which form/spec is better for leveling fast ?

[Shadow99]

Feral or Guardian until 80 ?

[Mirri]

Balance with heirlooms goes fast - multi dot quest mobs and they die after a few spells. Low downtime as you can heal yourself quickly too.
Go feral if you like questing as a cat.
Go guardian if you want to level by spamming dungeons (only effective if you have full heirlooms - else quest exp gains are higher)

[pkm]

Quest mobs don't hit that hard. You can pull a few and aoe them down as bear but cat kills them fast single target anyway. With heirlooms, balance also does good but cat is always smooth.

[Deleted]

Quest mobs don't hit that hard. You can pull a few and aoe them down as bear but cat kills them fast single target anyway. With heirlooms, balance also does good but cat is always smooth.

I'd rather suggest aoe as cat, since the combination of pre-Savage Roar'ing + Thrash, Swipe, Tiger's Fury, Swipe, Swipe kills nearly everything. Repeatable burst aoe is one of the strengths of a feral (especially in low level).

To be more effective as a guardian than as feral, you'd have to pull so many mobs, that most of them would evade. Collecting that many mobs also takes a lot of time - which has to be taken into account.

5-8 mobs are pretty easy as feral (the kitty spec) - even more 30+ since you get the 30's talent (right one, Cenarian Warden I think was the name. 30sec cd just like Tiger's Fury, 3 ticks, every tick heals ~50-100% or so at low level).

How fast a boomkin is... I don't know, but I leveled a new feral a couple of days ago and I was able to bomb the mobs until Valley of the Four Winds (Vermings etc. were still possible, or the turtles where you have to collect 160 turtle's flesh, but packs of more than 3-4 "real" quest mobs got a bit of... deadly.)
But I would also suggest to level on the Timeless Isle once you hit 86 or 87. The caterpillars around Old Pi'jiu give the same exp as every other mob on the isle (non elite + "reduced unitframe", average non elite, elite, strong elite at the top of the isle... everything gives the same exp).

There are 5 packs of caterpillars - 10 in each. Those 10 caterpillars per pack give the same exp as one quest of your level range (so it increases with your level, too - cause they are lvl 90 and not lower ).

The respawn takes around 4min or so and due to this, it is like finishing 5 quests every 4 minutes or so. You can even get the shrine buffs, buff items (only need level 85) etc., but you can't quest there / open chests.

By leveling there you get:

- The fastest leveling (takes a bit of training how to pull them (I'd suggest Fairy Fire, running a half circle around them to collect them all)).

- A handful timeless coins - especially, when you do some rare mobs, too (The fishing boss in the south, sometimes a Jade Crane or one of the rare Pythons... the beer elemental, the caterpillar rare... maybe sometimes the tiger, for which the players have to kite the cranes to his place... etc. ... the battleship Vazuvius, Evermaw... xP). When I finished there, I had around 6 496 leather items, 19k coins, ...

- ... many green items to disenchant

- an alternative way of leveling in comparison to the same quests we do over and over


The choice is yours Have fun!

[Shadow99]

But i heard feral dps gone crap now and yet leveling as guardian would be better for soloing ?

[Deleted]

But i heard feral dps gone crap now and yet leveling as guardian would be better for soloing ?

Felt more like guardian dps is pretty low (in comparison to other tank classes). Cat dmg was pretty nice. (No hotfix-changes since I leveled)

[Elunedra]

i have no problem leveling as cat but you realy need a hierloom weapon as cats are verry weapon dps dependant

[Deleted]

You should really play as whatever spec you're going to want to use at 90 as practice.

[Urden]

Guardian > Cat > Resto (If you dungeon grind) > Moonkin

Guardian is worse single target than Cat but you can pull 10+ mobs and kill them all with no threat of dieing very easily.

[Silent Earth]

I've leveled two Druids to max in their respective expansions:

1-80 as Balance in Wrath, and 1-90 as Feral in Mists.

Both had full heirlooms (as many as were available) at the time I leveled them. I found leveling Feral was faster and a bit easier. Then again, because of the time difference between leveling them, part of it could have just been because I was a much better player by Mists than I was in Wrath. So take it with a grain of salt, I guess.

[Damerflinn]

I leveled my druid from 1-90 only a week an a half ago. I used only heirlooms that gave an xp buff. And it was really easy as feral. I never really pulled more then 1-3 mobs at once, but you kill stuff so fast that it doesn't really matter. It did start getting harder once I hit Cata, but once I got a staff from a dungeon it wasn't so bad anymore. So if you got the heirloom weapon from Garrosh already or get one of the older ones I'm sure it isn't bad.

I have leveled a different druid as Boomy, I think he's like entering WotlK zones right now, and it wasn't that fun, in dungeons you don't do that much DPS because it's so reliant on AoE, and you kill stuff so much slower then feral does that it doesn't seem worth it, especially when both specs get access to easy and powerful self healing. HOWEVER, if you are planning on playing Boomy at max level, I do suggest at least doing the MoP zones in boomy, if not cata as well, because while the spec is simple enough in terms of number of used spells, it is a bit more complex in execution, and leveling in the spec will help that out a bit, it took me around a week after hitting 90 on my druid to get the hang of the subtleties of boomy.

Didn't play much Guardian past a pretty low level, but it seemed like more work then other tanks in dungeons to keep all the mobs on you, but it gets better with more abilities and the right glyphs. But if you don't want to straight run dungeons, you have to go Guardian/Feral or have two sets of heirlooms because Guardian is just so slow to quest as.

[Sobura]

Since you asked about Feral or Guardian...
I'd have to say Feral for questing, Guardian for fast dungeon queues.

[Veyne]

I'd rather suggest aoe as cat, since the combination of pre-Savage Roar'ing + Thrash, Swipe, Tiger's Fury, Swipe, Swipe kills nearly everything. Repeatable burst aoe is one of the strengths of a feral (especially in low level).

Something I just recently discovered is that Cat and Bear Thrash work independently of each other. You can put them both up. It's ridiculous AoE. Your meter will only have one section for Thrash, probably, but it will be freakishly high, and you'll notice two Thrash DoTs bleeding away. Just a thought. Pull as bear, Thrash, shift to cat, Savage Roar, Thrash, and then Tiger's Fury Swipe spam.

That being said, I LARGELY prefer Balance to level, especially at low levels (Starsurge hits like a TRUCK, especially with BoA's), but I've been on a Feral/Guardian kick lately for my last couple of levels.

- - - Updated - - -

I've leveled two Druids to max in their respective expansions:

1-80 as Balance in Wrath, and 1-90 as Feral in Mists.

Both had full heirlooms (as many as were available) at the time I leveled them. I found leveling Feral was faster and a bit easier. Then again, because of the time difference between leveling them, part of it could have just been because I was a much better player by Mists than I was in Wrath. So take it with a grain of salt, I guess.

Leveling as Balance was considerably better in Wrath than it was in TBC, but ever since Cataclysm hit, Balance has been pretty amazing to level as.

[Shennanigans]

Laser turkey! Balance is really fun I loved leveling that spec. At lower levels I would go cat for large aw packs and swipe til I got hurricane for aloe. I've always been aman of dots.