I have avoided this game since its release, I dabbled in EQ2 when it came out and heard WoW was even faster griding than that. So I've been giving it some thought of trying it out as a casual play game. I don't have time to raid nor the desire tbh.

Anyways, considering I wont feel like re-rolling multiple chars, I was curious was class and professions are furthest from useless. I had my eye on Druid, suck?

Druids are the best 2v2 healer, pretty good for 3v3 too. High survivability and really annoying, once you're geared at least, which can be done completely through grinding honor points in battlegrounds, PvP instances with PvP objectives. They excel at escaping.

For PvE, they make good raid healers, and good tanks. Balance, the nuking tree, is kinda meh. They can do decent DPS as feral too, which is the same tree they use to tank. Pretty much a jack of all trades. They also have the only in-combat rez.

Professions, nothing makes as much as mining with an epic mount, but epic mount itself costs 5kg to get. So that means you already blew a ton of cash on it. Rest of the professions are kinda meh, gem cutting is popular, but if you want to be a good gem cutter you need to get all the recipes, some of them being world drops, and going upwards of 300-600g off the AH. The rest are either bought from trainers, or reputation specific vendors.

People have been able to hit lvl 70 within 6 days played, so that's not a huge issue about rerolling. They recently made exp faster for the mid-levels.

Classes are for the most part pretty balanced, so I don't think you have to worry too much about being "needed" as a class, although on many servers a lot of medium-to-high guilds have many of the raid spots filled(not what you're after sounds like, just mentioning). I think it just depends on the server too. Maybe it's just my experience, but in many high-end guilds warrior spots seem to be taken up.

Tanks in general are somewhat sought-after simply because there are basically 3 potential tank classes while there are 4 potential heal classes and even more potential dps classes (with the right specs). Death Knight hero class was probably supposed to alleviate this need for tanks. Druids make excellent tanks for many an encounter as well.

Another note, since you said complete WoW noob. Every class has three talent trees, you gain extra stats/abilities through them, you get 1 talent point every level from 10-70, making a total of 61. You want to go feral for leveling.

Read up here for talent placement, etc: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 1186&sid=1

Shamans are the weakest PvP class atm. They have a niche in the 5v5 bracket, but they're the least represented class in arena overall. Feral druid PvP is kinda meh, you basically kill bad geared players, and might be able to kill rogues/warriors once you're all decked out. Mostly you'll get your butt handed to you by any geared player though. I've seen two druid kitties travel together and kill people, but most non-organized PvP doesn't go that way. So if you want druid to do damage in PvP you may feel a bit envious of other classes.

thanks for the info you two, that was some good insight, I never realized PvP was a viable way to gear up, I forgot WoW had that added feature. I was just planning on PvE for the most part. I liked that druids could turn into animals, I didnt know however, that druids were tanks lol.

edit: oh, btw, is night elf druid completely overdone? I remember hearing Nigh Elves had an easier time on CR's or some such benefit.

The PvP sets are mainly just good for PvP, where PvE gained items will have more PvE oriented stats like str/agi/crit/AP for kitty DPS, or agi/dodge/armor/stam for tanking. I think the feral druid set is OK for tanking, just there's other things you can get if you just want to PvE as a feral druid. The resto PvP set is good to start out with, probably on par with most of what you'd find in 5-man instances. On that note, once you're 70 you'll want to do those instances to get Rep up for head enchants and heroic keys. I'm sure you'd eventually want to focus on more MP5/healing rather than stamina/resilience though.

The PvP set focuses on stamina/resilience. Resilience is a stat designed for PvP, it reduces crit %, crit bonus dmg, and reduces damage taken from DoTs.

Alliance do tend to have more druids than Horde because people would rather be pretty elves than fat cows, but it's not too overdone. If you mean racial choice then no, since there's only one race per faction that can be a druid. Night elves get wisp form when they die, it's something like 50% movement speed. Not really that important. The "CR" part of WoW just involves running to your body and clicking a button. There's some exceptions but they usually try to place a graveyard close to quest areas so when you die it might be 1-2 mins tops for a run. If it's too far for you, you can even get rezzed by the NPC at the GY, but you get a short debuff that makes you not able to fight much of anything.

Night elves get shadowmeld as well, which for a druid will add an extra level of stealth when you're in cat form stealth, and it serves as an extra stealth button if you want to eat some food, press Shadowmeld right after.

Anywho:

Questing resources:
http://www.wowhead.com/
http://www.wowwiki.com/Main_Page

Addons:
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/addons/
http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Main_Page

I would download Cartographer, or any type of map coordinates mod. Useful for finding things.

on my server EVERYONE is looking for Warlocks. Cant seem to get enough skilled locks to raid with.

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There are only two races that can be Druids atm. Night Elves and the Tauren. So, its up to you which side you want to play. I say go Horde.

well, if I was gonna do horde, I was gonna play Undead, in which case I'd have probably done warlock. They just DPS casters i take it?

EDIT: ok I just read those links posted and noticed "Death knight" is a hero class available if you have a higher level char. Is that actually playable on live servers and such? I stood away from WoW because it lacked anything like a ShadowKnight, but reading that sure got my juices flowing.

Not currently. They are a feature of the next expansion. But Blood Elf Paladins are fairly evil, since they derive their power from a supernatural Being of Light that they keep magically trapped in a basement while they suck the mojo out of him.

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Hope is the new black.

If I had never played the game, but know what I know now, I'd probably make a Druid. One thing I always loved about the Rogue was the ability to stealth through some earlier caves for quests where you had to kill a certain guy at the end of the cave. As a Druid, you can still do this, plus have the added advantage of travel forms, and the ability to tank, heal, or DPS on a whim. Granted, you'll probably end up respecing alot later on, but the versatility of the class seems really nice for the casual player.

If you just want to have an easy time of things, I'd suggest either a Warlock or a Hunter. Both classes can solo Elites up to 3 levels above theirs, which is pretty huge if you don't plan on grouping that often. A BM Hunter can level 1-70 on cruise control with the pet doing most of the work. Get a decent bow/gun/crossbow and you don't even have to worry about the rest of your gear. If you play a Warlock, you can go tailoring and make the Frozen Shadowweave stuff as you get in your 60s and you'll be set.

If you are looking for strictly money-making professions, I'd say take up Mining for sure, and maybe even Skinning. Look towards what the next patch has to offer and you'll see if people will be changing professions. When BC came out, lots of people switched professions to Blacksmithing so they could go for the weapons. This meant that the price of ore skyrocketed as people power-levelled their Blacksmithing profession. There are some pretty nice Leatherworking items available with the next patch, so people may end up PLing that. If you don't want to do that, then take up Enchanting. Being able to DE crap and sell the mats can be very rewarding in the wallet (especially when you hit the Outlands).

Yeah, warlocks are just DPS basically. Wanding through your earlier levels will be faster than shadowbolting. Once you get 18 if you can have a friend run you through Blackfathom Depths, there's a really nice wand from a quest given by an injured NPC inside the instance, he's close to the turtle boss, if you ever do that.

Another bonus of warlock is your lvl 40 mount is trainable, saves some gold.

I have to say warlock is a rather difficult class when it comes to arena. If you can micromanage pet abilities/cc/dots/curses in PvP you will excel at warlock. To some it's pretty intuitive, I have two friends who I'd think are pretty smart/good at the game, but when it comes to PvP they're just not used to doing all that, and get sucked into tunnel vision trying to DPS one target, neglecting CC/curses.

I basically rerolled as an almost n00b about 3 months ago. I had played a little bit pre-TBC, but the game and the classes as a whole were quite a bit different back then. So when Oryx rerolled I took the opportunity to roll a druid. As I mentioned, when I played before it was only for a period of a few months so for all intents and purposes I was a pretty big noob this time around. I rolled a druid and had a good time leveling up. I think I did 1-70 in slight over 10 days played. A lot of the good things about playing a druid have already been mentioned. A great thing about druids is you can have a good pve spec which can also double as a pvp spec. I know some people spend 100g a day switching specs each day so they can pvp and pve (spec I'm speaking of, of course is resto).

But definitely level up as feral, you'll have no problem getting groups to tank. And soloing will be easy with the versatility of the class.

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-Rileigh (aka Golliwog)

Druids are great, but I wouldn't say they are as flexible as some have made them out to be. In PvE they can tank very well and heal (different specs of course), but DPS is definately lower than true dps classes. In the arena resto druids are fantastic, but feral druids are not very desired by most teams. If you plan to PvP and want to do so as a DPS class, I would consider something besides a druid. Many classes can fulfill at least 2 primary roles very well, so the flexibility thing is a little over rated.

Warrior all the way

Did #2 in dps in a HFR run the other day as a DW fury, significantly above a hunter and just slightly below a 66 boomkin (I was 62 at the time).

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If you pick a Warrior, don't pick it for DPS.

Don't pick a warrior. Seriously. You have to work a lot harder to both be a good tank and be a good dps.

I've gotten hugely burnt on my warrior. I'm sure some will disagree, but I don't care:

Pros:

1) Best tank in the game if you are good, but there are also a huge number of really shitty warriors. Lots of options to get out of trouble with cooldowns and talents. Can be challenging as an offtank or tanking multiple mobs at the same time, where Druids and Paladins are better.

2) PVP is great as an arms warrior. It's good enough that there is some class envy about it.

3) As a tank, you will feel like you are absolutely in the thick of everything. It's not a passive role. This is a huge plus for me, but it can also lead to burnout.

Cons:

1) Absolutely terrible ability to solo/farm as prot. I play a resto druid now, and I can tell you that even as a healer, if I put on my cat dps gear, it's significantly faster to dps down farm mobs than it was as a prot warrior. But hey, with almost 500 shield block, I can pretty much tank anything solo without dying. And my gear is only t4 with some t5 badge equivalents.

2) Multiple tanking options can actually be a negative. My bar is full of abilities. To maintain aggro, we have to mash buttons a hell of a lot more than other classes. Shield Block, heroic strike and an aggro generating ability on the global cooldown are pretty much all pressed every 3-6 seconds, for hours upon a time.

3) In WoW after you die, your gear deteriorates a little bit. After doing a lot of instances or raids, once you get to the raid stage, you have to farm and solo for a while to get the money to repair your gear, so that you can raid again. Since Warriors are some of the most gear dependent, you will find that it's not only harder to farm mobs for cash, but that you have to spend a lot of money on mats for enchants and gems for gemming.

4) Prot warriors get penalized for gear upgrades. We generate rage, which we use for abilities, by getting hit by mobs. Well guess what? When we DON'T get hit, which you would think is a GOOD thing, we don't generate any rage. Do you see the problem? As we get more gear, our ability to mitigate damage increases, as does our ability to avoid it outright. So as our damage-dealing friends gain more ability to do more damage from gear upgrades, we actually start to generate less threat because we're not getting hit as much. Kungen posted a nice little rant about this a few months ago when I was still playing.

5) As DPS, we have no ability to dump our threat as do most other DPS classes. So, if you're really good, you are completely dependent on how much threat a tank can build. If it's a shitty tank, you won't do that much dps. If it's a great tank, cool, you can do a hell of a lot of DPS. This has gotten better recently, but it's still an issue. DPS is a viable option, but you'll find that in instances and raids, you will feel like you're supposed to be tanking, and raid leaders will prefer to take a rogue/mage/hunter for the DPS versatility.

BTW - I did reroll a druid when my job got more demanding. Wanted to have the versatility, which, despite what you might hear, really is that good. There's absolutely 0 downtime when levelling as feral. They make great healers in PVE, have a viable PVP spec, can tank extremely well and can dps pretty well. It's a great class.

Roll a Shaman, we're OP.

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

I reread my post and it sounds harsher on druids than I intended. If you want to heal (pve or pvp) or tank (pve), then druids are really fantastic and in high demand. The only thing I think they are lacking in is DPS, relative to strict DPS classes(mage, lock, hunter, rogue). They are certainly more than competent solo exp grinders in this role, you just won't see a feral druid out DPS a rogue in a group or raid setting. That makes sense though, if they excelled at everything, we'd all be playing druids

2 classes I absolutely hate to meet in arena: Resto druid/Resto shaman. Geared out they can just put out so much healing it's ridiculous. Resto druid would have the edge there too. I have to blow every possible cooldown to stay on top of the druid. And in pve as a DPSer, give me a bear tank any day of the week. Jox was one of the best warrior tanks we had, but even as good as he is, a moderately talented bear tank is flat out easier to just go all out and dps.

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I will never understand DPS warriors.

You can do much better as any other class, safer with less gearing.

If you want overall versatility, go druid. All three roles the game revolves around are available to you, and you will be actually sought after.

If you want melee DPS. Rogue. You get better DPS than anybody else, plus tools to keep you alive. Face it fury warriors, the only people you are better than are people everyone else is anyway.

If you want caster DPS, you have really two choices. Warlock and Shadow Priest. Both will be high demand end game. Mages bloom early and get passed up end game.

Hunters are so saturated still that you will be hard pressed to find groups, let alone a spot in any raiding. Even low level raids such as kara if that interests you. Good for solo farming tho.

http://wowwebstats.com/rrlkrwwi61xxk

There's a relatively recent snapshot of one of our SSC raids. We have a druid in the top of the DPS charts (moonkin) and a druid in the top of the heal charts. Even had a feral druid as one of the 5 tanks on that raid.

Fuon, you forgot to mention that not only does a druid often produce more threat, but he, while tanking, will also out DPS a warrior tank AND has quite a bit less frenzied button mashing to do to do it. Oh, and when he's not tanking? Pop on a DPS set - with the same feral spec, mind you - and DPS when more than 2 tanks aren't needed. Meanwhile, if a prot warrior isn't actively tanking they are almost totally fucking useless.

Oh.. doesn't have to worry about being uncrushable, either.

I don't think you'll find many people that will argue a Feral is a better MT than a Warrior, especially as we near the limit of gear, that is, warriors approaching 75% mitigation.

It's hard to compete with superior magic mitigation, last stand, shield wall and spell reflect.

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

I don't think anyone here is. But there can be only one "Main" tank. 1 person out of 25 or 1 person out of 10. As I said, Warriors have a lot more utility to get out of tight situations.

I'm a feral offtank for my guild. We have a warrior MT and a couple feral OTs and it seems to work well. I like being able to do a little bit better dps in my tank gear than a prot warrior would if I have to tank an early add and then dps.

Ferals really shine in the 10mans where every spot is precious. I can offtank the bear boss in ZA but then be a reasonable dps for the eagle boss.

DPS shaman it is!

no, but really, I initially wanted to try out a druid, guess ill follow through on it. Thanks for the valuable input everyone.

Well, I don't know too many people who just roll up a warrior and think "I'm gonna dps in high-end raids with this char". For me it just ended up being the hand I was dealt. I like tanking, but my guild already has two excellent prot warrior tanks. I still usually end up around dps spot 3-5 from slam spam rotation. I can't foresee myself leveling up another character, there's only so much repetition I can take.

Just a little insight into the weird, wild world of the dps warrior =p

Frankly given the option I probably wouldn't do much different, though. I love warriors, especially in pvp, and I like doing everything on one character.

My first go-round in WoW was when it first started. Rolled a hunter and lvl'ed him to 60 then got bored. Once I quit, everyone started rolling hunters because it was easy-mode, and I didn't even know it. I was on a PvE server, so it was *extra* easy-mode.

Came back last June and rolled a Dranei Shaman on a PvP server. When I got to level 31, the friend that I started up with told me he didn't like his rogue, so he rolled a Human Warlock. I rolled one as a joke, named him Barakobama, as a joke, fell in love. I suck at PvP, but running around in small groups of friends makes it a little easier. I rolled the hunter for the pet, I rolled the lock for the pet. Found out later that priests and mages can get pets too. Hell, I have a warrior buddy who has some sort of token from EP that lets him have some fighters with him for a short period of time, sorta like druid trees.

Anyway, I'm at lvl 70 and working toward my BG gear. I'm still paper in pvp, can't beat very many classes. Rogues give me fits, as do warriors and paladins. I stay stunned and die fast. Oh well, I'm hoping that when I'm decked out in all purples, it might get better, but I doubt it.

My work schedule doesn't allow me to raid, although I would love to see some of that stuff eventually. Maybe when I get on day-shift, I can join a raid guild. All in all, I wouldn't trade my lock for any other class. Love him.

As a warlock I think rogues are always gonna give you a bit of trouble. Warriors will probably be less trouble for you as you gear up with resilience. I'm not too familiar with Pally/Warlock matchups(usually in arenas the warlock's duty is to mess with the paladin's heals, keeping curse of tongues up, silencing, and fearing)... I'd imagine a geared ret pally could be a decent adversary... in general a paladin can definitely excel in 1v1 matchups, but once you get to the arena it's an entirely different game of rock/paper/scissors with different combos working with varying success against other combos.

Barov Peasant Caller is the trinket you are thinking of.

There's also one that drops in ZA that summons 3 Gnomes to fight alongside you. With Netherwing rep, you can get a trinket that summons a Netherwing Ally (a small drake) that kicks a little ass (his arcane missles hit for like 900). It's a nice surprise to spring on someone when going 1 on 1 in AV or something. C'Thun also drops a trinket that summons a tentacle to fight with you, but who goes to AQ40 anymore?

The cannon trinket from Scarlet Strath was also a fun one.

I read somewhere that people were using that C'Thun trinket to cap flags while hiding inside the tentacles. I can't remember where I read it though, and I've never actually seen anyone summon the thing, but it sounded like a clever idea.

Been doing that forever with Kodos.

Sort of on the subject of druids, but more healers in particular: I had to take a break right before 2.3 came out because I'm studying for the CPA exam and WoW is a distraction. Has the change to add partial DAM modifiers to HEAL actually provided the claimed benefit of allowing healing specced characters to solo/farm more effectively?

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Hope is the new black.

I know the healers in our guild still use a "dps set" made from rotting drops as their farming set since it has more damage than the healing gear. It is helpful for things like killing your Inner Demon on Leo while in your healing gear, however.

As a druid, is it really worth taking skinning/leatherworking as my main two professions?

I assume it is advised to take the production skill which goes with your gathering?

Or can I be a crazy skinning Jewelcrafter~

edit: nm! I thought you had to pick one gathering and one production prof, Skinning and Mining here I come!

Keep two gathering professions until at *least* level 60. I'd suggest mining/skinning. Not sure if mining/jewelcrafting can make more by gemming the ore but I doubt it.

Few reasons why:

1) You'll quickly outgrow anything you make, most of it is available on the auction house anyway, and quest rewards are in many cases much better.
2) People are retards who do not understand economics. You'll find a lot of items on the AH that are priced lower than the value of the components used to make them. Basically disenchant prices are what end up seting most item values in the AH.
3) You'll need some cash to purchase an epic mount. It is much faster than travel form.
4) You can spend the cash on consumables that will help you level faster.
5) Once you're level 60-65ish you'll have plenty of gold to powerlevel whichever profession you want.

P.S. If you want a link to a good powerlevel guide I'll post it, I'm holding off here 'cuz it might ruin some of your fun.

Sarissa Candyangel

Remember that raw materials are always worth more than processed ones.

Copper Ore is worth more than Copper Bars for example.

Leather seems to always be in demand, but everyone skins so you have fierce competition. Still worth doing however.

Cloth will sell well also. Wool, Mageweave and Runecloth are definate money makers because nobody wants to farm it for skillups. Again, the raw cloth, not bolts. Netherweave isn't worth putting up usually. make it into heavy netherweave bandages and vendor. Or have a tailor turn it into bags, or save it for imbued netherweave bags.

Stay away from jewelcrafting and enchanting for now. They are huge money sinks with very little payout for the effort required.

You can make pretty good money doing enchants for tips, but you need the enchants. Executioner, Mongoose, +stats to Chest, Dexterity to boots.. these all get pretty good tips (I don't ask for tips, but don't turn em down, either). Stick with selling ore and stuff for the real money-makers, though. People are always buying those materials.

Its common sense really... Most people avoid professions until they can afford to powerlevel them later. They have the gold to spend, so what do they spend it on? The raw materials to level up with. Always tons of money with any gathering profession. I suggest skinning and mining. Skinning, because its so easy to gather materials since you are killing what you harvest anyway. Get mining because there are three professions that use metal: Jewelcrafting, Engineering and Blacksmithing.