So, you have the choice of dwarves or draenei, as GoodOmens said. Dwarves and gnomes start in the same area, but dwarves can be both hunters and paladins while gnomes can be neither. If you went for the other pet class (warlock), that one could be a gnome (but not a dwarf, are you confused yet?)
The starting draenei areas are more “take you by the hand”; there are quests explaining every single profession, for example, which are not available for any other race (not even blood elves, which joined the game at the same time as draenei). They also give better overall reputation and rewards. Draenei have less issues with “I can’t see your feet, therefore I can’t interact with you” than the dwarves, but more issues with “OK, why is this door so short? Help, I’m stuck!”
I love dwarves (of the 8 chars I have in my main server, 5 are dwarves, 3 are gnomes; of the other 2 spots, 1 will be a wolfboy and the other one a dwarf), but those “can’t see your feet” problems are a pain when I’m healing.
Yay! Although boo that you won’t be in the BDL just yet. If you get the hankering to try out the Horde side, feel free to roll a couple of alts on Cairne.
Objectively, I’d say start with Draenei–that starting zone was designed for the Burning Crusade expansion, so they had the opportunity to learn a few things from vanilla. However, it also requires that expansion, so if you don’t want to buy TBC just yet, that’ll mean you’ll have to stick with Dwarves.
That’s assuming, of course, that you want to be the same race. Since you’ll have friends on the server to help you out, you *could *roll whatever race you wanted, and then get an escort to the other person’s starting zone.
Or you could roll a dwarf and a gnome and start in the same area. If I were rolling alliance, though, I might pick Human – the reputation bonus seems pretty sweet.
IMO, the absolute best racial for leveling is the Night Elf’s Shadowmeld. Period. It’s a once-every-two-minutes get-out-of-death-free card, more or less. It’s the one racial I find myself missing when I’m on any non-Nelf toon.
FWIW, js, Night Elves can’t be Paladins, but they *can *be Hunters (also currently: Warriors, Priests, Rogues, Druids, and Death Knights).
Mr. Chilly used to be BoA, but Blizzard changed it to BoP only for whatever odd reason. I’ve also found that Mr. Chilly abandons you if you do a paid server transfer.
That’s actually the way you can tell that Jeph doesn’t play WoW. There’s almost nobody who’s that ridiculous about the Horde/Alliance split (at least not over the age of 13). A lot of us have at least one alt on each side.
Update: We got started. I have two characters, Asi has one, and we’ve played a couple of times. We both have enjoyed it.
However, I got an email tonight saying my account has been “permanently disabled” for spamming. I initially thought it was a hoax, but it isn’t. I really have been booted off. I don’t think I’ve even logged in since last Friday or Saturday, so I’m baffled and upset.
Unfortunately, it sounds like you got hacked and your account has been used for spamming gold advertisements. Calling or emailing customer support should get you started in restoring your account – but it may take a while.
Assuming that this is what happened (and it is sadly likely, given what I’ve heard and seen), I’d strongly suggest an Authenticator to protect your account in the future. You can either get them for 6 or 7 dollars from Blizzard in the form of a USB device, or if you have an iPhone/iPod touch/iPad you can download the mobile authenticator for free (I think it’s available for several other smartphone operating systems as well, but I can’t say for sure since I’ve not used one.
A word of caution if you use a mobile authenticator, however–make SURE to write down the Serial Number of the mobile authenticator program and store it in a safe place. Should your phone accidently get wiped, get traded up to a new phone, or even go through a botched upgrade which flukily wipes your apps/contacts but otherwise upgrades successfully (grrr, iOS 4), you won’t even be able to access your Blizzard/battle.net account page. Having the SN at least allows you to call Blizzard and have them remove it from your account. Without it, I’m told you have to sacrifice your firstborn to get them to remove it—I kid, but it’s a far greater pain to get it removed without the SN.
I’ve double and triple checked all my anti-virus stuff at home and can’t find any nasty programs. I know I haven’t been phished, and I haven’t given my login information to anyone.
So, how does this happen?
In any case, I haven’t heard back from Blizzard yet. I hope I will and that they’ll let me back in, though I guess I don’t really understand what they will accept as proof that I didn’t do anything.
Correction: It’s not a USB device. It’s a completely standalone gadget with a single button and a 6-digit LCD display. Push the button, it generates a 6-digit number, and you manually type that number into the login screen. It doesn’t physically connect to your computer in any way.
I was not aware of that. I may have to order one of those and de-couple my mobile authenticator to avoid the future accidental wipe thing from happening again.
Just because you can’t find the malware doesn’t mean it’s not there. It’s also possible that there’s some way of stealing your login and password that *don’t *involve infecting your machine with a keylogger or phishing you, but that sounds off to me.
Are you *sure *you didn’t use your login and password anywhere but the official Blizzard site? I.e., nowhere that you didn’t get to by entering the actual official website URL and then navigating to the page in question? Some of the fake pages look exactly like the real thing.
They can see where people log in from. And account hacks happen often enough that they’re pretty good at seeing that when an account goes from normal play to spamming gold ads, it’s probably not the same person doing it.
Well, I’m sure, but on the other hand, this wasn’t just some scam artist’s Christmas miracle, so something let them in and it pretty much had to have been me.
If you get the hankering to try out the Horde side, feel free to roll a couple of alts on Cairne.