That’s possibly a dumb question for most of my audience, since most of you are already druids. But! Maybe you’re not a druid, or maybe you are but you have a friend who wants to be a druid in the expansion?

So if you’re an existing druid planning on going Worgen or Troll, or if you have a friend who wants to jump in, here’s a bit of a primer.


Resto, Balance, or Feral?

It’s probably a good idea to decide which path you’re going to take, at the very least until Level 40 when you can grab Dual Talent Specialization. This will depend a lot on your play style and what you enjoy doing while you level:

  • If you want to do it solo, and fast, then feral’s the way to go. Balance is also good for soloing, but feral has the least downtime because it is not hindered so much by mana and drinking (not to mention all the stupid mobs out there who interrupt, drain mana, or cause spell pushback). Feral downtime is minimal.
  • If you want to solo but also have the ability to heal some dungeons, go balance. You’ll still have good soloing ability, and moderate healing (balance is absolutely fine for healing dungeons as you level). And best of all, you won’t have to worry about changing gear.
  • If you want a healing crash course through dungeons on the way to 85, then it’s perfectly viable to go resto from level 1. I suspect that when Cataclysm is released, many people will be levelling existing mains, so that might make it hard to find lowbie dungeons – but remember also that there will be a lot of players who want to level a Worgen or Goblin, PLUS the people who always wanted to play a human hunter, gnome priest, blood elf warrior, night elf mage (and so on). So I think there will be plenty of dungeons to be had.

    Resto is the poorest spec for soloing, but it’s not awful; however, if you’re going to be doing a fair bit of questing in between dungeons, you might want to consider a balance spec from 1-40, then “learn” resto with your dual spec at 40 onwards.


BOA gear

First of all, when choosing your BOA gear, consider whether you might later like to pass it onto another character. For example, I tend to pick cloth items for my caster druids, because I know that if I choose to create a clothie later, I can recycle my BOA items. I do the same for my melee characters – shaman/hunter/feral druid all have to share each other’s hand-me-downs (so if you see any of my characters without a chest or shoulder item equipped, it’s probably in the mail or on another character). Obviously if you’re swimming in tokens, this won’t be an issue, but it’s something to keep in mind.


Also, I’ll list the resilience items – but remember that you get resilience at the cost of other stats (eg spirit), so only take these items if you can’t afford the PvE equivalent. They still give you 10% experience, so it’s worth grabbing – just prioritise the PvE ones if you can afford them.

By the way – did you know that you can mail your BOA items to your characters on the opposite faction? My gnome rogue is currently using my feral chestpiece. I believe Blizzard have also said they would like to be able to let people mail them across servers, which would be awesome if you rerolled somewhere!

Anyway – here are the items to consider:

For Resto:

Slot
Best choice
Backup
Shoulder
Chest
Weapon
Trinket


For Balance:

Slot
Best choice
Backup
Shoulder
Chest
Weapon
Trinket


For Feral:

Slot
Best choice
Backup
Shoulder
Chest
Weapon
Venerable Mass of McGowan + OH
Balanced Heartseeker +OH
(good feral OHs are hard to find, though)
Trinket



Guides to help you

Now, our healing may change a bit in Cataclysm once we are given our new talent trees and abilities; but I don’t think that lowbie healing will change very much. Healing Touch will still be our dungeon heal (with HoTs, of course), and I don’t think there will be sweeping changes to how we heal at low levels.

With that in mind, WotLK levelling guides should still be a good reference in Cataclysm, so here are some guides to bookmark for later.