How is the Druid leveling experience in Classic? Is it enjoyable? I’d rather level my Druid than boost for TBC.
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I’ve always thought leveling a druid was difficult. This time I smartened up and looked up druid macros before I tried it. They make all the difference in the world. I just hit lvl 33 and I’m having a ball.
Couchy
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Nice. What sorts of things do the macros do?
The big thing they do is making switching forms much, much easier. Especially when you want to use a spell that requires a form that you aren’t currently in. My favorite is the one that allows you to pop out of your form, drink a health pot, then instantly return to bear form. I can’t link anything, but you should Google “Totally Pawsome Druid Macros”. It’s a great place to start.
Couchy
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Leveling as a druid is fine, its just slow, especially the first 20 levels then it’s a bit better.
it’s definitely best to level as a feral leveling spec. You just shift to heal/throw a hot on yourself and for the most part DPS as cat and sometimes bear on harder mobs. Sometimes root secondary mobs or hibernate or whatever. The positive thing is there isn’t a lot of downtimes and you can do a lot solo.
i didn’t use any macros but if that makes it easier for you that’s great.
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druids are super fun to level in bc. I leveled one on netherwing right before classic launched and had a blast. Flight form is super clutch
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If you are a serial altoholic (like me), Druid is a great class to discourage you from re-rolling because you can always do a little bit of everything. If that’s not important to you then you may feel a little discouraged by the lack of identity and speciality.
Otherwise, as others have said, slow going up to level 20 but then it’s a blast. Zero downtime, can fill any slot in a dungeon group, 30% movement speed increase at level 21 (if you spec feral). Easy stuff.
1-10, druid is easily the slowest-leveling class. You’re weak as hell and your spells feel kinda pathetic. Things pick up a bit when you hit 10, since Bearform practically makes you invincible against single quest mobs, but it can get really boring because Maul is literally your only attack. It’s not until level 20 that Druid starts getting fast/interesting.
Overall though, Druid is the 2nd fastest leveling class because you have 0 downtime and you get passive 30% movespeed boost at level 21.
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I dunno… I struggled wirh anything that put poison, magic or curses. While probably unnecess6, I was compelled to always remove that crap because I could. Shifting so much just chewed my mana.
Lashers in Un’goro sucked.
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Thanks for the replies, everyone. Very helpful. Now if I can just get past the awful Tauren cat form…
Yeah, that is true. If you can avoid doing it for every 3-4 mobs it’s fine but being unable to dispel curses and poisons from shapeshift form is a pain if you’re farming enemies that do it frequently.
No downtime leveling. I recommend getting the Druid mana bar addon so you can see your mana regen while shifted. That way you can blow all your mana and switch to bear or cat and just melee until your mana is full again.
Rinse and repeat.
Edit: Oh, you are going to want to write several macros. Mainly for getting you out of an animal form to cast spells like healing or buffing. At level 20 it is a good idea to also write a macro to make switching between bear and cat forms a one button action.
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Druid is the worst class in the game starting out, spam wrath and whack stuff on the head with a staff. Then both eat and drink because you don’t have any mana to self-heal. It’s one of those “charming” quirks of Classic.
Once you get cat form leveling a druid is fine. You can stealth out of a lot of areas to turn quests in more efficiently, which is a huge time saver. You can also pop out of cat and heal instead of having to sit and eat like a rogue. I don’t think it goes as fast as a BM hunter or an AoE frost grinding mage, but you can grind pretty steadily.
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I found it to be fairly smooth. I leveled with a mix of bear/cat. Had the movement speed talent and 7? talents in resto for the shapeshifting. It was fun to join groups as dps but be able to pick up tanking if the tank died or do some emergency healing. Grinding was very efficient. Once I got swipe for the bear it got much easier. I used that and killed crabs on the beach in Westfall for a while. Pick up a Rakzur Club from the AH or something else with str/stam and you’re set for a while 
Druid is great, but druid is the hardest class to be good at. If you’re a clicker, don’t play druid. If you don’t understand basic game mechanics, like how spirit works or what the five-second rule is, don’t play druid. If you don’t know how to make macros, don’t play druid. If you don’t understand how threat works, especially healing threat(prehots), don’t play druid.
To play druid well you have to have already mastered the game.
For leveling all you need are /startattack macros for all your primary abilities. You should save these two for later. First is a one-button for aquatic/travel form. Second will cast healing touch rank 3 on the target of the enemy mob(IE the tank). Can also change it to whatever rank you want, or other heals(I have the same for rank 5 rejuv/regrowth).
/cancelform [noform:2/4]
/cast [swimming] Aquatic Form; [noswimming] Travel Form
/cast [@target, help][@targettarget, help][@player] Healing Touch(Rank 3)
Feral is the most straightforward, but the feral tree kinda sucks till you get to the bottom. And feral in general is the least versatile of the specs.
I’ve tried a lot of different specs. My favorite spec by far has been 24-5-22. It was my leveling spec, but I used it for like the first two months I hit 60 because I wanted something I could tank 5-mans and heal raids with, and I didn’t want to give up nature’s grasp or improved thorns.
I didn’t realize how big a deal natural shapeshifter + moonglow + reflection was until I respec’ed 11-34-6 believing it would make tanking 5-mans and farming much more efficient(I was also farming timbermaw rep at the time).
With 24-5-22 I could prehot pretty much every pull because of cheaper spells/better regen. Whereas with full feral I felt like I was constantly oom. So as full feral I would just never leave bearform and keep rage high between pulls. Which meant the healer would have to heal me a lot more, and my aoe threat was actually worse than 24-5-22(no improved thorns, no aoe threat from prehots).
Likewise I felt like feral wasn’t even more efficient for farming timbermaw rep. The moonfire > swipe > hurricane from omen of clarity proc felt better than just staying in kitty. But I did make a macro that would /target winterfall and setraidtarget with a skull, to make it easier to find them.
Priest is even worse till you get a wand. Once you get bearform you should prehot > pull 3-4 mobs with moonfire > swipe down with thorns. Thorns will do like 10-30% of your overall damage depending on how many mobs you pull and how evenly they die. Your base mana regen at low levels is really high, so you should have regened full mana in the like ~30-45 seconds it took you to swipe them all down. This strategy is especially effective for mobs with a fast attack speed(cats). Also the ghosts that are around level 12, east of auberdine, near Anaya, I remember them having especially low HP. I ended up AOE farming them for like 30 minutes just because it was easy.
If you can find packs of cats, your thorns will do twice as much damage(1.0 vs 2.0 attack speed). And if you get improved thorns talent, your thorns will do almost twice as much damage. I prefer rushing omen of clarity + improved thorns. The damage is actually better than the comparable 14 points in feral, and omen of clarity/improved thorns is really nice in groups, especially for dungeons(can melee for omen of clarity procs to give free heals and never go oom).
Also, I usually continue doing the prehot > bear > thorns trick till like 40+. But thorns and swipe don’t scale much with gear/talents. Kitty scales much better. After 40 you can really feel bear drop off hard relative to kitty. But you can change up bear a bit by pulling 3-5 mobs with moonfire > go bearform > swipe till you get a omen of clarity proc > barkskin into a hurricane > go back bear and swipe down. Depending on what you’re killing, Hurricane might do half their health, thorns another third. So it is often still more efficient than kitty. And far more fun.
I find the stationary claw spamming to be horribly boring. In bearform you have a 2.5 second auto attack, which means you can hit > run for 2.5 seconds > hit > run for 2.5 seconds, and just keep moving(but you’ll need an auto-attack timer addon).
Lastly, and probably most importantly. Druid is the least gear-dependent class. Your base damage scales as you level, and thorns/swipe aren’t really affected by gear. Even with the absolute best gear relative to total casual gear, you’ll only get like a 20% damage boost. Whereas rogues/warriors will do twice as much damage with the best gear(and take less damage, which is important when you don’t have a heal).
Its good at leveling with all the different roles u can do .
I’ve leveled every class to 60, except Warlock, in a non-boosting type of way. I’d probably put Druid as the third best leveling class behind Hunter and Mage. I would even slot them ahead of Mages if you’re not going to be AoE farming to level a Mage. Druid is just such a smooth leveling experience.
As people have mentioned, the 1-10 grind is pretty obnoxious, but that’s only 6-8 hours or so? A drop in the bucket of the total /played to 60.
Feral gets early access to +movement speed talents at level 20, which is probably the best pre-level40 mount talent point investment among any class in the game. Druids healing abilities + first aid means you will never have to sit down to eat, and rarely have to sit down to drink.
If you’re leveling on a PvP server, druids are second to none at avoiding ganks. Between stealth, nature’s grasp, and travel form/dash, it’s super easy to pick and choose your fights, a luxury most classes don’t get.
I leveled my Druid as Alliance, and having a teleport to Moonglade really comes in handy for us. It makes cross-continent traveling much quicker, as you won’t always have to fly to Menethil/BB to get to the other side. Always keep your HS in Eastern Kingdoms. Although Moonglade is pretty northern Kalimdor, making a Moonglade to Gadget flight pretty long, it’s a pretty good time to get up, use the bathroom, get a drink, take the dog out, etc.
Assuming you level Feral, keeping a set of +int gear in your bags means you can fill any role in a dungeon, if you want to run those and knock off dungeon quests. By far, I had the easiest time getting dungeon groups together while leveling my druid, as it’s usually tank/healers that are hard to come by during the leveling grind. Easily the most flexible class in the game, which is king for pre-60 content.
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Druid is the second best class in the game after a shaman for leveling fun.
I’m not biased I swear.
I would hope not. But some people are pretty slow. I do 1-6(the starting area) in like 30 minutes. This speedrunner did 1-10 in 1 hour 40 minutes. A normal person should be able to do all of Teldrassil in less than 4 hours(and be level 12).
I just wanted to add that most people seriously undervalue spirit. This is because the benefits of spirit aren’t obvious, and because if people don’t understand the five-second rule, they won’t let themselves regen.
For some perspective. The druid regen is spirit/5+15 per tick. So if you have 100 spirit, then while not casting you regenerate 20 mana per tick, or about 10 mana per second. That means that “while not casting”, each point of spirit regenerates about .1 mana per second. Which seems small, but it is constant. If you do a 5-man that takes 30 minutes to clear, and you’re out of the 5-second rule half of the time. Each point of spirit will net you 90 mana compared to 15 from intellect. Which means 100 spirit will yield 9000 mana, while 100 intellect will only yield 1500 mana.
If you’re like me and melee for omen of clarity procs, with lots of spirit, you pretty much never have to drink.