Help two noobs get started in WoW

The Game Room
41

In my experience, on the Horde side I get the impression that the “kids” seem to gravitate to blood elves and orcs, and “adults” tend to play tauren and trolls. I base this purely on the way, in PvP situations (mainly holiday stuff), blood elves and orcs will attack on sight (cuz they just gotta be badass), while tauren and trolls tend to leave me alone, and even give a friendly wave. Seriously, my human can stroll into Thunder Bluff (the tauren capital city) and honor the elder/steal the flame/grab a bite at the “Thanksgiving” table, and the tauren players standing around don’t do a thing. If anybody does attack her, it’s almost always a blood elf or orc player who happens to be nearby.

I’m almost exclusively a solo player. My main character, a human paladin, has almost 75 “days played” (that is, almost 1,800 hours), and the vast majority of that play time was solo. I only started grouping up for dungeons 2-3 months ago, and then only because she’d simply run out of other things to do. She’d explored the entire world, all of her tradeskills were maxed out, she’d completed almost every available quest in the game. The nice thing about using the Random Dungeon Finder, though, is that once the dungeon is completed, you simply leave the group. You don’t have to continue hanging around with those people :smiley: (To quote a comedian I heard years ago, responding to people asking him if he was ever going to start a family: “If you do get married and start a family, you pretty much gotta talk to these people, like, every day. That wouldn’t work for me. ‘Honey, we need to talk.’ 'What, now? Can’t this wait ‘til the cable goes out or something?’”)

Questing for days and days and days in The Barrens, and then walking into Ashenvale for the first time was the big one for me.

Exodar Disco!

Yes! They’re “interdimensional goats” not “space goats”! :stuck_out_tongue:

42

Heh. I’ve actually sorta-semi grouped with Hordies on my gnome. I play strictly care-bear servers, and wasn’t flagged. Neither were they. We both happened to be at a quest location in Outland. They got there from another door just seconds before I did. They saluted. I saluted. They pointed at the quest trigger, then pointed to me. I nodded. They pointed at the quest trigger again, then to themselves. I nodded again, and did a “Flex” emote. They chuckled. Then they triggered the quest fight, and I helped them do the fight. We won. They cheered. I cheered. They point to their other guy. I nod/flex. They chuckle, then trigger. We fight together, win again. All cheer. Then they point at me, and at the quest trigger. I do it, we fight, win. I get quest credit. All cheer. All dance. The Tauren patted me on my gnomish head. I moo’d at him. All saluted, all waved, all left.

Later in AV, they pwned my ass twice, but I one shotted the orc with PoM Pyro once. And saluted the corpse, and vice versa.
:smiley:

43

I definitely did some cross-faction “grouping” for some of the tougher group-quest fights in Northrend. Three separate occasions, with myself and some alliance players arriving at the target at the same time & doing the battle twice so we both got credit.

44

To tag onto that comment about using your mouse to turn instead of your keyboard: Make sure you don’t have anything targeted when you’re turning as a ranged class. This is because right-clicking on anything that’s hostile (red text over their heads.) will result in auto-attacking it. Melee are lucky because they have an idiotproof mechanism that means WoW will just throw an error if you’re out of range. Ranged, on the other hand, tend to have an attack range of up to 36 yards.

This is bad when you’re a hunter.

Especially so when said mob is a raid boss. koff

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That said, I think my earliest ‘awesome’ moment in the game was exploring Mulgore as a weebaby troll hunter in my 20s and seeing the three fingered petroglyphs the devs put on random boulders. That still strikes me even now as a very cool little detail to add.

Wait, I’m wrong. I just went and dug through my screenshots, and the earliest one I have is a shot of my embryonic hunter standing in Stonetalon, just staring up at the night sky above.

45

Nitpick: There is no such thing as a “twink-only” battleground. I know this because 3 of my newest alts, over the course of 6 weeks, all got slaughtered by the same level 19 twinks at various times while leveling through the 10-19 bracket.

46

I spent my first couple of days trying different servers. Pick one completely at random (it’s PVP), make a dwarven paladin, get flattened by some ass before I’ve had time to look at all the buttons on the screen (it was a long, long time ago).
Pick another one, make a dwarven rogue, get spammed by duel requests by level 50 dudes, leave.
Pick another one, dwarven huntress (can you see a theme here?), start merrily killing stuff. This was on a laptop which had nowhere near enough RAM: I didn’t get indoor maps due to lack of RAM. It was also when Ironforge was Where Everybody Hung Out…

At one point, I was at Loch Modan and had to go to Stormwind. So I look at the maps and it seems like I can go this way and then this way and… uh, ok, that coyote was level waytoomuch, I don’t think this is the right way to go!
So, seeing a human paladin in the neighborhood, I asked her for directions to her hometown and she explained about the tram.
The views from the tram were so COOL I went up and down half a dozen times before finally getting off. I had to go back after I’d upgraded my RAM so I’d be able to enjoy them in movement :slight_smile:

47

There are only two kinds of raiders. Those who have accidentally caused a wipe, and those who will. Note that membership in the first group does not negate membership in the second.

48

I remember on my first toon, not having any idea of how big Azeroth was. I was a human paladin, and the first time I saw Stormwind I was intimidated. I thought surely that place was only for high-level characters. I thought some of the guards by the gates might stop me :slight_smile:

That’s why Orcs, Trolls and Tauren all start with “friendly” reps with each other, but “neutral” reps with Forsaken and BElves. And vice versa. The two sub-factions are inherently distrustful of each other.

49

Nitpick: The higher-level character isn’t required. Literally, twinking is just equipping a character with gear, enchants, etc. that it wouldn’t normally have at that level. You’re maxing everything out as much as you can, getting the best piece of gear for that slot, etc. It’s *easier *if you have someone higher-level financing or helping, but it’s not required. My first twink was the only toon I had on that faction of that server, and she was entirely self-funded. (I camped the Darkmoon Faire vendors a lot.)

And for a non-lore perspective: lowbie characters needed a way to get into the Blood Elf zones. Trying to run there through the Eastern Plaguelands would get you killed. Think of it like the Tram between Stormwind and Ironforge, only infinitely more awesome because (a) it’s almost instant and (b) the opposing faction can’t use it. (Grumble grumble Blizzard loves the Horde best grumble.)

My first character ever was an Undead Warrior. I clicked the teleportion orb in UC thinking, “What’s this do?” and FREAKED THE FUCK OUT because I’d read that just entering a capital city of the opposing faction could flag you for combat, and I didn’t know where the hell I was. Skeedaddled the hell back to UC as fast as I could.

Yup, I’ve done some cross-faction collaboration, too. Most recently, I think, was when I saw a guy who was clearly waiting for the same quest mob to spawn as I had been. When it respawned, I tracked him down and spammed /beckon and /point at him 'til he followed me to it.

Note that this **only **applies to Hunters, as they’re the only class with a ranged auto-attack that will start on a right-click. Everyone else will have their melee auto-attack start on a right-click (which obviously isn’t a problem if you’re out of range). Note that Wands, for classes that can use them, *will *auto-shoot, but that has to be triggered by specifically using the ability; it won’t start on its own at range.

Unless they completely changed the mechanic, that’s sort of correct. Anyone who turns their XP off is segregated to a separate set of BGs. Anybody who’s in the same BGs as you will also have their XP on. Now, it’s entirely possible that you’re up against twinked characters who are at the low end of their maximum level, such that they feel safe playing in XP-on BGs until they get close to ding, at which point they’ll turn their XP off and stay in the twink BGs.

50

Tell me that after you’ve tried to stomp out the Darnassus fire during the Fire Festival.

51

This is all made fairly clear in the quest flavor text and dialogue among NPCs in the Ghostlands (the level 11-20 Blood Elf zone).

52

Stupid pampered NElves, having it so easy… grumble

53

I got to Dal for the very first time last night (thanks again, Moobird!) and I was just running around like a total n00b idiot and kept on running into buildings only to be thrown out and stunned. And I’d be like, ooooh what about the place next door?! And get kicked out again. Everyone hanging around must have been rolling their eyes.

But yeah, that was one of those OOOOOH SHINY moments people have been talking about in the thread.

54

Oh, you wanna play that game?

Orgrimmar: Two entrances.
Undercity: Two entrances.
Thunder Bluff: Two entrances. On a fucking cliff. A single player with knockback can conceivably kill an entire raid, over and over and over again.
Silvermoon: One entrance. Unable to be reached by lowbie Alliance players unless they have someone who can summon them past EPL or are willing to engage in a multi-zone corpse run, unless there’s some other method I’m not thinking of.

Stormwind: Two entrances. The back entrance is directly connected to another capital city.
Ironforge: Two entrances. The back entrance is directly connected to another capital city.
Darnassus: One entrance. (Technically two, but the other one can’t be reached by a Horde player without being summoned into it.)
The Exodar: Two entrances.

So, pardon me if I don’t cry for you because you have to run the whole way through a sparsely-populated city to get to its flame. At least there’s a boat to get you there; there’s no boat to Silvermoon for low-level Alliance.

55

Pfft. Darnassus is easy. You don’t even have to go through the teleport for it. It’s right in Rut’theran Village!

Ironforge, Stormwind and Exodar are all harder than Darnassus. They’re all back behind the city walls, well away from the entrances.

The Horde equivalent to Darnassus is the Undercity fire. It’s right out in the courtyard, no guards.

56

Heh! Alliance enclave is set up differently from Horde in Dal. Their inn is actually outside their enclave (next door, as you noticed), whereas the Horde inn is actually inside ours. And yeah, they have really strict guest lists…

57

This is why Tauren are awesome.

58

Darnassus is the noob city; I’m not talking about the “steal the fire” thing. And to get there you have to run through the teleporter and straight through the middle of the (admittedly not terribly populated) city and out the other end.

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Hrm. I guess I just got really unlucky with matchmaking on all 3 alts, then. Those guys stayed at 19 for a really long time without turning XP off; each alt was rolled from scratch after the previous one hit 20.

Or tried to get across the Stormpike bridge in Alterac Valley while it’s being defended. Or, conversely, tried to defend the Frostwolf compound from infiltration.

60

Protip: Mouseover your debuffs. :stuck_out_tongue: