, you can usually just pot every two minutes to keep your health topped off. If you've got Uther's Strength (BOE trinket) you'll take no damage at all. One AOE, thorns, ret aura, pet on defensive, etc. to kill them off if you just want to eat up and pull again.

You can go from 1-"max-5" defense in ~3 minutes. To get the last few points it usually takes 5-10 minutes.

[Shuri]

Awesome tip, I'll do that this weekend :)

[puppychow]

the best gift strat is to level alts to level 31, only needing 100-300xp to level up to 32, and then gift them 29 levels (if you have multiple chars to gift from, then lower is fine, I'd say 20 or 21, but always leave 100-300xp to hit the next level). I gifted 29 levels to two druids who were 31.99 and they became 60 with just 200xp left to hit 61, just zoning into outlands dinged them to 61 :)

What really sucks is spending 200-300g+ training skills, then of course there is the mounts...

[shaeman]

hehe. I didn't say I nearly died. It's a prot pally - I probably had about an hour and a half before I worried :)

I bought some upgrade items of the AH and it went better. I also realised that I was kind of in tanking mode (I'm such a pally noob) so my aggro generation was fine, I was missing out on actually trying to hurt the boar.

My pally is now gonna have some high level escorts at all times to just burn through quests, till he's got some gear that I can use in instances.

[Vyndree]

Indeedy, RAF "gift levels" will NOT do the following:
Increase your weapon skill
Level your hunter pet
Make your gear better -- if you're level 30 and you gift to 60 then you're still wearing the gear you had at 30
Increase rep with any factions
Give you flightpaths
Give you enough money to pay for your skill training

It's good for an alt -- especially if you have the patience to later grind out weapon skill on dead mobs or tote around a level 70 to "protect" it while it levels weapon skills and earns new gear... Buying AH greens or BoE blues is also an option, but you should get a full replacement of gear in outlands quests anyway.

Hints:
If you're a pet class, spec BM or Demo to compensate for sucky gear.
Spells work well since they are unaffected by weapon skill
Leveling weapon skill can be done on ANY mob -- including critters. Spamming a non-damaging ability like hamstring or wing clip works well too!

[Nomak]

The gifted levels probably don't level your weapon and defence skills, do they?They don't. Check out my Paladin ('http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Akama&n=Michinosuke') that I've gifted to 59. I'm going to go outside org and pull 15 raptors later this weekend to start to level my def. After I get it over 250 I'll head to blasted lands to level my sword skill on those mobs that can't be killed.They no longer provide weapon skill.

[moji]

This isn't viable for level 60's, but weapon skillup NPC version 2.0 - http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=21416 keep this one in mind for lvl 70 weapon skill.

[noir]

FYI...

Prot. Paladin's CANNOT DPS. Period. End of story. They can't solo (well, they can, but its horribly painful).This advice is so terribly wrong, it's hilarious...

No class solo's better. Tankadins can solo more mobs than a mage or lock can AOE pull, and still end up the fight FH/FM. Tankadins can solo fel reavers, Onyxia, instances...

[shaeman]

Things have got better.

I realised I was in tank mode, so wasn't whacking out damage on the mob as I should.

After adjusting I was able to kill the boars.

I got my son to bring his 65 fury warrior along and he helped me do the first load of quests in HFP and my gear was upgraded. So my 59 is now a 60.

If you are horde I would thoroughly recommend going into RFC in Orgrimmar to level skills.

Especially on a palladin. I went in and killed the first few elites one by one, till I was skilled up enough to kill them easily. then I ran around aggroing absolute loads of the mobs in there standing with my back to a wall and letting them hit me. No danger of dying and my defense and sword skills rose rapidly.

[Talamarr]

Prot paladin single target DPS IS horrible. However, this is off-set by the unbelievable survivability and the ability to solo ridiculous amounts of melee mobs. I leveled all of TBC as prot. Very little instances. But, I sometimes beat my head in the wall when I need to just kill one freaking caster mob!!!

[Stabface]

I can easily do over 20K DPS sustained with my Protection Paladin.
Actually the Paladin has the highest potential sustained DPS of any class in the game, since our AoE attack is uncapped.

[moji]

FYI...

Prot. Paladin's CANNOT DPS. Period. End of story. They can't solo (well, they can, but its horribly painful).This advice is so terribly wrong, it's hilarious...

No class solo's better. Tankadins can solo more mobs than a mage or lock can AOE pull, and still end up the fight FH/FM. Tankadins can solo fel reavers, Onyxia, instances...Put one elite caster in front of them, or mobs that can AOE heal, or just do the island dailies trying to fight the guys that burn your mana or aoeing the blood knights. single target dps on a prot pally is laughable. survivability =/= soloing ability, in the end, you just want to burn the crap out of everyone in a hurry, not be OP against meele and gimped vs healers and casters. Prot pally has the worst PER TARGET dps in the game. You can only attain high dps by pulling a lot of targets.

[Stabface]

Really it depends on the target - ya, against single pulls or casters/healers then a Prot Paladin will be terrible. But I can for example out-DPS an Elemental Shaman on those elite trees at Skettis.

And a Prot Pally that only pulls 1 mob is doing it wrong... rather like a Mage using Blizzard on a single mob. Yes if you play your class badly then you'll do poor DPS, that's not news :p

[blast3r]

I just did this very thing yesterday. what you need to do is do the hellfire gear quests. that will at least get you some protection and a good shield/sword. Then go to swamp of sorrows and beat up on things. Then go to blasted lands and do the same..takes a while but i finally got my pally close enough in defense/sword to be useful.