I’ll still be mainly doing the retail, but as a lore fan, I do want to do some classic quests that I missed because I joined during 4.1. (e.g. Windsor quests)
I assume lock or hunter might be really good, but I may be wrong lol. any suggestions on race-class pair?
Lock and hunter are probably the best choices, as you suspected.
Mage is also good if you go frost spec for leveling. My Druid is only level 10 so I haven’t really played the class, but I’d imagine they could be good…any input Druids?
Priest is actually surprisingly resilient. I wasn’t expecting it when I made one, but they have a lot of cool abilities that help with survivability. Of course my priest is only in the high 20s, I suspect their advantage diminishes at higher levels.
Warlock and Hunter are best solo leveling classes and can often solo elite quests and elite mobs that would otherwise be near impossible for some others.
Mages have high damage out put and frost mages can handle large packs of mobs, but in general there’s only so far you can go solo on a mage. Warriors need a healer on some quests while leveling. No comment on shaman as I didn’t touch one until retail BC.
Rogues can solo some hard quests in interesting ways and they have vanish which a druid, the only other stealth class, either has to to live and die by bear form and barkskin heals or just skips. A balance or resto druid can only do so much on certain elites quests and mobs. A balance druid will be oom earlier and needing a pot or an innervate. Feral is widely considered the best druid leveling spec. You can play every role with a gear swap. A well played feral can solo quests and elites that seem very hard for some other classes. That said warlocks and hunters (especially hunters!) will be able to kite mobs and kill them. A druid would probably root and run if it went that far.
Can’t give much on priests either. Pallies have a lot of big cooldowns to save them and can heal through a lot, but if you’re leveling holy then mobs can run you out of mana.
I’d go with a hunter. The cons are you’re going to have to keep stock of your ammo and food for your pet. That’s some bag space taken, but you can kite mobs, traps pre-fight, later in leveling feign death to reset aggro to keep a mob on your pet or get somewhere with a ton of mobs for a quest items (seriously, run in to the spot, feign death, and let the mobs reset back at their original spot…quest item!), and more. After my druid my main alt was my hunter. If you hit max level, do Molten Core, and get the hunter quest item off Domo you have a unique class quest you can do that’s a bit of a challenge. So yeah, I’d say go hunter.
Warlock and hunter, and if the mob can be kited frost mage as a close 3rd.
Warlock because fear is op and doesn’t break from damage.
Fear does not work on Number 2
…pally is good…
Pet classes, I’ve been able to decently solo some elite quests as a shadow priest in STV
Just requires some skill of your class. Leveling a warlock can be good fear / dot / or (banish / curse of doom depending on the type of mob if they are elite)
Druids are good solo questers. Once you get cat form you can kill one mob after the other with a heal in-between and you basically never have to stop to eat or drink.
Fear can get you in some dicey situations too. A trap is stationary and you can decide where the mob is CC’d.
Feral druids are.
True, the problem is on some elite quests you’ll end up out of mana and needing a heal. Alchemy helps there, but a hunter won’t have that issue. That said I love my druids. I’ve leveled 15 to max level between retail Vanilla to Legion to private servers to Classic. I’ve learned a lot of tricks and know better timing than I do with the druid class than any other class. That said without that kind of experience I’d say hunter for experience quests.
Although I hope OP rolls multiple classes and gets to have multiple kinds of experiences in Classic. That’s the fun way to play.