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Beginner's Guide to the World of Warcraft
The World of Warcraft (WoW) truly is a world. Its huge natural environment includes dry deserts, lush forests, towering peaks, and inky depths. The eight main races each have incredibly deep and distinct cultures whose beliefs, lore and lifestyle permeate the thousands of possible quests that one can embark upon. The massive capital cities even offer all the services that you would expect a civilization to have (and some you wouldn't).
In such a huge place it is easy to get lost. And despite its gentle learning curve, it is also easy to play for 20 hours and find yourself saying "if only I knew that when I started!"
This guide is intended to keep that kind of regret from happening. It will show new players how the key systems work in WoW and how they can best use them. The intention of this guide is to help new players avoid frustration by providing them with the kinds of information that would be naturally learnt over the course of hours and hours of gameplay. At the same time, there are no spoilers here, just helpful tips that will put all players on an even footing. This guide will not introduce players to the very basics like using the interface, how to cast a spell or how to control movement or the camera. Blizzard has already written that guide here (other links in this guide will also point out more detailed info from Blizzard).
Instead, we will cover five main categories to keep you from having to learn the hard way: server types (PvP or PvE); character races, classes, skills, talents and professions; traveling around; the economy; and an overview of questing, combat, death and resting.
Server Types
First off, you'll notice that your race either puts you in with the noble but condescending goody-goodies of the Alliance (including Humans, Night Elves, Dwarves and Gnomes), or the nasty, brutish and ugly freaks of the Horde (including Orcs, Tauren, Undead and Trolls). Choosing sides can be an important decision depending on what kind of server you play.
On Player vs. Environment servers (PvE) (sometimes called "normal" servers), there is less emphasis on combating other human players and less concern that someone may be aiding the enemy. On these servers players are allowed a mix of up to 10 characters from both the Horde and Alliance, which can be freely switched between with a simple logout. PvE servers are geared to casual players who want to concentrate on simply enjoying the world, role playing, exploring, or experimenting with any race or class. Combat is primarily directed against natural creatures and in achieving quest objectives. There are still plenty of opportunities to fight other players, but it will mostly be consensual. Examples of this would be agreeing to duel another player, toggling on the PvP flag to automatically fight hostile races should you come across them (simply type /pvp in the chat window), or by going on raids into the territory of a hostile race. In the future, Blizzard will be adding Battlegrounds to the game, which are specific areas for groups to settle their differences in while other watch the carnage!
On Player vs. Player servers (PvP), there is a much more competitive and combative atmosphere. Guild and faction warfare is much more prevalent and intense, and being able to trust your mates is an important consideration. On these servers, players are still allowed up to 10 characters, but they can only be from either the Alliance or the Horde, not both. PvP servers are geared to frequent or hardcore players who enjoy fighting against others rather than simply the environment, and who want to push a given race and class to their limits. As such, players are only protected from combating other players in zones catering to levels 20 or lower. After level 20 or outside safe zones (usually the area around starting points), everyone is fair game. This can make the game more challenging, but also more of an intense, heart-pounding experience as your life depends on you being constantly vigilant and on guard. Players who play on a PvP server will almost certainly want to join a guild of some sort for protection and to mix different classes into strong and competitive platoons.
Character Races, Classes and Abilities
WoW gets a lot of its depth and replayability from the vast combinations of races, classes, talents and professions possible. New players should be aware that some combinations work better than others, though determining which is often a matter of common sense and being familiar with mythical traditions!
Races
Each race gets a variety of inherent bonuses. Dwarves, for example, have the ability to sense nearby treasure chests, while the Undead have a natural resistance to Shadow magic and don't have to breathe much underwater. Some racial bonuses can save you the cost of training certain skills or points for talents that can be allocated elsewhere. You should be aware of these bonuses as an extra edge to exploit, and to better find a race that suits your playing style.
Races are also defined by their starting attributes. The abilities of all WoW characters depend to varying degrees on their strength, agility, intelligence, spirit, and stamina. Each race starts the game with its own basic attributes, though these can be increased through leveling, using temporary boosters like potions or spells, or by equipping magical armor, weapons, rings and the like. You can find out what the starting attributes for each race are here.
Classes
Because of these bonuses and just because they are who they are in their attributes, different classes are more suited to the different races. There are nine different classes in WoW: Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock and Warrior.
Generally, Paladins, Warriors and Rogues deal the most direct melee damage, but also take a lot of damage and are highly dependent on having good equipment. Paladins can also cast some healing magic and make use of magical auras. Hunters and Druids are jacks-of-all-trades that are good at playing alone and are more likely to use ranged weapons like bows and guns. Hunters usually travel with pets, while Druids can morph into different animal forms that can allow them to be decent "tanks" in combat, faster travelers, or even better swimmers. Mages, Warlocks and Shaman cast aggressive magic and can teleport other players around. Mages are more inclined to direct ranged damage with their spells, while Shaman are a hybrid class and are able to resurrect other players. Warlocks are complex characters to play, creating different combinations of spells that often require the use of ingredients called "reagents", some of which can be quite rare. They can also summon pets and use a variety of amusing spells. But because of this complexity and relative physical fragility, Warlocks are generally not recommended for beginner players unless they are dedicated. Priests are also a more specialized class. They are the best healers in the game, cast skill-enhancing magic on others (called "buffs"), are able to resurrect fallen comrades, and can control the mind of humanoid monsters. At the higher levels a Priest can specialize as a Shadow Priest, which can deal decent damage if played well. Although they are quite difficult to go solo with, Priests are a group's best friend, and play a huge role in the more difficult quests and in PvP guild and raid warfare. Note that some Priest spells are race specific, so plan wisely with this class!
Creating a Character
Races and classes can be mixed with certain restrictions. But building the best character means synergizing the strengths of a race's attributes and bonuses with the needs of a class.
Warriors, for example, are highly dependent on strength to inflict maximal damage and health to take a beating. Creating a Gnomish warrior is entirely possible since any race can choose the warrior class. However, a Gnome only starts with a base of 18 strength, and are about three feet tall. If they were to go hand-to-hand with a Tauren warrior, whose base strength of 28 is supported by their 8-foot frame, they would be at a substantial disadvantage. Furthermore, Tauren get a 5% racial bonus to maximum health. A player would be much better off with a Gnomish mage since their base intelligence, the key attribute for spell casting, is 24. A Tauren, on the other hand, is a bit dim with an intelligence of only 15.
Skills
Each class is made up of a fundamental set of skills. Skills are as basic as sword wielding, armor proficiency, spell casting, or speaking languages. Each class comes with its own set of skills that it is naturally knowledgeable about, but new skills can be trained if they are available to a class (and if you have enough money to pay a trainer). There won't be any warriors waving around magic wands for example, but a human warrior could be trained in the use of mace or axe weapons.
Skills improve gradually with use. Every time you swing a sword or cast a spell, your skill improves a little bit. As a character increases levels, their skill cap increases too, meaning they gradually become better and better at what they do. But this also means that neglecting a skill will cause it to gradually fall behind. If my warrior only does combat with his sword but is also trained to use axes, the next time he tries to use one he will be a bumbling, ineffective fool. Note that an important exception to PvP combat is that skills do not increase.
Throughout the game, it is important to try and keep skills balanced, especially for those classes who are equipment dependent. You may be lucky enough to find an incredibly powerful magical axe, but if your axe skills are in the dumpster, you'll have to spend time picking trash before you can start taking it out again. Also try and save money early to buy new skills. This will afford your character more flexibility and leave him or her better able to adapt to any environment, opponent, or lucky find.
Talents
While skills tend to be more general, each class can really specialize and personalize through their own set of talents. Talents are a lot like the skill trees in Diablo II, and allow for character customization through the allocation of points into three different categories. How you chose these talents will depend on how you want to play your character. So for example, the Warrior talent tree is categorized into Arms (extra aggressive attacks), Protection (defensive techniques) and Fury (attribute boosting warcries). Mages can specialize in the Fire, Frost and/or Arcane schools of magic, each of which will be more or less effective against other players and monsters.
Starting at level 10, one talent point per level is gained. This means that a character that has hit the level cap of 60 will have a maximum of 51 talent points to distribute. Although talent points can be put in any of the three categories available to a class, each category has an "ultimate talent" that requires 31 points to achieve. This is because talents build on each other, and include basic synergies like in Diablo II.
The WorldofWar.net website includes a java-based talent calculator if you want to try out different combinations and see what is available to the various classes.
Professions
Professions give characters trade and crafting skills that can be fun and profitable, but are not at all necessary to succeeding in the game. You can get training in a profession in any major city beginning at level five. Gathering professions such as herbalism, mining, leather skinning and fishing can be practiced any time you find an herb to pick, a vein of ore to dig, a carcass to skin or a lake to fish in. The wide variety of goods that can be harvested through the gathering professions are used as ingredients in the production professions. These include alchemy (potion making), engineering (building mechanical and explosive devices), leatherworking, blacksmithing, and tailoring (to make various kinds of armor), and cooking (to make rejuvenating snacks). Service professions include the skills of enchanting armor and weapon, and first aid for healing wounds.
Professions are not class or race dependent, but training a character in a class-related profession can save money as well as making it. A warrior who can make his own armor could save a lot of money, while an enchanter warlock is able to fortify himself by permanently enhancing his robes with stat-boosting attributes. Like skills, professions improve with constant use to the point that a wide variety of items can be made. Starting your profession when you are young and using it regularly will make your skills powerful and in demand. Unlike skills, a profession cap is not tied to character level but profession training level, which progresses from Apprentice (minimum level 5), to Journeyman (minimum level 10), to Expert (minimum level 20) and eventually to Artisan (minimum level 35). It won't be enough to become an artisan by practice alone; it requires that a character go on difficult quests and find rare ingredients scattered throughout the world.
Any character can know a maximum of two main professions, and as many secondary professions as they like (fishing, cooking, first aid). Most professions go hand in hand however. An Alchemist is highly dependent on herbs and roots for his potions, and so will probably want to be a herbalist. Leatherworkers need a lot of leather, and so will probably want to be skinners as well.
Professions can be unlearned and new professions taken up. However, the old profession really is forgotten, and re-learning it means starting at zero. As a result, players should really try to figure out what profession is most useful to their class or their guild, and just stick with it.
Because of their creativity and collectability, professions are a really fun part of WoW. Even though they can give you lots of peripheral things to do beyond just questing or engaging in guild warfare, they are by no means necessary or mandatory, so you are welcome to ignore them completely if you like. For more info about taking a profession, check out the Blizzard page here.
Traveling Around
Modes of travel in WoW cover everything from a characters own two feet to soaring eagles. Knowing what the best way to get around can save you time and money, and make you a more effective and efficient member of your guild.
Hop, Skip and a Jump
Getting around on foot is safest if you stick to main roads where the chance for random monster attack is greatly reduced. Main roads also have signs at most intersections to point a player in the right direction. However, to chart new areas on the map, a character has to venture off the beaten path towards a nearby landmark. This can be dangerous if they don't know what level of monsters are hiding in the surrounding territory. Be wary!
Getting around town is very easy depite the huge size of the capital cities. Any guard will be able to provide directions to trainers, auction houses, mailboxes, item vendors and other such necessities, and will even place a flag on the mini-map to guide you in the right direction. A small golden arrow will also point towards the goal if they are not in the immediate area.
There are other options for crossing the landscape of course. Druids can take on animal forms that allow them to travel faster. Alchemists can create potions that grant a temporary speed boost, while Mages can cast spells that accomplish the same. Mages and Shaman can also teleport other characters around, which is really handy for raid quests crawling deep into dungeons, which can take upwards of two hours.
Once a character reaches level 40, they can purchase land mounts, which allow them to cover distance a lot faster. Each race has its own native mount. Dwarves ride around on mountain rams, while humans get horses and trolls get raptors. Characters need to learn the riding skill for their respective mount by speaking with a local stable master, which are located in major cities and small towns. At level 60, a character can buy advanced mounts that will get them around even faster.
It is possible to walk to just about any location in WoW, and for the first 15 or 20 levels, most of your questing will be confined to a single province or its neighbor. But given how large the world is, a more expedient method will be desired as your tasks begin to span the continent.
Infrastructure
To address this problem, there are more formalized methods of travel in WoW. Both the Alliance and Horde races connect their towns and cities via a system of flying gryphons or flying manticores, which you can access for a modest fee. To access new destinations, the flight master in each town has to have been spoken to already. This means that towns will have to be physically visited before they can be flown between freely. Cities act as hubs to connect one to another. To cover a lot of ground a character may have to fly through more than one town or city. Checking your map or speaking with the local flight master will show these routes to you.
Finally, there are a few more exotic forms of mass transportation. The human city of Stormwind and the dwarf stronghold of Ironforge are connected by an underground railway. The ride is free and a round trip just takes a minute or two, but be careful not to jump or fall off the train. It is a long walk back to the station!
The two continents in Azeroth are connected by goblin zeppelin or sea ship. These are also free. Jumping over board on one of these can easily result in death since it is an awfully exhausting swim back to land.
Combat, Death, Resting
Combat is an endless source of strategy and skill. Suffice it to say that almost nothing in WoW is useless, and will be handy in some situation or group. Because that kind of analysis is exhausting, this guide will just give you a few tips about issues relating to combat to keep you from messing up your novice character.
Death
When a character dies in WoW, they do not lose equipment and they do not lose experience. It is impossible to de-level a character through death. The main penalty in death is time or money.
Upon dying, a character becomes a ghost, and is sent back to the nearest graveyard. The ghost then has two options. If they want to be immediately resurrected at the graveyard and out of harms way, their equipment will suffer a 25% durability penalty. Equipment can be repaired in town for a fee that increases depending on the general fantastic-ness of the equipment. The other option is to run back to the corpse and resurrect on the spot where it died. This is free, but will cost the time to run from the graveyard, which is often a few minutes away (ghosts get a speed bonus of 50%, so this is less onerous than it might seem at first). The corpse might also be in a precipitous spot that is unrealistic to recover from, such as deep in a dungeon surrounded by monsters, or the middle of an ocean if you’ve fallen overboard.
If you've been killed in PvP or by an NPC, a two-minute penalty period is invoked before resurrection can occur. Any nearby friends with the powers of resurrection (including Shaman and Priests) can bring a character back to life immediately and on the spot.
Resting
WoW is a game that rewards you for having multiple characters. The longer a character goes unused, the more rested they are. When they are well rested, characters will accumulate experience up to 1.5 times faster than unrested characters. This bonus accumulates slowly if you logoff in the middle of nowhere, but a little faster if you logoff at an inn or inside city walls. If you have several characters and regularly rotate between them, you could well gain experience points in combat at twice the normal rate nearly all the time.
Most classes in WoW are fairly well balanced in such a way that there is little downtime after combat. Although health and mana are fairly quickly replenished, a character will be ready for action sooner if they have a bite to eat. Various kinds of foods will replenish health and mana at different rates, but are relatively cheap and commonly dropped by monsters or found in crates.
Questing
Questing is the heart of WoW. A decent amount of experience can be got from killing monsters, but a whopping amount of experience can be gained from completing quests. The focus for gaining experience and levels should be on questing. Which are a lot of fun anyway, because the quests in WoW are variable and tightly intertwined with the mythology and culture of each of the different races.
Gaining experience will go even faster if you are in groups. By grouping with other players, you will be able to do harder quests sooner, providing greater experience. The difficulty of quests are color coded in the quest window. Grey quests will give very little experience because of their ease. Green, Orange, and Red quests are increasingly difficult, but have an increasingly good payout.
Groups also share the reward from a quest. So if you need to collect the head of an ogre to prove that you completed a task, everyone in the group will get the head upon completing the quest. This eliminates the quest or monster "camping" common in many other MMOs. If you see a bunch of separate players standing around waiting for something specific to respawn, chances are that they are all doing the same quest but quite stupidly ungrouped. Just start inviting these people into a group (/invite in the chat window) and tell them that the loot will be shared among all.
The Economy
A few points about the economy that are not immediately apparent. First of all, the currency is copper, silver and gold coins. 100 copper make one silver, and 100 silver make one gold. 1000 gold will buy you the best mount in the game! But don’t be depressed, by the time you are level 60, 1000 gold ought to be within the realm of possibility!
Auction Houses
There is an in-game auction system that is more fun by itself than most games. Any item that other players make or don't want often gets posted to one of the auction boards based in each major city. There, players can set minimum and buyout prices and a time limit. After using a simple, categorized search system to sort items by kind, minimum level, price and other factors, other players can bid or buy out an item. If an item goes unsold, it is returned to the seller, who can then pawn it off to an NPC or try to auction it again.
Selling your stuff to an NPC is always an option, but they will often pay you much less than you could have got at auction. It also makes a lot of sense to buy exclusively from the auction system, since player goods will often cost less than the same that NPCs offer. Buying at auction will also provide much more choice in equipment, professional ingredients, and other miscellaneous stuff than NPCs ever will.
Another advantage of the auction house is that it affords the possibility of trading with the opposite faction (i.e., the Horde or Alliance) or with ones own characters. There is a neutral auction house in the Goblin city of Gadgetzan in Southern Kalimdor that allows this to happen.
One good thing to buy early at auction are additional storage bags, which will allow you to carry more loot, equipment and quest items on your character. These can usually be purchased for just a few silver, which is well worth the efficiency down the road.
Mail System
Items won or lost at auction are delivered via an in-game mail system. Players can check their mail at any mailbox, located at the center of most towns and sprinkled around major cities. Players can also send mail to each other for a nominal fee, and can attach money or items to the mail. This makes it very convenient to communicate and exchange items with friends even if they are not currently playing.
Another great trick is that you can mail equipment between your own characters. This is great because the magic wand useless to a warrior might make the career of a mage.
Banks
If you find that you’ve got too much sutff, you’d best open up a bank account. Every major city has a bank, wherein you can safely store your goods. You start out with just a few storage slots at the bank, but more can be purchased as you can afford them. Opening a bank account early can be a big help when you don’t have many bags to carry your loot around.
In Conclusion…
If you’ve read this guide through, you will be in good shape for taking on the World of Warcraft.
Remember that a lot of the fun in a virtual-world MMO is discovering new things for yourself, and enjoying the adventure as much as the goal. Playing with 1000’s of other people means that karma is important. Treating others well means they will treat you well, and you will quickly develop a reputation as someone worth grouping with. And that makes it more fun for everyone involved!
-Chris
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A Beginner's Guide to World of Warcraft... : World of Warcraft General Discussions
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