So…I’m back

Greetings.

So I have not updated this blog or anything in like 5 months. My bad. I can assure you that the whole time was spent in introspection. It wasn’t because I was lazy and didn’t feel like writing or anything. Nope, it was that first thing.

I need to point out that even though I am posting this today, this really isn’t what I consider a real blog post. This is more about me telling you where I am at and what I am thinking about. I will outline a couple of topics and outline some ways that I will be approaching this blog in the future.

First thing is that I recently made a change to what I will be writing about, as you may have noticed the blog is titled “The Battle Rez”  as in it is the old school druid combat resurrection spell. As in what a druid worried about things like healing would cast. It turns out that with the new expansion I no longer feel compelled to be a healer anymore, so I turned in my tree leaves for the thick skull of a fuzzy bear. Yes I intend to work on my tanking skills. This will be one major shift in my writing (not that I wrote a lot about healing before, but just in case you read the title and were expecting something different, there ya go).

Second, I have a whole slew of characters in the bullpen that intend to write about, mages, warlocks, rogues, hunters, etc…I am an altaholic and so whatever characters I have been playing that week is what I intend to write about.

That’s the next change, I want to try to get myself in the routine of writing more so I intend to make a post at least once a week. Hopefully sometimes it will be more. For now I want to see if I can discipline myself to a once a week post before we too carried away.

Finally here are a couple of topics that I want to start writing on. With the new expansion coming out I have started thinking a lot about what is coming up next for World of Warcraft. What I have seen them bring before and what they have left to do has left me with a couple of ideas, so I plan to write topics about classes, hero classes, path of the titans, archeology. All fun stuff!

I can’t wait to put an actual blog post out there again. See you next week!

Things are happening

There has been a lot of information released about many features coming with the new expansion.  I am sure that you have probably seen many of them yourself.  But for those of you who are not refreshing your web browser by repeatedly slamming the F5 key on your keyboard with your forehead and hoping that new information will magically appear, here you go.

You can find most of this information at wow.com, but if you don’t intend to blindly stumble over to that site, here are the topics that were released just within the last few hours.

Hunter News and Changes

Spec Masteries

UI Information

Relic Changes

Guild Vendor Information

Cataclysm Login Music

Thrall’s New Model

I am hoping that this sudden influx of information means that we might be close to some of the pre-cata quests and/or patches being released.

How to Heal – Rebirth

OK, so I thought I would write a couple of guides about healing. I know that this has been done to death but I wanted to throw a bit of a different slant on things. Instead of writing about how to heal (for example, casting this-then-that and rinse and repeat until the fight is over, will not be in this guide) I will be writing about each individual spell. I am doing this in order to give you the reader a better understanding of how the spells work individually, so that later when you the reader try to put everything together in a group-like setting, it all makes sense.

Since this is the first day of the new guide set up, I feel that it is only normal to begin with the spell that this blog is named after.  So we will start with the Battle Rez – more commonly known as Rebirth.

Rebirth

So. A couple of things about Rebirth.  First it is the only Battle Rez in the game, this means that druids win at warcraft because we can do stuff that other healing classes can’t do. Yay!

Anyway, the battle rez is a resurrection spell that can be cast while in battle. Meaning if you are fighting a boss and one of the members of your party dies you can, if not doing anything more important (i.e. tanking and…well pretty much just tanking) you can cast this spell on the dead guy and bring him back to life. Simple.

Basically the trick for this spell, if you want to call it a trick, is to cast it on people who die right away, like right after they die.

I will repeat this again for those not listening.

If you are a druid and you are in a group with somebody that dies, then you should be casting Rebirth on the dead guy. You should be casting this as soon as possible because the point of the Battle Rez is to cast it during the battle.  You have another spell to use outside of battle and the other spell doesn’t require a reagent.

Once more…dead guy gets Rebirth.

OK so now that we know the basics about Rebirth lets talk about tricks.  First, if you are about to wipe and there is now way that you can pull out a win in the group.  Pick out another member in the group that can rez people and wait for them to die.  Then after they die, before you die (Shadowmeld for the win) cast Rebirth on them, you do this because you can leave the rez up for about 1 minute after you cast the spell. Now if they are smart people who can rez, then they should know to wait for the wipe before they accept they the Rez.  This will allow the person to come back and start rezzing the rest of the group – preventing a wipe.

It might also be a good idea to tell them as you are sending them the rez “hey don’t accept this until we wipe”.  That way it doesn’t go to waste.

Yeah, I know I said “tricks” plural as in more than 1, but really as I write this, I can only think of one. So, I guess this means that we are done here.

Until next time (dead guy -> Battle Rez).

P.S. If you can pull off the Battle Rez while tanking then you are an awesome über druid.

Saying what I don’t know how to say

Have you ever had something that you wanted to write but you weren’t really sure how to write it.  I have been having that problem for the past 6 months.  Well that combined with a new job and playing wow again and a whole lot of other things.  Anyway the point is that I have felt compelled to try to get this thing out before I moved onto other things.

Since I have no idea how it is that I am supposed to write this thing so that it sounds good, I am just gonna spew it out here and hope it makes even a bit of sense.

Ok.  The druid, I play one but I am getting to the point where I cant stand some of the people that play them.  Not all of them, there are actual people that play druids, the people that have played them since the game came out, the know all the ins and outs.  You know the people that know that hibernate not only works on animals, but dragons too.  The people that did the druid quests even though they can just buy the spells and abilities at the trainer.  The kind of person that has played all four or the different specs and still isnt sure what they want to be.  That is the kind of druid that I respect and who I am writing this blog for (even if that druid is just myself).  The people that play druids for only one of the specs, like a tree, or a bear only.  You know what I am talking about, when you are running an instance with a group of tools and some fool that just damn near wipes the group starts talking about how he is leveling up his resto druid, or bear druid, or whatever.

Now, I agree with the whole its your $15 a month so you can play however you want to play, but before level 80 there is no such thing as a resto, bear, boomkin, or whatever other flavor of druid that you are playing.  Those distinctions dont exist until you are at the maximum level, which at this point is 80.  Until then you are merely specced into that tree.  If you spend the whole time your leveling in one specific tree then you frankly have no idea what you are doing.

I cannot count the amount of times I have been in a random group as a healer or a tank and done things that were not typically bound to the rolls that I was playing, such as being a healer and shifting into bear form to help the group avoid a total wipe, or being the tank and giving somebody in the group a battle rez during the middle of a fight.  Then somebody in the group mentions about how great of a healer/tank/whatever I am and how they are making a resto/bear/whatever druid too!  They say this as if I am supposed to be impressed that they are taking taking all of the experience playing all the different possible specs that I could, have played the toon from day one.  They seem to think that it will impress me that they are taking this class and cutting off three of its legs and expect it to run a marathon when instead it will hop around in a circle before it falls over dead.  The only way that you can make a druid like mine, one who can do all of those things that I mentioned earlier, is to not pigeon hole yourself into one of those specs until you are well into the endgame and you know how to play all the other specs well enough to be able to play all of the specs, no matter what spec you happen to be in at the time.

So I guess what I am saying is that if you are the kind of druid that want to play every aspect of the the druid class, then this blog is for you.  However, if you are the kind of person that want to handicap your druid by only playing on one branch of the vast tree that is your druid, Well then I’m sorry but the door is that way ->

Patch Day!

OK so I feel obligated to post something today as it is patch day for the new 3.3 patch.

I have other news as well, I started playing the game again which means that the information that I give here on the post will be actually correct now instead of me just pulling from memory.

Anyway I am also still working on my druid guide I am working on the level 40 to 50 stuff right now. I hope to post that here sometime soon, but with the new job and the playing again my free time is considerably less than it was before.

Keep on eye out for the new guide, should be up soon!

New Druid Guide Levels 3o to 40

So, I guess it time to talk a little bit about leveling a druid from level 30 to 40. Now, in my previous guild I said that I was going to talk about tactics for the different druid specs, I think this is a bad idea. Instead I would like to create new guides for each of the different specs. The reason that I am making this change is because you can start working on these different specs from day one and the leveling guides that I have written are already more than 1/3 of the way through and I think the information about specs would be better if the guide was created specifically for that reason.

This is not Flight Form, but it's still awesome!

That being said, I will hop right into this guide.

Now, at level 30 there are no new forms that a druid gets so there is nothing new to learn. This is a good thing because it lets you master what you already have and lets you learn, and learning is half the battle. Lets start with locations where you can level up.

Leveling Locations

Ok, so you are a druid which means you are a night elf, at the same time you are also a member of the Alliance. This means that the more popular leveling locations are going to be in Eastern Kingdoms. Now Kalimdor has some fun and interesting places, but because you will be in horde friendly areas you will not find many alliance members in these locations. This causes a problem if you want to group with other people.

Now if you are interested in leveling up in Kalimdor, then you will want to start out in Desolace. After there then you should move to Dustwallow Marsh. Now that there are newer quests in Dustwallow marsh it is a more popular than at one point.

Most people are going to be working in Stranglethorn Vale. You will be able to stay in this one zone, more or less, for the whole time you are leveling from 30 to 40. Also, there is a great variety of areas to and quests to level in, while in this zone. This make it a favorite for many. On pvp realms this is also one of the most dreaded realms. The other location that you can level up in is Arathi Highlands.

The place that I would recommend leveling up in would be Stranglethorn Vale. As much as I dread to say that, I think this would be the most optimal location to go from level 30 to 40. If you want to run instances at this level, there is really only 1 and that is going to be Scarlet Monestary. There will be two locations where you get quests for SM – Desolace and South Shore. Anyway this instance is going to be in the far northern part of Eastern Kingdoms smack dab in the middle of horde territory. If you dont want to go here I can understand, but this is one of the funnest instances in the game, and you will not find any better gear for our level. Not to mention that this is really the first instance that will teach you what it means to be a good tank/healer/dps’er. It will also be the first time in the game that you will need to work on strategy and crowd control. This is also the first winged instance where you can either run the whole instance or just part of it. Also, this instance increases in difficulty from wing to wing and you can actually level up from 30 to 40 by running the instance over and over again. I guess what I am trying to say is that Scarlett Monestary is the most awesome instance at this point in the game.

Now, with that out-of-the-way, lets look at the spells that you will be getting from 30 to 40.

Spells

Your level 30 spells will include mostly just upgrades of your old spells, you will get upgrades of Bash, MoTW, Rebirth, Regrowth, Shred, and Wrath. You will get a new restoration spell Tranquility which is an Area of Effect healing spell that is channeled, while you are channeling the spell it will heal your group members. This is a great spell that should only be used sparingly in groups, it is really mana intensive and until you get lots of gear with intelligence in it for extra mana, it will pretty much cost most of your mana. However when used it makes an awesome sparkly effect so its fun to cast when your not worried about mana.

At level 30, if you are specced fully into one specific tree you will also be able to pick up Insect Swarm if your Balance specced, and Feral Charge if your feral specced. Insect Swarm is an instant cast DoT that also decreases chance to hit on the target. Feral Charge is an ability that will give your bear form the warriors charge effect which allows you to rush up to your target immobilizing them for a short time and it prevents them from casting spells for that time. For the Cat form, Feral charge will act like the rogue’s Shadowstep ability, you will jump behind the target putting you in the perfect location to perform a shred attack on the target. You can even use the Cat charge while prowling, so you can jump behind a big group of mobs without them seeing you.

Now, like I said you will gain these spells at level 30 only if you put all of your talent points into these trees only. The talents trees that I have given examples of thus far in the guides have all included 2 points into the Improved Mark of the Wild talent first. Because of that you will not be able to spec into those talents until level 32.

Now, your level 32 spells will include the new spells Ferocious Bite, Ravage, and Track Humanoids (all for your cat form). Ferocious Bite is your characters first big finishing move. It will deliver a powerful single attack to the target consuming all of the combo points on the target and all of your remaining energy, the more combo points on your target and the more energy you have will increase the damage that this spell does. Ravage is going to be another attack like bite but much more powerful, it will do 385% damage to the target plus 161, and adds a combo point. Finally Track Humanoids will allow you to track humanoids on your mini map, just like you track herbs. It is the same spell that hunters get, only this can only be used while in the cat form, and its the only tracking spell that druids will get.

At 32 you will also get new ranks of Demoralizing Roar, and Healing Touch.

Your level 34 spells will only be new ranks of spells, but there will be a lot of them. Maul, Moonfire, Rake, Rejuvination, Starfire, Swipe (Bear), and Thorns.

At Level 36 you will get the new spells Frenzied Regeneration for bear and Pounce for cat. Frenzied Regeneration will be a healing spell only usable with bear form. It takes the remaining rage that you have and converts it into health. Pounce is a cat spell that is usable while in stealth form. It will stun the target, cause a small amount of damage, and award a combo point. It’s a good spell to use on a caster to start out the fight. You will also gain new Ranks of Regrowth, Revive, Rip, and Tiger’s Fury.

At Level 38 you will not get any new spells again, however you will gain lots of new ranks in Claw, Entangling Roots, Healing Touch, Hibernate, Nature’s Grasp, Shred, Sooth Animal, and Wrath.

Now at level 40 big things are going to happen. You will be getting new forms (2 via talent trees, and 1 via an upgrade to your bear form), you will also be getting major boosts to all aspects of your talent trees, of course I will be going into all of this in the next guide.

Talent Specs

As has been the “tradition” with all of my other guides, I have included Talent Specs in this guide as well.

Restoration

Using the existing talent tree I have continued by adding three points in Subtlety. This will reduce threat cast by healing spells and your dots (moonfire and insect swarm). Next I put 3 points in Intensity for the mana regeneration, the instant rage is also helpful to the bear form. Next is one point is Omen of Clarity for no mana/rage/energy. Lastly we need to stick three points in Improved Rejuvenation for improvements to rejuvenation.

Feral

Ok for this spec I finished off Shredding Attacks with 1 more point. I put 3 points into Predatory Strikes because increase in attack power in bear is a good thing the possible buff to nature spells would be handy to in case you have to jump out of forms for an emergency heal as well. I then put 2 points into Primal Fury as extra rage and an additional combo point from critical strikes would be pure win. Next I dropped 2 points in Brutal Impact for the extra stun duration of Bash and Pounce. I put 2 in Nurturing Instinct for the extra heals based on agility and increased healing in cat form. 1 point goes to feral charge. The final point will be heart of the wild, this is a great talent as it gives a little buff for each form.

Balance

So, continuing from before. We will put another 2 points in vengeance for more critical strike chance. Next we will put three points into Celestial Focus more for the haste than the actual spell pushback. This is kinda dicey here, if you wish to put all 5 points into vengeance and only 1 point into Celestial Focus, whatever you like. Next I will put 1 point into Insect Swarm, new DoTs are fun. Three points then go into Improved Insect Swarm. This gives a buff to Wrath when the target is afflicted with the Insect Swarm and it gives a buff to Starfire when afflicted by Moonfire. This will create a nice Spell rotation for balance specs keep insect swarm and moonfire up on your target, and Alternate between casting Wrath and Starfire.

The final point is kind of a gamble. I would recommend putting it either in Lunar Guidance for extra spell power via your intellect, or Moonfire for extra damage to Starfire, Moonfire, and Wrath. I would recommend that you fill up Moonfury first. Eventually you will have a full 3 points in both Lunar Guidance and Moonfury. However at this point in the game with the gear that you will be wearing, I believe that you will have more benefit from the boost to damage of your individual dps spells than a small increase to your overall damage based on a percentage of your intellect.

So then, until next time. Have fun playing your druid!

Worgen and Shapeshifting

Please note this post was originally taken from a thread I started on my guild forums.  The original post can be found here.

So, I have been reading a lot of different blogs, forum posts, and just general speculation all over the place in regards to worgen and their shape-shifting.  From what I can tell the shape-shifting ability is totally voluntary except when fighting and during the initial couple of quests in Gilneas.  From what I understand, for these early initial quests you are required to be in human form for talking to people and accepting quests.

I really would like to see all of the towns take the same stance on worgen as early level Gilneas does by not letting worgen in.  I would like to see it even go so far as to make them kill on sight.  It doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to why the whole Alliance faction is so lenient to a group of ferocious monsters when their own home was not.

I would like to see that people playing worgen would need to shift back into human form before they port/enter/fly into a town or else they would be attacked.  Once in human form they would have the normal alliance factions, and would be exauhlted (or whatever your rep is) with whoever because the town or faction would all think that the worgen is just another normal human.  They would gain faction/reputation just like every other race does while questing or raiding.  Its just while in the worgen form, while in town it would be like turning on a pvp flag, or had gone to “at war” status with the towns faction.

This would give the game some reason why the worgen have the ability to switch back and forth between forms at will (it would even be a lore-reason which is even better).  I think it would really add to the game and the story to be playing a shunned class that has to more or less hide who they are when in big cities or towns.

What do you all think?

ICC and 3.3

So it was announced a short time ago that the new ICC raid instance in 3.3 was going to have some stipulations in it.  Those stipulations being (in brief):

The instance will not be opened all at one time. You will have to beat certain bosses before you can attack Arthas.  You have to beat Arthas before you can unlock hard modes.  You will only have a limited number of attempts per boss before they de-spawn, and as time goes on (weeks) those attempts will increase.

Now, because I am child of the warcraft blog-o-sphere, I have been reading a lot of disappointment about this news.  These stipulations have been interpreted as Blizzard trying to put the  breaks on hard core raiding guilds, they are appeasing to the more casual guilds,  etc. and so on.

I disagree.

Now because I am not playing the game right now, or when I was playing, I was not in a totally hard core raiding mindset.  I can understand why blizzard is doing what they are doing.  This patch, 3.3, is supposed to be the last patch of the expansion.  Arthas is supposed to be the last boss of the expansion.  Just like Illidan was supposed to be the last boss of the BC expansion (and look what happened there).

If Blizzard was going to just open the doors to ICC on the first day the patch is released.  Then Arthas would probably be taken down within the first week by the major hardcore raiding guilds.  By the second week  more guilds would have him down, and within the first month or so most of the hardcore-type raiding guilds would have this instance on farm.  Now these guilds aren’t exactly common, but there are more than a couple on every server.  Which means that a large population of the raiding folks on every server will get bored within the first two months of the patch having been released and will slowly congregate on the forums complaining about the lack of content and that Blizzard needs to release more content or all of the people that have nothing to do are going to go and start playing Aion (or whatever the new flavor of the month MMO is).

I am not saying that the hard core raiding types are all a bunch of whiners.  They are paying money for a game just like everybody else if they want the hardcore raiding content they should have it.  Just like the people that want to pvp should have the pvp, and the people that want to level up 100 alts should get new and interesting content there as well.

Because Blizzard is staging the content of this new patch, they are able to do 2 things.  First it adds some lore to the game in that it makes the attack on ICC seem more like a Siege than just killing the boss.  You are spending weeks in this dungeon working towards this common goal that all of the npc’s are also working towards, in a way it makes the event seem more real.  But second, it also gives the developers a little more time to work on Cataclysm that they otherwie wouldn’t have.

To be honest, Cataclysm is who knows how many months away, we have yet to see so much of the new content, most of the stuff heard from Blizzcon was phrased as “We think” or “We would like to see”.  I saw more story board art than actual screen shots, and they aren’t even in beta with the new expansion, which we know will take months.

Knowing Blizzard they will take as much time as they need to get the new expansion finished up.  If releasing 3.3 in stages allows them more time to work on polish then I am all for that.  I would just hate for them to feel overwhelmed and that they will need to release something new and we get either another filler patch (like Sunwell) or an unfinished expansion.

New Druid Guide Levels 20 to 30

So, now your druid is level 20 and things are looking up. That’s right two big things happen when you hit level 20. First, you get your new level 20 spells, second you get a mount. As it is becoming common with this blog, I will start with the second item first.

Mount

As mentioned you get your newbie mount at this level. I believe the cost is 5g, 4g for the training and 1g for the actual mount. The 5g shouldn’t be a problem at this state in the game, you should have tripped over that amount just going to the AH. Once again, I am assuming that you are a nelf druid and so you purchase the mounts right in the same area as the druid trainer in Darnassus, to be precise it is in front of the hunter trainer building..lots of giant cats laying around, can’t miss it. Once you purchase the training you can purchase the mount. Once the mount is in your bag. Right click on it to learn it, then press the “c” button to open the character screen, click on the “pets” tab, and then the “mounts” tab. You should take the icon for your new cat mount and place it on one of your many action bars that we layed out back in the first guide. I recommend using your vertical right action bar (see the below picture). This will make getting on your mount simpler then following the above steps every time you want to mount up. This will also keep it off of your casting action bars.

Cat Form and Level 20 spells

The first spell that you should be the most excited about is your second “battle form”, your cat form (more commonly known as the kitty form). This new form will be your melee dps form, this will mimic the rogue in that your fights will be spent building up combo points and releasing them with finishing moves. Also with your new cat form you will also be getting a fresh clean action bar to put all your new abilities. In your first spell slot on your new action bar you will want to put your first new cat ability, Claw. Claw is a basic attack causing an extra 27 damage and awarding 1 combo point. The second new cat ability will be Rip. Rip is a finishing move that causing an damage over time effect on your target. The more combo points you have on your target, the more damage Rip will do. The final cat ability that you will gain is prowl. Prowl is like a rogue’s stealth ability. This will allow you to move around unseen by most mobs. This is helpful for sneaking past enemies or large groups of mobs. Later it will be helpful to get behind targets to open up with more powerful attacks.

Other spells that you will get this level is your second rank of Demoralizing Roar…very helpful towards your bear form. I probably should have mentioned this in the last guide by demoralizing roar is an area effect spell, it lowers your targets attack power so it is most useful. However because it is an area effect spell if you use it in a crowded are there is a chance that you will pull nearby mobs, so I tend to leave it out when fighting in crowded areas. However if while fighting something and you get adds then be sure to use it as all the adds you get will not hit as hard. It is also a wise tactic when starting out a fight in cat form and if you gain adds you can shift to bear and use this spell.

20 will not be all about the feral however. You will gain a couple of new restoration spells, the first is Rebirth. Rebirth is a resurrection spell, just like revive. This is also known as the battle rez, it can be used while in combat. The druid is the only class that has the ability to use a battle rez, which makes this the ultimate and most awesome spell the druid will get. However this spell also requires the use of a reagent, a Maple Seed, which can be bought from any reagent vendor. This also makes this the ultimate and most lame-o spell the druid will get. But then again its not like we are the only class that has to worry about reagents, so I generally get over it pretty quick. Also there is a glyph that you can pick up that eliminates the need for the reagent, I highly recommend the glyph. You will also get new ranks for Healing Touch and Mark of the Wild.

Your one and only balance spell for this level will be Starfire. Which is another Direct Damage Spell, like Wrath, that does wonders in a balance rotation.

Leveling Areas

Now that we have you all set up with your cat form and your new spells for level 20, we should discuss about where you should go to level. Just like before I will recommend places to level up for you, but by all means choose the location that you feel the most familiar with. That being said, I recommend that you level up in the Wetlands. There is a quest (The Absent Minded Professor) that you can pick up in Darkshore that will lead you into the Wetlands, but besides that the Wetlands are just an all around fun place to level up. Also while leveling in this area there is also a chance to get a rare mini-pet, the Crimson Whelpling, by fighting the red dragon whelps near the middle to the eastern end of the zone. If you do not want to get this as a pet, this does sell pretty well on the AH and who could turn down some extra gold? Anyway, besides the Wetlands you can also level up in Ashenvale, Red Ridge Mountains (although you are really pushing the experienced gained from killing mobs when you are in your 20s…most things are upper teens here), and Duskwood.

The Remaining Spells

At level 22 your new spells will be Shred and Sooth Animal, as well as new ranks of Moonfire, Wrath, and Rejuvination. Shred will be your cat version of the rogue’s backstab/ambush. You will need to be behind your target and causes 225% plus 54 to the target and it awards 1 point. This spell is a great opener to start up a fight. I usually will place this spell in the cat action bar in the first spell slot (I will move claw to the second spot for the time being). As this is generally the spell I choose to use as an opener it makes sense to put this as the first key to press. Sooth Animal will decrease the agro radius of Beasts and Dragonkin, this is helpful when traveling through highly populated areas. This spell is not a widely used spell so I usually place it on a vertical action bar, if at all, as it is useful but not commonly used.

At level 24 your new spells will be Rake, Remove Curse, and Tiger’s Fury. You will also get new ranks of the spells Regrowth, Revive, Swipe(Bear), and Thorns. Rake will cause bleed attack on your target which will provide Damage over Time towards your target, it will also award 1 combo point. Tiger’s Fury will increase the damage done for a short time. Remove Curse will dispel 1 curse from a fellow target. This is very helpful as the only other class that can remove curses are mages(I could be and probably am wrong about this, but that doesnt stop me from acting like I know what I am talking about). I would put Rake in the next available spell slot in your cats action bar, I think its 3 at this point. Tigers Fury you should put wherever you can remember to use it. I personally always forget about it so I should probably find a better place for it, but what can you do. Remove Curse should go on your Healing action bar (shift +2) right next to Cure Poison.

At level 26 your new spells with be Abolish Poison and Dash. You will gain new ranks in the spells Healing Touch, Maul, and Starfire. Abolish Poison will be a huge upgrade to Cure Poison. Instead of just removing 1 poison effect from your target, Abolish Poison will work over time to remove multiple poison effects on your target, one effect ever 3 seconds for 12 seconds. Dash is a cat only sprint that increases the running distance over a short period of time.

At level 28 you the new spells that you will gain are Challenging Roar and Cower. You will also get new ranks of Claw, Entangling Roots, Moonfire, Nature’s Grasp, Rejuvenation, and Rip. Challenging Roar is a Bear only spell that will force all mobs within range to attack you. This is helpful if you are in a group that is super lame and pull extra mobs. Cower is a Cat form ability that will reduce your character threat. This is helpful only if you are playing dps in the group and you pull agro from your tank and the mob starts to hit you. Cast cower to drop agro and the target should start attacking your tank again. I would suggest that you stick Challenging Roar on the left side of your bear action bar, wherever you have room. Cower I would put on your right horizontal action bar. This spell should not be used all that often because you will be a good kitty druid and know how to control your agro, but it should still be easily accessible as you will need to have easy quick access to it.

That will conclude all the spells for this post, level 30 has more awesome spells but that will be for the next post.

Talent Specs

So, we talked about the spells so now here are a couple of sample talent specs. Please keep in mind, I am working off of the talent specs from the last post.

Feral

I am sticking with a streamlined feral spec at this point not focusing on the cat or bear forms. Because of that I started with the final 2 points into Thick Hide. Then 2 points into Feral Swiftness, this will increase the movement speed of cat form and increase chance to dodge in cat and bear forms. I choose 3 points in Sharpened Claws to increase the critical Strike chance of Cat and bear by 6%. 2 points into Primal Fury will give 5 extra rage for ever critical strike when in bear, and will add an extra combo point when you crit with cat. Finally I will end with 1 point in Shredding Attacks this reduces the energy cost of Shred and rage cost of Lacerate.

Balance

Balance starts out with the finishing point towards Nature’s Majesty. Then add 2 points to Improved Moonfire to increase damage and critical strike change of Moonfire. 3 points go into Nature’s Grace which for each crit will decrease the casting time of spells. 1 point in Nature’s Splendor with increase the duration of the DoTs and the HoTs. Nature’s Reach needs 2 points and it will increase the range and decrease the threat of Balance spells. Last point goes into vengence because more critical strike damage is win.

Restoration

Resto starts out by finishing up Nature’s Majesty. Then 1 point will go into Nature’s Splendor to add to the durations of the HoTs. Next put three points into Furor because I don’t find push back to be a huge problem and there is nothing else in the Restoration tree in which to put three points. The final 5 points will go into Naturalist. This will decrease the casting time of Healing Touch by 0.5 seconds and increases all damage you deal in all forms by 10%. The points in balance will allow you to spec into healing spells and still allow you to have descent dps.

As you can tell by the way the different trees are starting to split, as you follow one spec down you will start to see issues in working with the other trees. For example if you are resto specced and you fight something in bear or cat form you will be effective because of the forms themselves, yet it will take longer and more importantly it will be more depentant on your gear.

You will also find that if you get lots of gear with agility and stamina in it you will not be able to heal a whole lot because your mana pool will be very small. Thusly getting gear heavy with Intelligent and spirit will be good for casting or healing but your feral forms will suffer. Because of this, you will want to get gear for all occasions.

Gear

For the healing and caster gear you will want to be looking for items that carry intelligence, stamina, spell power, and to a lesser extent spirit. You may have a hard time finding leather items with these stats especially spell power at this low of a level, so you may have to pick up cloth gear, that should be no problem as a healer or caster as you wont be taking any damage. For feral form you will be looking at gear with Agility, Stamina, and to a lesser extent Strength. You also want to get crictical strike and dodge, but at this point in the game there probably wont be much gear out there with dodge and critical strike in them yet.

Now in theory you could easily have four sets of gear. A set for healing/tree, caster/boomkin, cat form, and bear form. But to me this seems to be a bit excessive and you would have almost no bag space. You should be fine with only 2 sets of gear. A caster/healer set, and a feral bear/cat set. This means that you will be wearing one set and only have 1 extra set taking up bag room. Following the above stats you should have no problem with only 2 sets. As you might have noticed it might also be a good idea to make sure you have the biggest bags that you can afford. Right now 16 slotters are only a couple of gold on the auction house.

Extras

At this point in the game you will start running around with groups and doing instances, because of that you will need to working on some basic group etiquette. Now, I am not talking about things like loot rules and stuff like that. That will all be dependent on the group that you are in and should be discussed with the group. No, what I talking about are things such as attacking what the tank is attacking and icons. This will prevent pulling agro from the tank and it will make fights much easier. For example if the tank is holding on three things and he is attacking mainly the first guy and one dps is attacking the second and the other dps is attacking the third the tank will not be able to maintain agro on all three mobs. You will all probably die. There are two solutions to this problem. The first is to assign icons to your target. Normally you would assign the “skull” icon to the target everybody should focus on first, the “X” second, and so on. The second is to create a macro button to assist the tank. Pressing this button will target whatever the tank is targetting, very easy.

Once again starting with the second thing first. To create a macro type “/macro”. This will open up a macro window. Click the New button, label the macro something like “Assist” and then pick a pretty picture. In the space to type stuff type “/assist (tanks name here)”. The only problem with this method is that you will need to change the macro with each new tank’s name that you get in each new group.

Finally the first option of assigning group/raid icons to the targets. This job is normally left up to the tank or member of the group that is familiar with the instance. You can target a mob and right click on their name plate and you can choose raid icons this way. The problem is this can be long and tedious for the people in your group that are not assigning the icons. The solution is to set up keybindings. I like to set them to F9 through F12. I don’t remember the exact steps to do this, but if you press escape then choose keybinding you will be in the keybinding menu, then just scroll around till you find where you want to put the icons. Easy-Peasy.

In the next guide since we are starting to get some of the basic abilities I will talk alittle bit about techniques for the druid, i.e. how to tank, heal, and dps. Until then, have fun leveling up.

New Druid Guide Levels 10 to 20

So the last portion of the guide was leveling from levels 1 to 10.  I will continue with that trend with today’s post of leveling from 10 to 20.

I am changing up the format of this guide slightly in that I am not going to be giving as much as a step by step walkthrough and just give a guide about the different spells and techniques.   There are two reasons that I am changing the guide.  The first is because you can take any number of paths towards leveling and you may not want to go in the area that I describe or you may have your own favorite area that you like to level up in.  That is totally fine, I have my own spots that I level up every character no matter what race.  I will still give you advice on good areas that I think you should level up in, it just won’t be a “walkthrough.

Random pic of druids being awesome.

The second reason is that the druid can pretty much go anywhere and level and doesn’t need to be tied to any cities for need of visiting the class trainer.   From level 10 on you will be no more than a port away from your druid trainer.  which means you can port to Moonglade and train there, or fly back to Darnassus from Moonglade to train there.  Then you can just hearth back to where you were leveling.  Easy-Peasy.

So lets not waste any more time, and jump into the guide.

Druid Levels 10 to 20

Bear Quest

At level 10 you will be assigned your first class quest, in reward for this you will get your bear form.  Once you get the quest/hit from the druid trainer in Darnassus you will be given a portal spell that will take you to Moonglade.  Once there you will be directed to the Bear Spirit who will give you the major details of your assignment.  I kind of like to think of this quest as an initiation to becoming a Mafioso with the Druids.  The reason that I say this is because your very first quest for the druid cause is a hit.  The way I understand it the great bear spirit was in the middle of completing a deal with this Moonkin when his den was raided by the man.  During all of the confusion the Moonkin made off with a load of magic-crack dust and also swiped spirit (don’t know why it was laying around, but whatever).  You have been hired to eliminate this Moonkin and retrieve the spirit.  You will be given the location of a preapproved location that the hit will go down in as well as some bait (magic-crack dust) for use to lure out your mark.  (There is a reason that druids roll on all the rogue gear, it turns out that we are more hard core than them.)  After you get your quest you will need to head to Darkshore to start your quest.

Before you leave though there is a couple of things that you want to do.  The first is to look around the town a bit and know where everything is.  There are a couple of building that look like Inns but there isn’t a whole lot to them.  The biggest area of interest is going to be in in front of the main building that looks out over the lake.  In front of the building is a moonwell with a druid trainer standing in front of it.  The other thing that you want to do while in Moonglade is to get the flight point (not the druid only flight point, but the main flight point).  This will allow you to fly from Moonglade to any other flight point in Kalimdor, not just to Rut’therin Village (which is where the druid flight path takes you).  This flight path is directly south of the druid village.  The easiest way to get there is to just jump in the lake and swim south, the flight path is right next to a little building, can’t miss it.

Then head back to the druid village and take the flight path (this will take you to Rut’therin village, which is right outside of Darnassus).  From hear take the flight path to Auberdine in Darkshore.  The cave that you will look for is going to be directly east of Auberdine and north a little.  It is the northern-most cave closest to the road.  It is best to clear out the area around the cave and then in the cave.  You will want to do most of the fighting in the cave.  The Moonkin that are running around this area are going to be pretty challenging because they are a couple levels higher than you are.  If there are other druids running around doing this quest you might want to group with them, otherwise you will want to fight the Moonkin in this area like the other fights I described in the first guide, but with a little more care.  Make sure you have Mark of The Wild (MoTW) and Thorns on as well as your newest spell Nature’s Grasp.  This spell will give you a buff that when you are struck there is a chance that the target will get an entangling roots on them.  This is helpful to keep enemies from hitting you.  Then cast entangling roots on your target, follow up with moonfire and then wrath until your target is dead.

Once you clear your way to the cave, and then clear the cave you will notice a stone sitting in the cave.  You will take your magic crack-dust that you got for your quest/hit/assignment/whatever, and sprinkle it over the stone.  This will cause an angry Moonkin to come running.  Kill him and this will the Mrs. spirit.  Once you have this accomplished, port back to Moonglade and go turn the quest in, I believe then you finish up in Darnassus getting your Bear form and the remaining bear spells.  At this point you will now be inducted into fold/family as a druid of the claw.

Once you have the bear form and you turn it on the first thing that you will notice is that your first action bar will be blank.  This is another reason that I had you set the bar the way I did in the first post.  You will put all of your bear spells(attacks) on this first action bar.  You will also notice that later when you get your other forms (kitty, moonkin, tree) you will also get a clean action bar.  The underwater and travel form will use the main caster bar, this is fine, there are no spells that are specific to those forms.  I would recommend that you put the auto attack in the first slot, the Maul in the second slot, growl in the very last slot on the right, and Demoralizing Roar just to the left of Growl.

A couple things that you will notice is that your mana bar will have changed to a rage bar.  You no longer have to worry about regaining mana.  When you are running low you can now switch to bear and continue fighting while the mana regenerates, good times.  Finally after you get into your first fight as a bear you will notice that it takes a really long time to kill something.  You will last a lot longer than you did in caster form, but aside from auto-attack you will only have 1 other attack, maul.  The way that you want to approach something as a bear is to start the attack with auto attack…or if you want to pull something to you, use growl.  Once pulled or attacked,  it is pretty much auto attack to generate rage and hit maul whenever you have enough rage to pull it off.  Rinse and repeat until the mob is dead.  Good times.

The other main difference that you will see when it comes to leveling is that you have to be really careful in this next area.  There will be a lot more things that are aggressive towards you and you will also notice that mobs will also start to run away from you when they get low on health.  The way to counteract this is to cast entangling root on anything that is running away.  This will stop them in there tracks and allow you to finish them off with a wrath or a moonfire.

For leveling I recommend that you level through Darkshore.  This is just a recommendation however, and you can go anywhere you want to continue leveling (Loch Modan, Westfall, etc).  The only reason that I say you should level here is because that’s where I like to level, plus it is still relatively close to Darnassus.  Although you can port to Moonglade to train, you will find that it is cheaper in Darnassus because of the faction discount.  The other place that I would advise that you go to train would be Westfall.  It is southwest of Stormwind city and is a very good location to level up in simply because questing in that area will lead you to your first instance rather early in the game with Deadmines.  This is a great location to hone your grouping skills (tanking, healing, dps) early on.

The leveling here will be pretty quick, it will take a bit longer than going from 1 to 10.  If you go straight through you will find that it takes about 10 hours to get from level 10 to 20.  As a matter of fact, from this point forward it will take you about twice as long to get the next 10 levels as it did the previous 10 levels.

New Spells

Now, the spells.  At level 12 things will be slightly easier going in bear form with the addition of enrage to your bear attacks.  Enrage will give you the ability to generate rage at the beginning of the fight at the cost of armor for a short time.  You will also get Revive which is the druid resurrection spell, and Regrowth which is a healing spell that heals for a descent amount followed by a hot that heals for more over the course of 21 seconds.  I would put enrage to the spell slot just to the left of demoralizing roar on your bear action bar and put revive to the very right most spell slot on the second action bar.  Regrowth should be on the third slot of your second action bar just right of rejuvenation.  As you are leveling and tasked to heal things healing touch will be your main healing spell with rejuvenation helping out.  As you keep leveling and regrowth gets better (higher in rank) this will replace Healing Touch as the main healing spell, but for now Healing Touch is the win.

The reason that you are putting some of these spells to the right on the action bar is because these are not spell/attacks that you will be choosing via the keyboard or all that often, they are going to be more situational spells and you will be clicking on them to activate them.  You should leave the left spell slots for your attack spells, the spells that you have to cast repetitively during a fight.

At level 14 your new spells are going to be Bash, which is a new bear spell.  This attack does not do any damage but it does stun the target for 3 seconds and it interrupts casting.  This is most helpful when you are fighting against a caster, or when you are fighting something in bear from and you need to heal yourself.  Cast Bash on the target, press shift+2 to get to your healing action bar and then cast a healing spell.  You will notice that you do not need to shift out of any of the druid spells in order to cast healing/balance spells casting them will shift you out of that form on its own.  You will also get a Cure Poison spell, which removes a poison debuff.  You will also get new versions of Healing Touch, Thorns, and Wrath.

At level 16 you will get your next two major forms Aquatic Form and Travel Form.  These spells do pretty much as they say, aquatic form will turn you into a sea lion thing and allow you to travel underwater at faster speeds than swimming and breath underwater.  The travel form will give you a 30% speed increase and shift you into a leopard/cat form.  You will also get another bear attack Swipe, which is your first and only AoE bear attack.  If you are fighting more than 1 enemy you can cast swipe and it will attack everything in melee range within a 360 degree radius of you.  This is helpful when tanking for a group, this along with Demoralizing roar is a great way to hold threat and keep all of the things attacking you focused on you.  You will also get new versions of Moonfire and Rejuvenation spells.

At level 18 you will get a couple more spells Fairie Fire, Fairie Fire (feral), and Hibernate.  Fairie Fire is a very useful spell, it decreases the armor of the target by 5% for 5 min and the target cannot stealth which under its affects.  This is helpful in PvP when fighting Rogues, and this spell should now be the opener for every enemy that you attack (you can’t beat the 5% armor decrease).  You can also pull with this spell, so once again, a great opener.  Hibernate is a sleep spell that affects beasts and dragonkin.  This is very helpful when fighting large groups of beasts or dragonkin.  Hibernate 1 mob, kill the others, then kill the hibernated mob.  You will also get newer versions of Maul, Nature’s Grasp, and Regrowth.

The next time you get new spells will be level 20.  This is an awesome time to be a druid because you will get your second battle form, cat form.  At this point in the game this will be one of the bestest forms to choose simply because you will start to kill stuff a lot faster than you could the first 20 levels.  However we will not be talking about that in this post, that will be saved for the next post.

Talent Specs

You will also notice (although I haven’t talked about it till now) that at level 10 you started to accrue talent points.  This is where you will start to diverge as a druid, you will at this point be able to pick and choose what kind of druid you would like to be.  You will get to choose between a Balance druid (caster), a restoration druid (healer), or a feral druid (bear-tank or kitty-melee dps).  At this early level the talent points that you select will not seem so different between classes, so even if you put all of your points into the restoration tree, you will still be an effective druid while in bear or caster forms.  I will not try to tell you what talent tree that you should spec in, all I will say is the last thing I said in my last guide: respec often, respec always.  You want to try every spec in order to be the best druid that you can be, and keep flopping to different specs.

With that in mind, I have a couple of sample specs to start you off:

You will notice that all of my specs will start with 2 points going into Improved Mark of the Wild.  I find this the most important talent choice you can have with your first 2 points.

Feral

The first couple of points go into improved mark of the wild.  The next 5 go into Ferocity reducing the mana/energy of attacks.  The next 3 go into Feral Instinct which increases swipe damage by 30% and when you get the cat form reduces the chance you will be detected.  The final point goes into Thick Hide which increases your armor by 4% (with one talent).

Balance

The first couple of talents go into improved mark of the wild…very important.  The next talents you want are going to be Starlight Wrathx5.  Wrath will be the main damage spell as a balance druid so you want to cast them fast.  The next three go into Moonglow to reduce the mana of balance spells, reduced mana is win.  The last spell goes into Nature’s Majesty increasing critical strike chance.

Restoration

The first couple of talents points that you will want to have is to be put into Improved Mark of the Wild.  I then chose to put 5 points into Genesis.  This will increase the healing done by your rejuvenation and regrowth spells by 5%, it also gives you a buff to moonfire which can’t hurt, right.  After that, I chose to put 3 points into Moonglow this will reduce the mana of all the healing and balance spells, the more mana you have the more spells you can cast.  That is a win-win.  The remaining point I put into Nature’s Majesty this will increase the critical strike chance of Healing Touch and your balance spells.  This is important to the healer as it will also increase the critical strike of the balance spells as well.

You might have noticed that even though this is a restoration build most of the points are in balance talents.  The reason for this is because at this point in the game balance has more to offer a restoration druid than the restoration tree does for straight up healing spell buffs.

So until my next blog post, take care.