brainstorm

Introduction

Welcome to WoW! This guide is aimed at people who want a Players Guide written by a player and not some bullet pointed tooltip’s or walkthroughs on 50 billion quests. I am not here to share my secrets to making hundreds of gold a day, nor am I telling you where Mankirk’s Wife is.

What I am here to do is help you get on your feet in the game and figure a few basic thing’s out. First off, I’m going to assume you neither read the manual, nor are using the little tutorial help pop-ups. Some people can’t work with that sort of thing, and that’s cool. I’m here to provide a running dialogue of how to play and how to behave. I will also be dropping a few pointers for advancement and having fun, which no guide really focuses on and I think is a shame.

Congratulations, you’ve installed and patched your game, took a while, sorry to hear that…

You have a few options at this point, post account set up you’re going to have to make some choices, many of these will depend on if you have friends playing or not. In all cases, follow your friends advice and ignore anything I say contrary, it’s not about who’s right or wrong, it’s about having fun and fitting in. If your friend tells you to roll an Orc Rogue on Feathermoon Server, he’s right, do it!

Choosing a server

First off you have selections of server location, type, and name. If at all possible choose a server you have friends playing in. If you do not have any friends playing WoW you can follow my advice below, if you’ve already got your friends server in mind, skip this next section.

Your server types are PVE (You and your buddies vs. the creatures of the world), PVP (You and your buddies against other players of the opposite faction), and lastly RP (Where storytelling and in character narratives are encouraged). Keep in mind that all of these servers also offer some of what the others do. The main focus of each server, however, is denoted by its name. While you could RP on a PVP server you’re unlikely to find many people willing to go along with you.

After you’ve chosen your server type you’ve got a list of available servers. Some have indicators of New, Low, Medium, High or Full population. New servers are recently opened and typically have lower level characters; some of these players are old hands however. Low population servers are not recently opened but for some reason have a lower population than is normal, I suggest avoiding these, as they typically are not conductive to grouping, questing, leveling and any social interaction. Medium population and High population servers follow an escalating level of server activity, these are good places to learn the game, meet new people and have fun. A Full server is one that has reached a critical level of population and may require substantial patience in logging in, while they can be fun they may not be the best idea for a new player.

Some research can be done in the Forums of each server through the main WoW Website. Simply log in via your account info and drop a forum post asking for opinions on the server you’re interested in, peak activity times, and how much of each activity you’re interested in. Some server forums are a bit aggressive to new players so go in calm and patient, if you get a bad vibe, try a different Server.

Faction and Race

Once you’ve chosen a server to start play on you are given two basic choices, Alliance or Horde. Neither side is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to play as, although historically speaking Alliance sees more characters than Horde. If you have a friend on one side or the other you must choose that faction in order to socialize. Each faction has a different language set and no communication is possible between opposing factions. The only other differences in Factions are races, which for the most part are cosmetic differences. Each race has a few unique abilities but none are major enough to lose sleep over, anymore. If you’re into role-play and familiar with Warcraft lore, select a race that you can build a story about, otherwise select something that catches your eye.

Once you’ve chosen a Faction and Race you’re able to select a class and modify your appearance in a few ways. Set your hair and features, skin tone, and find an appearance you can live with.

In the coming expansion you will be able to modify this again, later, but it costs gold and may be a long time before you can be bothered to do so. So select something you’re going to be able to deal with for a while.

Basics of Play

Once you get past the in game cinematic you’re standing in a starter zone with no idea what to do. Most of WoW is a simple point and click interface allowing you to navigate and interact with only the mouse. You may also move around using the WASD or arrow keys and use abilities via your 1-0 keys. Many players use unique modifications and add-ons to enhance and customize game play to suit them, but you can always get along fine using the default interface.

Your first focus in the game is ‘Have Fun’. Whether you enjoy Leveling, Fighting Monsters, or defeating other Players, or even telling stories in character you should always focus on enjoying the game. One of the best ways to enjoy WoW is with friends, either from real life or that you’ve met with in the game world.

If you have a friend in game you should add their character name to your ingame Friend List. You can access this list by pressing O then selecting the Friends tab from your Social Pane, there will be a button for adding the person’s character name to your list, press the button type the name and there you go. Now whenever they log on you will get a small system message letting you know. To talk with them right click their name and select ‘Whisper’ this will bring up a text box to type your message in. To respond to a whisper you can press R. Otherwise it’s simple chat interface.

To talk to people in the game world you can whisper them, talk in ‘Say’ or if you’re grouped in ‘Party’. The commands for this are very simple. ‘Say’ is the default chat-channel and every time you press ‘enter’ your message should appear in white text to people nearby. To access and speak in other channels simply type ‘/party’ for people you’re grouped with, or ‘/guild’ if you’ve been invited to a Guild by a friend. Once you type the chat-channel command it will default your ‘enter’ to that channel, meaning you need only type ‘/party’ once to talk to your part by pressing ‘Enter’. Very simple.

Professions and Talents

As you level your character you gain the opportunity to learn professions, which are trade skills for either crafting items or gathering materials from the world. Depending on your class and inclination many Professions may be interesting to you, but you may only practice two at a time. You may later unlearn a profession, resetting it to 0 skill, and pick up a new one, so there is no major concern with initial selections.

Many trainers for Professions are found in Major Cities, and will teach you their skills for a small price. If you can’t locate one at first right click a guard in a city and ask for directions, he will flag your mini-map with the location of the person you seek. Once located a trainer can teach you the initial skill, advanced training, and new patterns depending on your level of skill.

One easy way to make money at lower levels is to focus on two Gathering Professions, as you can always sell what you collect on the Auction House to other players. Often high-level players, with extra gold, will purchase materials to level Crafting Professions for their other characters. This is faster for them then going back to the lower level zones and ends up being beneficial to both parties. As you progress in level a Crafting Profession may appeal to you for it’s unique crafted items, if this is so feel free to unlearn one of your Gathering Professions and learn the new Crafting Profession. It is suggested that you retain one Gathering Profession to supply you with the materials or gold you need for your Crafting Profession.

As you level you will eventually gain Talent Points, you may access your Talents by pressing the N key. Talents are split into three ‘Trees’ for each class, and are widely varied between them. Each Talent further down the ‘Tree’ requires more and more investment in other Talents, leading to special skills reached at higher levels. I suggest seeing what is available early and enjoying the early Talents as you level, many are very suited for a starting character and can greatly speed your progress in the game. At higher levels the payoff for specializing in one particular branch of Talents tends to outweigh a more diverse selection, but this does not always hold true.

There are many class forums, websites, and guides that detail these things. As always a friend with experience in your class is a good source of help and advice.

Levels and Loot

Once you’ve started playing you should be near a few Non-Player Characters, these are game controlled characters that provide your character with details about the world and various quests to partake in. Simply move your character near one and right click it to interact. IF the NPC has a gold-colored exclamation point ( ! ) above it’s head it has a quest to give you, if it has a gold question mark ( ? ) you have completed a quest for it. Either way once you right click the NPC you will have a dialogue box pop up with the characters Quest or Information.

After you accept a quest you can always check your progress, review the information and find details about it by pressing your L button for your Quest Log. From the log you may select any quest you are on and see a short summary, the original dialogue, and an itemized tracker of progress. If you ever lose your way on a quest, forget what they wanted to do or can’t figure out where to go next, try your Quest Log. If you are still lost you can ask a friend, or consult a website like Wowhead for information.

Combat in Wow is as simple as anything else to learn. Simply approaching a monster will typically draw its attention to you and it will begin attacking. This process is called drawing or pulling Aggro. To attack the monster you may right click it for basic melee attacks or select it and press your number keys for you special abilities, including spells. Once defeated the monster falls to the ground leaving a body for you to loot. By right click the body it brings up a small bag of items the creature had on it, take the items by right clicking them, or dragging them into your bags.

Parting words

This guide is not a definitive answer to all your questions, I can’t even begin to guess what they might be in totality. Instead this is aimed at the first time player, looking at the bright lit game world, the cinematic panning over their character and wondering where to start.

With 10 million players, dozens of servers, hundreds of zones, and soon four continents this game is vast. It can be overwhelming to join a friend in his Epic Gear who knows all the ropes. Some people just don’t want to shame themselves by asking questions like ‘How do I whisper?’. I’ve introduced more than a few people to the game and this is a regular speech for me, I’ve done this, been there, seen that. I’ve been a noob, a scrub, and a nobody.

This guide is here to help people through the first day or two of the game, get them grounded, and focus on what’s important. Having fun with friends in a massive game world. Agonizing over how to do all the tiny bullshit is not fun.

I hope I’ve helped someone new out with this, if you are ever on Feathermoon contact my guild or me. We’ve all been there, and we’re all still here having fun.

Esvachel, Undead Priest, <Nine Princes> - Feathermoon