Leveling woes.....Follow

The first 10 levels are incredibly painful, and I dare say the hardest of any class.
I died so, so many times.
Then, when you get bear it gets a little better, but your damage output is still low, and the legendary survivability of bear doesn't show itself yet.
At 20 you get catform, which helps immensely.
However, you don't have a proper finisher (at least, not for leveling) neither do you have a good stealth opener

from level 30 you'll notice an increase in damage, and after 40 feral druids lvl incredibly fast.
Incredible damage, no down time..

So to answer your question, yes leveling does get better.
In fact, I think it took me about 2 weeks to get to lvl 10, just because I often would die and alt + f4.
Maybe weak, but I just couldn't stand it.
Then I did lvl 20-23 in one day, and three days later I was lvl 30
Edit : grammar owns me.

Edited, May 19th 2008 4:36pm by NeroSeekerOfSouls

Edited, May 19th 2008 4:39pm by NeroSeekerOfSouls

Assuming you're leveling Feral (only because it's most common, not because you can't level any other way), the answer is: 36. That's when you get Pounce. Mobs will be mostly dead before they can even turn around, and downtime will become a faint memory.

At 40 you will get Dire Bear, and be able to choose between taking down single targets really fast or taking down a virtually unlimited number at once. You will laugh at others, politely of course, as they picnic off to the side with their cute little muffins and melon juice while you take down all the mobs. Sure, it's taken a long time to get here, but from this point on you are the most efficient leveler there is, hunters included.

At 50 you will either put that 41st point into Mangle or respec for it. This is when you order your Druid t-shirt from Jinx, insist on being addressed by your Druid's name around the office, and start shouting "Druid FTW!" at sporting events while other people are shouting more situation-appropriate things. You will also spend lots of time right here, assuring newer druids that it's totally worth the wait.

So pull up a chair. We have cookies. :)


Edited, May 19th 2008 6:10pm by teacake

deleted

Edited, Aug 27th 2008 12:44am by kawainui

Druids are still a bit slow to level later on. At least compared to my rogue (which arguably is probably one of the faster leveling classes).

I took the rogue 60-70 recently, and the druid 60-68 (where I'm currently leveling it) and the rogue probably had a good 20% more DPS through the same stretch. Seemed like part of the reason at least was that there's a ton of +hit upgrades as you get through Hellfire Penin and beyond, but the Druid very quickly became hitcapped and many of the upgrades weren't nearly as big as they were for the Rogue.

The Druid might have a tiny bit more uptime (particularly when he dodges/crits at the right time, letting Imp LOTP keep him pegged near 100% health; but also due to self-healing) but not enough to make up the ~20% DPS discrepancy.