Druid Ramblings

[Refrigerator]

In the picture above you see my Night Elf Druid Freyrveyk wearing the cool looking guild tabard he recently bought (which also made him broke for a bit - 1g - yikes!).

This is my combination Druid ramble/screenie thread. And, btw DeeBye, IrfanView is AWESOME, as is ImageShack. Words cannot express how much I love the program/site. Thank you very much for those links you posted.

Note: Much of this is out of order. For example, I was in Dolanaar waaay before I hit level 8.

So, I started off with my level one druid in Aldrassil, a region in Teldrassil surrounded by mountains with weak monsters all abound. The first thing that happened was the phone rang, and I missed the beginning cinematic bit. I came back on the last three words :angry:.

Anyways, the first thing I saw was a guy with an exclamation mark over his head standing there nearby. I ran over and talked to him, and found out that he wanted me to thin out the wild animals to balance the food chain and whatnot. (I don't think he knows that they respawn every few minutes...) I completed the quest fairly easily.

During the first few battles, I tried turning while in combat. It works just as well, it seems. I lunge forward towards the empty air in front of me and the mob behind me takes damage! I also found, later on, that when I did too often my staff skill 'increased' to a number below what it used to be!

"Staff skill increased to 29"
"Staff skill increased to 28"

I had a screenshot of this, but unfortunately, I accidentally deleted it. :(

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I also jumped from the top of the main (only?) tree building in Aldrassil and died on impact, right next to another person that had apparently had the same bright idea as me. The first few levels passed fairly uneventfully after that, killing some random yellow mobs, until I saw a line on the minimap and decided to see what was there. When I got to the area, I saw that the very forest and ground changed where that boundary line was! This is a screenshot of a similar boundary line in a different spot, since I deleted the other one by accident (They were taking up a lot of space!:().

Across the boundary I saw my very first red mobs, WebWood Spiders. They looked a bit too high level for me, but I decided to try one that was 2-3 levels above me just for the heck of it. I won, and it wasn't even all that hard of a fight! Of course, there was no way I'd be able to take on more than one at a time, but I felt happy that I had managed to do at least that.

Past a few more spiders was a spider cave, where there were some spider eggs that I later had to collect a sample of. It was there that I learned a lot about how World of Warcraft was fundamentally different from Diablo 2. The hard way.

One, if a monster sees you, it will keep chasing you for a looooong time, and it will be able to attack you, even if it is 5-10 feet behind you. If you ran away from it while you were in combat with it, it would be able to attack you until it stopped chasing you.

Two, if you run even remotely close to another spider, it will follow you too, and attack you. This will keep on happening, until you have about 5 spiders stacked inside one another. Three, you will die in a matter of seconds.

Running away in WoW, unless you have a fair amount of life and know what you are doing (i.e. crossing the invisible line where the monster will not follow you anymore, which is usually quite a distance) does NOT work. Even if you run into a lake, monsters that would seemingly die if they followed you into a lake will run along the bottom of the lake and attack you, even if you're floating at the top, more than 30 yards away (I know this because I was far enough away that I couldn't hit them with Wrath, which has a 30yd range.) That one really surprised me.

"Ok, I can't beat this mob, so I'll just run away from him. Jeez, he's still hitting me even though I'm running! I know, I'll run into the lake, he can't follow me there! Haha, stupid monster, he followed me into the water, but he's walking on the bottom, and I'm swimming on the top, so I'm ok. OW, he's ATTACKING me! How does THAT work?"

*Starts casting Healing Spells*

I eventually had to swim down to the bottom of the lake to fight this thing.

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Now, onto some of the spells I was using. At first all I had was Wrath and a Healing spell. Both of them operate on a timer: I press the '2' key for Wrath, my druid starts the casting animation and a little bar appears on my screen that says 'Wrath'. The little bar starts filling up with orange, and when it gets to the end, it flashes green and I cast the spell. If an enemy hits me while I'm casting the spell the bar empties of orange and starts again, unless it had managed to get over half in which case it empties halfway.

When fighting enemies such as the leopard-type cats (their names escape me for the moment) in Darkshore, who attack really rapidly, it's just best to not even try to cast spells.Then I got the Moonfire spell. This spell is great, i love it. You cast it at the beginning of combat, it does a bit of damage off the bat, then does an additional X damage over Y seconds. It's an instant cast spell, and I adapted it into my opening routine like so:

I see a monster. I get close enough to start casting Wrath. As soon as the bar is turns green, I cast Wrath again, if there's time, then when that's done the enemy is getting close to me with just enough time for a Moonfire before I engage in melee combat. I then start hitting the mob with my staff, watching for when Moonfire runs out, so I can recast it. I also learned Mark of the Wild fairly early on, which, with the the first rank, just increased the armor of whoever it was cast on by 15 for 30 minutes.

Another spell I got a little bit later on was thorns, which does a little bit of damage to a monster when it hits you. Not all that great by itself, but combined with moonfire and attacking the monster, it adds up. (Note: Thorns is great against guys that use 2 weapons. :lol:)

I'm not going to list the advanced ranks of spells that I got individually because they're pretty much the same but better, so that would just be repetitive. :)

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Next, when I was able to learn Entangling roots at level 8, I was pretty excited. I was thinking: Great, now I can root a melee enemy and wail on them with wrath and moonfire without even getting close! I trained in the spell, and went out looking for an enemy to fight. (note: Entangling roots is not an instant cast spell) I found out, unfortunately, that when you hit enemies trapped by the roots, it releases them from the roots, and they are free to attack you. Except on Mondays every other minute and on enemies that have no rotten teeth. I saw another Night Elf Druid using Engtangling Roots and hitting them with Wrath, and the enemies would stay there for a few seconds before escaping. They said it was because they were a much higher level than the monsters. That may be, I haven't done much testing on it yet.

So, at first I thought it was mostly a useless spell, since it woulnd't hold them in place when they were hit, and it didn't do much damage compared to my other spells, and it rarely held them for the full 12 second duration anyways.

Then I thought about it differently, instead of using it as an attack spell, I could use it as a crowd control spell, to control additional monsters that showed up. Or, when running across country, if I needed to get past a monster quickly and didn't want to fight it, I could just root it and move on. They rarely escape quickly enough to catch up to me before I'm out of their set range that they will go. It's VERY useful now. I've been using this last way quite a bit recently, and the first one not enough.

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I eventually got a quest which told me to deliver a letter to some guy in Dolanaar, the city which I know as D-something with a lot of A's for a loooong time. Aldrassil was a pretty basic place, a few vendors, a class trainer for each of the classes, a few Sentinels for protection, and that important guy at the top of the tree. Dolanaar had a mailbox, an inn, MORE vendors, and a few tradeskill trainers. This is where I started getting quests that I needed to group for. This is also where I saw my first ancient protector. Big. That's about all I can say.

At this point I still had very few skill points and the whole tradeskill thing was pretty confusing. Also, I couldn't FIND any tradeskill trainers. I did a bunch more quests in Dolanaar, including a memorable one where my partner and I had to find a moonwell southeast from the entrance of Darnassus. Now, I was unfamiliar with the names in this place, and thought that Darnassus was the continent and Teldrassil was the city. My partner thought that by Darnassus it meant Dolanaar. I thought that we should go to the most south eastern part of the continent, and my partner thought that we should start from the sign by Dolanaar and go south east. So, we didn't quite understand at the time that where we thought we should go was different. We ended up trying to go over the southest easternest mountains in Teldrassil, looking for the moonwell that was in the southeastern corner of the city of Darnassus.

About an hour later, after looking at some lakes I clued in and we just followed the stone path from Dolanaar to Darnassus, and found it really quickly. Now I always read the quest log thouroughly before starting to walk.

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So, after doing that quest, I spent more than an hour trying to find my way around Darnassus. It's pretty confusing at first. By that time, I really wanted to learn a tradeskill. I didn't care what, I just wanted to do SOMETHING. I found my way to the Cenarion Glade and picked up the survival skill, just for the quirkiness of it. It took me a long time to figure out that lumber was bought at the General Goods vendor, and not the Reagent or Trades vendors. I then built a few campfires in fun places.

While exploring Darnassus, I came upon something rather odd... Looks like Blizz forgot something...

Also while exploring Darnassus, I was swimming around, following the water, and I found out where the water flows to! Strangely, this water wasn't moving at all, and looked as if you were still above water, even when underneath the waterfall. Normally when below water, everything is blue, and you swim. I wasn't swimming. It was a translucent waterish looking curtain. Like the birds and fish that just sit still, it's probably because I have the settings all the way down. Of course I just COULDN'T stop there. I tried to slide down the slope, but died upon landing.

Now for two sort of scenic screenshots before I wrap up this part of the report. I haven't even gotten on to bear form or Darkshore yet!

One is in Teldrassil, a picture of the purple night sky, and the moon. The other is a bit north of Dolanaar, I think, and it's a hidden little passage behind some hills that leads to a cave full of little imp type things, and back to the main field type foresty places. I liked this place, it's scenery was pretty, and unique. Nothing looked quite the same as it.

Unlike Ironforge, where every shop or house uses almost exactly the same design, or worse, where I found two CAVES, one in westfall, one in darkshore that had exactly the same layout. I felt that crossed the line. I can see dwarves building houses the same, but I CANNOT imagine caves forming in EXACTLY the same formation. That ruined part of the atmosphere for me. I know there will be a lot of caves that they have to do, but couldn't they make the effort to make it at least SLIGHTLY different?

SNEAK PEEK: Next time, on WoWReport...

THE BEAR!

[Bolty]

Newb. :)

Seriously, nice read! I'll try to shed some light on things here:

The land of Teldrassil is really a gigantic tree. It is the new World Tree, grown by the Night Elves in an attempt to regain the immortality that they possessed when defending the old World Tree, Nordrassil. Nordrassil was corrupted beyond use by the Burning Legion. When you jumped down from the waterfall, you jumped OFF the World Tree. Jumping off a tree that's larger than 50 Empire State Buildings put together is usually a bad thing. :)

The capital of Teldrassil is Darnassus, and you're right - it's confusing, because it's a city that Blizzard hasn't put too much effort into yet. It's getting a major rework soon, but I don't know if that'll be in the next patch.

It's fun watching your learning curve at work - your discovery of Entangling Roots as a crowd control spell is dead on. You will find it more and more useful the more you play, allowing you to take a monster out of a battle for a period of time while you work on another, or simply providing you with a breather or a chance to run away.

From what I understand, there are around 13 basic cave layouts, and of course there are more than 13 caves in the game, so you will see repetition. You will also see repetition in architecture throughout the game. With thousands of buildings and hundreds of caves, it could be a bit much to expect Blizzard to create unique ones throughout the world.

-Bolty

[Bun-Bun]

The capital of Teldrassil is Darnassus, and you're right - it's confusing, because it's a city that Blizzard hasn't put too much effort into yet. It's getting a major rework soon, but I don't know if that'll be in the next patch.

Interesting. I found Darnassus to be pretty well laid out, and laid out rather prettily. :) Of the cities I've visited, it's almost as easy for me to navigate as IronForge, and significantly easier than StormWind. On the other hand, StormWind has the guards to tell you where to go, and familiarity may be a factor. And it's all IMHO.

But oh, those Ancients. :)

[--Pete]

Hi,

Because of my Unfailing Sense of Direction® (it never fails to get me lost), I've spent about half a day each in Ironforge and Stormwind doing a complete map (there are some online, but I find them too cartoony to be of much use, YMMV). So, I can find my way around those two OK.

Right now, the minimap seems to be broken in Stormwind, so that even with the guard's help, getting around is a PITA. Hopefully that is an indication that the often mentioned city maps are being implemented.

--Pete

[Refrigerator]

WoWReport#2

THE BEAR!

Welcome to the next part of my druid ramblings! Bonus points to anyone who can count the number of bears in the last picture of my last post!

A few levels after I got bear form, I started questing in Darkshore, so that’s mostly what I’ll talking about this time. Also, I’m never using notepad in Win2k again, as it screws with the format a LOT. :(

So, the first time I went to Darkshore was when I was exploring the city of Darnassus (which was not a wasted hour and a half; I know my way around there pretty well now), just after I jumped off the local waterfall. I saw an odd pink glowy thing surrounded by big runestones, which intrigued my curiosity, but my suicidal instinct urged me to jump off the waterfall first. Guess which instinct won? :lol:

So, (eventually) I walked into the circle of runestones with a pink aura around them, and lo and behold, I was teleported to the outer edge of Teldrassil! I followed the path before me, which split two ways. One led to a pier and the hippogryphs, and the other led to a hut where their eggs were kept. My first visit to Teldrassil, I wasn’t quite a high enough level and was annihilated by the level 10 Moonstalkers.

On my next trip to Darkshore, I was more prepared. The Moonstalkers were so scared of me, they ran up trees trying to get away. :lol: At first, I disliked Darkshore, just coming from beautiful Teldrassil and it’s purple sky. I really like the atmosphere of Teldrassil. Very well done. In contrast, Darkshore was, well, dark, gloomy, and sort of boring. It never lightened up, even when it was daytime. Eventually, though, I came to love it, and see how it was actually quite nice.

And now, for another dead sea animal lying half-decomposed on the beach picture!

The first quest I got in Darkshore was one where I had to gather some mushrooms from a dangerous cave. Wonder what he wanted those mushrooms for…? At the time, it was red for me, so we’ll come back to that later.

I don’t remember exactly how this line of quests started out, but I liked it, overall. The first one (I think) asked me to trap a Rabid Thistle Bear and bring it back here. First I had to lay a trap on the ground, then lure a Rabid Thistle Bear into it. Then, once the trap had released and stunned the rabid thistle bear, I had to target it and type “/soothe”. After that, the bear would just follow me around.

This wasn’t very hard for me, I just set the trap while I was fighting the bear, and it worked fine. For some reason, MANY other players couldn’t get the /soothe part to work, and assumed it was bugged. Not sure if it was bugged in their case or whether they just couldn’t type… :lol:

Once I had caught the bear, I had to bring it back to someone in Auberdine, the town in Darkshore, for him to study. He finished studying the bear and proclaimed that the Rabid Thistle Bears had to be destroyed, then told me to kill twenty(!) of them. Surprisingly, this quest didn’t take very long and was actually quite enjoyable compared to some… It was also very group-friendly. Thistle bears are quite plentiful, if you know where to look.

After I had killed enough of the bears, he commissioned me to kill the Den Mother. This one was red (really hard) to me too, but by this time I had found a few friends to play with, and we easily killed her and her two cubs, after waiting a few minutes for her to respawn. The hard part was finding her. The map showed a cave, but the cave was partway up the mountain. Also, a wide area around the cave was crawling with thicket bears. Overall, it was an enjoyable quest line.

One quest that was NOT fun was in the ruins of Bashal’Aran. I talked to the spirit of a night elf that was surrounded by a blue glow, and he asked me to collect, I think 8 magical earrings from the Grell-type demons around the area. Just for me and one other person to collect them took more than an hour. We’d kill maybe 10 Grells for each earring. And each of us needed 8 separate earrings. That’s a lotta Grells. By the end of it all I was so sick of Grells, never seeing one again would be too soon. Eventually we finished it, but right after that, we had to start killing the numerous Satyrs in the area… Fortunately, we only had to find one this time.

Frequently when the Satyrs die, they get stuck in their dying animation, and just stand there, dancing. Well, they’re not really dancing, but it sure looks like it! It’s hard to get a sense of motion from a screenshot, but I’ll try and explain it a bit. The satyrs are sort of staggering a bit, then beginning to fall over, but right about then their death animation resets to the beginning again. Rinse and repeat. :lol:

And now, for another dead guy floating in the water picture!

Now, back to the magic mushroom quest. We had to look for mushrooms in a cave which happened to be just across the river from the Den Mother’s cave! Me and my other 2 party members had to gather 5 of a common kind of mushroom, found throughout the beginning of the cave, and 1 of a Death Cap (I think), which was way in the back, past all the tough monsters. This cave had monsters that were several level above us, and it was also the first time I fought any naga. These baddies introduced a new factor in the fight: Frost Nova. Maybe. Sorry, I’m not entirely sure of the name, but ‘frost nova’ describes it well. When they cast this spell, a ring of frost burst out from them, and anybody it hits gets chained to the ground for a while. If you’re only a melee fighter and this hits you when you’re out of melee range of the mob, you’re stuck sitting there waiting for it to wear off. It also prevents running, which is sometimes quite annoying.

We got all the way up to the last room, but then, in an accident, (I don’t remember what it was, but probably a bad pull. Even at lower levels, that can be dangerous.) my two party members were wiped out. I was saved by a level 20+ dwarven rogue who was passing through. He stayed with me to make sure respawns didn’t kill me and even offered to escort me to the Death Cap, which was now within sight. If you could see through the monsters guarding it, that is. Once my party members resurrected in the cave, the rest was fairly uneventful. Got the Death Cap, fought our way back out.

Now, I think it’s time to discuss the bear a bit, eh? :D The bear is essentially a warrior in a nature disguise, as far as I can tell. In bear form you get 2 more hit points per point of stamina and + X to hp. Also a bonus to power, but it’s not quite as significant as the health. The bear also has a taunting ability – Growl, which is probably my most used ability. Unfortunately, I find Growl is resisted quite a lot, and in lower level areas, there is no point trying to draw agro, because by the time you do the monster is dead. When it happens 5-6 times in a row, it just gets plain annoying. :(

The other attacks the bear gets relatively early are:

Maul: Adds 18 damage to your next attack.

Demoralizing Roar: Decreases enemies attack power by 25 (AoE)

Bash: Stuns enemy for 2 seconds.

Enrage: Increases your rage by 20 over 10 seconds, but decreases armor by 75% for that duration. Goodbye damage reduction. This ability is quite useful, because often it’s really hard to generate rage as a bear when you first get into combat. Looking at this skill again, I suppose that’s exactly what it’s for. It’s to help the bear get enough rage to draw the attention of the mob(s) via growl. If nobody’s hitting you, then you don’t need armor anyways, so there’s no reason not to use it!

And, now for another beautiful bear picture. Stay AWAY from the light!!!

In solo play with the bear, (not very often) my pattern usually looks something like this:
(1)Enrage
(2)Engage mob in combat
(3)Demoralizing Roar
(4)Wait until I have enough rage, then use Maul.
(5)Repeat step 4 until mob is doing something I don’t like, such as running away, or casting a spell, in which case I use Bash. Go back to step 4.

In team play with the bear, (and only whenever there is a need of a tank) my pattern usually looks something like this:
(1)Enrage
(2)Growl. Growl again. Growl until the mob stops resisting Growl and turns towards me to fight.
(3)Demoralizing Roar
(4)Wait until I have enough rage, then use Maul.
(5)Repeat step 4 until mob is doing something I don’t like, such as running away, or casting a spell, in which case I use Bash. Go back to step 4.

As you can see, pretty much the same except for the Growling. My bear growls a lot. When fighting lower level guys with a group, when even a spellcaster can tank anything just fine, I only use Maul, as by the time I get the mob’s attention, it’s dead. That’s happened enough times that I have realized to not waste rage doing that by now.

Also a question for the warrior players out there: How exactly is rage generated? Is it based on how much you’re getting hit, or how much you’re hitting, or both? Does the amount of damage dealt matter?


And now for – just joking, sorry. This is just a picture of the ghost realm, for those that might not have seen it. Note that there must still be oxygen, of a sort, in the ghost realm, because my torch is still burning. But it’s ghostly too. I sure hope the ghost of my torch doesn’t come back to haunt me… Also when I was walking around in the ghost realm, I found this bizarre portally thing. I couldn’t click on it or do anything to it. I have no idea what it is, but I suspect might have something to do with PvP, because there were a few horde members raiding Darkshore at that time. When I got my body back, I went to check it out again, but there was nothing there.

Back to the rambling for a bit :P

As I continued questing through Darkshore, I gradually started getting farther and farther south, where the enemies were tougher. Eventually, I got to Ashenvale, and Astranaar, but didn’t stay there for long. Before I started questing there, I took the boat from Darkshore to Menethil, then a few gryphon rides later was in Westfall. That’s where I spent most of my next levels. More on that later. In WoWReport#3!


SNEAK PEEK: Next time, on WoWReport…

THE ANGRY SEALBAT!

[Refrigerator]

Thanks! I actually agree with Bun-Bun here, once I got used to the city a bit, I loved it! I think the only problem I have is the annoyingly repetitive music in the Cenarion Enclave.

Entangling Roots is sort of in a love/hate relationship right now. I love it because of it's crowd control capabilities, but I hate it because it takes long enough that by the time it finishes, the mob is going melee with the main tank anyways, and because I can't use it in the instanced dungeons (can only be used outside). I don't know why roots aren't allowed to come out of a tunnel floor.

And, yeah, I suppose you're right about the cave layout. There ARE a lot of caves in this game. I was with a group that did Blackfathom Deeps last night, and the instanced caves make up for it. We died at the end though when two people triggered one seal each at the same time. Something like 10 big crabs, and 20 little ones! They were split into two, half coming from the left, half coming from the right. I died pretty quickly, but one of our lvl 30+ druids (33, I think) just shapeshifted into travel form and ran around the big room in circles with 30 mobs chasing him. Our warrior survived too, by running away outside the room. Me and the level 35 druid died though. It was pretty funny to just watch the mobs all chasing the lvl 33 guy though. :lol:

Note: The numbers may be just a tad exaggerated.

[Ruvanal]

And now for – just joking, sorry. This is just a picture of the ghost realm, for those that might not have seen it. Note that there must still be oxygen, of a sort, in the ghost realm, because my torch is still burning. But it’s ghostly too. I sure hope the ghost of my torch doesn’t come back to haunt me… Also when I was walking around in the ghost realm, I found this bizarre portally thing. I couldn’t click on it or do anything to it. I have no idea what it is, but I suspect might have something to do with PvP, because there were a few horde members raiding Darkshore at that time. When I got my body back, I went to check it out again, but there was nothing there.

That was a mages group portal in action. The players that are in the mages party can run through it and will be transported to the city that is in the image. I could not make out the city clearly enough from the picture to be sure of where they were portaling off to.

As for the rage generation, you can get rage from both doing melee damage to an opponent and from taking damage from an opponent. I am not sure of the exact mechanics as it appears to change for warriors based on what stance they are in at the time. But the more damage that you inflict or recieve will give you more rage on what appears to be a diminishing return scale.

[Bolty]

Fridge, just want to say that these reports are a delight to read. But boy, your detail level is set WAY down, isn't it?

-Bolty

[Refrigerator]

@Ruvanal: Oh, ok, thanks! I sorta thought it must be something like that for the rage generation, but wasn't sure. :D

@Bolty: :D Yeah, my detail levels are waaaay down there. I don't have much confidence in my system running it at anything much higher than that (from experience). Every once in a while, especially in Teldrassil, I turn up all the settings except for resolution (because that WOULD probably kill my computer) and just stand there and look at the place around me. I stand there because if I move, I won't be able to do anything for a good thirty seconds or so. :lol:

EDIT: Is anyone else having any trouble accessing my pictures? For some reason, I can't get to the ones I linked :(

EDIT 2: OK, fixed it. In this form of html-ish code, I don't need the "quotations" around the links. <_<