Warcraft has been designed to promote solo leveling. It is faster and easier to level as a solo player but not nearly as much fun in my opinion. Todays article is short but hopefully it's useful.
When leveling as a team like Grettir and I have done, you have to optimize your efforts to keep your leveling speed up. The first issue that all team levelers encounter is the experience penalty for MOb kills while grouped. This is a significant portion of your experience. We used the BoA chest and shoulders to help counteract the penalty, but it still slowed us.
Secondly there is the matter of grinding vs questing. I'm forever on the side of combining them both. We quest and kill MOb's at the same time. Grettir disagrees with me in that I feel it's better to kill everything along the way while he would rather skip MOb's and just get the quest done. There's probably a happy middle ground somewhere, and I am sure it varies depending on the time it takes to kill the MOb's vs the experience earned.
While questing you will find that certain quests will slow you down greatly. Most of the time it's a collection quest. Gathering quests where you pick items up off the ground aren't too bad, it's the ones that require you to kill a MOb and hope an item drops. Remember, you are collecting for two or more and collection quests suck even without adding the team aspect to them. I recommend skipping those quests, they just aren't worth the time investment. Certain collection type quests work very well, there are some that drop unique items. Once these items drop they can be collected from the same corpse by all members of the party, do these. My personal favorite quests are the “kill this many” of something quests, in a team such as a druid and paladin these are extremely fast and easy.
You'll find that as a team you will out-perform most areas. For example, Grettir and I had completed nearly every quest we could obtain in Stranglethorn Vale by level 34/35. This was probably our most challenging issue, finding proper places to level for our ability that provided enough experience to keep us leveling at a decent rate. Do not be afraid to move to new areas and abandon old quests. You will slow your leveling speed way down if you try to level this way.
Looking back on some of these issues, we could have avoided a lot of them by running instances. It's hard to know though, grouping for instances can slow you down as much as speed you up depending on how you do it. If we had planned out a few instance runs and gathered quests for them, I think it would have paid off. Scarlet Monastery and Mara would have been useful. They would have provided instance experience as well as new quests during the 30's and early 40's. To be honest, 30-55 were the slowest levels we encountered. They weren't slow but they could have been faster with proper planning and instance running.
Quick Tips:
Do not be afraid to spend money on your tanks gear. It pays dividends. The easier the tank is to heal the easier it is for you to DPS after slapping a HoT on them.
Make one of your characters an enchanter. The ability to D/E all unused greens and blues as well as the ability to enchant your items while leveling will improve your speed greatly.
It's very hard to level Herbalism and Mining simply because you are a team and only one of you will see the nodes causes lots of downtime and often causing confusion. That said Tailoring is another useful easy to level skill along with Skinning and Leatherworking (LW IMO is not worth the effort but you might as well fill the empty profession slot)
Spell Power Spell Power Spell Power... put spell power gear on the druid. Enough said.
Break up the monotony with battlegrounds and instances. If you enjoy pvp, AV still provides decent exp though you must be level 51 or higher. Instance runs as a mentioned earlier can actually improve your leveling speed, even if they don't they keep things fun.
Burn Innervate every chance you get. Either give it to the paladin or use it for yourself, just use it. It will save you more time than you can imagine.
Healbot and Pallypower help make sure you keep buffed at all times. At lower levels, the druid buffs on the paladin are extremely important.
Good luck to you in your endeavors.
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