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!