How would you roll a good herbalist?Follow

the +15 herbs skill doesnt really matter. you can pick things up 15 points earlier but...well if you pick the right things, you just need to pick up 15 plants to get where the tauren would be. and since you can max out to 75 or 150 or 225 by picking green-level plants, by the time you hit lvl 35 and want to advance beyond 225, the extra 15 still wont matter then either.

tradeskill in WoW is freakishly easy and a lvl 60 wanting to get from 0-300 herbalishm pretty much could pick and choose herbs and just have to do it 300 times.

there is no penalty for failing to pick an herb, and you dont necessarily get 3+ items on an herb for having higher skill.

so the end result of my commentary is, dont worry about choosing tauren just for the +herb.

and dont worry about the +herb enchant or +herb weapons either. just go pick herbs and that is all you need to do. there is no benefit right now for having greater than 300 herbalism.

as for class, any class will do fine. stealthing around some mobs always helps if they're not really close to the plant but they could aggro you on your way to the plant. otherwise, you do break stealth when you pick.

but at some point you'll be able to kill it anyway without worry ing about it, so again, any class would be fine.

having said all this, i prefer druid class for herb picking because once you get to the point where the nearby mobs dont aggro you (7-10 levels or higher), you can run around in cheetah form and cover distance faster. some people mount up to do herb picking so that negates the need for cheetah, but i hate that little bit of delay as you're standing there activating the mount.

I will argue this point back and forth again, Unlike skining, thier is no magic flower you can pick that requires over 300. The bonuses help you in other ways. Firstly herb avaliblity, starting at 15 makes starting the profession much eazer, earth root is avaialbe form the start. For me on eof the biggest sellers is swifthissle it comes from mageroyal(50) and Briarthorn(70), but as a mad cow you only need 35/55 skills, so right off the bat being able to pick "Earyler" is a boon.
Next is success rates, some herbs are just hard to pick and even at 300 you will fail from time to time, you will notice with 315 herb, flowers that were orange and took a while to pick, and ya failed on, are now yellow, and sucess is almost gauteeed. This is more relevent for a florist that has a travle form like a druid or shaman, for the pick and go tatic, it sucks trying 3 times for some silversage.

once u can pick blindweed (215 or 225 i think) go to SoS u can lvl all the way to 300 there and blind weed grows all over the place.

i picked up herbalism at lvl 40 for my rogue and went from 0-300 in roughly 3 days. Didnt even farm intensivly or anything. I simply started out in tirisfal and worked my way through silverpine, tarren mill, arathi and badlands. Easiest 0-300 i ever did.

money is very good too, fadeleaf goes for 15g a stack on my server so a few hours of farming pays very well.

I would say the +15 is nice but not necessary. My skill level is usually higher than what I farming anyways. Druids seem very ideal to herbalism. 1. Cat form - stealthing around mobs is a plus 2.Sea Lion form- anyone who has ever farmed the coast line of Westfall knows why this is good. 3. Travel Form - able to run from herb to herb fast (plus no automatic "daze" if you get hit like hunters in Cheetah aspect) 4. Ability to gather in forms. If you want bonuses for picking flowers enchanters have a glove bonus I know. But realistically +trade enchants other than fishing and skinning don't help that much.

True, but most starting places are littered with these two herbs.

I'm a level 60 Tauren druid with 315 herbalism, so here's my take.

Druid herbalists have several advantages:

1) Getting to the herbs:

Travel form -- Speed boost. Not til level 30 though.

Aquatic form -- Useful for getting Stranglekelp, an underwater herb.

Stealth -- Useful for slipping past mobs. Steath breaks when you start gathering the herb however. If there are mobs nearby, you then still need to either fight them, run away (in which case you don't get the herb) or incapacitate them without fighting them.

2) Crowd Control:
Useful for incapacitating mobs. This makes the process of herb gathering go much faster than trying to kill every mob you come across. Druids have three methods:

Soothe Animal -- Makes beasts much less likely to notice you

Hibernate -- Puts a beast or dragonkin to sleep

Entangling Roots -- Immobilizes almost any outdoor mob, and most herbs are outdoors. (Additionally, you can spec to get Nature's Grasp, the auto-cast Entangling Roots spell, which is extremely useful in these situations.)

3) Survivability:
Travel form and bear form aid greatly in survivability if your crowd control fails for some reason. Druids are generally very hard to kill and good at getting away from things.


And of course, there is the +15 to herbalism bonus if you're Tauren. I only found this helped me out in a handful of situations ever. Nice, but definitely not a big deal.


On the downside, if you're avoiding mobs rather than killing them, it will probably take quite a while to level up.

Edit: And cows are not ugly!!

Edited, Tue Apr 4 19:35:12 2006 by Llhyn

Edited, Tue Apr 4 19:39:58 2006 by Llhyn