In the middle of my trial... some questions

Mithrandolir

Well met gang.

I played very briefly at release and now I just signed up a week ago for the trial, to check things out again.

Something I noticed... I got a usable axe dropped as loot on the newbie island.
Now... I couldn't barely lift it let alone equip it (I'm a frail mage ya know!) but it lists classes that can use it.
It's nothing fancy, just a refurbished axe of some sort (I forget at the moment what the exact name is).
My question on this is, does HZ have usable loot that drops from mobs now? Or did something weird happen with me? (I could have sworn it dropped as loot! )
I don't remember this game having dropped usable loot.

Also... I see that Shaman is a prestige class.
I'd like to make one. Do I start as a cleric? I found a list of all of the classes on GI.n but I can't seem to locate a tree that shows what starting class leads to which prestige class.

Thanks for your time

I'll post this on the official forums as well

Mithrandolir

Got a bunch of quick answers on the official forums so this can be disregarded

For anyone new that would like answers to these questions, look HERE