Leveling Guide (11-20)

Levels 11-12
At 12 you get upgrades to venomous thorns and lightning strike. The new toys are Sageberries (summons 3 berries which can cure you of poison) and binding roots.

Binding roots (BR) are quite different in nature from Piercing roots (PR). To put it simply, PR is more of way to quickly stop a monster (mob); BR on the other hand will hold them in place for a significant time. The downside is however the long 3-second cast time on the spell, but it will hold the mob in place for good 40 seconds. This spell is great for separating mobs before a pull but will also become a key asset to soloing hard targets later on.

In addition Druids also obtain one of the best travel spells. Cloudwalk! Although currently missing the cloud, the spell will allow the caster to literally walk on air. Scared of cliffs? Not a problem anymore as now you can simply walk off them without the fear of falling down to gruesome death.

Cloudwalk allows you to bypass dangerous places by walking off mountains and high rises. Note that you will descend faster if you are looking downwards, so if you need to cross large distance try to look horizontally or higher, even though it is a little inconvenient when traveling. From now on, you can quickly cross large water features and canyons with a breeze.

Also Cloudwalk is great for kitting. As long as you don’t take off completely, it allows you to move backwards faster than normal. Do take care because if you leave ground the game mechanics are such that the mobs will instantly teleport to your location.


Levels 13-14
Time to say goodbye to your horse, assuming you had one of course. Now you run almost as fast all by yourself and without the aid of pet bard. Say hello to the “Speed of the wolf “ buff. This buff will increase targets running speed by 30% (and mounted speed by 5%) and is a great aid for general traveling, kiting and dungeons.

Upgrades to old spells are also welcome. The new and improved Stormcaller's Fury buff and upgrade to the Healing-over-Time spell (HoT), Soothe.
Soothe is a great way to keep your damage output and keep party members healthy. It provides small health point (HP) boosts every 2 seconds over 16 seconds. Placing one of those on a tank or careless melee or magic fighter will keep the workload of the healer and at the same time allow you to keep on nuking the mobs.

Barkskin is a good buff although relatively useless at early levels; it increases targets resistance to fire and physical (magic) attacks by 63. While this is a great boost to resistance you do not really get hit with magic that hard at these levels. However it is still a nice buff to have on and will become more important later in game.

The last new addition to your arsenal at 14 is Natures Calm (Calm). This is an interesting although potentially dangerous spell. It calms the opponent, reducing the chance they will assist their nearby allies in battle. The uses are many, for example when faces with a 3 mob pull, you can try to Calm one, root the other and fight the third, greatly reducing the load on the tank and the healers.

The sad thing is that the spell does not always work. While you will not gain agro from failing to cast the spell it is still up to lady luck to decide what the mob will do if provoked. Generally, Binding Roots is a much more effective and foolproof way of separating mobs.


Level 15
The level many eagerly await. The level when druids gain their class deciding abilities, the Phenomena! These are stronger than normal spells and use special Phenomena Points (PP) instead of energy. PP pool regenerates at a slow rate of 1 PP per minute. At level 15 you gain 30 PP to start you off and will obtain an extra 2 points every 5 levels (at levels 20, 25, 30, along with new phenomena)

Your first phenomena are:

Starfall - a direct damage nuke which costs 15PP, it deals around 800 damage to the opponent. No cool down. Since this does not cost you any energy it is useful for finishing off a mob when running low on energy or for tagging a named at the beginning of a battle.

Rampant Roots – A very useful escape spell. It roots all targets in radius around you for 20 seconds. Great for awkward pulls and for running away. Costs 10PP

Life Stream – A Wonder. A large group heal in essence. It heals all allies in a radius for 770 HP. While it has its uses and saved myself from a while a number of times with a cost of 25 PP you cannot use it as often as other phenomena.


Levels 16-17

Levels with mainly spell upgrades. These include a new Barbwood Talisman, more powerful Solar Flare, restore and a bigger Earth Elemental (Earthen Bruiser). Just replace the old spells on your hot bar.

The new spell does deserve attention though. At 16 we gain a strong DoT – Wild Growth. It is instant-cast so it great to use as a starting spell in group fights (the ticks will start while you unleash the rest of your deadly arsenal). This spell alone will give a great boost to your damage output. It can crit and it stacks will all other DoT effects.


Levels 18-19
The level that defines druid game play.

Spell upgrades are there (Lightning strike, Piercing roots, Natures Wrath and Roseberries) are there but they are not so interesting. Upgrades are straightforward replacements for old spells. Lightning strike however has a slight change, now it has 5% of dealing additional damage on spell cast. Hmmm, cool!

The most interesting spell is the Taproot. Say hello to your new best friend. Taproot will allow you to regenerate all of your energy in just 16 seconds. Of course this comes at a price, the spell also roots you in place preventing any movement (you cannot even turn on a spot) and absolutely any action will stop the energy regeneration (but the root effect will remain). There is nothing you can do to free yourself from the spells effect safe for being hit. Like most roots, they will break on hit with a 50% chance.

In groups getting hit is rarely a problem, if it is then something must be going terribly wrong and most likely you’ll get 50% energy back pretty soon and will face a run back to your corpse. Just make sure you don’t make the rest of your group wait for you.
It is always important to keep track of your energy bar and when you see it running relatively low, load the enemy up on DoTs and use Taproot. This will allow you to still deal damage while getting the energy back.

When soloing you have to wait for the DoTs to run out, cast Binding Roots on the opponent and only then use Taproot. With multiple opponents this becomes harder but doable.

Also Druids gain access to their first Area-of-Effect (AoE) spell, the Cyclone. It has short range but apart from your target will also hit all enemies around it. It does have rather long cast time of 2 seconds.

And of course we wouldn’t be druids if we count shapeshift into animal forms. The new ability Wolf Form not only grants significant melee bonuses but also increases our running speed by 50%. Now there is defiantly no need for a horse, wolf form is better in all ways. It semi-stacks with “Speed of Wolf” buff to make the caster run at 160% normal speed and you cannot be “knocked off” like with a horse. Combine this with Cloudwalk to gain amazing results!


Level 20
The first thing you notice is that you have become more attuned with nature and your phenomena pool has increased by 2 points. It may not be much to some but that’s a whole 2 minutes off the wait time on phenomena reuse.

Along with upgrade to venomous thorns you will obtain a second finisher. Thunderclap is an arcane finisher with has no recast timer and will be available after any spell critical.
As you now have a choice which finisher to use, a simple rule of thumb is to use Natures Wrath when the mob has more than 50% HP and Thunderclap when less.

The 2 defensive spells come next. Okeli’s Shield (OS) will reduce incoming damage by 100% making it 0 in other words on the target for 30 seconds… or 2 hits which ever comes first. While this may not look like much it is useful for few things. Pulling for example, casting OS on you before a pull will give your tank time to gain agro on the mob without causing yourself significant harm. It is however hard to use it reactively during battle at this level because of 3 second cast time. The upgrades to this spell will reduce cast time later in the game.

The other defensive spell is a wonder. Tranquility provides temporary invulnerably to your defensive target. For 20 seconds the target will be completely immune to all incoming damage.
Sounds too good to be true? Well, there is a catch. While under the effect of the spell a person cannot use any abilities or perform any actions. None what so ever. Of course, running is always an option. Keep this in mind before using Tranquility on a healer in a pinch. While it may save them, it may kill the tank in the process. Not to say it can’t be used in this way. We are Druids after all; we can heal.


Tips
In groups, watch your energy and Taproot early. Using the spell will keep you in place for 16 seconds and your group will rarely wait for you. Often it is better to load the almost dead mob on DoTs and Taproot before it's dead.
Earthen Elemental is not as useless as it looks. As a travelling DoT, it's always nice to use him when you have more than 1 mob to fight. Otherwise he is generally a waste of energy.
You can dismiss the Earthen Elemental by clicking the little button right of his health bar (pet's health bar is located right under your own by default). Useful if you need to root the enemy for example.
Watch out for enemies casting healing spells. You can easily identify them by the "heart" icon. If you encounter a healing opponent, save your counterspell for the heals.
When solo fighting stay mobile. At level 15+, the mobs will kill you in only few hits. Do not let them near you no matter what. Ensnare and SoW are you best friends here.
You can use "Vanishing Winds" right after you cross the chunk boundary to jump to the closest altar. Cuts travelling times by almost a half.
Use Cloudwalk when kiting. Provided you have a level ground it will greatly increase your backward moving speed. Be careful though as sometimes it does get a little bugged.
Add a macro to "Vanishing Winds" to alert your group members that you are casting it. You can do this by right-clicking on the spell in the hot bar and adding this for example:
/group Casting Evac, brace yourselves!
OR

/emote raises his arms. Immediatly strong winds begin to gather around. (Evac incoming).
Personal key bind preferences differ but it is often convenient to bind finisher reaction to “Q”. This will make it easily accessible during fierce combat.
Counterspell can be bound to E in the same fashion. An even better way is to create a macro on the hot bar that contains:

/cancelability
/cast Dissipate
And then bind this macro to E. What this will do is allow you to not only cast counterspell at any given moment (even if reaction is not lit up) but will also activate it if another spell is already being cast.