In fact there are almost no choices you can make on a character in WoW that can’t changed later, though in some cases it requires a fair amount of time and/or gold, few things are set in stone.
Kill, loot, sell. Kill, loot, sell. Kill, loot, sell…
Some things do require real money (server transfers, faction changes, race changes) and you can’t change your class at all aside from creating a completely new character. But that’s about it.
Sigh. Then Kahbueme is a sad gnome. 
PoM Pyro was his favorite combination. That, fire blast, and a couple of those new spells…Arcane Blast (I think it was called…and I could drop most BG pvpers. Think my build was something like 41/20/0, deep arcane. Don’t remember what I did with the points post-70. I stopped playing around level 72 or so…
Frost nova.
You forgot ‘Dance on a table in your underwear in Goldshire for coppers’ 
Oddly, I never got a single copper unless I promised to stop.
–Z, male draenai shaman 
On topic, I evangelize Enhancement Shaman as the most fun you can have in WoW. Certainly Rogues are faster dual wielders, but Enh talents let you get that wonderful feeling of going into what I refer to as “Frappe Mode” when you hit that first critical, and instant-cast chain lightning never stops being funny, especially when you slaughter 3x 78 Blood Elf paladins in 15 seconds after they attack you when you’re just trying to run an errand in Venture Bay.
My eleven year old daughter can play…it isn’t difficult. The chat is incomprehensible, but seems mostly targeted to the 80s and raiding and trading things for 500 gold - when you get to that level, it starts to make sense.
Get some good add ons - it makes the game a lot easier. We play with Atlas, Quest Helper, Baggins and FuBar as sort of the basic set. If you go out to curse you can see and download a bunch of add ons - they can be sorted by popularity and type to accomplish what you want.
Its also a lot easier now than it was two years ago when we first played - and then high tailed it back to City of Heros because WoW - despite its popularity - was such a pain in the back end. Mostly travel times and the amount of grind has been reduced. Items you need drop much faster so “go get ten trinkets for monsters” might be 15-30 kills instead of 50-100 kills.
Auctioneer is another good add on - a lot of people create a “bank gnome” - create a character, hightail it to the city, and park it between the bank and the auction house. Then you can mail things to yourself as your bags get full, and with auctioneer can do a little market speculation - buy low, sell high - to fund yourself.
As for character types, play what appeals to you - you can have 50 alts on the account so you can create a bunch until you find what you like. You won’t bother to level them all - or even more than a few - to 80 (soon to be 85). What one person loves to play, another dislikes. And it makes a difference who you play with - my main is a protection paladin I play with a mage and a shaman, the combination works well. But the mage was nearly unsoloable for many levels because he was so squishy with no heals, he needed me around to take aggro. I could solo - I was just SLOW.
If you are looking for something to level to get invited to raids, watch chat. There are certain classes that are always being looked for (and they aren’t rogues).
If you find you like WoW but hate the default interface, I highly recommend Carbonite+DominoBar+Auctioneer as another good covers-the-bases set. Carbonite completely revamps the interface and has mapping, harvesting-guide, and quest-guide features, while Domino lets you completely reorganize your action bars and have up to 10 of them on screen at once in a multitude of configurations (which is invaluable for Shamans, let me tell you, I don’t know about other classes).
Bartender (v.4, I believe at this point)
If you’re going to be using non-standard interface, I highly suggest getting Bartender at least. It’s not that hard to figure out how to configure it, and it’s very handy to have everything right out there on the screen.
I’ve been using the default action bars in WoW for a year and a half, and just this past week I finally grabbed Bartender. It’s freaking amazing. I love it.
I love it too, except when i leave button lock off by accident and unmap a crucial button accidentally mid fight…
Another thing to remember about add-ons is that they’re not official things. Blizzard has nothing to do with them other than a) allowing them to be made and hook up to the WoW program and b) occasionally stealing them to add to the default WoW IU.
If you use add-ons, you WILL fall in love with an add-on that the developer simply abandons, which means (unless someone else takes up the development of it) it WILL end up deprecated after the next patch (or the next one after that, and so on). You WILL find after a major patch (like the upcoming Cataclysm expansion patch) that at least half of your add-ons will either not work at all, or will do really weird things to your UI. And you WILL, because of these things, occasionally have to change one, a few, some, most or all of you current add-ons out for new ones or updates. Add-on maintenance is ongoing, but only rarely does a patch break everything. There have been two expansions since WoW was released (three as of this fall, hopefully) and both times (and most likely with Cataclysm) a major overhaul of my UI needed to be done.
At the same time, that’s not that bad, really. Three major tune-ups in 6 years of existence is a decent number. And frankly, the benefit of having stuff like Bartender or Titan Panel or SexyMap outweighs the little bit of maintenance I need to do.
That’s why:
a) curse is wonderful.
b) don’t go add on nuts…there are add ons for every little darn thing - there is likely an add on to tell you when to drink beer (in game or out). There are add ons that are terribly useful if you are a Mage in a Raid group - but functionally useless for a level 20 hunter.
Whoah, now, let’s not get carried away with esoteric talk about add-ons. You don’t need any at low levels, and won’t ever need most or all of the add-ons mentioned in this thread.
The only eventual must-haves are:
Deadly Boss Mods, for max-level raiding.
Omen Threat meter, for dungeons and raids.
Don’t even worry about them for now. Everything else is a matter of taste, and you’ll get a better idea of what add-ons you’d like as you get more experience with the game. I have other favorite add-ons, but telling you about them won’t be very helpful. Whatever you do, though, don’t get Quest Helper or its ilk; it takes the fun out of the game and breeds stupid players.
QuestHelper is PART of the game now. Every time you open your main map you’re using QuestHelperGeneric, [del]specially swiped[/del] reverse-engineered by the Blizzard devs.
And there’s no reason to breed stupid players. Fifteen minutes in Barrens General or…well, ANY Trade channel will demonstrate that they multiply quite well all by themselves.
Personally, not knowing where to go or what to kill isn’t fun for me. Tell me what to get, point me at the spot, and I’ll hack and slash everything in my path to get at it. Spending an hour wandering around a zone due to poorly worded quest instructions isn’t my idea of a good time.
Concur wholeheartedly–if this is your idea of fun, FFXI is looking for you.
Two things:
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I know from my brief time trying Quest Helper that it has way more features than the map markers that Blizzard incorporated into the game. The whole business of telling you where to go in what order for optimal efficiency and the giant green arrow on your HUD were never reverse-engineered, and make a world of difference to your play experience.
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I take it you’ve never logged on right after a patch. The cries of “Help me please Quest Helper doesn’t work what do I do what do I do?” in Icecrown general handily surpass anything that goes on in (Horde) Trade.
There are only a handful of quests out of thousands that aren’t clearly worded. The only one that immediately comes to mind is the infamous Lost in Battle. Virtually every instance of someone in General asking for help with how to do a quest is because they either didn’t read their quest text or lacked the reading comprehension to understand it.
Installing Quest Helper and having it diminish your entire solo experience is overkill, considering that the alternative is to tab out and quickly look up a quest on wowhead every couple of weeks or so.
it’s hard to find poorly worded ones though. when WoW first came out, alot of compliments were given to the well thought out quests, story and the few fedex quests. i remember a big part of the experience the first time i played through was simply wandering around, soaking up the atmosphere and picking up more of the story as it sends you from zone to zone, exploring the world.
once you get involved with a guild and your first 80, you’ll have plenty of time and reference to speed up and streamline the game to max out your character. for someone new to the game though, i would suggest jumping in with as little outside interference as possible and simply enjoy the game. you only get to play it once through as a noob, why spoil it?