Help two noobs get started in WoW

Run up the stairs and head right. It connects through.

Sorry, sorry!

No worries! I know how it is. :smiley:

Sorry. Moving my random chatter responses to the main WoW thread.

Discussion of WoW will expand to fill all the spaces available to it. :slight_smile:

Sorry…we all kind of forget which thread we’re in and start blabbering away. I’m sure there are some posters on this board noting the increase in WoW threads and starting to worry about a cancerous expansion starting. :smiley:

:smiley:

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if I end up being one of the chatterers but we should try not to scare Asimovian. He’s skittish. :smiley:

So did you two get started? I think I’ve met Asimovian at one of the socal dopefests, not sure if I’ve met you though. Are you in socal? I will tell you that there are 2 more socal dopers in the Dope-guild, Yeticus Rex and me. Always fun to share comments about random quakes that happen while playing. (“Cataclysm is coming in more ways than one!”)

Starting advise: With a pair, I’d recommend that between the two of you, you take all three gathering professions, split with one having skinning and herbalism, and the other having mining. The split is that way so that you only have one tracking and one tool to carry per character.

Sell everything you harvest on the AH, and buy the biggest bags you can. Space is always an issue.

PvP servers aren’t that hard to start with, the ganking is nothing more than annoyance these days (I think my current alts have died to world PvP twice each (excluding the summer event)). Still, if PvP bugs you, then stay on the PvE servers.

The RDF is a great way to level once you can use it, and if the pally specs for tanking, your queue time will be very short (my wife and I have pair of alts, one tank, one heals, we don’t have a queue time:D). I would certainly let people know that you’re learning if you decide to use it, most people are cool with new players.

Other things to consider, off the top of my head:

  1. As a new player, save what little coin you get from loot or rewards to pay for your skills training. Every new spell or ability costs money to learn at the appropriate level, and you are probably going to struggle a little with cash flow as you start, unless the BDL guys hook you up.

  2. There is really no point in buying any gear off the auction house or a vendor until at least level 20 or so. You’ll be leveling so fast you won’t really get much value for your money, because you will outgrow the gear you bought.

  3. Do spend money on the biggest bags you can afford. It’s well worth it, because the more stuff you can carry, the less time you’ll spend running to the nearest vendor to sell your loot/turn in quest completions, etc.

  4. How to get money: Tradeskills–actually, gathering the raw materials used in trade skills to sell on the auction house. You probably want to take two gathering skills, like mining, herbalism, or …um…drawing a blank here…mining and herbalism were the ones I usually use. Whatever you take, there will be “nodes” of that resource scattered around the adventuring areas. Lower level materials are found in lower level zones. High level players who are powerleveling their way through other skills…like tailoring, engineering, balcksmithing, etc. will pay good money for stacks of raw materials. A couple gold a stack is nothing for a level 70+ character, but for the impoverished level 14 paladin, a couple extra gold can really help. On edit: AHA! Skinning! as Redwing says, that’s a good skill to take, and you use it by skinning corpses of some types of mobs you’ve killed…or that others have killed and abandoned.

  5. Never give your account password to anyone for any reason. Blizzard employees will never ask for your password under any circumstances.

  6. Do not buy gold or power leveling services from out of game sources. That is a bannable violation of the rules, and also a frequent source of much angst when the supposed service provider uses your character to loot your guild bank, sell off all your stuff, and otherwise ruin your character.

  7. Play the game anyway that makes you happy, as long as you aren’t griefing anybody. There is no right way to play WoW. If you want to just walk around and look at all the cool stuff in the newbie area, do it. If you want to go fishing for hours, and barely get any experience at all during that time, good on ya. If you want to powerlevel all the way to 80 and join a top tier raiding or pvp guild, go for it. The game is what you make it. As social or solitary as you want it to be. As fast paced and challenging as you can handle, or as laid back and mellow as you like.

  8. When you do advance beyond newbie stage…and you will…remember what it was like when you started. Maybe wander through newbie zones sometimes, and pass out some free stuff to lowbies…or go help the little level 10 druid beat the BIG BAD Quest Mob he has to beat to learn how to turn into a bear. Or go clear the village ahead of the mid-teen level guy trying to complete the escort quest in…damn my memory is going…the zone south of Stormwind, where the entrance to the pirate ship dungeon is…

If one of you is a cloth-wearer, tailoring is a good fourth profession. It’s one of the few crafting professions that is not terribly expensive to level.

Enchanting is another decent choice. You can level it by disenchanting magic items you’ve looted and won’t use, or have outgrown, and it produces stuff you can sell on the AH as well. I sometimes made a little gold by enchanting a few low level wands and selling them on the AH.

Oooh, okay, newbie question about the Auction House.

I’ve mostly stayed away from it except to buy cloth for when I was leveling up my First Aid and too lazy to kill things. I’ve only tried selling once, and set my stuff at about a third cheaper than the nearest item. It was some kind of cloth, I don’t recall exactly (Runecloth maybe?) but no one took the bait. At this point I’m leveling up far from cities with AHs, so I just always sell to the local vendors for bag space.

Is there a super-special way to handle the AH? I know about the addon that historically tracks prices. But is the effort needed to sell a lot of things (I’m a gatherer) on the AH as opposed to a vendor worth the price difference?

The only things you shouldn’t sell on the AH are grey items. Everything else is worth something to someone, and for orders of magnitude more than the vendors. A stack of 20 Copper Ore only sells for a handful of silver, IIRC, but a player will buy it for 3-4 gold.

Really, the only way you can make a decent amount of money in a reasonable amount of time is by selling everything you pick up on the Auction House. Basic strategy: set your Buyout price to just under the next cheapest Buyout price and your stuff will sell, I guarantee. Don’t worry too much about the starting bid, very few people actually bid on stuff, they just use buyout.

Personally, I’d vary this advice a little bit.

1.) Pair professions in a way that makes sense to you. That could mean putting a gathering profession together with a production profession that uses those materials, or it could be taking two gathering professions to make money faster.

2.) Don’t double up. Your four professions shouldn’t overlap at all–otherwise, you’ll just be competing for materials and/or recipes.

3.) Don’t take both Mining and Herbalism on the same character. You can only have one form of tracking active at a time, meaning that you’ll miss a lot of ore while you’re searching for herbs, and you’ll miss a lot of herbs while you’re searching for ore. I tried having both once on a DK I was using to farm mats, and over the course of an hour or two I went quietly insane.

Herbalism goes well with Alchemy and Inscription.
Mining goes well with Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting.
Skinning goes well with Leatherworking, and possibly Tailoring.
Enchanting goes well with any profession that produced equippable items,* but especially well with Tailoring, because Tailoring uses cloth that drops without requiring a separate gathering skill.
If you want to take Tailoring but not Enchanting, it will pair fine with any other gathering skill.

*As an Enchanter, you can also Disenchant magical items–after the first couple skill points in a profession, that will be all of the equippable items you produce. Some of those can be sold on the Auction House or to a vendor, but they will almost always be worth more as the “chant mats” (the dusts, essences, and shards they DE into) than as the actual items.

Everyone should train all three secondary professions: First Aid, Cooking, and Fishing. You don’t have to worry about keeping them leveled all the time, but they’re good to have around. Fishing/Cooking are good to level together, and you can find guides to help you do so.

This is what you should do if you want to make the biggest profit the fastest… but that isn’t everyone’s goal. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed having crafting professions on my alts. It’s very gratifying to be able to make some of your own upgrades/consumables/etc.

In general, don’t worry too much about buying upgrades off the AH. If there’s a particular piece that’s lagging behind, that’s the only time I’ll go search. Otherwise, while I’m leveling, I usually just say “good enough.” Sometimes when I’m on a server where I’m particularly flush with cash, I might buy a couple of good pieces as I level, when I know they’re ones that will stick with me for a while.

Ideally, you should invest in a Netherweave Bag for every slot as soon as you can. (These are 16-slot bags.) Depending on your server, these will run you 5g to 10g apiece, but you can often buy the materials themselves for much cheaper, if you can find a friendly guildie to make some for you.

Also, be very wary of any emails, in-game mails, or in-game whispers from anyone claiming to be Blizzard or claiming to direct you to a Blizzard-affiliated website. Phishers will often buy up all kinds of plausible-sounding or slightly-misspelled URLs and populate them with login screens that look just like the legitimate one. When in doubt, attempt to navigate to a page from the main Blizzard site instead of clicking a link or entering a URL of dubious origin.

Even if you think “I’ll never get hacked,” keep in mind that a lot of the gold that gets sold online does come from hacked accounts; so even if you keep yourself safe, you’re still profiting off someone else’s misery.

The main thing to keep in mind is that the TOU disallows any exchanges between in-game and real-world currency. So, say, it’s perfectly allowable to pay someone 25 gold to use their character to escort your character through a dungeon, because that’s a game-currency payment for an in-game service.

This times a billion. It’s your $15 a month; don’t let anyone else make you feel bad because you don’t have the same goals they do.

With the caveat, of course, that you should be prepared to actually put the necessary effort in to achieve what you want. E.g., don’t expect to be able to put in the effort of a casual raider and achieve the kills of a hardcore raider–that kind of thinking just isn’t fair to the other members of your raid.

Short answer: yes. You’ll make five times as much money, probably more.

Longer answer: make up a second character (a “bank alt”) who you run straight to the capital city; do not pass go, do not bother leveling up. Just before you log off your main character, mail all of your saleable stuff (green non-soulbound items, gems, cloth you don’t need, any herbs or ores you’ve gathered) to your bank alt. Then have your bank alt auction the stuff off. (Grab some of the bags out of the guild vault for your bank alt and mail them to him, as well.)

You don’t even have to do the auctioning every time, although it’s a good habit to get into; a once-a-week clear-out would suffice.

There’s almost no effort required to sell on the AH at all. It’s very easy. And you’ve been cheating yourself out of obscene (seriously, obscene) amounts of money if you’ve just been vendoring everything you gather.

Personally, I use the Auctioneer addon. All the features can seem a bit intimidating, but the nice part is that almost all of them are completely optional; the parts that you’d actually use on a day-to-day basis are very easy to use. If you like, I could take some screenshots when I get home and set up a little guide.

Not 100% accurate, but a good rule of thumb. *Almost *everything that isn’t vendor trash (gray items) should go up, though. You’ll occasionally run into things where their AH value is barely above their vendor value, in which case you’re probably better off avoiding the AH deposit. (This is why it’s important to use an auction-tracking addon: if you can see the historical prices, you can get a better idea not only of how much to sell something for, but whether it’s safe to vendor it.)

Yup, almost everybody wants their items right away. The only thing to worry about with your minimum bid is to not set it any lower than the absolute minimum you’d be willing to sell the item for, because some people who spend a lot of time playing the AH will have automatic scans set to bid on items that are currently under a certain percentage of market value.

ETA:

Tom Scud, good advice on the bank alt. Honestly, it’s so second-nature for me to roll one on every faction of every server that I don’t even think about it anymore.

When I was speed-leveling my enchanter I would place minimum bids on about 40 green items of the appropriate level, and then just disenchant whatever I happened to get in my mailbox the next day. But other than that, yeah, nobody really bothers much. I usually just set my minimum price and my buyout price to the same value.

The primary reason for the bank alt is not even to centralize your auction sales, although it is useful. There are only a few places in the game where you can access your bank (the capital cities, the goblin neutral cities, Shattrath, and Dalaran), and even fewer places where you can access the auction house (capital cities for factional AH, goblin cities for neutral AH), but mailboxes are everywhere.

Without a bank alt, every time your bags got full of things you don’t want to just vendor away, you’d have to return to the nearest bank, dump your stuff, and return to questing. It’s even worse if you want to auction stuff off.

With an alt parked in a capital city, though, you basically have access to the bank and auction house at any place that has a mailbox. Mailboxes can hold an insanely large number of items, and they’ll stay in the mailbox for up to 30 days, so you can stop by a mailbox, dump everything sellable to your bank alt, and keep on going.

On your alt, yes, but when it’s your only character it can be difficult to keep your crafting skills high enough for the stuff you craft to be useful(specially these days with the increased leveling speeds, most professions are still tuned for the vanilla leveling speed), and at the same time you’ll probably be dirt poor.

Another warning about tradeskills…if Asimovian is going to roll a Hunter, his gathering tracking is going to interfere with his Hunter tracking (Hunters can track various types of creatures on the minimap). It’s not quite as serious a conflict as between the two tracked gathering skills, but it can be annoying.

The bank alt scheme worked a whole lot better when enchanters used to be able to disenchant anything, no matter what their level. You’d make your bank alt an enchanter and every single magic item that dropped that you couldn’t use could be disenchanted by that alt, and the components sold on the AH. Of course, they’ve dinked around with enchanting beyond that point, too, which makes the components not as valuable on the AH as they used to be, so…

Get off my lawn!

I *have *done this with my main, *and *with my highest-level alts on various servers. It’s always served me well; I’ve always had plenty of gold (often more than other people I know) as well as the benefits of whatever items I could create. With all things, though, YMMV. I just don’t want the nooblings to think that they *must *take gathering professions or they’ll be stuck begging for coppers outside the capital cities.