I can't read Magelo's on the computer I post from, which probably saves me from a great deal of potential posts.
But, beastlords are the least gear dependent melee class. Our dps has three components: our own melee, our spell casting, and our warder. Warder is unaffected by gear, spell casting has very little impact from gear, and our melee output is (at these levels) about 1/3 of the total.
So whatever gear you have, it doesn't make all that much difference.
Exp per kill isn't very important; what matters is exp/time. I recall that I was getting a level in about 3 hours in Jaggedpine on basilisks; I have seen people claim faster exp on cave yetis in Dreadlands.