Journal Entry #2

Hey everyone it's time for entry 2 of my leveling journal series, thanks in advance to everyone reading :)

OVERVIEW
Levels gained this session: 31-43
Feat Spec. Used: Thunder - Click Here for build
Groupings Used: Solo


I started this session just after hitting 31 and headed to the wild lands of Zelata as I hadn't touched the zone yet. Upon entering I gathered the first quests at the beginning of the first town, called Tesso. Most of these quests were kill quests and as a tempest that sounded great to me! Since you receive Storm Field at 30 and I already had my Storm Crown feat buffed to the max, these quests were fast and I stayed at each site longer than required to grind out some extra XP (as I've said before, kill xp is very important!). My main strategy here was to drop an Idol, put up SF and SC and rush into mobs bringing them back to the idol. as my AoEs killed them I HoT'ed myself up. Wild Lands is an EXTREMELY useful zone if you can save it until the thirties, there's an abundance of quests and it you don't have to look far to find EXCELLENT AoE grind spots (Which I'll list at the end). After making it to 33 in Wild Lands, I headed to the Border Ranges, and instanced zone off of Wild Lands with it's own quests. ..
Since the zone is instanced to your character, you are standing in a gold mine of uninterrupted experience flow once you enter the zone. There are quite a few minions mixed in with tons of normal mobs in the zone, this is great because they hit for nothing, and each give you an extra 40-50 xp when they die on top of the xp from your pull of normal mobs. I would suggest clearing this entire zone a couple times to maximize xp as quests start to run slim in wild lands. I finished up the zone, turned in my quest and wow: I'd made 2 levels in under 2 hours here!
As I was now 35, I headed to Outflow Tunnels in Old Tarantia. As many of you know, this provided a generous amount of grind xp as well as the one or two quests for the zone. Here I would set up large groups of totems and pull rooms of the level 35 mobs back to them, rinse and repeat. Every run through took 15-25 minutes for a full clear and gave nearly a half a level of xp! This is the kind of place a ToS dreams of when they want to grind :) A summarizing video of my Outflow Tunnels adventures was release the other day and can be found on my site at the top of the page or on youtube by clicking HERE. A spent a couple hours in here to quickly get from 35-38 and prepare for my first instance which was....
Sanctum of the Burning Souls! At 38 I gathered the 5 quests I could find for the zone and got together a group from my guild. As we had a PoM along assisting on heals, I got to get my first taste of instancing and aggro control in general. I kept the same spell rotation as when soloing with the exception of letting our tank get some aggro first, and throwing heals in when needed. We completed the instance without incident, but nothing good loot-wise dropped for me : / At the end I had 6 quests to turn in (I had picked up another on the inside of tSoBS) each clocking in at 9800-12500 xp per turn in. I had made 39 and half way to 40.
Now I headed to the Noble District in Old T. I grabbed the first quests inside and went to town taking out the Nemedian rebels overrunning the land there! After the first few quests I had dinged 40 and moved deeper into the zone, opening up a treasure trove of new quests. Unfortunately many were bugged, and I temporairily left the zone to hit 40 elsewhere and make some of the quests more doable. I went to Wild Lands again and headed down to the valley in front of the Sanctum entrance. Here are camps of many level 38 NPCs as well as the area in which you complete two quests from the Outcast Camp in Northwest Wild Lands. I completed the quests and continued to grind until I was one bar away from 41. I did this because the quests were green at the time and I didn't want to level too quickly and gray them out, else they would provide significantly less xp. After turn ins I returned to the Noble District and was delighted to find that the "Villa quests" were available to me now :)
Levels 41-43 were done in the Villas. What are they you might ask? You get quests from various NPC's in the noble district for the Villas, each one is a different house that is instanced and holds many tightly packed together level 40-42 NPCs. These houses are heaven for AoEing and I suggest you let leave after clearing them and let them reset before turning in the quests you can grind them again, each more will give 600+ xp per kill. Once you're done turn in the quests and you'll be pleasantly rewarded by turn in xp of 25,000 to 30,000 PER QUEST. BAM! Now you're 43 :) For my next write up I'll be heading to fields of the dead, and I'll be able to confirm or deny that the zone lives up to it's reputation for AoE grinding experience!


Most Used spells: Storm Field, Storm Crown, and Idol of Set.

SUGGESTED AOE SPOTS LIST:

1) Instanced Border Ranges: mobs level 32-34
2) Outflow Tunnels, with mobs of level 35
3) Valley of Nemidian NPC's in east Wild Lands, mobs of level 38
4) Instanced Villas in Noble District, mobs level 40-42
Thanks a lot everyone for reading, as always I appreciate feedback so feel free to e-mail me or comment on the blog. Also if you havn't seen it yet check out the Outflow Tunnels video for examples of the AoE pulls there :)

Until next time!

Settar - Tyranny

P.S. I won't be making many videos while leveling, but the positive response to my last one encouraged an idea. I'll be making a short video on spellweaving and possibly some other AoE clips once my character hits level 50, so stayed tuned and subscrube to my youtube channel to be the first to be notified! :)