Starting Out In WoW

Those good old days….
Wearing cloth on my warrior until level 31, boasting about my MP5(mana regeneration per 5 seconds) on my hunter when hunters used mana, picking armour favouring ‘armor’ value above any other stat….the list goes on.

When you’re just starting out in the massive and ever expanding World of Warcraft everything is a little scary but super exciting. There’s a tension as you play, a realisation that if you stray out of the small safe areas, you are liable to be hammered into the dirt at any time by NPCs or opposing faction players. Since you’re not generally out to do anyone any harm in the game at this stage, it can be quite a daunting feeling to be overwhelmed so quickly and be forced to corpse run to find your body and resurrect when that’s not something you are used to doing yet either.

Experienced players often take for granted the skills they have learned through being ‘ganked’ and learning the hard way that there is a carefully planned technique to finding the right spot to resurrect by using obstacles in the surrounding environment to get away from your heartless predator. In fact, if you die and rez enough times, you can actually resurrect a little closer each time towards the safety of a nearby friendly village or town before slipping away undetected if you just resurrect at the furthest extremity of the allowed circumference boundary around your lifeless corpse. A bit of practice in evading comes with experience as with anything else. Be sure tho, if your sad bastard of a corpse camper wants to make your life a misery, sometimes it’s best to just log out while you’re a ghost and create a brand new character 🙂

…which brings me to my next point. As a beginner in this massive game of depth, community and minute detail, it is advisable to try out as many of the 11 different classes as possible before deciding on what suits you best as you forge out your future in the game. Name your characters with the express intention that they will be yours forever because if you fall in love with that class, you could be seeing that name a lot in your WoW career. Experienced players take great care in naming their newly created characters because they can imagine the depth and the effort that will go into nurturing that budding world beater.

Finding your way in the game will inevitably mean meeting the best and worst of the people the game harbours. There’s the pleasantly mature and respectful young teens to the rude, obnoxious and downright arrogant elitist early twenties who you might surmise are angry because they failed to make much of their life so are just bitter little keyboard warriors. There’s the 15 year old brat that joins a group just to create havoc and waste everyone’s time. You know, the type that just wants to watch the world burn and then there’s the guy who would devote all his time to help you learn the basic aspects of the game so you may find your own way. There’s single mums who will ask for your Facebook, there’s psychos who will pick on you because you only hit the boss with 3 counts of ‘shield of the righteous’ and who knows your class inside and out and feels the need to tell you how much better he is at the game than you. There’s even grade A celebrities like Vin Diesel who raid progression. All these delights are yet to come but in your arsenal is the ability to ask for help, look around the community for people who set up to help beginners.

This game is good, but it’s longevity is easily stifled if you don’t find friends to enjoy it with. I always say you play the game for the enjoyment of it but you stay because of the friends you run with in there. Those friends are what keep people returning to the game. The game is easily done solo and some play for years while barely interacting with others but the depth of your involvement really depends on your ability to find that group you just click with.

There are numerous sources with good tips on how to make regular gaming buddies who have similar interests to you within the game. This is an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) so it really is designed to be played with others.

Finding a guild is a different ball-game. A guild is like an association and all too often these days a new player will get spammed with guild invites until they simply accept one of the spammers’ invites and get on with it until they find their feet in the game. Well my lovelies, by reading this, you have an advantage because you don’t need to join those spam inviting guilds who simply don’t care who they get, you are just another number on their roster to boost the GM’s ego.

What you want to do is use the link above to discover the best ways to find the right guilds. The best guilds do not need to spam newly created characters to buff up their roster numbers. The best guilds are known through the community, they advertise for the people they want by using the proper channels meaning that people who look for a guild using the proper channels will find them. This is the first stage filter to avoid attracting tradechat trolls or any other undesirables who are unlikely to fit with the guild’s community. I’m assuming any self-respecting guild will have a devoted leader who cares about the types of players the guild attracts. In The Dambusters for example, we don’t care how great a player you may be but we do care that you’re a good human being who will try to help your guild mates when you can.

Your best chance as a new player is to learn the basics of the game and how to manage your user interface to make it work for you and your computer. Use the online resources available to you in the multitude of websites listed here and make the right friends who never tire of answering your certain endless questions. Remember that your chosen guild will have people there who will feel nostalgic about the questions you must ask and although people will be busy playing their own game, in the right community you should be encouraged to group up with more experienced players and learn from them.

At the end of the day, learning to use the multitude of resources and being able to google ‘where to find Kodo eggs in Westfall’ for that annoying quest you can’t manage to complete is somewhere everyone has been and you really just have to go through it and create your own path and experiences as your adventures continue. Soon it will all just click. You will know exactly what youtube videos to watch, what websites are to your liking and we will all be a little bit jealous of that feeling of adrenaline you still have as you wander the world soaking up the amazing places and creatures that create the backdrop of an immersive gaming experience. I miss that feeling when I ran from Elwynn Forest where the infamous ‘Hogger’ hangs around down the crocodile infested river and down through the winding pathway of the old (it’s been reformed since the shattering of the Cataclysm) Stranglethorn Vale getting my ass handed to me on a plate by big gorillas every step of the way until I reached Booty Bay, crossed on the boat into Ratchet in the old expansive Barrens as I searched for hordes to kill.

Those were the days, I ended up stood outside the gates of Orgrimmar and got smashed to oblivion by the first horde that spotted me lol. You need to make your own way and learn for yourself. Everyone plays this game slightly differently and at max level, there’s just so many different paths to choose from which allow for fulfilment for a wide variety of different people.

/Salute to you on your adventures!