WOW Druid Leveling Guide
As manipulators of the natural world, Druids have a great deal of spells and tricks that they possess. Raid groups love Druids for their wide range of talents and spells. The ability to raise other players from the dead as well as get rid of poisons that players possess, makes the Druid a powerful healing class. With their connection to the natural side of World of Warcraft, Druids have the ability to conjure some of the more deadly spells nature has to offer.
These nature based spells can help destroy, confuse and even capture enemies of the Druid. Many of the Druid's spells are the strongest in the World of Warcraft. In addition they can change their shapes to allow them to be more productive in certain roles. Each different animal that a Druid can become, gives them unique and special powers, based on the strengths of that animal. If you are new to World of Warcraft, Druids are a wonderful way to test out all the different aspects of the game. Using the variety they have, you can find out what is the best fit for you as a player.
If you want more information regarding leveling your Druid or just more info in general, visit this Druid Leveling Guide.
In your natural form you are a spell caster, or a ranged DPS; this is a character that attacks from a far. Once you decide to shape shift you will take on specific traits of that shape. As you grow as a player you will find which shape you like best, but you will learn a great deal from all of them.
Some of the more popular forms to take are, Sea Lion, Cat, Bear and Tree. Some forms are meant for travel purposes only; the Sea Lion form will allow you to swim faster through water. As a Cat you become a much more powerful melee character similar to what a Rouge is. In Cat form you can use stealth to sneak past enemies and will have a high level of energy for your attacks. You may also move at a faster pace than your natural form.
When a Druid becomes a Bear it is usual used to operate as a tank. As a Bear, Druids can take high amounts of damage and generate a great deal of threat from their enemies. Druid's have healing abilities as well. The Tree form is best suited for healing, where the Druid takes on similar traits to a Priest.
Limitations are the biggest down fall of a Druid. They are only able to wear leather armor, making them susceptible to melee attacks from their enemies. Thus you should look at gear for enhancement of your character, not for protection. Keep a good distance from enemies because of your lack of protective gear.
There are always positives and negatives to everything, changing forms is no different. Each form clearly represents a different type of character that the Druid can mimic, but when you mimic one of those character types full time, you will see a difference in performance comparable to the class you are mimicking. For example, if you were looking to be a permanent healer and be in Tree form all the time, you might want to consider being a Priest instead. You will have more spells to choose from. The success of a Druid comes in their ability to be versatile, if you are looking to be one specific aspect of a Druid; I suggest you try another character.
Check out this Druid Leveling Guide for a more detailed look into being a Druid.
When it comes to matching which talent goes with which spec you want, it is pretty easy. Three specs for three talent trees.. If you choose to be a tank, you will want to utilize the Balance talents and if you want to mainly DPS then Feral Combat will be your best choice. That leaves Restoration to be your tree for healing. One drawback to having so many different specs to choose from is that your talent trees are harder to make your own.
For example: If you were a Warlock, you would only be able to do damage, even though you have three different talent builds to choose from. This wide range of options gives you the ability to fine tune what you want to accomplish with your Warlock. With Druids, you only have the one tree based on what you decide to have you spec in (tanking, DPSing or healing)|When it comes to Druids you have one tree per spec and that is it.
When you level a Druid I would suggest using the Feral Combat talent tree even if you don't want to end up as a DPS. When leveling you are usually by yourself, thus you want to make sure you have protection and damage, Feral Combat does both of those things. Others would be tempted to pick Restoration, but that would put you at a disadvantage when it came to killing your enemies. Feral Combat also lets you have more animal forms you can change into, which is a blast!
Don’t get too weighed down by all the different options that a Druid gives you. Use the time leveling your character to see what aspect of the Druid interests you the most, and focus on that. This will give you ample time to make your decision and you can always change the talent points in your talent trees.
When you have a powerful Druid, it can make any group much better. Utilizing their different abilities in all three spec categories, a Druid can make or break a raid or a battle ground fight. A Druid can be a welcomed addition to any group.
If you want more help with leveling your characters and your overall World of Warcraft knowledge, visit the Best WOW Guides.
How To Get To Level 80 With Your Druid
Hello fellow Druid! My article is all about the Druid talent builds and which one you should be using to level faster and gather the right gear for the endgame content before it is too late!
Alright, here we go.
1) The Balance Spec
The Balance talent build is a caster talent build. What are the consequences? First of all, you need a lot of good equipment to be able to level decently. Your damage will be based on your mana since all your spells require a lot of mana to cast.
Here’s the problem: In the old world there’s hardly any spellcaster gear. That’s why I urge you not to choose Balance below level 60.
2) Feral Tree
This talent tree does not require spellcaster gear and still generates a nice DPS. It also makes you tougher so you will die less often! The best thing about this spec is, that your abilities do not use up mana. It’s easy to fight your enemy, kill it and then shapeshift to heal yourself up before you start the next fight.
The Feral tree is the best for leveling purposes. But when you come closer to the level cap, Dungeons become more important. Unfortunately all you can be to enter a group is either a tank or a damage dealer. And there are already lots of DDs and tanks waiting in the queue.
3) The Restoration Tree
Use the Restoration Tree to become a healer - of course that’s automatically useless for questing on your own. You can still join groups and visit Dungeons as a healer if you want to level up that way.
The talent build suddenly gets very useful when you come closer to the level cap! You should always be able to find a groups as a healer and you can start to collect the spellcaster equipment you need for your raid group right before you hit the level cap.
Would you now like to learn more about other classes? If you are interested in learning about a Mage leveling guide, then please continue reading here: http://www.mage-levelingguide.com/.
Just How WoW’s Cataclysm Expansion Pack Could Possibly Make It More Difficult For Hybrid Classes To Choose Gear : A Druid’s Perspective
As soon as I first started playing WoW, I went through quite a few classes before deciding upon a druid. I hated being pigeonholed as just a healer or just DPS, and druid offered up an escape from being a one-trick pony. The only problem was that with so many options in front of me, I wasn't quite sure how to go about leveling, so I solved my problem by getting into a druid leveling guide and letting it take care of the details.
Of course all of this was back at release, when hybrid classes had huge issues finding gear. I can't even count the amount of time I spent in the wow auction house, hoping for something decent to pop up. Fortunately for my social life, the gear quandary was resolved with the release of The Burning Crusade. The quests in Outland offered a much wider variety of quest rewards. The odds of getting through more than a couple of quests without getting a new piece of gear were slim to none. Whether you were a "true" class or a hybrid, no matter what your talent spec was you were going to be getting a lot of gear as you leveled.
At the point that Wrath of the Lich King was released, Blizzard gave us more of the same. Hybrids got plenty of options as well as a consistent upgrade path irrespective of build. However where The Burning Crusade had focused on base stat points like agility and stamina, WOTLK placed the attention on rating stats like crit rating and spellpower. Base stats were pushed to the back of the stage, which turned out particularly well for the more well rounded hybrids. Where it was previously difficult to gear for multiple specs, requiring a great deal of either gold or time, it suddenly became something that you could achieve incidentally.
At this point with Cataclysm coming out, it looks like things are going to be shifting once again. The stat model will be getting overhauled yet again. Which means now, the big question is if brand new druids will need to be investing time and expense following a druid leveling guide in addition to staring at their screen in the wow auction house for long periods of time like before, or maybe if the simplicity and variety presented in Burning Crusade will end up winning out. I suppose we don't have that long to wait before we learn the answer.
Druid Leveling Guide
The druid is a very interesting class in that it starts out pretty slow but turns out into, in my opinion, the best leveler. Whether you choose Balance or Feral you will do very well, as you still have the ability to heal yourself after combat. I have to say though, even though Moonkin is an option I highly recommend going the feral route. Because of this I will only cover Feral leveling in this guide.
The downside to being a melee class is that your gear decides greatly how fast you kill mobs. If you’re looking to solve this problem you can have a look at my Secret Gold Guide Review. In the review I cover all the features of this renowned gold guide.
Let’s get back to feral leveling. I suppose I haven’t mentioned it and as such I will now, don’t even consider going restoration to level. For those druids wanting to heal dungeons as they go through the levels I suggest you simply go moonkin as it gives you plenty of ability to heal the relatively easy dungeon content (at least till around level 50) while not losing your damage capabilities when soloing.
With that said I will finally get into the core of this guide.
As previously mentioned druids are slow starters. The reason for this is because from level 1 through 10 you only have a few spells and a staff to deal damage, while from 10-20 you’ll be in Bear form which is made for taking damage, not dealing it. This doesn’t mean it won’t be easy to level though, especially in bear form there’s very little risk of dying and the damage isn’t that bad.
The next point I’d like to stress is that if you want a good feral talent point you will have to carefully choose your points, namely between damage and survival talents. Remember that even though you will spend most of your time in cat form, your bear form is still there for those clutch situations where you get in over your head.
Click here for the feral build
As you can see I didn’t create a level 80 build. This is done to make sure you only get the talents that are good. Afterwards you get the talents from the restoration tree after which you can freely spend your last 2 talent points as you see fit.
Now I’ll cover some of the talent choices. Unfortunately the talent choices aren’t too nifty until you start getting Feral Swiftness at level 20. Feral Swiftness is the beginning of the greatness that is the feral tree, giving you a superb 30% movement speed increase in cat form on top of some well needed dodge chance. Swiftness allows you to speed up your leveling in so many ways, from mob traveling time to getting around before you get your travel form and mount. You will always get full benefit from this talent.
My choice of Survival Instincts and Thick Hide is to lower the chance of dying as this really puts a hamper on things. I’m a big fan of spending some scattered points in keeping yourself alive as not only is corpse running boring, it takes a lot of time as well. Especially Survival Instincts is great as you can use this in cat form as well.
After the slow start you’ll now start getting your damage dealing talents for your cat form. This is mainly Primal Fury as it gives you twice as many combo points when your critically strike with your combo points. This is especially powerful when soloing as mobs will die so quick that you don’t a long time to build them up.
I’ll now explain why I didn’t pick up Shredding Attacks. There’s not much to it. Al though it is a must have if you’re dealing damage in a group or raid situation it is rather useless solo. It’s a hassle setting up situations to get behind your target. On top of this is shred very dependent on effects such as bleeds and glyphs to deal good damage. This leads to Claw/Mangle being your combo point generator of choice.
Once you get deeper into the feral tree you will find even more talents that subtly boost your damage. This is until you finally hit level 40 and you can pick up mangle which will finally remove your silly claw attack. I chose not to max the improved version as the return in talent points spend isn’t worth it while soloing. After mangle you can start picking up King of the Jungle which changes your tiger’s fury from a cute little buff to a powerful on-demand energy boost. It’s easy to forget having it, so I hereby remind you to use Tiger’s Fury on cooldown as soon as you pick up at least a single point in King of the Jungle.
Now we get to Rend and Tear, which is another superb talent for soloing and will show you some great druid ability synergy. Your main attack being mangle, increases the bleeding damage the target takes while inflicting high damage. This is followed by using rake on the target to put a bleed effect on it. Then you look at Rend and Tear and you realize your Ferocious Bite now has an increased 25% chance to critically strike. Considering this is a finishing move that is usually used when your target is already weakened it makes this even better at what it’s supposed to do, namely finishing stuff.
After this you can move on to the restoration tree and pick up those talents to further increase your damage. Especially clearcasting is great as it ends up requiring you to pay attention to when it procs and making the best use of it afterwards.
All in all I can recommend going feral for anybody who wants a unique but powerful leveling experience. If you’re ever looking for a change you can always have a look at the Balance tree, but as I find feral faster and more enjoyable I’m afraid you’ll have to look for a balance guide somewhere else 
.
If on the other hand you’re looking for a step-by-step questing guide I recommend you check out Dugi’s Guide which you can find through my Dugi’s Guide Review Here.
