Is mindless grinding time efficient in leveling?

[kreeshak]

I rerolled to play with friends. I now play a Sith Juggernaut rage specced. I noticed me and vette do a hell of aoe damage which got me thinking. I also happen to have reusable biochem stuff which do help a lot.

 

If I am about to farm 5 levels lower heroic areas, will that be efficient in terms of time efficiency in leveling?

If the above answer is yes or potentially yes, do you have any specific planets or heroic areas to suggest?

 

The reason I am asking is because sometimes, mindless killing while listening to music is relaxing. And I don't have to keep traveling while missioning.

[MikeDx]

I find myself doing the same thing, mindless killing. Lets say when I finish a quest, I still find myself leaping into the fray on my jugg, and just busting heads because its just that much fun. Its not efficient but idk maybe its the jugg playstyle that make me do it?

[Baelish]

Last I heard, that's a "no". The XP from quests is so much more than that from mobkill that you're best off just completing quests as fast and efficiently as possible. Of course, that includes the "kill 1 dozen random locals" bonus quests.

 

Even at the point where you overlevel a heroic enough to trounce it, and still get XP from mobs and the Heroic quests, you're still going to have to do a load of travelling, since you can only do Heroic quests once a day, and you'd probably still be getting similar XP from taking the same time to do "even level" quests, with the addition of getting more relevant/valuable loot.

 

BW have done a pretty fair job of tuning the content so that the XP/hour is largely (within broad constraints) constant, for the effort you're putting in. Even 5 levels over, you probably still have to be somewhat careful and pay attention in Heroic areas, as much as you would doing solo stuff of the same level.

[MAgson]

For every quest worth x amount of xp, I find that I earn about 3x to 4x of xp in my mob kills. The quests are a nice bonus boost, but the vast majority of my leveling actually is the "mindless grinding" of mobs during the completion of my quests.

 

I read another thread recently where the person said he'd done every quest as he leveld but that he'd stealthed past all the mobs and only killed what was absolutely required by the quests. He was about 2 planets farther than may character in the story line, yet he was a level below me. Since each planet's generally worth about 4 levels, that meant he'd "lost" about 9 levels worth of xp of "non-mindlessly-ground-out" mob killing.

 

Personally, I don't grind, but I don't (generally) avoid mobs either, so I don't run down roads, but next to roads and thus into all the groups of mobs as I travel. Perhaps I should say that I don't consider this to be grinding, but others might. Gotta love personal definitions, no? But anyway, it slows down my questing a little, but I'm leveling quite rapidly and get so over-leveled on some toons that I end up skipping whole planets (doing only class quests) on other toons just to keep them somewhat close to the recommended level for the content.

[luizon]

The reason I am asking is because sometimes, mindless killing while listening to music is relaxing. And I don't have to keep traveling while missioning.

 

Then you should have an easy time with this suggestion: do the missions and on your way to the mission objetive do not avoid any mobs, slaughter everything that moves. That's the best way to earn xp in my opinion.

[mathisk]

As others have said, questing is the fastest way to get XP (compared to simply grinding on mob killing), but that's not to say you can't enjoy killing. If that's easy and fun for you, then you should never pass up a quest's bonus missions. Those usually lead to a lot of extra killing (especially with objectives like "kill 40 enemies") and some pretty significan't XP rewards (and a nice amount of credits too).

[phydaux]

Most of the XP is in the quest turn in.