if you're playing as a ne you will need to focus on str, agil, int, and even spirit. if you're a tauren, then i would suggest that you focus on stamina instead of agility. you'll need str as a bear to accrue the damage you need to hold hate as your taunt alone simply doesn't do it well enough; you'll of course need str as a cat to be an effective dd. agil helps decrease the overall damage you'll take as a ne, and sta will of course increase the amount of punishment you can take.
switching into your forms does cost mana, and that mana cost increases with your level (as does the bonuses granted by your cat and bear forms) and your mp increase at each level does not scale equally with your animal form's cost increase. furthermore, if you're shifting between forms to attack, tank and heal, you'll need to keep in mind that at higher levels your healing spells will be costing more and more mana. so being able to switch effectively between your caster form to heal yourself and others, and then back to your animal form requires that you pay a lot of attention to intellect. for example: a rank four (or five, i can't remember) healing touch costs something like 185 mana at the level at which you can first buy it and your bear and cat forms cost about the same. you encounter x mob, shift into one form or another for about 180 mana, draw a considerable amount of damage, shift out and heal for about 180 mana, while you are still in the hole from that first shift for about 100 mana, and then shift back again for about 180 mana. at the end of this process you are fully healed and back in animal form, but with little to no rage or energy, and now in the mana hole for about 500 mana... which is probably over half your mana. so you really can't shift, heal, shift more than twice in a fight... casting combat spells like moonfire/starfire/wrath/roots(arguably a combat spell) in any combination of the two will put you in the hole even more (you should be casting at least two because shifting to cast just one of these spells on anything but a running mob is wildly inefficient as no single one of them do as much damage outright or over time as your animal forms do in the same amount of time).
as a side note, focussing on just restoration and feral talents will leave you hurting if you plan to do a lot of shuffling between forms: swiftshifting (i think it's called) is a balance talent and requires something like five (or more) points in balance before you can outlay the first of three points for it. while a druid that shuffles alot between forms is doable without swiftshifting, you are gimping yourself: at each shift you are left with a little less than three seconds or so of cooldown before you can cast a healing spell or use that animal's ability, and three points in swiftshifting cuts this down to about half a second.
focussing heavily on spirit helps alot with hp and mp management. in fact, one of the hardest things about playing a druid between lvls 15-25 is knowing exactly when you have to shift to heal yourself; you have to know when you'll have enough mp to shift back to caster form to cast a few healing spells and shift back into animal form, and you need to be able to judge how long your hp will hold out before you need a healing touch or similar spell. boosting spirit means that when in animal form you are gaining mp that much more quickly.
as far as what weapon to aim for... i would advocate that, even as early as lvl 16 or so, you try to keep two sets of some items, especially weapons, so that you can have a str, agil/sta set and a spirit, int set. for the alliance, the staff of westfall (the "defeat vc" award: http://wow.allakhazam.com/item.html?witem=2042) is ideal at early levels for spirit and int. honestly, i relied on armor to boost stats more than weapons, and i found that the dps outlay difference between daggers, staves, fistweapons, one-, and two- handed weapons to be more or less negligable, given that my dps usually did about twice the damage i was dishing out through a combo of thorns+(roots/entangling if outside)+weakening buffs (faerie fire or demoralizing shout)+moonfire... my dps was important but i just couldn't compete witth a mob of my levl or higher, in many cases without first throwing that combo on it.
and as far as i know your weapon seems to effect your dps, but not too greatly: your damage in cat and bear form is always the same. that is, you will always deal damage in the median of the range described in your character info. i have never actually tried to figure this one out exactly... but given that your attack power and dps are effected by your weapons, and that your bear and cat form seem to take your character+weapon dps and power to calculate their base damage (before the bear and cat +power bonus) i would guess that your weapon does effect your animal form's dps as well.
EDIT: i don't mean to deter anyone from playing as a druid. i'll be a druid come tues, and i want to take it all the way to 60. what i like so much about a druid is that it requires a lot of planning and attention, not that any other class doesn't in one way or another... but there is no time when i was playing as my druid that i could just tool about from one mob to the other w/o paying any attention.
as far as talents go, i went for skinning/leatherworking. herbalism/alchemy would be another great way to work it, but my thinking was: the items i make to wear as a leatherworker are always in effect, but i can only quaff a potion if i'm in caster form (granted plenty of potions have enduring effects).
and no... i disagree that the mana cost for shifting is somehow "not right" with the druid. if i could shift for free, i would become, imho, too powerful. the cost seems right on, you just have to learn to like, or at least abide by, the sort of mp and hp management that it requires. i think the druid is meant to be more of a support class; though i could handle some time on the frontlines, i couldn't do it like a rogue or a warrior could, and i certainly couldn't do it for long: the druid has neither the agility bonus of the rogue nor the armor/sta of the warrior and so has to be able to disengage quickly and entirely from combat to heal... i would never dare to be a tank, say in the stockades until i was at least a lvl 35, if not a 40 (the stockades is an instance in sw w/ lvl22-29 elites).
second edit for clarity, spelling.
Edited, Sun Nov 21 01:04:48 2004 by sheapearce
Edited, Sun Nov 21 01:58:05 2004 by sheapearce