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I have not been able to get much info on what happens to your equipment when you die. Do you drop anything... a misc item, a bag, armor, etc. When are the items lootable by other players? I know, simple question, just wondering.

First and foremost, items can never be lost. Period. (thus far at least). It makes no difference if you are player killed or ripped apart by an ogre, your character's body cannot be looted for spare parts. Your items and bags stay with you though thick and thin unless you give them to another player, complete a quest (and therefore give up a quest item), destroy the item, sell the item, use the item, or (like all good warriors) eat the item!

I've seen a few posts on the officials where people complain about Druids being very weak and not worth playing. However, these posts assume that people are in the game and know what the poster is talking about. Is anyone here playing a Druid, and could they please go into more depth about what exactly is "wrong" with the class now?

The main complaint has been that they are the least able to solo, and the easiest opponent in PVP. Their ability to shape shift into a greater adversary like a bear can even the odds, but even with the armor bonus the Druid is still wearing cloth and swinging with a limited arsenal of melee weapons. Now that Two-handed axes have been removed from the Druid's available weapon choices their possible DPS drops significantly.

If they choose to stay in humanoid form the Druid has a wide variety of attacks and heals, but they are much more of a support class than any other casting class is. Mages, Priests and Warlocks will destroy a Druid every time. Entangling roots is no use against these ranged opponents unless you plan to just run away. All have bolt type attack spells, but the Mages are 10 times as deadly. All have self buffs and some sort of defensive spell, but the Priest's ability to put a damage shield (blade turn bubble) up will quickly frustrate a Druid. All have some sort of "oh-crap!" ability to get them out of sticky situations, but while Priests have mind control, Mages have sheep form, and Warlocks have health/mana stones and pets to fight while they run, a Druid's only option is shifting to travel form and running like hell.

VS a melee opponent, Druids will have to play the endurance game. At nearly half the hit points of a Warrior, Druids can't stand toe-to-toe with them for any amount of time. Rogues will be slightly less resistant to a Druid's attacks, but in the end if they successfully get one stun move off on your Druid, you will lose 70% of your health in a matter of seconds. Paladins can do just about the same damage as a Druid in bear form, but a Paladin doesn't have to shape shift to heal himself, and can outlast a Druid any day. Remember, players can still attack you and cast spells when rooted, so there's no way for a Druid to hope to prevent his opponent from healing themselves without a lucky stun from a bear form attack.

What are the starting attributes for each race? I assume by now they have to be nailed down reasonably well.

Posted this earlier to the home page. You can now checkout all of the starting stats for all races. Start here at our Class home, or at our Class Chart

http://wow.stratics.com/content/statistics/classes/
http://wow.stratics.com/content/statistics/classes/classchart.php

Well been in the last few nights playing the game. So far I love it. But I have one question. How are looting rights determined. Is it by most damage? First Strike? The same question for Kills. When I have been doing the quest, Frost Trolls for an example, I never could get a Kill count to start my quest. Not untill I joined a group did I start gain counts. Curious as to what it takes for both.

Looting is determined by the group leader. He can right click on his portrait and click Free for All, Round Robin or Loot Master. It is defaulted to Round Robin, so each group member would get their share. If you pickup a class specific item that might benefit someone else you should share it, but its up to you. With the combination of items that bind when you pick them up it is important to make a clear statement about what the looting rules will be if you expect to get rare drops. In an instanced zone there are almost always rare drops for one group mate or another, and if you aren't careful you might accidentally loot that uber shield your warrior friend wanted. Blizzard has recently added a confirmation dialog to warn you before you loot a "Binds when picked up" item, so you can Decline if you would like to offer it to the group.

It can be a good idea when farming big time loot like this to let the group leader be the loot master, and allow them to collect all loot. You'll still get your share of cash, you can divide up the linen and wool later, and all of the rare drops will be safe from any noob group mates you might have brought along. At the end, any rare items that were not "Binds when picked up" can then be distributed by the loot master.

I, and I'm sure others, want to know how smooth this game runs. One of the best way to figure that out is to know how many frames per second it's running. So is there a frames per second counter in the game?
If so what configuration of computer do you have, CPU, Memory, and Video Card and how many frames per second are you getting with that configuration? What are your video settings at? resolution, Anti-Aliasing, Ansio-Filtering, shadows, etc. Is the game capped at a max number of frames per second like SWG is capped at 30 FPS? Is the frame rate your getting good enough for smooth play? Does the frame rate drop with a lot of other players around and or many game effects such as explosions and smoke?

Due to RL, I have hardly any chance to play these days. But I was running the game with the highest settings on resolution 1024x768 and was getting FPS40-60

My rig is:

AMD64 3000
512 MB DDR RAM
GeForce4 TI4200 128 MB

The rest is bla bla, internet connection is a 3 mbit/sec line. So as you can see the game is certainly not capped at 30 FPS, that would really suck imo.
Yes there is a FPS counter in the game, No I never turned it on.

My rig is an Athlon Sempron 2800+
An ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 128 Meg (faster than the 9600s Also Overclocked from 275/270 core/memory to 325/310)
768 Megs of PC3200

The game plays ultra smooth at 1280x1024 Resolution With all the Stress Test options turned on.

Originally I was having trouble with the game, it was thrashing my hard drive a lot and performing really really badly. That's why I added an extra 256 Megs of Ram (originally had 512). First I lowered my AGP aperture to 64(started out 128) but that only helped a little bit, second I realized that agp fast writes were disabled for some reason on my motherboard and switched windows over to use the same size virtual memory all the time, but again only helped a bit. Switching to OpenGL again helped a little bit before I added in the extra Ram. But After having the extra ram available DirectX seemed to run smoother than OpenGL did.