Druid Leveling Guide From 1 to 70 for TBC Classic

This guide will aim to provide you with a clear skill and gear path to Level 70 in TBC Classic. While detailing every single quest and the optimal leveling routes is beyond its scope, you can find detailed talent builds for all playstyles, their rotations and guides for class quests and leveling weapon suggestions below.

Providing non-Druid leveling advice is outside the scope of this article and is covered in our general TBC leveling guide.

Druids have three talent trees: Feral, Balance, and Restoration.

Feral is the recommended leveling build. It does great damage, has excellent survivability — in fact, it doubles as a tank main spec — and multiple mobility options. This is due to Feral Swiftness and Cat Form being unlocked at Level 20 and the melee nature of the spec allowing for movement while doing your full rotation.

Most importantly, you can regenerate Mana while in animal form and heal between pulls, removing the need for food and water. Stealth is also an option, allowing you to escape dangerous situations or skip pointless enemies on the way to some quests!

Balance is also viable to level with, but is usually much slower than Feral due to the Mana requirements for both your offensive spells and healing in between pulls. Fortunately, your damage potential is fairly high while you have Mana available.

Finally, Restoration is the slowest spec to solo with because its talents focus on healing rather than damage. Still, it can be made to work when you know you will be leveling with others as a healer to enable both greater sustain to the whole group and larger pulls.

If speed is what you care about, the best way to proceed in TBC Classic as a solo Druid is to use our Feral talent build.

Besides being a very strong solo-leveler, it will also allow you to tank for any groups you find on your way to 70 making it extremely easy to complete any dungeon-related quests.

Leveling in dungeons is a very popular way to reach Level 70 quickly and painlessly in TBC Classic. There are three major gains to be had from skipping questing:

• Avoiding PvP and Competition for tags will make your experience gain much more consistent over time.
• Reputation gains can be obtained from killing enemies in most dungeons up to Honored, while keeping the regular quests for extra experience and gold later.
• Minimal TBC Quest and Zone knowledge required, which will be especially relevant for anyone who is not familiar with the questing content but still wants to rush to 70.

Druids are always welcome in any group due to their strong DPS and the versatility of being able to DPS, tank, or heal whenever required.

This is especially true for Ferals, whose tree is made for tanking and DPSing in a single-talent setup, and they can even do some pretty noteworthy healing with Nurturing Instinct!

Balance can be a fine support for caster cleaves, and Restoration has all the healing a group could possibly need to round out the Druid specialization paths.

Learning professions early on is very useful, as you can naturally level them as you go and avoid extra work at max level. While you can start right away with crafting professions if you have extra gold to spare or other characters to rely on for getting started, gathering professions are recommended as they create gold for you without requiring any initial investment.

We recommend that you learn First Aid (for Mana-sustain purposes) and two out of Skinning, Herbalism, and Mining. You can readily level these alongside your questing path, which will provide a steady gold income along the way through the auction house. At maximum level you can easily drop these gathering professions and power-level your crafting professions of choice by buying materials, so do not worry about falling behind during leveling.

While leveling, if you are Feral Druid, your weapon has little-to-no impact on your performance as the damage you deal is based on your stats rather than weapon damage. This changes once you get into TBC zones and can loot Feral weapons such as Ursol's Claw, which give a special Feral Attack Power bonus to compensate for weapon damage not being applied.

As Feral, most of your gear should have Agility or Strength on it, as they are the stats that increase your damage the most. Still, do not shy away from taking on other stats as well, especially if they come in much larger amounts than the Agility and Strength you are losing!

For the other specialization options, Balance and Restoration, gear is less important but try to aim for Intellect and Spell / Healing Power, as these stats will help you out the most.

By setting yourself up with an upgraded user interface and macros from the get-go, you will make your leveling process much easier. Check out our Druid Addons and Druid Macros guide in the links below for the full list.

While all gear is relevant while leveling, weapons are especially important due to generally carrying the majority of the offensive stats on your character, especially in TBC content.

Read our full guide on weapons below.

Every class in TBC Classic has important class-specific quests that allow them to gear up and learn new active abilities which are often critical to the class. Most of your animal forms are given as rewards from doing these quests, and we will detail every single step of the way for you in our full guide for quests below for both Horde and Alliance Druids.

By the time you hit maximum level, it will be very helpful to read the rest of our guides. Pick Restoration Druid if you intend to heal at maximum level, Feral DPS Druid and Feral Tank Druid if you want to be a flexible tank / melee DPS and Balance Druid if you want to be a great support caster, which every 25 raid will want at least one of.