First thing is first, this is a link to my character in the WoW Armory. It will show many of the important stats, and is rarely more than 30 minutes behind actuality. It will also give me a place to start. I’m sure most of this information is old to many people, but to some people who read here, it is a look at something they have never played before.
Key things to know — There are two factions, the Alliance and the Horde. While some will describe the Horde as the ‘bad’ side, this really isn’t the case. They are just two groups that don’t like each other, and from my experiences, the Alliance is far more evil (because its full of teenagers playing rogue gnomes).
I did levels 1-64 in under 4 weeks. This is faster than is normally possible for a beginner. This was due to two things — #1 – my friend knows the game and the quests very well and was able to get them done fairly quickly, and #2 – linked accounts give triple experience points for all quests and monster kills.
Since in WoW, the primary way to gain experience is to do quests, we were moving around a lot, which makes easy transportation key.
The primary long distance travel method is the flight path. These cover long distances fairly quickly, but require you to talk to the flightmaster first in order to learn the path. Unlike FF, the flight paths are an on-demand travel system that will take you automatically to your destination. There are also many small settlements around the game world, most of which have flightpaths. Every so often, Blizzard will speed up or otherwise make the flightpaths faster, or add paths to make more connections. This is the opposite of what SE likes to do. SE makes things take longer, Blizzard makes the annoying things take less time.
There are three types of settlements, Friendly, Neutral, and Enemy. The status is somewhat based on your reputation (or fame) with that faction. For example, all Horde cities are ‘friendly’ to all members of the Horde, and ‘enemy’ to all members of the Alliance. Then there are other groups that will be either neutral to you (such as the various goblin cities, unless you do a lot of quests, in which case they turn friendly) or enemy (some groups will consider you an enemy if you side with their opposing group, and questing one group will raise your fame with them, but lower it with the other).
The three statuses are color coded. Green is Friendly, Yellow is Neutral, and Red is Enemy. There is a stage between Neutral and Enemy called ‘Unfriendly’. These monsters have an Orange colored name, but won’t attack unless attacked first (like a yellow).
As I mentioned earlier, the primary way to get experience points is via quests. A quest will also give you some reward (and item or money or both), fame, and experience points. For example, last night I soloed a bunch of quests. It took about 3 hours, and I gained around 400,000 experience points (not as much as it sounds, as 63->64 is around 650,000 experience points, 64->65 is around 680,000 experience points). I also gained around 250 gold (money) during this time, and raised my fame with several factions. Oh, and this was all solo too. With a current level cap of 70, and as an attack magic user (mage class), I was able to solo about 2/3rds of a level in a few hours, near the level cap, that’s just awesome (especially coming from the FF world where you can’t solo much of anything).
For gear, there are several ways to get the best stuff. The first is quests. Once you hit the outlands (starting around level 58), quests give very good items as a reward. And then the next quest gives an even better reward. The second way is instanced dungeons. These are not always easy, but give a lot of the best PvE gear. The third is battleground and arena. This is PvP, and gives PvP-centered gear (mage gear with high defense for example). Some of these items are just amazing, even for PvE events. The final way is to make it. In WoW, there is the concept of a r/ex recipe for an item, and some of these make r/ex items (so you make your own gear via the crafting system, making it so that people will level a craft that compliments their class, and at high levels, can make some really nice stuff for themselves). As a frost mage, I’ve chosen shadoweave tailoring, which will allow me to make the Bind on Pickup (r/ex) Frozen Shadoweave set.
This set can be further upgraded from its awesomeness with sockets (not sure how these work entirely, but I assume its like Diablo II) and enchanting (while my character is an enchanter, it is not high enough to do the enchants I really need, nor does it have the recipes required). The game has included a mechanism for an item to be enchanted via the trade window (and not traded, because it is soulbound). To be honest, I still do not fully understand enchanting, other than it is quite expensive and can be very profitable.
Crafting in general is different in WoW than FF. For starters, you have to buy (or be trained, or find the drop) every item you wish to make. You get an item when you hit the skill required (so if an item is 240, you can learn it at 240). Items will start off ‘red’ meaning you will be guaranteed a skillup for making one, then fall to ‘yellow’, where you will have a 50-75% chance of getting a skillup, then fall to ‘green’ where you have a lower chance of getting the skillup, and finally fall to ‘grey’ where you have no chance of getting skill. Items all have different ranges, and while one item may go from red to grey in 25 skill levels, another may do the same in 10. There also are tiers for everything. For tailoring, you start off with linen cloth from 1-75, then move to wool cloth from 76-150, then mageweave from 151-225, runecloth from 226-300, and finally netherweave from 301-375. These correspond nicely with every 10 levels of the game. Likewise, with enchanting, you gain the items needed by disenchanting other items. For items to get your skill from 1-75, you will need to disenchant items from 1-10 (more or less).
In terms of the rarity of drops, if you level normally, you will not have an issue leveling most tradeskills along as you level. I fully believe I could level tailoring and first aid without issue, just with the items you get from killing monsters, if I had not done the triple exp thing. Enchanting is much harder, especially since we leveled too fast to really get enough items to disenchant as we leveled.
As it stands now, my First Aid is 375 (capped), Tailoring is 351 (cap of 375), and Enchanting is 220 (where you’d expect it to be for about a level 50, it is the most expensive craft to level and will be my focus after I get my flying mounts and shadoweave gear. My cap is 385 on this due to a racial bonus of 10 skill levels).
These are my feelings after 4 weeks of playing. I’m still in the newbie phase, and I still really like the game. I don’t know how I’ll feel after a bit though, once the character is basically completed as far as it can go.
The only thing I can say I really don’t like is that you can only have one class per character (unlike FF where you can freely change between 20 jobs). While not a game ruiner for me, it is a negative point. It also means that to level a different class, you have to start a new character, and do some of the same things all over again. I can understand why they do not let you do more than 1 class per character — since you cannot repeat quests, it would require a redesign of a large portion of the game, or require you to just grind your way up through the levels by killing monsters.
Oh, did I mention that you get rested experience points for logging out in a major city or an inn in a minor city? This gives you double experience points until it wears off (but in my case, it hasn’t worn off in a while, and just keeps growing).
-pyra and syd