Toque’s Beginner’s Guide to WoW

I like to help others. As a teacher this comes naturally, but I also enjoy sharing what I know about my hobbies and passions in hopes that it will make someone else’s life easier. I wrote this article after “re-starting” the game again recently. I’ve played WoW for three years now, but I had been on a break for a few months and when I came back I decided to start fresh and experience the game from scratch again. My fresh experience inspired me to write up this beginner’s guide. With it I hope to make others’ entrances into the world of Azeroth a little more smooth. And who knows… it may even teach a seasoned veteran a thing or two! I originally wrote this to help out some of the newer members of my guild, but I decided to format it as a general, all-purpose guide for my site here as well. Please let me know if you have any thoughts on this article or have suggestions on things I’ve forgotten.

Basic Tips and Things I Wish Someone Told Me as a Newbie

• Pressing Num Lock makes you auto run without having to hold down your mouse buttons or arrow keys. So convenient when you have to travel down long zones like Stranglethorn Vale or across Duskwood, for example. Especially before you have your mount!
• You can eat and drink at the same time.
• Can’t find something? Certain things such as mailboxes or Stable Masters, are typically found within close proximity to the Inn in whichever city you are in. If you’re looking for the Inn, ask a guard. Right click on a guard to talk to them and they’ll give you a list of things that they can direct you to. This list may include profession trainers, class trainers, mailboxes, inns, or banks. So if you’re in a major city and you can’t find something, “ask a guard.”
• You can send items or cash to yourself on alternate characters via the mailbox.
• You are able to train professions at level 5. If you choose a gathering profession such as mining or herbalism, look in your spellbook for the ability like “find herbs.” Drag that out to your action bar for now, and click it. This will activate your ability to find herbs or mining nodes and have them show up as little yellow dots on your minimap. This way you know when there is a nearby node or herb just waiting to be picked.
• Always, always, ALWAYS train in First Aid. It may seem silly, especially if you have a healer character, but having the ability to bandage is important for less downtime when grinding, and is a good alternative when you get in a tight spot and your healing potions are on cooldown. Non-healers are typically asked to bring bandages with them to raids and instances in case there’s downtime and they need to heal up mid-fight instead of having the healer waste mana on them. It’s just silly not to have First Aid.
• Hippogryphs and gryphons are for flying from place to place on the same continent. To get to the other continent, you’ll need to take a boat. Some boats, such as one of the ones in Auberdine, will take you across to Rut’theran Village, which is on the same continent, but the typical rule of thumb is that if you fly, you’ll end up on the same continent, and if you take a boat, you’ll be switching continents.
• You can walk (the slow walk instead of the default-run-all-the-time) by pressing /. Press / again to go back to running. The / key is a toggle between walking and running.
• To link items into chat, for example, guild chat, /trade or party chat, hold down shift while clicking the item when your cursor is in the chat you wish to link it to. This will send the link to the chat, and is called “shift clicking.”
• When you see items linked in chat, click on them to see the items’ information pop up. Holding down control and clicking on an equippable item will bring up the “dressing room” window that will show you what you would look like wearing or holding that item.
• When you see someone’s name in chat you can shift-click the name and it will automatically return the details of a /who on that person, returning their name, guild, class, level, etc in your main chat frame.
• Speaking of /who, if you do a /who warrior or /who priest, you’ll get a list of all of the warriors or priests that are online right now, and see what level they are and where they are currently in the world. You can filter this even further by typing /who warrior 10 in order to return all of the warriors currently online that are just level 10. Even more? Give it a range, such as 10-20 and it’ll return a list of warriors online currently that are in that range. You can also do a /who spark and it will return a list of those on your realm online currently (if any) that have “spark” in their name somewhere. So if you can remember part of someone’s name and you’re trying to find them, that might help. The /who command is also handy for finding members of certain guilds. For example, if you /who Celtic Dragoons, a list of those online in the guild Celtic Dragoons will be returned. /who is a very handy command!
• You can add new chat tabs to your interface, and this makes life easier. I like to add a separate tab for just private messages, just party chat, just guild chat, etc. I watch all chat in my main general chat frame, but if I want to see if I missed any private messages or only want to focus on party chat, I simply click those tabs. You can set the filters for each chat tab by right clicking the tab name and setting the options from there.
• If you have access to potions, elixirs, or scrolls – USE THEM! The temporary boost to stats are great for those who want less downtime and an easier grind.
• When you purchase something on the Auction House, you’ll find the item you purchased waiting for you in your inbox. Go to a mailbox and the item will instantly be in your inbox after you purchase it or are the successful final bidder on it and win the auction. While it is an instant process to receive the items you purchase on the AH, it takes 60 minutes to get the money earned when you successfully sell an item on the Auction House yourself. Sending items via the mail system, whether a single item, cash or multiple items, is instant. When someone purchases an item of yours up for sale on the Auction House you’ll have to wait 60 minutes for the cash to arrive in your inbox, however. You can see the progress of that pending sale by reading the message sent to your inbox when someone purchases your stuff.
• If you are a wand user or bow user, you’ll find the ability to “shoot” in your spellbook. A lot of people who get their first wand or train in bows aren’t sure how to use them, and it’s not very clear… you need to open your spellbook (the little book icon) and drag the shoot ability to your action bar. When you click or hit the key associated with that spot on your action bar, you’ll start to shoot. Hunters have auto-shoot on their action bar by default, but for the rest of us it’s not so obvious!

Grinding Vs. Questing – How to Level
The most efficient way to level isn’t grinding. Believe it or not, it’s easiest to level when questing, particularly when the quest you’re doing asks you to kill x number of mobs or get x number of items from y mobs, because a healthy balance of questing and grinding together makes for the most experience gain. When you’re asked to go and kill x number of mobs or need to collect x number of drops from y mobs, you’re gaining experience from killing the mobs for one thing, and then once you finish the quest and turn it in you’re rewarded with a huge chunk of experience on top of that, making the combination of questing and grinding the best way to go. Not to mention that the quest lines are interesting and tell you stories about the world that you’re playing in. Azeroth is full of lore and interesting little tidbits that you’d miss if you didn’t quest. Doing quests can also give you excellent reward items that can be green or even blue along with that huge chunk of experience. And then it gets even better if you’re a skinner or other gatherer, because while you’re out there doing those quests and killing the mobs you’re asked to kill, you’ll explore and uncover new areas and level your skinning or gathering as you come across those items in the world. The quests are really cleverly written to help guide you to new areas and onto the next area you’re ready for once you outgrow the area you’re currently in so that you experience as much of Azeroth as possible, making the game a lot more exciting than what it would be if you just sat and grinded all day in the same areas. At various milestone levels you’ll also find that your trainers have class-specific quests for you that sometimes teach you abilities you’d not be able to get from a trainer or give you class-specific items that are superior to what you’re using already. Do them!

Making Money and the Auction House
A general rule of thumb for making money is to sell EVERYTHING that you get from drops, etc. Sell all gray items to a vendor, no matter how little the return seems to be. It adds up! If the item’s name is in white, it is something that is usable by others either as a reagent or ingredient to a recipe of some kind or for a quest. This means you can sell it on the Auction House to those who need it instead of selling to a vendor. Even if you don’t think you’ll get that much for something, when you sell on the AH you have the potential to make even a little bit more than what a vendor will give you, and over time that little trick adds up to big bucks. Cloth is something that always sells well, and cloth drops from Humanoid creatures in Azeroth. If you need a little cash, focus on Humanoids and sell the stacks of cloth that you acquire. At higher levels, cloth is used by those who want to increase their reputation with various factions, so you’ll never have a shortage of people out there wanting to buy cloth from you.

Always check the Auction House search for the items you want to sell to see what the current going rate is for our server. For example, if you want to sell a stack of Heavy Leather, search the AH to see what others are selling a stack of 20 for. If most people are selling a stack for 2 gold, you can sell around 2 gold or even just under 2 gold to ensure you sell your stack. Depending on the supply and demand for that day, you may have something for sale that’s really in demand right now and there’s very little, if at all, of that item up on the AH… this means you’re able to get a little more money for the item you want to sell than you might normally be able to sell it for. That’s why it’s important to do a search on the items you’re about to sell before you put it up, so you can see what kind of range you have to work with.

Another way to play the Auction House market is to supplement the experience with an AddOn called Auctioneer. This one does all of the searching for you basically, and helps you suggest good prices to start with and a buyout price for the item you want to sell based on the current market on your server. If you’re interested in checking it out, it’s available here at Curse Gaming.

Addons
Speaking of Addons — if you’re comfortable with how to use them or how to “install” them, there are a few simple ones that I suggest that simply make life easier in-game. I don’t like cluttering up my client with loads of extra “junk” so I stick to the very unobtrusive things that don’t actually affect my game play, but make getting to locations, for example, easier. Here are the ones I suggest.

LightHeaded
An amazing quest help companion, LightHeaded adds a little pane docked to your Quest Log (that you can minimize or maximize/open or close to your Quest Log easily) that will link directly to WoWHead.com, displaying all of the pertinent info about the highlighted quest in your log in the LightHeaded pane. Stuck on a quest but don’t want to alt+tab out of game to load up WoWHead? The LightHeaded pane shows you everything you need to know about a quest right next to your Quest Log, including comments that others have written about the quest and all of the info you need to complete the quest. Any links in blue within LightHeaded are clickable, and if you also have TomTom (see below) installed, the companion to LightHeaded, it will automatically add an icon of the item’s location to your world map. Amazing! I HIGHLY recommend both LightHeaded and TomTom used together.

TomTom
This is an addon that simply adds your in-game word coordinates for the zone you are in a convenient little pane that can be moved around to wherever you’d like on your screen. You know how all of those help sites out there tell you that whatever you’re looking for is at coordinates x,y? This addon let’s you know what your coordinates are in-game, and when you open your World Map, it puts your coordinates at the bottom of the map and shows you the coordinates of your cursor on the map. So if you’re looking for coordinates 23,10 all you need to do is move your cursor around on your World Map and see where those coordinates are so you know where to go. It even has the ability to type /way 23,10 to put a little dot on your world map so you can find those coordinates easier, with a little arrow on your minimap to point you in the right direction. Works hand-in-hand with LightHeaded. Any quest info that shows coordinates will allow you to click the blue coordinates within LightHeaded and automatically put the dot icon on your map. VERY handy and unobtrusive.

AlphaMap
“Basically, AlphaMap is a scalable, moveable, transparent WorldMap that the user can have on screen while they continue to play and interact with the world.” This is a map addon that in addition to the normal World Map, has maps built in for dungeons and instances with info to help you find your way through the instance. Handy if you get lost in a dungeon!

How Else Can You Make Money? Thoughts on Professions
Gathering professions are good money makers — for example, skinning, herbalism, or mining. These are great because they don’t require you to do anything but gather them, and then you can sell the raw materials in stacks on the Auction House for big bucks to those who use the raw materials in their crafting professions. If you want to craft, I suggest pairing a gathering profession with an accompanying craft profession that uses those raw materials so that you can support yourself and then sell the leftovers. For example, skinning with leatherworking or herbalism with alchemy. Enchanting can be really good, but it is expensive to level and it’ll be awhile before you start getting returns on your investment into this profession. Engineering is fun but is more a money sink than other professions because most of the items you make, especially at higher levels, have an engineering requirement on them. This means that only other engineers can use the items you make, which limits your market. If I wasn’t a purely gathering profession kind of girl, I’d suggest herbalism and alchemy together because all of those potions are used by everyone, and higher level alchemy potions and elixirs, especially the flasks, will be sought after and you’ll have no troubles selling them if you price them right. Everyone needs potions! All of my characters have some kind of gathering profession, and most double up on the gathering professions. I like to have my alts or characters I don’t play as often do the crafting professions. This means that the characters I play the most do lots of gathering and can send my crafter alt materials. Gathering professions are very profitable; I sell all of my herbs, ore and skins and make most of my money from that. I’ve found that for some reason the mid-level skins, such as heavy leather and thick leather, are the most sought after and the ones least available on the Auction House. Even though I’m killing things at my level now that drop way beyond heavy or thick leather, if I’m low on cash I’ll go out and farm lower level mobs that only drop those types of leather and get a few stacks up onto the AH for some quick cash. Because these types seem to be the least readily available, they tend to sell for more. There’s always people out there leveling up leatherworking or in search of skins, so this is good for me.

Other Thoughts
There’s plenty to do in the World of Warcraft. Azeroth is a vast world, and if you’re getting a little burnt out on questing or grinding, try something else for the day. Fishing is one thing you can do to pass the time and enhance your character if you’re tired of the daily grind. Fishing is quiet, simple to do, and can bring in money, too! Some of the higher level (and even some of the not-so-high fish such as Oily Blackmouth or Sagefish) can bring in decent money. Deviant Fish are one of my favourite things to fish for, and while it’s out in the Barrens and not always incredibly easy to get to for an Alliance character, the rewards of nabbing some for myself or selling is always worth the trip. Some of the seasonal fish go for big bucks in cooking or alchemy recipes, too. I like to put on my fishing gear, find a quiet place to fish, and then chat in guild or general chat while I fish to keep me entertained. Cooking pairs really nicely with fishing because there are loads of recipes out there to cook the fish you catch. Cooking is good for anyone, not just Hunters, but if you are a Hunter you’ll find cooking and fishing to be a great way to ensure you always have food on-hand for your pet. Cooked food given to your pet causes their happiness to last longer than raw food. But beyond just Hunters, cooked food that increases stats, for example spirit and stamina, are beneficial to everyone, and better than the typical mage food or basic foods available out there because it’ll help you grind better with increased stats. It’s a simple way to boost your stats when you don’t have elixirs or scrolls readily available, and everyone can use that!

And when that’s not doing it for me, I like to explore. You can read a previous article I wrote on some of the “easter eggs” of Azeroth here. Go and check out the places that are rarely travelled by others and experience the thrill of uncovering places that most don’t take the time to see.

And don’t forget — you can always just go outside, read a book, or do something with your family or friends. While Azeroth is great, real life and its priorities are great, too, and it’s important not to forget that! Feeling like you need to work a little exercise into your World of Warcraft routine? Check out my most popular article, Toque’s WoW Fitness Program, which was featured on the official World of Warcraft front page. Good luck!

Articles may not be republished elsewhere in whole or in part without permission. Feel free to link directly to this post. ©2005-2008 by Lesley Karpiuk (Toque of pinktoque.com)