WoW for complete MMORPG beginners

Static M.e.

Totally ripped from another Site but still good info
(Thanks to origional poster Justin the Austrailian)

I was a complete MMORPG beginner. I don't even read game manuals so how screwed was I? anyway I learned a few things that are super obvious to anyone here but might be useful to someone starting MMORPGs with world of warcraft.

1. After you roll up your character, they start you in a newbie zone. In a newbie zone, the monsters (hereinafter known as mobs, for MOBiles) do not attack you even if you run through them, so you can pick on something and beat it up without worrying about its buddy nearby.

2. Nobody wants anything you find in a newbie zone after killing something, it is all crap with pretty pictures to be sold to the vendor. Don't even bother keeping the large variety of healing or mana restoration items unless you make a stack of one type. Space optimization is vital to avoid leaving stuff on the table so just sell everything.

2a. All vendors buy anything from you all at the same price. Stupid, I know. The closest vendor to Ogrimmar airport has absolutely incredible "flow" due to incoming peeps unloading. He should drive a gold mercedes, not have just a few sticks of wooden furniture and a fire in his living room.

3. Take as many missions as you are able in the newbie village. After you level up, re-check around about for more yellow marks. If someone has 3 missions take them all. You can always drop a mission and at least for the first 20 hours of play you can always get it agan by going back.

4. Don't sweat whether or not some item you pickup and can wear or wield is better than something you have. Until you are level 15 it really doesn't make much difference whether some bit of equipment is a point or more better. In fact, you can pretty much do the first 6 levels naked if you fancy showing off, especially if you are a cloth wearing magic user.

5. If your pack gets full and you want to pick something up, just chuck out (drag to desktop) whatever looks like it would be worthless or whatever is not stacked and looks worthless. Usually body parts are worthless.

6. For the first 10 levels there is no need to kill random creatures you find unless it is part of a quest. Quest experience levels you up faster than mob experience. If you see a new bunch of creatures, just note where they are, because if you haven't got a quest to kill X of them, you surely soon will have.

7. When you've graduated from the newbie zone, you'll know because you'll get one or more breadcrumb quests. This is one that kind of says "go n/s/e/w, young man, to find Joe Schmoe at village X, and give him this item". As you travel to an unknown area, stay on pathways to avoid mobs that want to waste your time, but if your map has gone blank, then veer off the path at a likely looking spot and you'll often get a "discovery" place name and free XP. It usually triggers shortly after the name appears. Then your map fills in. Always try to fill your map in.. it helps later.. If you don't do this, you'll end up having to go back and do it anyway because there will be some vague quest in the area.

8. don't bother grouping, or duel, at less than level 10 unless you want to be social. It just wastes time. Groups are for when you've got an "elite" quest (they shows as "elite"), or an instance quest (going thru a portal). neither happens until level 10-20.

9. Blizzard like to designate areas as being matched to levels in groups of 10. So newbie zone + beginner zone is 1-10, then 10-20, 20-30, etc. Breadcrumb quests tend to lead you from zone to zone (as well as from village to village). Since each race starts in their own styled area there are multiple newbie zones, multiple 10-20 zones, etc, so if you're bored of doing quests at 10-20 in "your" zone, or you're just stuck, you may have already found the equivalent zone of some other race, so you can go off and spend time with them instead and do their quests..

10. Try to hold onto any leather you skin, or cloth you find. The stuff stacks in an inventory slot, to either 10 or 20, which helps. Later, when you find the auction house, you can sell it for much more than you can sell to a vendor. About the only things that are commodity items available to level 20 or less are:
* leathers, linen cloth, wool
* pearls
* green items that are not already soulbound to you
everything else is crap, sell it.

11. If a quest reward has a choice, pick the item you can use. The other stuff cannot be sold to anyone, only to a vendor, it is all soulbound.

12. From very early on you can ask a guard where something is (ie, where is my trainer? where can i learn this skill?). Guards stand or walk around looking, well, guardish, but not all can be quizzed. If they can, they will mark for you on your map the thing you're after with a big red flag. This helps. A lot.

13. When you've done a quest, returning to the quest giver to get the reward is easier if the quest is selected. (quest window does not have to be open). Then a gold dot appears on your mini map to show you the quest giver. The gold dot does not ALWAYS appear, though, so don't assume because it isn't there you've got the wrong area..

14. Don't bother joining an unknown guild no matter how much they spam the channel. Later, much much later, you'll probably find a guild of people you prefer to hang with.

15. Back to advice on mobs. Mobs that are not in a newbie zone will lock onto you when you come into range. This invisible range reduces the higher level you are over them. It doesn't make much difference if you are behind them or in front of them, or there is scenery between you and them, all mobs have little radar packs that blizzard gave them. When a mob locks on to you ("aggro'd to you") all it wants to do is kill you. It will only stop if something else becomes a bigger threat (eg, another party member or your pet if you have one).

16. More advice on mobs. Mobs that shoot things (spells, arrows) or stuff you shoot (spells, throwing knives, arrows), are SO magical they will go through scenery once in flight. Unfortunately blizzard decided that YOU can't fire at something that is not "in sight", however once a mob is locked onto you, it will keep firing at you even if the stuff goes through a hill and a barn to hit you. Luckily most mobs do not have ranged attacks until they are level 8+

17. More advice on mobs. A mob that is alarmed either because you shot at it, or it saw you, or because you tried to (open/pick/take) something near it, will wake any other mob up to you within a certain smaller radius around it. This extra mob is known as an "Add". Fighting a mob plus an Add is twice as hard (obviously). Therefore picking the mob to fight next is an important technique. Unfortunately two more complexities arise. One is that mobs are, after all, mobile, and another unrelated walking mob can walk into range of your fight and become an Add. Another is that if you are fighting in an area for a while, in order to please some quest giver or other, you have accumulated a large number of dead bodies. Mobs respawn, and their respawn rate depends on the kind of mob. Therefore once you've decided to fight from A to B it is important to do it as fast as you can, so you are at "B" before respawns at "A" happen.

Static M.e.

18. Escaping. When you lose control and get Adds or other problems, you need to escape. if you can run away from the mob zone the chasing mobs will give up and go back to their blizzard assigned positions quickly. Sadly, if you're doing the "A" to "B" strategy solo then escape can be impossible, because after all, your logical escape is back to "A" -- where the mobs have respawned.

19. More escaping. During an escape it is also important to avoid all other mobs. Usually a quest involves killing X of one or more types of special mobs that are in an area surrounded by boring mobs. If your escape at 1/4 health has you running into a low level bear or whatever, then you've got new problems. Unfortunately blizzard decided that the landscape draw distance is many times that of the mob draw distance, so just because one direction looks empty it may not be when you get closer! usually the first sign of trouble is a circular shadow on the ground appears - the mob fades into view after that... so change course.

20. More escaping. As soon as the persuing mobs have given up, they turn their back and run fast back to their assigned positions, and magically heal up as well. If you know the mob(s) have given up, immediately turn around and chase them for a short way. Why? because you know that route is empty (which you may not know about your escape direction). You then stop and heal up. While you are escaping you are not healing and are very vulnerable from aforementioned random low level mobs.

20a. more escaping. If the persuers are too near you, you will be repeatedly hit from behind. This is the end, my friend. You will get stunned, and move slowly, which compounds the problem.

21. To avoid too much jogging from town to town, when you first come to a new largish town, it probably has a wind rider (alliance) / bat handler (horde) person. It is important to find this person so the route can be added to your map! Ask, if necessary.. running from place to place in this game gets boring fast, the less of it the better. tip: bind a spare mouse button to auto-run, then you can make small adjustments with mouse or keyboard to direction and alt-tab out to read news or whatever while waiting to get there..

22. Simple auction house tips: only sell maximum stacks of trade goods. Always do 8 hour auctions and always set a buy-now price. Trade goods (leather, cloths) sell for much more than recommended, always check what other buy-now prices are before deciding yours. Use the bank to wait for the right time if you want maximum cash, some days there will be too much leather or cloth, other days, not enough. For green items, make a 24 hour auction with a realistic buy-now price. The deposit is expensive and you do want the item sold.. search around the level of the item for others to see what competition you have for the green item. If it doesn't sell in one 24 hour period, unless you mis-priced it badly, give up and sell it to a vendor.

23. More auction house tips. If you want to fit yourself out in better gear than you slowly eek out of quest rewards, then check the AH regularly for around your level of uncommon or better items and bid on them or buyout if the buyout price is fair. What fair is you'll only know by experience. Shortly you'll laugh at the poor quality quest rewards and always be selling them. Well done, you're well on the way to just grinding (killing endless numbers of mobs) for experience rather than doing quests... you can do the math on whether this is worth it yourself: if at level 30 a quest gives 3000 xp and an item worth 40 silver, is the time better spent (from an xp gain point of view) killing a whole bunch of your favorite target? perhaps... At this point, you are DEFINITELY not a newbie any more!

24. The instruction manual doesnt really tell you that much despite how thick it is. If you have questions, ask a friend if they are playing or even ask in the general chat channel

* hit enter
* type: /1. my question goes here

25. Cosmos - a user interface that will give you more buttons on screen (helpful later on) and lets you use map co-ordinates!! Map co-ordinates are very helpful when trying to find a particular quest.

26. Thottbot.com - a site that has extensive info on quests, NPC's (non-playable characters) and ITEMS. Stuck on a quest? This is a good place to go. It may even have map co-ordinates you can use with cosmos.

27. Macros. Macros automate some tasks with a simple button click like feed a pet or autocast health spells when your about to die. Check the official wow forum for macros others have made that you can use.

Be sure to use specific chat channels. Usually, /1 for General, /2 for Trade and /4 for Looking For Group.

Use /GQUIT to leave the guild you just signed up for to help them start their charter.

Please stay away from the fires in the Auction Houses BEFORE you go /AFK
Address other players directly with a /W to Whisper only to them.
Don't /Yell in any channels if you really don't need to.
Use /P while in a party to plan out your attacks.

/who PLAYERNAME gives you some info on them
/r will talk in raid chat, many cant figure that one out

Shift-click a stack item in your inv. to separate it
Shift-click a item (eg. sword,axe) in chat to link it.
Shift-click the name of the quest.

Borrowed from another site. Some repeats and some good info.

-You can chat with everyone in a zone using /1 or /general
-To reply to someone use /r or just press R
-Alt-up repeats the last thing you said
-You can always train in cooking, fishing and first aid
-In most towns, you can right click on a guard to get directions to NPC's. It will even put a flag on your map so you know exactly where to go!
-You learn new spells every 2 levels
-You get rest experience when you log out in towns and double rest in inns
-Shift right click looks all things on a corpse
-Shift click a person name to see info about them
-Ctrl click to send them a /tell
-Alt click invites to a group
-Shift click an item in chat will link it and can be clicked on to see the info. This works on all channels but general
-/1 is general chat, /2 is trade in capitol cities and /3 is defense channel
-Use the auction house to your advantage. Check it to see what things are selling for than go down by a little bit and always set a buyout for quick selling
-Mining is one of the best gathering skills for money
-To take pictures, hit the button prt scr button. They than go to your screenshot folders and are in .tga format. To see these go to www.irfanview.com
-Its better to get lots of quests and do them all before turning them in
-You can use the mail boxes to send money and items to other players. Mail that is only text, or includes money will be delivered instantly. Mail with items attached takes 1 hour to be delivered. It costs 30 copper to send any message.
-Numlock is autorun
-Alt Z hides your UI
-You can set in keyboard settings to look behind you while running to a key
-When you want to reply to a private /tell after someone else has sent you a tell, use 'Tab' key after hitting 'r' to reply to scroll through all the people that have recently sent you.
-You can hover over blips on your mini map to see what they are

tHE vAGGABOND

Im a total MMORPG newbie, but Im lucky that Im in a guild with blokes I know in real life - who are all recovered everquest addicts

some great tips there tho..