Item bonus stats

As you progress past level 10 you will start to receive quest rewards that have bonus stats on them. These items can be identified by the green title they have, instead of the gray and white ones you have been used to so far. For example, you might pick up a new staff that has a +2 stamina bonus on it. This means that while you are wielding the staff your stamina rating will go up by 2 and therefore your health will increase. If you pick up an item with a +3 strength bonus on it then your attack power will go up.

There is a lot of discussion about which stats are best for the druid and it depends a lot on what type of druid you intend to play. I like to solo a lot, so for me the important stats are strength and stamina. In other words I want to do more damage and I want to be able to stay alive longer. Some people recommend trying to get a good balance of all stats. Again, the best advice is to do a bit of reading on the subject and make up your own mind.

Talent tree

Another very important part of reaching level 10 is that you also get access to a new area of the game called Talents. I could have mentioned this earlier on but I wanted to get you to the stage of getting bear form before talking about this. Look along the bottom middle of your action bar for a new icon labelled Talents. Click that button to bring up your talent tree.

Talents are a way of customizing your character and improving their skills and abilities. Every level you will receive one talent point that you can spend on your talent tree. This starts at level 10, so you will see that you have one talent point to spend. There are three groups of talents, each with their own advantages and are different for each class. The three groups for the druid class are Balance, Feral Combat and Restoration.

Balance is aimed mainly at improving your spells in druid form. Feral Combat is aimed at mainly improving your spells in the other forms, such as bear and cat form. Restoration is aimed mainly at improving your buff and healing spells. A proper discussion of all these talents is a guide in itself, so I'm not going to spend much time talking about them here. There are already some great guides out there that will explain them all and suggest templates for different styles of play.

Improved Mark of the Wild

For now I'm going to spend my one talent point on Improved Mark of the Wild in the Restoration tree. This will boost the effectiveness of my Mark Of The Wild spell, which is already a powerful spell in its own right. Ok, let's get back to trying out bear form and finishing off the quests in this area.

The first we are going to do is Preparation for Ceremony, which requires collecting feathers from harpies that you may have spotted near the bottom of the lifts. Bring up the objectives on the screen and head back down the lifts. One thing worth noting here is that you can stay in bear form while running about. While it may seem slower due to the slower animation of your character, it is in fact exactly the same speed as running about in druid form.