by Macnair » Fri Sep 05, 2008 7:05 pm
For a high level shaman helping a second toon to level up to 60, maybe a little higher, the limiting factor is, how many mobs can your shaman tank all at once, over an extended period of time?
Your shaman needs , and the spells and .
Try out Lower Guk, which is currently a hot zone and has mobs level 30 to 40. Let your shaman tag a mob with Hungry Plague, and move around in a few rooms to get a train of, say, 10 mobs. See how hard it is to keep your shaman alive, tanking those ten, using Spiritual Serenity to heal yourself while the mobs beat themselves down on the damage shield. After you've discovered that 10 is pretty easy, try 15 or 20. The goal is to get as big a train as you can manage well.
Your paladin's job is to cause at least one point of damage on each mob, but not a lot more than that: and otherwise you want him to stay out of the way. You don't want him to get aggro, and he won't, unless you leave him on autoattack while your attention wanders.
With a level 80 shaman in Crypt of Nadox, when it was a hot zone, I could handle about 30 mobs, level 55 to 60. That brought my pet enchanter to level 60, averaging about a level per pull. I stopped there, but I think I could have brought him to 64 or 65 without too much difficulty (the rate of experience gain would have slowed down, because either the mobs would turn light blue to the enchanter, or we'd go somewhere else where the mobs would hit harder, and I wouldn't be able to tank as many at once).
That suggests that as you learn how to do it, your level 70 shaman will probably be able to handle mobs in the 45 to 50 range, though maybe not thirty at a time. You should be able to use this technique, then, to get your paladin to level 52 or 53, moving to harder zones as your paladin gains levels.
At some point it becomes too much work for too little return: your shaman can only tank 2 or 3 of them at a time, and the mobs have too many hp and take too long to die. At that point, though, your paladin is perhaps 53 or 54, so just group up with him now, let him start to tank, and work on all the defensive issues that you have neglected in getting him up in levels so quickly.