World of Warcraft; I'm standing, now what?

The Game Room
1

The last time I played anything was the first PC version of Doom. I chanced to see the Free Start Edition of World of Warcraft, so I thought I’d like to check out the graphics and see how characters can interact and fight and cast spells nowadays.

I downloaded the Free Starter Edition. I checked the start of the Beginner’s Guide seeing that I’ll create a character first. I read about some classes. I started and created a character. As I’m doing this my breathing starts to get heavy. That character standing there with its own heavy breathing is contagious and annoying ;). I chose Normal with Roleplaying so that I could see how talking to NPCs worked. I clicked Play.

I’m standing in a pretty park with some characters near and far. Some run through the scene. I imagine correctly that I can drag the POV around. I chanced to see that the scroll wheel zoomed. I imagine correctly that I can use the arrow keys and turn and run around. I read that the people with the exclamation point over them are NPCs that might start you on quests. I approached one and forgot what I touched that had the NPC greet me. I couldn’t think of or find what to do. I clicked Goodbye and walked off.

I see that I can check my Spellbook and Backpack (baackpack, backpack - baackpack, backpack - sorry, Dora flashback to my kids). I ran around and found this glowing book. I don’t even know how to pick it up. I also don’t know how to wield my own dagger or put poison on it. I saw some character crouch. I don’t even know how to jump, climb, or sit down.

The Beginner’s Guide talks about the Bank and Auctions and different kinds of quests. I still don’t even know how to pick up an object, wield my knife, or jab with it. :smiley: Pretty pathetic! So does someone know where to point me to learn the Basics of the Basics (of the Basics)?

2

First things first…Welcome! Now, my first suggestion is: You should create a new character on the server: “Cairne” and you should choose a Horde race. The reason I suggest that, is there’s a community of dopers there that will invite you into their guild and there will be a group of people who will happily answer your questions whenever they pop up. It’s bound to happen :slight_smile: But if you prefer to play an Alliance character or on the RP server you already joined, it’s all up to you. People will answer questions here in this thread or in the current WoW thread anyways.

Now on to your questions. Yes the ! means that NPC has a quest for you. Right-click on the NPC and you should get a panel with another, smaller ! and the title of a quest or just the text and an ‘accept’ button. For the first few, you should read the quest-text which will tell you what to do. Then when you complete that task, the ! will turn to a ?, which means you can turn in the quest for money, xp and possibly a reward. Get used to your skills and abilities and ask any questions you may have here, in the other thread, or to anyone you meet in-game.

Enjoy the ride!

3

Tooltips should be turned on. Last I remember, WoW is pretty obsessive about giving you instructions for every minor command you could need or want as a newbie. You shouldn’t be needing to guess at what to do, it should be leading you through the first few quests.

4

Right-clicking with the mouse is how you interact with the world. Right-clicking an object (like an herb, quest item, or mineral node) will pick it up. FYI you can only pick up herbs and minerals if you train herbalism and mining, respectively. Right-clicking a hostile npc will attack it. Right-clicking a friendly npc will talk to it, and open a dialogue box if applicable. Not all friendly npcs have something to say, but there’s really nothing to talk about unless you’re on a quest anyway.

If you hit M, that will pull up the map of your current zone. The objectives for quests in your log will be shown on the map, so just go to where the dot or blue area is. Then read the quest and find the thing to pick up or kill. Then hit M again and it will tell you where to turn it back in.

By the way, moving with WASD is more efficient than using the arrow keys. Keep your right hand on the mouse and your left hand on WASD. Pretty much all PC games use WASD as the default for movement. W is forward, A is left, S is backwards, and D is right. Also, Q is strafe left and E is strafe right, which comes in handy a lot because shuffle-turning is so slow in wow.

5

FTR, “Roleplay” servers don’t change how you interact with NPCs. That’s the same no matter what server you pick. The “roleplay” aspect is how you interact with other players: you’re supposed to stay in character, and not talk about stuff that’s extraneous to the game, like TV shows or sports or what have you.

6

Technically, the RP “ruleset” is unenforceable by Blizzard. It’s also not generally adhered to by players on RP servers. RP takes place in roleplaying guilds, and that’s about it. Maybe you’ll occasionally run across someone roleplaying in /say (usually just alliance in Goldshire), but you’ll never “have to” stay in character if you don’t feel like it. The only enforced difference between an RP server and a normal server is a restriction on allowable names.

I’m on an RPPVP server, and character/pet/guild names must be RP-compliant. You can’t name yourself anything containing textspeak or memes. On a normal server, you could name yourself Sephirothlol or Imonaboat or Pandapandahi or Lololololol. On a RP server, those names could be flagged by fellow players (of either faction), and you’d have to change it. On a normal server, names of players/pets/guilds can be anything you want, as long as it’s not crude or offensive. For example, a guild called The Pwn Starz was recently forced to change its name on my server.

That’s probably the only good thing about playing on my RPPVP server. I’m not even a roleplayer, most people are not roleplayers, but we do enjoy our petty revenges. If someone is being retarded in trade chat and they have a stupid name, people will report them. Enough violations could theoretically result in a banning if a person kept changing their name to something stupid and trolling trade, although I’ve never seen that happen.

7

If you see something that’s kinda glowy with sparkles rising from it, you should probably right-click it. That’s how the game highlights things for you. This includes objects you need to interact with for quests, slain enemies that you can loot, and mining or herbalism nodes if you have the appropriate profession (professions come in around level 10).

Relax and enjoy yourself. The single-player portion of WoW is very easy; more relaxing than exciting. Even if you do get your character killed, the penalties are minimal. The thrills come later in raids and/or pvp.

8

In addition to what folks have already said:

  • Space bar is jumping.

  • X is sitting down.

  • Climbing doesn’t happen in WoW, just a lot of jumping. There are mechanics for flying, but they’re very rare and you won’t encounter them until much later.

  • Alt-Z hides your UI to let you see the world. Pressing it again will bring back your UI.

  • Press C to check your character sheet. You can equip gear by either dropping it into the correct slot or by simply right clicking its icon in your bags.

  • Regarding poison, I think you should have a spell in your spellbook that will poison your daggers for you. It’d have poison in the name somewhere.

  • Fighting with weapons is done by a) targeting a hostile and b) pressing the spells that should be automatically located on your action bar. The spells will turn red if you’re not in range of the hostile. By poison, I assume you’re a rogue, so you’ll have to be in melee range to be able to do your stabby thing.

  • What Max the Immortal said re: interacting with objects, but I’ll also add that your cursor will change based on what you’re mousing over. A dagger means this is a hostile, a gear wheel means you can do something with it, etc.

9

Thanks! Those keystokes will help and I’ll play with them. Looking for glowy things and icons to appear in the action bar based on content will help too. Let me see if I can obliterate myself and get on Cairne - I only saw the “United States” realm when I first started. I’m looking at Blood Elf or Forsaken, and as a Rogue, so that I’m not playing too safe. I’ll summarize some of the initial learning curve for future people starting and wondering what to do.

10

I’m not sure how it is with the trial account, but the last time I checked a full account could allowed you to have up to 50 characters (up to 10 per server; I think 11 with the new expansion). You can pretty much go nuts creating new characters.

Also, bear in mind that your choice of race has such a small impact on your abilities that it’s fine to base your choice on aesthetics. Blood elves also have a pretty well-designed starting zone; you don’t have to be a blood elf to quest in the Eversong Woods or the Ghostlands, but it can be a hassle for a new player to find their way there.

11

I’m in Cairne and doing the Wyrm Quest. I find that I can left click to apparently set my target, and it doesn’t engage a fight. I found Auto-Attack in my Spellbook after clicking the General tab on the right. I found I could put in in the Action Bar in slot 2 so that Alt-2 would turn it on and off. So I think I see that you can put your favorite actions in slots where Alt-# executes it quickly. Right-clicking works too, I accidentally found when I activated Arcane Torrent unexpectedly :eek: :stuck_out_tongue:

While Auto-Attack seemed to fight for me, I assume there is a way to fight with your own actions. I can move while fighting, and I see these “Miss”, “Dogde”, etc. words floating up and disappearing during combat, but I don’t seem to be doing combat myself. I should be able to Attack-with-Left, Attack-with-Right, Parry-Left, Parry-Right, Crouch, and Dodge, etc. What are those keystrokes? Should I just find a keymap somewhere and read it until I’m familiar with it?

Auto-Attack puts the weapons in my hands, but I don’t know how to sheath them. Ha :smack: A couple of times I did Alt+Z to clear the screen and let me see the landscape (thanks, lizardling). Just now I wasn’t paying attention and I did Ctrl+Z instead. That sheathed and wielded! Hurray! Only 2,874,541 commands to go :D.

I also wanted to swap weapons, as a test, but dragging them to the opposite slot on the Character Sheet didn’t do anything. I assume I can have armor and weapons and stuff in an Equipment Bag. I’ve been able to put stuff in one and clicking the bag brings it ack, but I don’t know how to move items around from hand to hand.

12

Right now you only have a very limited number of abilities. You can right-click on an enemy, and you stab it over and over again until it’s dead. Every other level or so you’ll get a new ability–for rogues you’ll get stealth, and backstabs, and specialty moves. But you can learn to use each new ability as you get it.

Combat in WoW is focused on your character’s special abilities. As you go up in level your right-click autoattack won’t even register, fighting consists of triggering the right abilities as they become available, watching your health and popping healing, and managing which enemies notice you and start attacking you.

To equip something you open your bag (hit “B”) to open all your bags, then hit “C” to open your character screen. Drag things from your bag to the appropriate spot. Some things you won’t be able to use because you’re not high enough level, or are the wrong class. “Z” sheaths and unsheaths your weapons, but it’s only aesthetic, it doesn’t matter if you run around with your weapons sheathed or unsheathed.

Right now you’re so low level your character doesn’t know how to dual-wield, and so you’re stuck with one crappy dagger in your main hand. As you get better you’ll get two daggers and will be like a little cuisinart chopping and slicing everything in sight.

I found rogues to be the hardest class to use. Wizards and suchlike you click on a guy and pop spell until he’s dead. Warriors you run up and bonk em on the head until he’s dead. Hunters you shoot them until they’re dead. But rogues are delicate like wizards but have to attack hand to hand. Takes some delicate manuevaring especially if enemies are packed in tight.

Your race is mostly for flavor. Different races have some special abilities that are useful at low level, but pretty soon your class abilities will be much more important.

To figure out what you can do, press “P” to open your spellbook. You can drag abilities from your spellbook to your action bar, or if you’ve got open slots when you learn them the game will add them automatically. So combat means sneaking around, picking an enemy, and firing off your abilities while watching your health nervously and hoping another enemy doesn’t aggro you. But in the low level areas all the enemies are “yellow” which means they won’t attack you unless you attack them first. Even if you stab their buddy in the face, they’ll just ignore you until you start stabbing them.

13

Don’t quote me, but I believe “b” only opens one bag, shift+b opens all of them.

If I had to give a class recommendation, it would be Paladin. You end up getting quite a few abilities, but:

  1. You wear plate, making you able to take a lot of hits.
  2. You can heal yourself, making you able to make mistakes
  3. You can do some damage from range, if need be. Useful if you don’t know some of the tricks you can use to get the attention of aerial enemies, it also makes it easier to manage mobs that run away.
    Anyway, I’m glad you’re using the hotkeys. Eventually you’ll learn to rebind your keys to make it something you like, but using the mouse is a real downside. I’m not saying this from a snobbish uber raider perspective, I mean there are just boring old quests that I’ve saved from dying on just because I could press buttons faster than clicking.

Another note – as far as I know, except for auto-attack it seems that talking/quest getting/harvesting/picking stuff up can be done with the LEFT mouse button as well as the right now.

I don’t know of a text command for sheathing your weapon (only the hotkey you already found) but a lot of the “emotive” stuff is done via the chat box*. For instance to sit down press enter and type “/sit” (without the quotes) and hit enter again and you’ll sit down. There’s a lot of things like this you can do, /sleep, /train (you make train noises!) /chicken. I’ll leave it up to you to find them all.

  • There are hotkeys for sit, and maybe lay down, but they’re a bit useless. I’ve long since rebound them.

As Lemur hinted at, you don’t really “micro-manage” combat like that. If you want combat like that I believe the usual recommendation is the game Mount and Blade. In this game, things are based off of numbers and percentages. There’s a chance that your or any enemy will dodge or parry an attack. There’s a chance you’ll hit or miss. Things can be done to influence this – standing behind a mob won’t let it parry (this is pretty much impossible if you’re not in a group) for instance, and an attribute on some gear called “hit” (why it’s not called “accuracy” I will never know) will reduce your chances of missing.

Generally if you’re a melee class or a hunter most of your combat will consist of right clicking on an enemy and then using the special abilities you have. For casters (e.g. mage, warlock) you probably will almost never be autoattacking, opting to cast spells (which are your special abilities) instead.

This is a very, very simplified version of things, of course, but you’ll learn the nuances on your own in time.

14

Your character does a few things automatically while engaged in combat, like attack with his weapon(s) and to dodge and/or parry each incoming attack. You don’t need to do anything for this to happen, and your chance of succeeding depends on your character’s ability scores, like agility. Your character sheet has info on your current chance to parry/dodge/etc.; these usually start around 5% and increase as you equip better gear (talents used to help, too, but they just revamped the talent system and I’m not sure if they still do).

The auto-attacks are kind of a baseline filler damage. As you gain levels, you’ll gain new abilities, like Sinister Strike, Gouge, and Mutilate. These abilities need to be activated; typically one binds them to the number keys (I can’t remember if by default there’s a separate action bar for 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. and for alt-1, alt-2, alt-3, alt-4 etc. or if that’s how I set up my keybinds; I think it’s default). These special abilities cost a rogue energy. A rogue usually has a reserve of 100 energy, and using a special attack could use, say, 25 or 40 energy; energy replenishes at a rate of (about) 10 points per second, so you’ll eventually be using them pretty much constantly.

15

By default the action bar is bound to

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =

The reason “alt+1” did something for him is that if, say, alt+1 isn’t explicitly specified, it will pretend you just pressed “1” (I presume this is so if you’re in combat and press, say, “alt+1” and immediately need to move backwards, your character doesn’t sit there stupidly while you accidentally press “alt+s”). My set up, is set up near the movement keys. I rebound the whole thing to revolve around q,e,1,2,3,4 and various shift+, ctrl+, alt+ variations (I recently had to add the ` key because Brewmasters have way too many abilities that are actually useful). You can, in theory, bind things like ctrl+s, ctrl+w etc too, but this is usually considered ill advised for various reasons.

16

All those are automatic. The non-automatic skills (special attacks, short- and long-term buffs…) are in your spellbook; its default shortcut is P and it’s also one of the tiny icons to the right of your action bar. WoW will already have placed some of them into your action bar automatically as you obtained them.
The most versatile classes are Paladin, Druid, Shaman and Monk. All three have a healer specialty; Monk and Paladin’s other specialties are tank and melee damager (DPS); Shaman’s possible specs include a melee and a ranged DPS (no tank), and Druid is the only class with four possible specs (the aforementioned healer, plus tank, melee DPS and ranged DPS).

17

My Paladin character is definately the easiest to use. You can just stand there while the mobs tickle you with their puny attacks, then if you get a little bit of damage you use a healing spell on yourself. You might not do as much damage per second as other classes but that doesn’t matter since you’re so much tougher, and can heal yourself. No need for food or potions or bandages or any of that crap.

Hunters are also pretty easy, especially at low level. Your pet helps you out, even if you don’t know anything if someone attacks you your pet will attack him while you stand there like an idiot wondering what to do. And you can just hit 1-1-1-1 and Arcane Shot 4 times while your pet is running off to attack someone.

18

I don’t know about hunters (or warlocks, the other pet-based class) being that easy though. My main is a hunter and I love the class, but some people get confused by having they char split in half (if you’re a pet-based class, the pet is as important as the humanoid toon).

19

Warlocks and hunters certainly aren’t easy to play WELL, but there’s a reason we have the term “Huntards” – they’re a really simple class to level with. Warlock, way back before their buff in Vanilla, were a rather technical class, but if you were good you could solo a lot of elites your level with the right talents (up to and including being able to tank Scholo post-nerf with two properly specced warlocks), but now they’re rather powerful, much simplified, and since the leveling content has been incredibly nerfed danger-wise there’s no real problem anymore. An afflic lock, I understand, is still rather difficult to pull max potential DPS with in a group, but we’re trying to get the guy levelling and learning, not make him into a hardcore raider. He can function in a group and solo just fine with either.

I’d be more worried about rogue or mage because while you can really do stuff in a group setting, soloing can be a pain due to a reliance on crowd control and mobility.

I still say that pally, as over-populated as they are, is probably still the simplest though.

20

If I may tag on to this post - I played from vanilla up to part of the way through Cataclysm. My main got up to 84. Haven’t played since. Got the bug again with Mists, and excitedly logged on to my main… only to find myself facing a completely updated skills and abilities system. I had no idea what I was looking at. I’m sure I could spend some time digging in and figuring it out, but does anyone know if there’s a good primer on the new system for returning players?