Ok, so I was online trying to get about 30 minutes of grinding in before work and I was talking to some of our fellow guildies about grinding. I was simply amazed about how little most people know about how to do it efficiently, so I thought that I’d post a small guide on the basics of doing it.
Now I’m not going to say that its “my way, or the highway” when it comes to grinding, because I have not played all classes extensively. I have played all classes in the game. But I’ve only played a lock up to level 8, so I’m not so well versed there. Every other class I’ve hit about 20 onthem with the exception of paladins which I abandoned at level 14. The purpose of this little essay, if you will, is to give some simple guidelines and helpful hints.
First, I’ll start with the basics.
Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency
Hunt mobs that are your yellow to you but equal to or less than your own level.
Try to minimize down time.
Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency
Find areas with quick spawns and minimal amount of running between mobs, but be careful to not be too close together so as to avoid argoing a second mob.
Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency
Remember that you don’t have to be at 100% health/mana between each mob.
Have enough healing/mana pots food/water to last for the duration of your expedition.
Now, I’ll cover the basic steps you should follow when grinding.
Step 1, Pulling: You want to start out pulling a mob with your “big gun.” This is your strongest attack and usually has one or more of the following properties: Longest cast time (starshards, Mind blast, etc.), Hits hard (ambush/backstab from stealth), causes a stun (charge), has the greatest range, and has a moderate cost (energy/rage/mana). The notable exception to this is a Warlock and Hunter. To pull with them (if fighting closely packed mobs) you use a very minimal attack so the mob can come away from the pack and your pet can start tanking for you. (for locks, a good pull is a debuff and hunters, concussive shot).
Step 2: Hit them with a DoT (Damage over Time). Almost all classes have one; some are more powerful than others. It doesn’t matter if it’s strong or not, it will help increase the damage meaters.
Step 2.5 (for classes that have it): Hit yourself with a HoT (heal over time). This will allow for minimal down time.
Step 3a (ranged/casters): some sort of snare or something that slows them down. Ice bolt for mages, Mind Flay for priests.
Step 3b (melee): Rogues now should have 2 combo points, warriors should have some rage built up, and paladins should have, well not much… maybe ready for another seal blast (not quite sure, but this is about 2-3 seconds of the monster actually charging. At this point, it is all about DPSing now for these 3 classes. Find whatever style you find useful. If you have moves that allow for stunning/incapacitating, use them. Do not be afraid of allowing your DPS meter drop. For Meleers it is important to control your opponent while doing as much damage as quickly as possible. It is a hard balance to find, but once you find it, and get into a groove, you’ll be doing close to 35k exp/hr. Just remember, the less damage that you take equals less down time for healing.
Step 3c (Pet casters): Allow for your pet to gain good argo. If this means you have to wait a few seconds, then let it go w/o doing anything.
Step 4: Melee classes, just repeat step 3. Non-pet casters, use some sort of crowd control. Psychic Scream/frost nova. For Pet casters, you want to open up on your high DPS abilities.
Step 5: Wand/shoot them to death. You must observe the 5 second rule. Super important on mana focused classes.
Step 6: Bandage… do not heal! bandage!
Step 7: Find your next victom!
Now to explain a little bit more in depth, let me tell you how I grind with my priest.
I start out at maximum range, and cast mind blast and immediately follow up with Shadow Word: Pain. As I do this, I start backing up. As soon as I can, I cast Vampiric Embrace on my target, and continue backing up until my universal timer (UT) is just about up, I stop. Then I hit it with Mind Flay as soon as the UT is up. If I have time, I will use it again, but if the target gets to me and is able to melee me, I fear it with psychic scream. Then Mind flay it again usually one more time 2 times more at most as usually they’ll be at 1/3 health with a DoT on it. At this time, I whip out my trusty wand and wand it to death to make sure that I’m within the 5 second rule.
What to grind? My recommendations are yellow mobs that are =< your level. You can do the occasional +1 or 2, but not on a regular basis.
Now you might say “but I can kill monsters 2 to 3 levels greater than I, why should I be doing ones that are less than my level?” The answer: Numbers. It is all a numbers game. Let me explane.
If you are fighting monsters that are 2-3 levels more than you, you are getting more exp per kill than if you were to kill monsters of your same level. Now if this were a short duration effort, than it’s a good thing, but not if you are in it for an extended period of time.
Hypothetical situation: Let’s say you get 10 exp per level of the mob, and let’s say that you are level 40. Let’s also say that you can kill a monster that is 2 levels higher than you (42) in 30 seconds for 420 exp. lets say that you spend 15 seconds between mobs for regen/travel. So that is 4 mobs every 3 minutes (with the travel to the 5th mob) for a total of 1,680 exp.
Now let’s say that you can kill a level 39 mob in 20 seconds with 15 seconds in travel time. Now in the same time that it takes you to kill the 4 level 42 mobs, you can kill 5 level 39 mobs and be 1/3 of the way to the 6th mob in the same amount of time for 1,950 exp.
So lets bump it up to where you can be at the same point (ready to attack the next mob) when you are done figuring in the number… 9 minutes. In 9 minutes, you can kill 12 level 42 mobs for a total of 3,780 exp or you can kill 15 level 39 mobs for 5,850 exp. See where this is going?
Now in the hypothetical situation above, you are not really taking into consideration how much down time you require. When fighting a higher level mob, you’ll have more misses/resists/parries/dodges and you will also take more damage. In light of these factors, the down time would realistically be closer to 30 seconds between pulls for bandaging/drinking and travel.
Another counter that I see all too often is “I play
Another issue I see a lot of is that not everyone knows what the 5 second rule is. On any WoW board, it is assumed that if you are posting there, then you know what it is. But for newcomers to the game who are trying to learn about the game, it is difficult to find out about it. I was in this camp for the longest time. Now that I’m not, It has made a world of difference. Simply put, it states that Mana Regen does not start until 5 seconds after your last cast. This is why castersuse a wand to finish off the mob.
Final thing that needs to be covered, gear.
For Casters, you want to focus on 2 stat bonuses… first is not intellect and the second is not stamina, and no, they are not reversed. You want gear with +spirit first and +whatever school of spells you are using the most of.
For hunters and rogues, you want to focus on Agility and Spirit.
For Melee, you want to focus on Sta and whatever stat adds more damage (str?) and you want some healthy doses of spirit too. Melee is my weak point, so sorry for the lack of details.
I can hear what you are thinking. WTF, Spirit?!?!?! right? Here is the reason that you want spirit over int or stamina as a caster. You want to maximize your efficiency. The 2 best ways of doing this is by 1, killing the monster faster, thus decreasing the time you spend fighting the mob (+spell damage) and 2, increase your mana regeneration rate and thusly decrease down time (+spi). Now if you go with Stamina and Intellect over spirit, you are shooting yourself in both feet. on one foot, you increase the size of your mana pool, and on the other foot, you decrease your potential mana regeneration. Granted the first foot is more or less a small glancing shot that stings but is really superficial because you really shouldn’t be waiting for 100% mana/health between pulls anyway, but visually, it is difficult to do this if you regen ticks don’t look all that big.
I Hope that you find all of this information helpful. I know that acting on this information has seriously increased my exp per hour. If I forgot anything, please let me know and I’ll add it in the future.
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