Think charming is the way to go till about 46.

Charming is a lot more mana efficient. If the level of the mobs are close to each other you should be able to kill the 2 mobs with 15-20% of your mana. Rough estimate that is 10 mobs for your entire mana pool versus 4 mobs on quad.

If you are having problems with charm breaking then the mobs your charming are too high for you. There is a level range for the blue con, high blues your charm will constantly break, blues towards the lower end to mid range you shouldnt have any problems holding charm for the duration of the fight.

This is a perfect time to work on your charm kiting skills, when youre in your late 50s you be spending a lot of time in either the permafrost pits or kedge.

Is there any reliable way to separate high blues from mid-low ones? I'm level 27 and I don't like charm kiting at all. It just seems like a crapshoot on the range of blue that I'm charming, so quite often my charm breaks a lot which usually means I get my face mashed in for a bit. I know snaring helps, but my snare doesn't last the duration of the fight yet.

The /con message has a higher detail of resolution than color. Read those con messages.

Make sure you're using Ensnare instead of Snare. It lasts 7 minutes when you get it at 29 (and up to 15 minutes as you level).

35-40 quadding pirates in Firiona Vie is pretty decent if I remember right. They're rogues, so they're pretty squishy and will have less downtime than quadding other things of the same level. Plus you can make some decent plat from the fine steel they drop as well as porting people out of FV.

Yes, quadding pirates was really fast xp when I did it, provided there isn't a bard there PLing someone.

I primarily quadded on my druid until I was 55+ and in the perma pits (basically had no viable options to quad anymore).

That said, from a technical standpoint, charming would be more mana efficient than quadding and could get you leveled faster assuming that the area you're hunting in has an abundant number of animal mobs. But remember, you would need to be more re-active in your play style to handle random charm breaks as well as knowing when to break the charm yourself to kill the pet + other mob and claim all the xp.

Quadding is a bit more reliable (albeit slower) and lets you play in spurts, then AFK if you need.

EDIT - As for the concern with "hp matching" the mobs, all you can really do is pick ones around the same level and do whatever you can to keep them sort of close. Unfortunately, you don't have access to a slow spell to do this easily but there may be some other ways that could work that I'm just not thinking of.

If my pet is losing, I either give it thorns, or dot the other mob. If my pet is winning, I'll switch to the other as a pet when charm breaks and use thorns and/or dot to even things out.