Shifting Perspectives: Your first steps as a Druid
Shifting Perspectives: Your first steps as a Druid
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week John Patricelli, sometimes known as the Big Bear Butt Blogger, starts his series on leveling a new Druid from 1st level all the way to 70th.
Before I begin my series on leveling your new Druid from 1st through 70th levels, I’m going to start with some of the things you can do to prepare.
Why not just leap right on into level 1? My reasoning is simple, just like me. When you have been watching Druids claw face as bears or cats, or as a new player you read about the description of the class and the shapechanging capabilities Druids enjoy, you might just expect to walk in and start doing the same yourself right from the start. The promise of the class is the fun of shifting from one form to another, depending on your playstyle.
Well, when you start your new Druid at level 1, you won’t be clawing faces. Instead, you will be leveling as a caster… a ranged DPS caster for levels 1 - 10, and likely on towards 20. Just as Hunters don’t get the ability to tame a pet until level 10, Druids do not get the chance to learn their first form until the Bear quest chain becomes available at level 10.
If, as you were sitting at the character creation screen, you were thinking you were going to be a kitty, all up in the face of the bad guys right from the start, it can be a bit of a let down. Especially if you don’t care for playing a caster class in the first place.
Hopefully, however, by knowing how to set yourself up in advance with the in-game Options, useful User interfaces and Addons, you’ll find yourself leveling up as a caster painlessly, and may even come to enjoy the versatility of some of the Druid’s powerful casting abilities.
While the focus of this series of articles will be to help guide a brand new player into the fun of playing a Druid, hopefully there will also be some suggestions that an experienced player trying the Druid for the first time will find useful.
5. Racial Traits breakdown
Before starting your new Druid, you’ll need to decide which faction and race to choose. You probably already have a fairly good idea which you’re going to select, and it’s unlikely that racial traits will make much of an impact on that decision. It’s still a good idea to be familiar with what extra abilities you’ll have at your disposal.
If you choose to play the Alliance, your only choice for a Druid is the Night Elf. If you go with the Horde, then your choice is limited to the Tauren.
If you are a Night Elf, then you will start with the passive racial traits Nature Resistance, Quickness and Wisp Spirit. Nature Resistance adds +10 to your resistance against nature-based damaging attacks. Quickness adds +1% to your Dodge, and Wisp Spirit arguably is an ability you hope you won’t be using too often, since it makes you turn into a Wisp Spirit on character death, boosting your travel speed on your corpse run by 50%. Of these, Quickness is by far the most useful, as in higher levels, especially as a Bear tank, that +1% Dodge comes in mighty handy.
Night Elves also have a racial trait with an activation, Shadowmeld. Shadowmeld allows you to enter stealth, but the effect breaks if you move. It is mostly useful early on for going ‘away from keyboard’ for brief periods of time in enemy-infested areas. However, in later levels, Shadowmeld is very useful for Druids and Rogues, because it adds an effective 1 character level to stealthing when in Cat form or as a stealthed Rogue.
If you are a Tauren, then you will start with the passive racial traits Nature Resistance, Cultivation and Endurance. As stated above, Nature Resistance adds +10 to your resistance against nature-based damaging attacks. Cultivation adds +15 to the Herbalism profession if you choose to train in it. And Endurance increases your total health by 5%. Endurance obviously benefits you more if you have high health… which is something a Bear tank in later levels will strive for.
Taurens also have their own racial trait with an activation, and it’s a nice one. War Stomp allows you to Stun up to 5 enemies that are within 8 yards of you for 2 seconds, on a 2 minute cooldown timer. Having a 2 second AOE stun is highly useful, especially in your early levels when extra enemies join the fight. A quick War Stomp, followed by backing off and casting Entangling Roots on the extra mob is very, very useful. If you are a Tauren, you must work War Stomp into your playstyle. Also, the benefits of War Stomp in PvP to interrupt casters cannot be overstated.
All things considered, War Stomp has to win out over all of the racial traits presented here for sheer flexibility… but the sneakiness of Shadowmeld and the usefulness of Quickness are very nice consolation prizes.
Enough about racial traits. Let’s talk about what you can do to prepare yourself before you even start your first quest.
Filed under: World of Warcraft