Slugging my way through the mobs worked, after all my armor took a lot of punishment, and being a W/Mo made it pretty simple to survive, but it was slow going, so I tinkered a bit here and there, and came up with a halfway "efficient" farm build.
Now, while the finest farm build uses Balthazar's Aura, Symbol of Wrath, Zealot's Fire, Healing Hands or Shield of Judgment and then some form of spammable heal, the downside of that is, in my opinion, that you need to take your farmer almost all the way through the game to get the skills required (Healing Hands / Shield most noticeably). Since my W/Mo is still to actually enter Kryta, that meant I had to come up with some other ideas.
this is what I came up with.
So far, I have axe 11 (10+ rune), healing prayers 8 and smiting... 7 I think.
I use :
Mending
Balthazar's Spirit
Healing Breeze
Symbol of Wrath
Cyclone Axe
Sprint
and some form of adrenaline spammable attack skill.
I'm using the gladiator's set, so I have 26 energy.
I start off with Mending and Balthazar's Spirit. This puts my energy recharge at zero, but it's not really that big of a deal. I make sure to have enough energy left for cyclone axe (you could wait a bit longer after casting mend, to leave yourself with more energy, but at 1 pip regen that takes forever.)
Draw the mobs, then let them wail. Because Balthazar's Spirit gives you 1 energy per blow you receive (as well as a bit of adrenaline), you will be full of energy for most of the battle. Turn on Healing Breeze to help your mending keep you alive (obviously, if you have a lower level armor, you'll need to draw fewer mobs at once, this is not an invulnerability like Healing Hands), then just spam Cyclone axe every four seconds. As a warrior, I'm still slashing away during the battle, and Balth's Spirit keeps the adrenaline flowing smoothly as well.
Now, like I said, this is supremely inefficient compared to the popular smiting builds, but it works rather well in killing 3 or 4 mobs (probably 2 or 3 with lower armor) within about 30 seconds, which still leads to a nice bit of money. The good part is that you can use this type of farming as early as the northern shiverpeaks (probably even sooner, I think most of the skills are given before that.)
It works fine on mobs of minotaurs, charr etc.
The biggest issue is having a decent armor, ofcourse, although I think Yak's armor plus ascalon boots plus some form of absorp rune would allow you to stay alive to make this work. I had 18 minotaurs chopping on me at one point, and that even made my armor sweat quite a bit, so I wouldn't recommend that with 50+20 armor.
I think it makes about 5-6k an hour, which can shoot up nicely if you happen to find some worthwhile stuff (not likely from minotaurs and Charr, but the occasional black dye is pretty decent money.)
I used it for about an hour before I got bored with it and moved on, but I just thought it was pretty cool that it worked. I'm easy to please.
Any comments on it? Perhaps some suggestions to make it slightly better? (note, it would have to be with skills that can be gained BEFORE Kryta).
I really want to find some way to up the spammability of Cyclone Axe, but I think only a ranger stance does that? And you need to be W/Mo to do this, so no Ranger stances...
Creston