Day Two: Argggghhh!

Well day two of the Two Druids at Once experiment has concluded and it’s been quite the learning experience.

First off, I have decided to change the format here. Instead of providing a blow-by-blow report in the daily updates I have added a quest log that provides the overview of what I picked up and the order in which I completed them.

Why was today such a pain? Well the druid is designed as a jack-of-all-trades class. That is a good thing in the long run, but for the level 10 to 20 stretch it really pigeon holes what works well, and sadly the Balance tree is just no where near as effective as the Feral tree at this point. As a pair of balance spec’d druids I quickly discovered that I was playing like a mage with no free water and a smaller mana pool.

In the past when I leveled my now 70 druid I chose the feral route and it worked incredibly well. The problem I found when attempting to utilize bear form to bring some “ok” melee dps into the grind was that trying to keep 2 melee classes in range of mobs that run away at low health is a great way to get in over ones head. In the end I had the best luck with one druid in bear form while the other would heal, wrath and root. When the casting druid would run low on mana I’d switch them around. This helped drastically decrease the amount of time spent drinking.

The over use of store bought drinks leads into the next problem, money! Simply put I couldn’t keep enough incoming to offset new spells and supply the duo with an adequate supply of drinks. In fact, at one point I was so poor after buying a few choice spells I lacked enough to even fly back. Now a solution for those on a server where they don’t have higher level support would be to take up gathering professions and utilize the auction house. Luckily or unluckily for me, I have high level support on my server so it raised the question of whether or not to provide some supplemental income and if it would skew the spirit of my little endeavour.

I gave in!

So after sending 20 gold and 8 Netherweave bags to the druidly duo they were off to complete their trip to level 20.

I am still going to avoid instances and instance related quests for two reasons. First there’s many well written posts concerning high level boosting at dual-boxing.com. Second, the reliability of pick up groups is almost non-existent for sub 60 instances. So the higher level support provided by a bit of gold and bags is all the druids will get, though if they can scape up the gold for materials I will use my own crafters. Now that I think about it, with mounts available at level 30 I may have to give in and supply them with more gold to cover that expense.

The next update will hopefully cover 21 to 30!

-Stav