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?

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.

Cataclysm DK Conundrum

Please not that this post was originally intended to be posted in my guilds forums and since it was such a long post, and because I am also incredibly lazy I decided that I should make it a blog post as well.  (Also I was looking for insite into this topic and people actually read the guild forums).

This is a topic that started on the wow forums, and it got me thinking about how worgen and goblins will fit in with the Death Knight class time-line wise, and that unfurled other lore problem.  I was hoping that somebody here might help clear some of this up.

The way I understood the time-line is that in the beginning there was vanilla wow.  People leveled up from 1 to 60 in Azeroth.  At some point, months before the Portal Opened up and the Burning Crusade began, the Spacegoats crashed there spaceship into a planet, and the Blood Elfs swaggered out of whatever rock they were hiding under.   They too leveled up from 1 to 60.  Then there was the Burning Crusade and all the people that were of the appropriate level went and dealt with whats-his-name.  The along came wrath and all the people that went from Outlands to Northrend and they started doing there thing there.  In the mean time there was a proliferation of the amount of Death Knight’s floating around the plague lands.

From a time-line stand point the way that I understood this was that during the time in Vanilla WoW, right after the Spacegoat crash, and right before the portal opened up – would be the time that people would have been around the mid 50s or so, and some would have died fighting the scourge in some way and have been turned into Death Knight’s.  The whole showdown at Lights Hope would have then occurred shortly there after, and then after that the events of the Burning Crusade would have begun.  Then wrath happened.

This is how I always saw it, I have also drawn out a timeline below, that way you can see it as I have seen it.

WoW progression timeline

Now, the problem that I am having is when you start talking about worgen and goblin Death Knight’s.  The reason that they picked sides and started fighting was because of the events of the cataclysm because the eruption of the lands, this is why the Gilneas wall opened up and the worgen joined the alliance and this is why whatever happened to the goblins has happened to the goblins and they went off and joined the horde.

So from that point on is where the goblin and the worgen stories will play out.  So, if the whole Cataclysm thing is going to happen after the Lichking is dead…why would the worgens and goblins get turned into Death Knight’s?  Also since from what I understand the cataclysm events will not affect Outlands and Northrend, how will this work since all of the events in Outlands and Northrend take place before cataclysm?

Its like Vanilla was changed by Cataclysm but then when we hit level 60 we go back in time a couple years and go to outlands and then northrend, then future jump back to the future that you were at when you were level 1.

Any Ideas?