Selecting a class/race comboYour first choices may seem like the easiest. However, your racial selection can have a fair amount of impact on your character later in the game. Consider the racial abilities carefully.
In selecting a class, it may be helpful to consider the roles each class can fill later in the game. In some cases, the specific talent spec can change the role of the class.
There are 3 general roles that a class can fill. A tank is a class that absorbs the brunt of the punishment. A healer is a class that keeps others alive. A damage dealer is a class that focuses on killing. Damage dealing is split generally into physical and magical damage.
Druid
Druids can fill different roles depending on their talent spec. The restoration talents focus the druid toward the role of a healer. The feral talents allow for either a tank or physical damage role. The balance talents allow the druid to take on a magical damage role.
Hunter
The Hunter is mainly a physical damage class and one of only two classes that gets a combat pet. However, there are a few abilities that inflict magical damage. The hunter generally uses their ranged weapon and their pet to inflict damage.
Mage
The Mage is a magical damage class. Be it fire, frost, or arcane. The mage is all about dealing magic damage. Fire attacks deal the most damage with the longest cast time, Frost attacks deal a decent amount of damage while slowing enemy movement speed, and Arcane is an all-around damage dealing attack style that can also use mana to create things like food. Since attacks are ranged most of the time, in grouped fights, they are generally untouched. However, they lack armor, so when they do get hit, it will hurt.
Paladin
The Paladin is another class that can fill various roles depending on talents. Protection fills the tank role. Holy paladins work as healers and retribution paladins become a hybrid physical/magical damage role.
Priest
Priests can fill two different roles depending on talents. In general, priests are healers. However, the shadow talent line changes the priest into a magical damage role.
Rogue
Rogue are to physical damage as Mages are to magical damage. They focus entirely on dealing heavy physical damage. They lack the armor of Paladins or Warriors, relying on speed and agility instead. They can become invisible (the stealth ability) and are extremely deadly in player vs. player combat.
Shaman
The Shaman class can fill several roles depending on talents. Elemental shamans fill a magical damage role becoming Mages that inflict nature damage through heavy use of lightning. Enhancement shamans focus more on the physical damage role, but still utilize a variety of magic spells for damage. Restoration shamans focus on the healing role.
Warlock
Warlocks are one of the only two classes that gets a combat pet. They focus heavily on magical damage. The various talent lines simply change the method in which that damage is delivered.
Warrior
Warriors fill either a physical damage role or a tank role. Warriors make perhaps the best tanks in the game, and are much sought after for high-level groups.
Selecting professionsFor a new player, selecting professions can be somewhat daunting. First, there is the distinction between primary and secondary professions. Cooking, fishing, and first aid are secondary professions. You can learn all three of these. The remaining professions are primaries. You are limited to having only two of these per character. Some professions lean more heavily toward certain classes. Tailoring, leatherworking, and blacksmithing are generally focused at providing gear for specific classes. The items crafted can be helpful while leveling up but are certainly not required.
For a new player, it is probably beneficial to select two gathering professions. These professions acquire the raw materials needed for crafting. These materials can be sold either on the auction house to other players or in the worst case to a NPC vendor for money. One of the hardest parts of being a new player is feeling as though you never have enough gold to buy anything. Using gathering professions helps alleviate this problem.
Getting gearedOne of the easiest mistakes a new player can make is buying weapons, armor, or bags from an NPC vendor. These items cost considerably more then their actual usefulness. It is far better to save your money until you are able to reach an auction house (AH). At an AH, you will be able to browse for items being sold by other players. The weapons, armor, and bags will be better and cheaper then any sold by an NPC vendor. Additionally, as you complete quests, you will often be rewarded with new and better equipment which rapidly makes NPC vendors obsolete and generally useless.
TalentsNew players may be confused by the mention of talents. The talent system does not become available to a character until they reach level 10. Every level starting with 10 will grant the player 1 talent point. The talent system is a set of 3 hierarchical tree structures. Each class gets their own 3 trees. Each one grants improvements to various aspects of the class. Talents are gained by spending talent points in any of the 3 trees. Selecting talents while first leveling is mostly a matter of experimentation and player preference. Any tree can help with leveling, some more then others. Should you ever wish to change your talent spec, simply visit a trainer. You will have the option to pay some amount of money to reset your talent points. The cost increases each time you choose to respec. The cost will go back down if you spend a considerable time without respecing.
About RaidsRaid groups are a way to have
parties of more than 5 and up to 40 people, divided into up to 8 groups of up to 5 players. The terms "raid" and "raiding" primarily and traditionally refer to
PVE raid-specific instances and zones. As party
leader, a player can convert their group into a raid group by accessing the "Social" Panel, selecting "Raid", and choosing "Convert Group to Raid." From then on, any new players invited to the group will join the raid group (up to a maximum of 40). This requires at least 2 people (IE a party). A person alone cannot form a raid group.
While in a raid group, players do not receive credit for completing quest objectives unless the quest calls for a raid. Players also receive an experience reduction for any mob killed while in a raid group. These are to prevent players from creating very large groups in order to complete normal quests or other game content intended for parties of 5 or fewer. This experience reduction is simply that the usual "group XP bonus" is not applied while in a raid group.
Many instances requiring a raid are also subject to a
raid timer.
About BattlegroundsBattlegrounds are
instanced areas used for player versus player combat. Each classic battleground (
Warsong Gulch,
Arathi Basin and
Alterac Valley) has two red instance entrance portals: one for the
Alliance, and one for the
Horde. Crossing these portals was originally one of the ways to enter the
queue for their respective battlegrounds. Now, to enter the
queue for any battleground, the player must seek out a
Battlemaster, which can be found at the portal or in any capital city, or do so through the Player vs. Player tab. Once inside the instance, the two teams will engage in large-scale
PvP, with various objectives determining the winner. Players will earn
honor points making
PvP rewards available.
If a character goes
AFK, he/she will leave the battleground and gain the
Deserter debuff. This prevents entry to another battleground for a 15 minute duration. You can report an inactive player by right clicking the player's portrait and selecting "Report AFK". When enough reports are registered, a 60 second debuff will begin to count down. Once the timer is up a new debuff will appear that will prevent the player from gaining any honor or marks while it is on. This debuff can be negated as soon as the player engages in PvP combat. This system is often abused, since a player can have good reasons for not participating in PVP, for example when he is defending.
The two initial Battleground areas,
Alterac Valley and
Warsong Gulch, went live June 7th, 2005.
Arathi Basin was added to the list in
Patch 1.7 on September 13th, 2005. A fourth battleground, named
Eye of the Storm, was released with the
Burning Crusade. A fifth battleground, the
Strand of the Ancients, was added in
Wrath of the Lich King. The sixth battleground, the
Isle of Conquest, was added in
Patch 3.2 on August 4th, 2009.
CommunicatingIn a world filled with other players, you will undoubtedly find a need to communicate with them. This is done in general through slash commands. These use the "/" character to execute various in game commands. For our purpose of communication, one of the earliest commands to know is /tell (player name here) (message here). This will send the message to only the player specified. The next most common conversation channel is /party (message) and /raid (message). /party will send the message to any players you are currently grouped with. /raid does the same but for the entire raid and not just the party you are currently placed within. Within a battleground, the /bg command function similarly to /raid.
Communicating on a more global scale is done through various chat channels. These are generally localized to zone wide chat. These types of channels can be accessed by using the slash command followed by a number (/#). By default, /1 is the general chat channel for the zone you are currently within.
UI beginner's guide
This page explains the basic ideas behind and differences between terms like Macros, Scripts and AddOns to those who are beginners to using or making such things.
Slash CommandsTo understand how everything else works, you need to know what a Slash Command is. WoW allows you to give simple commands to the game in the form of a slash (/) followed by the name of the command. You can give these commands directly by typing them into the chat box. An example would be the "/follow" command. If you target a friendly and type "/follow" (without the quotes), you start following them. You can get a list of some of the slash commands by typing "/help".
There are several types of slash commands. Some are designed to perform game actions (e.g. /follow, /assist, /cast), others are chat related commands (e.g. /yell, /chatlist) or give you information (/who). You also have emotes (eg /laugh, /bow, /dance).
MacrosThe purpose of a Macro is to allow you to create some very simple custom actions or tasks, based on the existing game actions. A macro is just a sequence of slash commands, which are executed in order when you execute the macro. To create a new macro, either type "/macro" (without the quotes), or click on the speech bubble next to the chat box and select macro. You can then give a macro a name, an icon and type in a few lines of slash commands. The macro is created in the form of an action that you can drag onto your hotbar. You can activate the macro by clicking on the resulting button on the hotbar.
An example macro would be: /cast Fireball(Rank 1)
/say "I am frying it!"
This macro merely casts a fireball, and then has your character tell everyone nearby that you're casting it.
Another example would be: /console farclip 177
/cast [button:1] Hearthstone
/stopmacro [button:1]
/console farclip 1500
This macro sets your view distance to minimal, then if you left clicked your mouse uses your hearthstone and stops the macro, if you used anything but left click it continues into setting your view distance to furthest. The usefulness of this macro would be if your computer can handle max graphics every where but Dalaran and your hearth is set to Dalaran, if you have problems in Dalaran if you set the view distance to minimal before hearthing it allows a much quicker load time with no lag, the reason to make it so that if you don't left click it it sets your view to max is so that when you leave Dalaran you can click the same button to put your graphics back up to the good looking view.
Scripts Scripts are small computer programs that manipulate and combine a small number of objects that exist outside the script. Scripts are usually written in a scripting language, which is designed so users can quickly express those small programs in a flexible way.
The World of Warcraft client embeds a powerful scripting language called Lua in its client software. This lets you create specialized commands, similar to the macros described above. However, scripts can be much more complex, making decisions on what to do based on what is going on in the world rather than the fixed sequence offered by a macro.
Lua scripts are used in the following places:
/script [command] : If you type the slash command "/script" in the chat box, you can follow it with one or more valid Lua language statements (i.e. a script), separated by semi-colons ( ; ).
Macros: you can enter scripts as part of macros, by putting one or more "/script" commands in your macro.
Addons: these extend the WoW client with new slash commands and often user interface elements. This additional functionality is provided through Lua scripts (containing the actual addon logic). User interface extensions are defined in XML files. (XML is, incidentally, not a programming language. It's a "mark-up" language which contains source code but can also contain media contents or structured references to external, possibly remote network media resources ... including other XML files. However, XML is stored as structured, syntactically complex text and is parsed and interpreted in ways that make it similar to a programming language).
AddOns From a user's point of view, what you need to know is that AddOns come in the form of one or more text files, ending in the ".toc", ".xml" and ".lua" extensions. These files are supposed to go into a folder called Interface in your World of Warcraft folder, or into one of its sub-folders. Usually AddOns are distributed as zip files by their authors, and you "install" them by simply unzipping them in your World of Warcraft\Interface folder.
Warning: Be very very careful with AddOns that come as executable ".exe" files. Always triple-check before you use these to make sure that they really do what they say they do, as executable files can do anything whatsoever to your computer. AddOns are supposed to be written in text format in .xml and .lua files, so that anyone can check that there is nothing malicious about them. You have no such check available with executable files. Also, since AddOns only operate within WoW, they can't harm your computer, whereas executable files can.
Having said that, some authors do distribute their AddOns as executable files. Most of the time these executables don't do any more than just unzip the AddOn's files and place them in your WoW folder in the appropriate places. Occasionally the executables are used to automatically download updated versions of the AddOn, or to upload data collected by the AddOn (for example item statistics to be put on a web-site, etc.).
Uninstalling: You can always uninstall any AddOn and reset the WoW UI to its clean default state by merely deleting or renaming the Interface, WTF, and Cache folders in your WoW folder, then restarting WoW.
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References:
https://wikicheats.ga...ner's_Guide
https://www.wowwiki.c...ner's_guide
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