Druid Strat Question
 

Level 17 newbie druid. Want to maximize my limited playing time. I am fighting mobs currently like this:

1. Root
2. Flame Lick
3. Stinging Swarm
4. DS myself
5. Sit
6. Root Breaks
7. Usually add another flamelick
8. Melee/DS mob down
9. Med
10. Repeat

Would it be more efficient to do this:

1. DS myself
2. Flame Lick
3. Stinging Swarm
4. Melee/DS mob down
5. Heal myself
6. Med
7. Repeat

Use tree form between kills. And don't be afraid to use an actual DD nuke. Don't bother with root, just DS, Dot & melee. Throw in a nuke as needed. You will eventually learn the proper mix so that between fights your health and mana will regen to full at the same time. That is the optimum strategy.

You could also charm an animal using Befriend animal, and send it on another mob. Help your pet to make sure it wins. Then "hide" to break the charm, and kill a very weak mob for full exp. Kind of a 2 (or 3) for 1.

I recommend giving befriend animal a shot. Befriend animal a blue con, have it attach another blue con, med while they fight when pet is below 20% cast camo or invis vs animal nuke or melee both mobs to finish them off. Get 2 kills and use limited mana.

Alternatively(and perhaps the only choice if it is hard to keep finding new blue con animals) find an animal to charm, give it a couple rusty 1h weapons, and keep it hasted with feral spirit, pull other blue con mobs with snare and aggro kite them while pet beats on them. One way to maintain aggro would be to keep casting snare on the mob, or you can throw a dot or some nukes. This method requires that you not afk since you always have to watch for charm breaking, but befriend animal has a low enough cast time that you can run with sow and cast it on a full speed mob from max range before they get to you and start hitting you. You can also use the pet guard command to help keep some distance between you and your pet when charm breaks.

You already understand the important thing for Druids at low levels: You will need to use a mixture of spells and melee with DS for optimal leveling.

For me, another important strategy was which mobs to fight at what level. For instance, Baby Elephants and low dark blue elephants in SK are great at 17. Darters are harder. Hence, I pulled Elephants over Darters whenever I could.

Also, on the topic of mob selection, the type of mob will influence how much, if any melee you will be doing, as will your current level of health and mana. Thus, it is hard to give you an exact blue print. What you posted is up the right alley, just keep working on refining those general approaches under different circumstances.

Charm Animal, as has been mentioned, is also very effective for a Druid. You can snare him before charming if you like to reduce danger when charm breaks.... but charm holds quite well for Druids. Again, SK is a great place to use Charm Animal.

I've had great success with this. Befriend animal rocks...tends to last a good while on blue mobs.