I have a feral druid now. I have had a tauren druid for a few months. I really had not played on it much and it was only level 6 or 7 for the longest time. A few weeks ago, my druid, which was the only character I had on that realm, joined a new guild. The week after I joined, one of the guild members lavished a lot of very useful armor and an extremely nice 2H axe on my character. She did it on her own initiative and I was bowled over by her kindness. Leveling that character in its combination of grays (meaning poor quality) and whites (meaning common quality) was quite painful. In WoW, the clothes - and the weapons - make the man. You can customize your character slightly through the use of talents by virtually all of a character's power and survivability comes from statistics that get improved by values added by its gear. Thanks to the generosity of my guildmate I was able to increase my druid's level from a few levels below 10 to level 14 quickly and painlessly. At level 10, when you can finally start to specialize the class of your character, I chose feral combat - as opposed to balance or restoration. I shied away from feral on my first druid. When I started WoW I was strongly biased towards creating non-melee characters. For the most part, I felt that fighting at a distance was the way to go. The old adage keep your enemies closer was not for me. Over time, I have broadened my perspective and I think both play styles are fun, effective, and survivable. The reasons and mechanics behind this are very sound. Melee characters are way tougher than say casters who wear cloth armor. So even though they are in the thick of things, they are not in much more danger than the casters and hunters that are attacking from a distance. One setback on this druids realm is that buying gear was incredibly expensive. Even, and in fact, probably especially, low level gear and materials was extraordinarily expensive compared to prices I see on other realms. I wanted a way to enchant the gear for my druid as well as supply him with some jewelry. So what I did after dinner was create a pair of blood elves: a paladin who does mining and jewelcrafting, and a mage who does tailoring and enchanting. In a short time, I got both characters up to level 5 and beyond. Level 5 is when a character is allowed to chooes a profession. From my main, I sent them each golds, gear, elixirs, potions, bags, and some meat to cook. And they quickly became very prosperous. Leveling them was in no way a struggle. My impression is that blood elf characters level a little faster than new characters of other races. Their starting zone seems a little easier and the surroundings are a lot more pleasant. I started playing World of Warcraft a couple of months before the Burning Crusade expansion set came out. BC expansion is what introduced the blood elf race, along with the draenei, into the game. The first night it came out, I was amazed how a couple hours after midnight, blood elves started appearing in the zone surrounding Undercity. At first, I just saw level 7 blood elves. By dawn, they were over level 10 and less than 24 hours after BC debuted I was seeing a lot of blood elves in their midteens in not just the vicinity of UC but also in The Barrens, especially at The Crossroads. Blood elves are tough players to beat in battlegrounds. I am not a fanatic about playing against other players in BGs by any means. However, I do appreciate it as a swift way to get great gear in a semi-predictable amount of time. I also find it sharpens my skills. Whereas playing against PvE NPCs can allow for all kinds of sloppiness, or at least fail to reveal where quick reactoins and sharper thinking could have saved the day - playing against other players in PvP makes a lot of these shortcomings painfully obvious. One of the benefits of playing a role playing game, especially an MMORPG is that it teaches you to think really fast. So, I believe everybody should do some battlegrounds on their character once they are comfortable with it and know their class and how to play it pretty well. BGs are how you get really good, so there is no need to wait until you have perfected your game play on your character. That will come, in part, by doing player vs. player combat in the BG. You learn both from the enemy players trying to kill your character, and from the friendly players fighting along side your character, and hopefully sometimes healing and protecting it. And in many cases, you are able to do the same for them. World of Warcraft, like any MMO, is about teamwork. Quite a lot of the opportunities for teamwork first become available in batltegrounds. This experience, combined with the experience of doing 5 man parties in dungeon instances - as well as the occasional group quest - is what prepares characters for doing 10 to 40 man raids at level 60-80. I had noticed that blood elf paladins and mages were particularly deadly to my Alliance characters in BGs. So, in part, that is why I chose those 2 classes for my 2 blood elf characters. I both wanted to have and needed to understand their deadliness. The answer, it turns out, is pretty simple: magic. Blood elves are a little resistant to harmful magic spells cast on them. They are also able to silence all enemies within 8 meters of them and regenerate a small percentage of their maximum mana using an Arcane Torrent spell. That spell can be cast every 2 minutes. That sounds like a long time but any battleground lasts several times that and typical battleground times are something like 10-25 minutes. Now you know that if you are a caster, you need to keep a distance from blood elves. And also, that you will have a little harder time killing them than your melee counterparts on your team will have. Having a melee character on your team tank a blood elf in a BG while you cast spells from a distance should be extremely effective, however. Just avoid soloing them close up, if possible, unless you are a melee class character. Well, that wraps up what I learned last night. At last, a piece of the puzzle of this game has fallen into place.