Soloing is hands down faster experience, provided you understand and implement the most efficient method. If you burn all your mana and have to med for 10 minutes then you lose that efficiency unless you were able to kill about 8 mobs in that time. Kiting in general is only somewhat efficient and really only shines if you can either a) quad kite, or b) kite yellows and reds. Kiting a bunch of blues is sort of pointless as the whole entire idea of killing a higher number of blues is the lower mana cost in order to do so not to mention the extra time it takes.
My iksar necro spent most of his 20's chain killing high blues, whites and yellows and leveled extremely fast while never really running out of mana. I'm talking a level in 90 minutes or so. There's a threshold you have to find and understand to determine the best mana per kill efficiency. Do you burn more mana to kill mobs faster and then sit and med, or do you use less mana and take a bit more time?
I was killing the two treants and then still had enough mana to run around and kill 3-4 blues in the area, come back and still be able to get treants when they popped. That's 5-6 kills per spawn cycle with very little downtime. The only time I really had to stop completely to med was when I had way too many resists in that cycle and decided to just med to full before starting again. Of course the entire reason I played an Ikky was for the regen as it is god's gift to a necro.
How did I do it? Used as little mana as possible, sit down as much as possible and found a nice spot where I didn't waste time running too much in between spawns. Easy blues would only get one darkness, one fear and my pet. Tougher mobs would get one darkness, one boil blood, one fear and my pet. Turn off taunt, darkness mob, fear it, put on a blood boil, run about 100 yards out and then sit and med. With allure on I had gained a good portion of my mana back by the time the mob came after me in which I'd simply run away again and then sit and wait.
This threshhold takes time to figure out for each class, level and situation but if you're smart about it then it becomes natural. I did the same thing leveling my shaman to 50 completely solo. Instead of root dotting and kiting (which I find embarrasing to shamans everywhere), I played an Ogre and went full on battle shaman. I was tanking, yes tanking, spectres from 45 to 50 and doing it very efficiently. I also camped AoF solo from about 45 and up doing the same method of tanking and got awesome exp as well. AoF himself hit pretty hard so I only stepped in when pet was in trouble or I was getting low on mana, but I still had that option.
Had I root dot'd or kited them it'd have been far slower. I loaded up on HP and AC gear, rubi BP and FBSS, grabbed a nice high damage 2h weapon then went to town. I did this for most of my career and I leveled very fast this way. Open up with a slow, drop one dot on the mob then would melee it down with pet helping. Keeping hit points about 60-70% was enough and plenty to canni if needbe. The regen kept me healing fast during what small downtime I had and I was pulling pretty consistently. Most shamans don't use this method and I see them plugging away for much longer grinding but it's just not that efficient. Root dotting is a horrible method for Shammies due to the high cost of mana.
Then there is the whole idea of how much more money you make while soloing versus splitting in groups...
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