5-Box leveling speed

[nodoze]

I'm running with a warrior in my trinity setup and for big AoE pulls, I think the warrior has the advantage, but for running end-game instances, where you do much less AEing, a druid probably works very well. You're less gear dependent, you have an extra rez, MotW, thorns. I've loved my team for levelling, but now where I'm grinding pre-raid BIS, I wish I had a druid / priest / mage / lock / shaman setup :-)

I love Druids also just want to be clear of where they stand out and don't. All of those are advantages and as long as you aren't having to use Engineering items while Tanking/shifted and are within the numbers they AoE Threat well against they are should be great.

[Acidburning]

5 Man MB on German PvP Dragons Lair sporting Druid Tank, Priest, Warlock, Mage, Shaman here - lvl 40 currently with 3d 23h. Can't get over 35k XP/h but the group is very robust and fun to play, plus on 60 I'll have 5 different classes for variety. Had a Warrior tank at first, but the druid does WAY better with AoE Aggro.

Specs are Feral, Holy Nova, Full Destro, Arcane, Ele - I pull 1-2 groups and AoE them down with AE/HolyNova/Hellfire/Chain Lightning spam.

Thought about 4 Warri Shaman, but from what I've read its tedious.

I am running the same group.

How do you manage the druid tank for your AOE pulls? Just swiping?

They are 38. I just respec'd the mage and lock to have a bit more synergy with fire.

[nodoze]

I am running the same group.

How do you manage the druid tank for your AOE pulls? Just swiping?

They are 38. I just respec'd the mage and lock to have a bit more synergy with fire.

I have similar questions but after re-reading the post I think the most relevant part is "...I pull 1-2 groups and AoE them down". If only doing 1-2 groups likely the Druid gets initial sight aggro & gets a little ahead on all mobs from at least Thorns (can't remember if the warlock pet buff stacks with Thorns) and solidifies aggro on at least 3 mobs from Swipe. There is the probability that the Druid's swipe doesn't always hit the same 3 mobs so you may get pretty solid threat on a bit more than 3... By the time the non-swipe'd mobs aggro turns and they turn/move to switch the amount of actual incoming damage 1-2 groups can do before they die is likely within the party's health/healing limits. The limits can be stretched some if the Druid is ping-ponging aggro on remaining mobs via Swipe. As mobs start dying the incoming damage becomes less and less so it really comes down to how big of a spike you can survive.

It does not sound like the scenario where you "aggro half or more of the entire instance and have Tank keep aggro on most everything while the AoE group dishes damage with immunity and no incoming damage from mobs" that some other groups can pull off...

Love Druids and would be great to hear differently but I suspect this is a more limited mob count AoE scenario which can be great/fine if you are OK with that approach (I generally am OK with pulling 1-2 groups when I play).

[ExBox]

I drop damage mitigation totems and pre-hot/shield him for the pull. Gather mobs, do 4-5 demoshouts while running back to the group then start swiping while they unleash AoE - Sometimes the mage pulls aggro after a few secs, but my DPS is enough to keep him alive till the mobs start running away. Usually in 8-10 GCDs everything is dead. I also noticed that mobs in Cathedral actually have less HP than in Armory. The annoying AE from the mage mobs I can mitigate with shaman totem and priest holy nova spam.

Lets see how it will work in ZF, when I reach it hopefully mid next week.

I'm a bit sad though, that my warrior now sits at 34 now and is left behind, as I was looking forward to play him later in raids. Well you can't have everything..

How long did it take you to get them to 38 I'm curious? Will you main one of them at 60 in raids? And if so why that one?

I am running the same group.

How do you manage the druid tank for your AOE pulls? Just swiping?

They are 38. I just respec'd the mage and lock to have a bit more synergy with fire.

Imp Fireshield does not stack with thorns unfortunately.

I tab change targets after each swipe, so the aggro gets spread evenly throughout the 8-10 mobs plus an additional demo shout every once in a while. Also the bear tank self heal generates aggro and only has a CD of 60 seconds. So i throw that one in, provided I have enough rage.

Maybe also interesting, my shaman's rotation are two simple castsequence makros, one for damage (fire nova totem, chain lightning, magma totem) and while these abilites are on CD I spam heals on my tank/mage whoever has aggro. Priest does nothing but holy novaing.

I have similar questions but after re-reading the post I think the most relevant part is "...I pull 1-2 groups and AoE them down". If only doing 1-2 groups likely the Druid gets initial sight aggro & gets a little ahead on all mobs from at least Thorns (can't remember if the warlock pet buff stacks with Thorns) and solidifies aggro on at least 3 mobs from Swipe. There is the probability that the Druid's swipe doesn't always hit the same 3 mobs so you may get pretty solid threat on a bit more than 3... By the time the non-swipe'd mobs aggro turns and they turn/move to switch the amount of actual incoming damage 1-2 groups can do before they die is likely within the party's health/healing limits. The limits can be stretched some if the Druid is ping-ponging aggro on remaining mobs via Swipe. As mobs start dying the incoming damage becomes less and less so it really comes down to how big of a spike you can survive.

It does not sound like the scenario where you "aggro half or more of the entire instance and have Tank keep aggro on most everything while the AoE group dishes damage with immunity and no incoming damage from mobs" that some other groups can pull off...

Love Druids and would be great to hear differently but I suspect this is a more limited mob count AoE scenario which can be great/fine if you are OK with that approach (I generally am OK with pulling 1-2 groups when I play).

I'm very curious which group comps can manage that "pulling half the instance" scenario well. I suppose it doesnt include a tank anyway on horde side (Alliance scum! ) but a mage iceblocking or potions?

[nodoze]

Imp Fireshield does not stack with thorns unfortunately.

I tab change targets after each swipe, so the aggro gets spread evenly throughout the 8-10 mobs plus an additional demo shout every once in a while. Also the bear tank self heal generates aggro and only has a CD of 60 seconds. So i throw that one in, provided I have enough rage.

Maybe also interesting, my shaman's rotation are two simple castsequence makros, one for damage (fire nova totem, chain lightning, magma totem) and while these abilites are on CD I spam heals on my tank/mage whoever has aggro. Priest does nothing but holy novaing.



I'm very curious which group comps can manage that "pulling half the instance" scenario well. I suppose it doesnt include a tank anyway on horde side (Alliance scum! ) but a mage iceblocking or potions?

If you look through the forum history there have been lots of videos posted of essentially 'eye of Kilrogg' pulls of a huge amount of the instance with a Warrior staged ahead of the AoE party and spamming shouts as the mobs approached and got into range. Much of this was prior to the shout nerfs but there were some videos after the nerf that said it was still viable just with some additional prep time on the Warrior.

The AoE side of the equation was typically a Priest with various mixes of 3 AoE DPS capable characters. Mages or Warlocks are both viable and essentially interchangeable (with pros/cons) but the approach required at least 1 Warlock for the 'Eye of Kilrogg' to pull with. If you go with all Warlocks you really want a Priest healer because the Warlocks damage themselves in the AoE so AoE healing can help but if you go mainly Mages you can go Paladin Healer which has multiple compounding Threat advantages as Mage AoE Threat is less and Paladin reduces it even further via Salvation and buffs the Warrior via Retribution Aura (and Paladin can heal the Warrior and a single Warlock fine) but one downside is that Paladins can't shield the 'eye of kilrogg' like a Priest can which likely will result in smaller pulls. Eye of Kilrogg has no cool-down so you can try to offset this some by doing 2 eyes back to back with the first pulling further mobs and the 2nd pulling the closer ones but that is more complicated than a single eye pull and could result in 2 waves of mobs which isn't necessarily desirable (especially if the 1st wave arrives when you are controlling the 2nd eye to pull more and you aren't able to spam shout and heal well while controlling the eye)...

I think the best Tank in this type of approach is a Warrior as they take the least damage and while leveling can spam threat against a ton of mobs. Paladins can also do great threat on a lot of mobs but Consecration is more gradual/consistent compared to burst spamming like the Warrior and with lots of incoming damage you have lots of rage to spam so the Warrior is likely superior on both mitigation and threat in these kind of huge pulls. That being said most people are doing more reasonable pulls (and this is mainly really viable on green mobs anyway) so I think the Paladin is a wiser choice for most teams in a traditional approach and/or when doing dungeons on level (especially if that is their first team on a given server). Once Paladins get to Cap they can "shout" like warriors to push AoE Threat via the level 60 Greater Blessings but that doesn't help while leveling.

[ExBox]

If you look through the forum history there have been lots of videos posted of essentially 'eye of Kilrogg' pulls of a huge amount of the instance with a Warrior staged ahead of the AoE party and spamming shouts as the mobs approached and got into range. ....

Does Druid demo shout generate less TPS or why is he inferior to a warrior in that scenario (leaving out the big CDs like shieldwall etc.)

[nodoze]

Does Druid demo shout generate less TPS or why is he inferior to a warrior in that scenario (leaving out the big CDs like shieldwall etc.)

Good questions... Note that Warriors do multiple kinds of shouts and use at least 2 different kinds in the pulls (one type prior to the bulk of the mobs showing up the other after)... Also it is not just the cool-downs that are different... Warriors & Paladins Block which mitigate lots of damage while Druids do not. Druid higher health pool & armor mitigation helps offset blocks to make them comparable on standard pulls but huge pulls likely more than offset this extra buffer while blocks scale with larger groups.

I look forward to other folk's thoughts on this but off the top of my head I think the above are some of the factors which make Warriors superior for this approach (in addition to the cool-downs which should also be factored in).

[Anemo]

Sm gy, lib, and armory were a solid 2.5 hr/ level, and cathedral was closer to 3h/ level, so I only ran enough to get the gear

Do you see what I am missing/ are you certain of your exp per hour?

I just did level 35 in SM Lib in under 2 hours without going super hardcore or anything. I do have 1 mage at level 38 (rest 35) but I doubt it has a huge impact either way. I guess 4 DPS is going to be faster unless your tank can make up the difference with significantly larger pulls.

Edit: Random Lib run when squad was 33 (1 mage 36)

[Peregrine]

My played is 4 days 22 hours as of this moment (lv 52, 4x mage disc).

I've lost around 7-8 hours on afking ,respeccing testing things. Overall, it takes me around 2.5 per level and it will most likely stay that until lv 56 where ti will take around 3 hours until I hit 60.

The brd is tad bit scary due to melee damage so I gave up on Bael Gar gauntlent until 56 (new level and not to be crushed heavily by melee cleave).

The Zf grind was also super easy once I got to 46. Around 40k xp per hour or so. You can review my runs at my twitch streams and that should be the clue about the xp per hour more or less.

[Acidburning]

I drop damage mitigation totems and pre-hot/shield him for the pull. Gather mobs, do 4-5 demoshouts while running back to the group then start swiping while they unleash AoE - Sometimes the mage pulls aggro after a few secs, but my DPS is enough to keep him alive till the mobs start running away. Usually in 8-10 GCDs everything is dead. I also noticed that mobs in Cathedral actually have less HP than in Armory. The annoying AE from the mage mobs I can mitigate with shaman totem and priest holy nova spam.

Lets see how it will work in ZF, when I reach it hopefully mid next week.

I'm a bit sad though, that my warrior now sits at 34 now and is left behind, as I was looking forward to play him later in raids. Well you can't have everything..

How long did it take you to get them to 38 I'm curious? Will you main one of them at 60 in raids? And if so why that one?

damage mitigation totem = Stoneskin Totem?

good to know how you are pulling. I was using eye from warlock. I will def try this tonight in SM GY. Thanks for the tips.

My played is 8 days so far; however, I am not even using that as a good metric. For the first 3 weeks, I was remote queuing in from work, 3-4hours in advance. Then AFK'ing for hours just to stay logged in. Coming back and jumping or doing something really quickly to reset so I wouldn't get booted out.

I can't commit the same time I used to back in vanilla. I get to play for maybe a few hours a night, tops. Been at the SM grind for a while now