Bear form

When you land or arrive at the top of the lifts make your way back to the Elder Rise and to Turak. You should be getting excited about now because you're about to sample what makes a Druid really cool to play. Talk to Turak and finish the quest. You will be reward with three new spells, Bear Form, Growl and Maul. You will also get a new icon on your action bar. Go ahead and click it straight away. Cool, isn't it! Go ahead and run about in your new bear form or try sitting (X key) for a laugh.

Once the immediate excitement wears off you will want to take a few minutes out to sort out your action bars again. When you are in bear form there are only a certain type of spells you can use. You will not be able to cast any of the spells you have used up until now while in bear form. This will be obvious because your primary action bar is now blank. When you switch between normal and bear form your action bar will also switch, allowing you fill them with spells that are relevant to the form you are in. Switch between bear form and druid form a couple of times using the bear form button to see what I mean.

Actionbar setup

When in bear form you will be able to use your two new bear spells, Growl and Maul. Switch to bear form and drag these two spells to your action bar. Put Maul first because that is the one you will be using the most. I also find it useful to put the bear form spell in the same spot on both my druid and bear form action bars as you can see from the screenshots below. This means I can switch back and forth using the same key, the equals sign in my case.

Rage

You may also spot one other major difference when you are in bear form. If you take a look at your character portrait at the top left hand side of the screen you will see that you no longer have health and mana but health and rage instead. Rage is required to cast some of your bear form spells, such as growl. During a fight you build up rage when you are hit or when you deal damage. You then use this rage to cast some of your bear form spells. I'll explain this in more detail later on.

You will also notice that your health is higher than it was in druid form. If you bring up your character info page and switch between the two forms you will also see that your Armor, Melee Attack Power and Melee Attack Damage go up when in bear form. It is also worth noting that your staff is close to useless during combat in bear form. The damage rating of your weapon does not come in to play while in bear form but the bonus stats that you might have on it does have an affect.