Balance Leveling QuestionFollow

I've been leveling my Druid, Malesar a lot recently. I've looked through a lot of the FAQs and guides here and on the official boards, and while they all discuss gear, talents, stats, and viable builds, I can't seem to get much information on a leveling strategy for Balance. I just want to see if there's a better way to fight while leveling than I have been doing, or if my strategy is good. I've spoken to a few guildies who are Balance specced, and get different answers. I figured I'd get opinions from any Alla posters that play or played balance and have their own ideas.

First off, I have the whole +spell damage / spell crit gear, and have in my bags DPS gear in case I go OOM in a fight. I have Outfitter set up to auto-change my gear when I change forms (with the obvious in-combat limitations). My strategy is simply:

(1) Thorns
(2) Mark of the Wild (or Gift if I'm duoing or grouping for quests)
(3) Nature's Grasp
(4) Moonkin form
(5) Starfire, Wrath, Moonfire, Insect Swarm
(6) Mainly melee for a while to regen some mana, and DoT when they wear off
(a) Rejuvenation if I'm going under 1/3 health
(b) Throw out treants if I get adds or multiple mobs
(c) Go into Bear form or cat form if I'm OOM and no mana pots (rare)
(7) Target next mob, repeat from (5)

I tend to find I can usually solo fairly well with this strategy- it changes according to what I need (for example, cat form & stealthing past mobs if I just need the named mob, or hitting multiple casters with Treants and hurricane to slow down their casts, etc.). However, I tend to need to drink a lot doing this (usually every 4 or so mobs when I'm soloing mobs my level), and was wondering if there's a more efficient strategy for Balance druids that I've missed. One of my guildies said he roots his mobs, moonfires, Insect Swarms, then wraths until they die. Another said she kinda just wades in and beats things, DoTs them, heals up , switches back, and repeats. The third said he "just kinda wings it".

Anyway, any feedback is welcome- from gear to talent choices to stats. However, my primary mission here is for leveling strats!

Looks good to me, someone brought this up in another post. Balance druids are the only caster that can't use a wand. As such, we have to be in melee range taking damage to get out of the 5SR, or hope Root+IS+MF ticks do the job for us.

Since I respec'd Resto, I have ~700 spell damage with a mix of healing pieces and off-spec gear I picked up. I still think it's easier to just throw on my cat gear and kill stuff that way. But I leveled from 1-60 Feral, 60-60.5 as balance, and 60.5-70 as feral. I have a destro/demo warlock if I want to see big spell damage crits.

elle shammy can not use wands also.

when i am low on mana, i tend u jsut rely on the dots from Root+IS+MF and let my dreamstate come into play(25mp5 at lvl 46 ^_^) it makes a heall of a difference, when i was getting boosted in ZF, i was randomly spamming starfire and b4 i finished casting one i had regained nearly half of the mana required for another one.

i have found it hard to keep mana while in bg though, i always get caught oom.

gonna have to work on that

Hmmm, on all my casters, I took up the assumption that I would probably OOM after every fight.
Water is cheap.