Druid Equipment Guide 

Gearing up a Druid can be difficult, even more so than many other classes because you have three different roles – healing, DPS, and magic. Each role requires a different set of gear, different gems, and more. This guide is here to help you figure out the best way to achieve that. The biggest step before you start sorting out your gear is to look at our basics guide which goes over stats, what they do for you, and what professions to take. Professions determine what available enchants/gems you may have available to you.

This is a basic guide to equipment for someone who is just starting out and in the process of gearing up. It includes the basic info you need to know in order to gear up and do well in instances and starting raids. As you advance higher you will find that it becomes increasingly more complicated on how you should gem and enchant and no guide out there can tell you what to do at that point, other than the basics which are included below.

Equipment

Ah, gear, the thing that determines what the direct power of your character will ultimately be. Here is what to look for when leveling up:

Feral: Agility, Attack Power 
Balance: Intellect, Spell Power 
Restoration: Intellect, Spell Power, MP/5, Spirit

At level 80:

Feral Cat DPS druids will want to aim for agility and attack power while leveling up. At level 80 armor penetration becomes a really good stat until it’s capped. Critical Strike, Hit, and Attack Power will come as your gear continues to get better, but Armor Penetration is a stat you should look for.

Balance Druids will want to gear up like a Mage. While leveling up Intellect and Spell Power are kings and then at level 80 it’s all about hitting that hit cap. Once you hit the hit cap (see our basics guide for that) you can then focus on spell power and haste.

Restoration Druids need to softcap their haste (until your spells finish casting by the time the global cooldown is up (~1 sec with latency)) and then focus on mana regeneration. Spirit increases spell power, is boosted by Blessing of Kings, and improves Innervate. Mana per 5 seconds is a pure mana increaser. There is always an argument between the two, but spirit is rather good. While leveling, you’ll probably just need to focus on Intellect until Outlands where you can start stacking up on mana regen gear.

Gems

Gems go into the gem slots in your gear. The following are some simple rules to follow for gemming your gear.

Enchants

Enchants are needed to beef yourself up and become all that you can be. The following are the basic enchanting principles.

Feral

Resto

Balance

Glyphs

Balance: Insect Swarm, Moonfire, and Starfire. 
Cat DPS: Savage Roar, Rip, and Shred. Mangle and Beserk work, too, especially if you have to Mangle (i.e. no other ferals, no bear tanks).
Resto: Glyph of Swiftmend is required, Regrowth and Lifebloom are good choices as well. An argument can be taken for Wild Growth and Nourish as well.

Well that’s the basics for gearing out a Druid! Feel free to return to our main page here. 

Gearing Up

While Leveling

Gearing up while leveling is dependent on how you spec and if you’re soloing or doing instances or doing the BG. Twinking out a Druid is relatively easy, you twink them out like a Rogue except you grab the highest level polearm that you can for feral or staff for balance.

Gear from 1-60 will be rather sparse unless you run instances which isn’t always the easiest thing to do. At level 60 you’ll get a full set of awesome green gear from quests, but if you can sneak in a few instances in Hellfire you can get some gear with gem slots. The tricky thing is a lot of gems don’t have level requirements, so you can load them up with blue (don’t waste epic quality) gems that give you a massive attack power boost. Imagine 72 additional attack power on top of whatever the gear offers.

At level 70 you’ll again get a new set of gear, and again if you can snag a few instance runs you’ll be for the better. Not only will you probably get the massive attack/spell power boost that your previous socketed gear had built into the piece, but you’ll get more sockets to play with.

At level 80

It’s a simple process to gear up no matter what you spec. You simply run heroics to get emblems and turn those emblems into high quality epic gear. With a full set of emblem gear you’ll be able to easily raid in any non-heroic raid without embarrassing yourself.