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Shifting Perspectives: Your first steps as a Druid
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week John Patricelli, sometimes known as the Big Bear Butt Blogger, starts his series on leveling a new Druid from 1st level all the way to 70th. Before I begin my series on leveling your new Druid from 1st through 70th levels, I'm going to start with some of the things you can do to prepare. Why not just leap right on into level 1? My reasoning is simple, just like me. When you have been watching Druids claw face as bears or cats, or as a new player you read about the description of the class and the shapechanging capabilities Druids enjoy, you might just expect to walk in and start doing the same yourself right from the start. The promise of the class is the fun of shifting from one form to another, depending on your playstyle. Well, when you start your new Druid at level 1, you won't be clawing faces. Instead, you will be leveling as a caster... a ranged DPS caster for levels 1 - 10, and likely on towards 20. Just as Hunters don't get the ability to tame a pet until level 10, Druids do not get the chance to learn their first form until the Bear quest chain becomes available at level 10. If, as you were sitting at the character creation screen, you were thinking you were going to be a kitty, all up in the face of the bad guys right from the start, it can be a bit of a let down. Especially if you don't care for playing a caster class in the first place. Hopefully, however, by knowing how to set yourself up in advance with the in-game Options, useful User interfaces and Addons, you'll find yourself leveling up as a caster painlessly, and may even come to enjoy the versatility of some of the Druid's powerful casting abilities. While the focus of this series of articles will be to help guide a brand new player into the fun of playing a Druid, hopefully there will also be some suggestions that an experienced player trying the Druid for the first time will find useful.
Interface Changes in Patch 1.12
I find some of the interface changes included in patch 1.12 to be quite interesting, and they follow the recent trend of integrating popular addon features into the core UI. Feature number one on my list is the new "floating combat text" functionality. You'll find options for it under the interface options menu (see right), and it mimics the Scrolling Combat Text addon, which shows combat information floating over your character. I've always found this to be a more convenient place to view information, but it can be too spammy at times. And, if you've never played with Scrolling Combat Text, I'd recommend giving it a try now that it can be enabled without downloading anything. The look of the addition is dead-on, though it's a bit less customizable than the real thing, which allows you to select more precisely which messages you'd like to see, as well as customizing colors and fonts. This simplified interface may be more accessible to more users, however, as the number of options Scrolling Combat Text provided could be a bit daunting. However, I may end up sticking with the original, because I prefer to be able to resize the font used.Of special interest to me as a healer is the new name plate functionality. If you aren't familiar with the phrase, name plates are the little health bars that show up over enemy and friendly NPCs when you hit the "V" key. In the past, name plates would only appear above hostile targets and NPCs. It's long been on my wish-list of features to have the ability to have name plates over friendly targets as well - for ease of seeing the health of players around me when either ungrouped or in a scattered raid, where you may not necessarily be near your own party. (Battlegrounds, anyone?)Now, if you check your key bindings (see above), you will see a binding for showing name plates (for the existing functionality) as well as one that allows you to show friendly name plates or all name plates. Combined with the battlegrounds change that automatically groups players on joining, and my priest may have to respec holy and go back to trying to heal in battlegrounds. Next up is a feature that came as a complete surprise to all of us - iTunes integration. This is a Mac-only feature, as, apparently, the Mac development team managed to get it working first. If you're running the Mac client, you'll see the above options at the bottom of the list of key bindings, allowing you to bind keys to basic iTunes functions.The final feature addition, at least that I noticed, is the new auto self cast checkbox in the interface option. I've used a feature like this before - as part of CTMod, and probably other addons as well. With this option checked, if you do not have anyone targeted when you try to cast a friendly spell (a buff or heal spell, for example), it will automatically be cast on yourself. In some situations, and for some character classes, this can be very useful - allowing you to keep a hostile target selected while casting useful spells on yourself. But it can be difficult to get used to, especially for healing classes who frequently use little but friendly spells.
