If I can offer you one peice of WOW advice, as an experienced player:
GET CARTOGRAPHER.
No other addon is absolutely necessary, but Cartographer is. Get it.
WEST. You want to go West from the front gate to Undercity. You don’t want to go to Western Plaguelands yet. If ever.
And, the gravestone will probably have a big golden question mark over it. Kids these days have it easy. When I started playing, we didn’t have any question marks over anything but people, and the only things that sparkled… well, hell, nothing sparkled; you had to LOOK for stuff, none of this big, glowy, sparkly, CLICK THIS IT’S WORTH XP, GOLD, REP and MAGIC ITEMS business. And most quests? You had to actually kill things, not like in Northrend. I have seriously worn out the right mouse button on my mouse from doing quests in Northrend.
You know, I have YET to give directions in this game not actually looking at a zone map without messing up the facing somehow. It’s like this great big gray blob over part of my brain that doesn’t let me remember which direction things actually are.
HA! Tell me about it! When they implemented that stuff, I just shook my head reading the patch notes…
Well that was insanely aggravating/irritating!
My night elf warrior got herself killed north of the Oracle Glade, and her wisp appeared in the graveyard in Darnassus. But, having never woken up in that particular graveyard before I had no idea exactly where I was. I tried heading in the direction of my corpse as indicated by the arrow, but thanks to the previously mentioned obstacle course that is the typical WoW graveyard, combined with a mile-high cliff on one side of the graveyard and an impassable forest on another side, I was forced to go in exactly the opposite direction from my corpse.
Next thing I knew, I had somehow fallen off the continent down to the Veiled Sea. That’s a loooooooooong frickin’ way down, folks. That’s when I discovered/realized that Darnassus has no docks. The continent of Teldrassil is apparently a titanic tree (and they’ve gone so far as to detail the roots extending down into the ocean).
I spent about 20 minutes trying to get myself onto dry land, and I was about to give up and summon a GM with a “Stuck Character” complaint. Then it occurred to me to bring up the map and see exactly where I was. That’s when I remembered Rut’Theran Village has docks.
So my wisp basically floated along, skimming the surface of the sea, following the coastline south from Darnassus and then east all the way to Rut’Theran Village, where I was finally able to float up onto dry land, make my way to the portal, and then back to Darnassus. Once I came out of the portal in Darnassus I finally knew where I was and was able to make it back to my corpse.
Criminy.
Earlier, with a different night elf, I had yet another “!@#% unique monster won't !@#% spawn” issue, but it’s 3:00AM now and I’m going to bed. Tell you about it in the morning. :mad:
The maze issue is why you need Cartographer. It’ll show you the map even if you haven’t “discovered” the part of the zone you’re in. That way you can see the geographic features, and how to run around 'em.
Ah yes, falling off Teldrassil, it’s a classic. I don’t think there is anyone who started a night elf when they were a new player who hasn’t done that.
Hell, I did it on purpose just to see how far it was! One of these days I’m going to remember to take my mage to Darnassus just to see if I can Slow Fall all the way to the sea.
I managed not to do that with my Night Elf Hunter. On the other hand, my Tauren warrior must have racked up six or seven falling deaths in Thunder Bluff.
I have a bad habit of picking utterly stereotypical classes for my first go at each race: Night elf hunter, tauren warrior, dwarf paladin, dranei shaman, blood elf warlock. Haven’t yet made a gnome, so I still have time to make my first one a mage =).
There’s Lore (yes, with a capital L) that deals with that.
In Warcraft III (the last Warcraft RTS before WoW came out), the World Tree Nordrassil must be destroyed to drive back the demon invasion of Azeroth. The World Tree is what caused the Night Elves to be immortal. When Nordrassil was destroyed, the Night Elves’ immortality ceased and they became as any mortal on the planet.
There is a certain faction of Night Elf druids who sought to recreate a world tree, and thus Teldrassil was created. But the Dragon Aspect who was guardian of the principle of Life rejected the new world tree, so things aren’t going quite as ol’ Fandral the Archdruid expected. The corruption in Teldrassil is what has caused the furbolg around Ban’Ethil Barrow Den to become hostile, drove Lady Sathrah mad, and caused the harpy infestation around the Oracle Glade.
I haven’t fallen off Teldrassil or Thunder Bluff. Neener neener. 
I would have pegged different stereotypical classes for each race, actually. Night elf druid, tauren shaman, dwarf hunter (though paladin is close enough), draenei paladin, blood elf mage, orc warrior, troll hunter, human warrior, undead…something? Rogue? Not sure.
The tauren, dwarf, and draenei stereotypes are mostly based on me seeing a billion of each of those running around.
You also get a lot of gnome rogues on PVP servers because of the racial (Escape Artist) and because they’re harder to click-select.
I tried Cartographer and didn’t care for the way it pastes all that text and a big ugly arrow in the middle of my screen. It wouldn’t have helped in this case, though - when I said I didn’t know where I was, I meant “where in Darnassus”. I’d already explored all around the area and inside Darnassus, so it was all revealed on the map. It just never occurred to me, for some reason, to open the Map until I’d already fallen off the edge and floated halfway to Rut’Theran Village. As I exited the graveyard words appeared on screen telling me I was in the Cenarian Compound, and then in the Tradesman’s Terrace, but I was still completely lost because I saw no buildings - just trees. The falling off the edge caught me completely by surprise.
But I didn’t do it on puuuurpooooose! 
I guess it’s been too long since I played WCIII all the way to the end game. I’d forgotten about that.
I remember all that being explained to my night elf druid, but somehow it just didn’t register that I was actually running around on a tree the size of Texas. I just thought there was some big-ass tree in the forest somewhere that I hadn’t seen yet.
And that brings me to my latest “!@#% unique monster won't !@#% spawn” issue. The High Priestess gave my druid the quest to slay Lady Sathrah and bring back her Silvery Spinnerets. I went to the area Questhelper showed me, and I patrolled the area around the indicated spawn point for approximately 90 minutes (total, as judged by the fact I renewed my Mark of the Wild twice while searching) and killed enough other spiders and Nightsabers to level twice, and raised my Herbalism skill by many points via reharvesting the same herbs every time they respawned, but Lady Sathrah would not appear. I was starting to think Questhelper was mistaken.
But to make matters even more infuriating, after approximately 45 minutes of searching another character (the only other player character I’d seen in the area this whole time) went running past me. I was going the opposite direction, and a short distance later what do I find but the corpse of Lady Sathrah, a few yards away from the Questhelper-indicated spawn point. Apparently, though I never spotted her at all in my lengthy search, this guy ran in, there she was in a spot I’d run past 20 times, and he killed her. AAAAAAAARRRRRRRG!
But at least I now knew I was in the right place. So I settled down near the spawn point and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. But Lady Sathrah would not reappear. So I gave up and went away to finish up some other quests. A couple hours later I came back and waited around another 20 minutes or so, again in vain. At that point I said, “Screw this” and abandoned the quest. :mad:
On another, more pleasant note, I made a second Horde character for the Burning Dog guild, an orc warrior. I’m disappointed that the game wouldn’t allow me to use apostrophes in the character name (though I understand why they only allow letters - I remember how in Diablo II people gave their characters names of random gibberish and strange characters that made it quite impossible to report their dickish behavior because nobody could figure out how to spell them). I wanted to call him P’nez N’suuz, but had to settle for Pinezensuuz. I couldn’t tell if anybody got the joke, though. Somebody in the guild called me “Pine” for short 
Undead are warlocks per stereotype.
(Not that I have a lvl 79 one or anything…)
BTW, undead warlocks discover quickly that they have little use for one of their few buffs, the water breathing one - because undead are really good at that skill as is.
I’m currently working for the “Argent Champion” achievement on her just for the cognitive dissonance of seeing an undead warlock running around with a title of “the Argent Champion” over her head. This involves getting exalted reputation with the Argent Dawn out in the Plaguelands in the Eastern Kingdoms, and with the Argent Crusade out in Northrend. The groups are mostly made up of the Alliance races but the factions start neutral to Alliance and Horde, and they work against the evil Scourge in the Plaguelands and in the continent of Northrend. An undead warlock just doesn’t fit the mental image of who would align themselves sooooo closely with those do-gooders that they’d get all of that reputation for working for them.
True, the Foresaken don’t fit the Argent whatever stereotype, nevermind Leonid Bartholemew in Light’s Hope Chapel and that battle scene at the end of the DK startup.
And especially not a warlock. I know the Forsaken have a really good reason to resent the Scourge but the usual view of them is to do their own thing to fight against them, taking allies when it suits them but mostly sticking with their own. And the majority of the Argents (barring your examples and the few Horde-race Argent Dawn at the Ramparts in Tirisfal) are Alliance races.
On the topic of newbies falling from a great height - EverQuest had this problem too. A really popular race were the Wood Elves. Wood elves, logically enough, lived in the forest. In a treehouse-style city in the forest, called Kelethin. It was formed from platforms connected with bridges. These platforms and bridges didn’t have any handrails, and where the bridges were wasn’t always the most obvious thing, you’d have to adjust the camera pointing down slightly to see the sloping-away bridge from the platform you were on.
So just picture it: Lots of newbies starting up their characters, and they could perish within minutes by falling from a great height into a dark forest. Where you had to go find your corpse, dodging anything hostile because you were reincarnated “live” rather than “dead” and without any gear on. We called it “Kelethin lawn darts”, watching the elves fall to the forest floor.
Actually, Sathrah spawns in two different places, and (I think) alternates between them when killed. There’s a spot right up the hill on the west side of the river with the swamp things, way toward the north wall of the Tree. And there’s a place on the east side, a little farther out than the first spot, right about where there’s a little cul-de-sac of impassable stuff.
I’d have picked priest as the stereotypical Undead class, though there really isn’t one that’s associated in my mind as strongly as eg tauren with warrior.
Thottbot and Wowhead are your friend. I used to have a set of mods which would hotlink from my quest log directly to the wowhead db, so I could see everybody’s comments in-game about where you needed to go to complete a quest.
It always amuses me to find old posts from people who were adamant that multiple spawn points didn’t happen… the quest to kill the naga on the island off the coast of Feralas comes to mind.
Poster 1: She spawns at [a].
Poster 2: No, she’s at **.
Poster 1: You’re crazy. I’ve killed her twice, and both times she was at [a].
Poster 3: You’re both wrong; I killed her at [c].
Poster 4: Dudes, she spawns at all three places. Randomly. You’ll have to search around for her.
Poster 1: NO! she ALWAYS spawns at [a]! Three times now, I just rolled another toon just to go there and do this quest and she NEVER spawns everywhere else!
Poster 5: I just killed her at [c].
Poster 1: YOUR LIEING!!!11!
There are also a couple trolls at the main Argent Crusade outpost in Trollsylvania (I mean Zul’Drak) in Northrend.
Is there any mainly-Horde faction that Alliance characters can run pointless errands for? The Scryers in Shattrath, I guess.
Heh…QFT. I just finished the fragment-gathering quest in the excavation in Wetlands. The one fragment spawns in a pile of loose soil, which spawns all over the freakin’ place, not just in the excavation pits. Thottbot’s comments were just like that until people realized that it spawns randomly in about five different places and you just have to keep looking.
I solved the problem by logging out that night right at one of the spots. When I logged in the next evening, the pile was right there. Of course, this was after I’d driven myself crazy dodging raptors trying to find the damn thing.