Your First Toon - Make a Human Hunter

Make a human hunter.  Don't agonize over it.  This is the one you will play to a) see if you like the game at all and b) to learn the basic mechanics so you can be more in control of your style of play.

Human hunters start in Northshire with wolf pet. 

I tell new players to make a hunter first because hunters get a combat pet that helps you fight. You may not know the mechanics of the game, but your pet does, at least when it comes to combat.  And combat for a new player - AKA a "noob" - is where you can get totally confused when you are mobbed. But your pet keeps going because your pet knows how the game works.  I've had people who started WoW once and hated it try again with a hunter at my suggestion and they really get into the game that way, even if they never make another hunter toon.  I suggest you play a human because you get a reputation bonus, and the pet you get to start with, the wolf, gives you a hit bonus as well.  The only down side of the human hunter as a start toon is that the starting zone will be crowded because humans are the most popular race in WoW.

Once you hit level 20, you'll have some idea of the game.  If you like the hunter, keep it (hunters are one of the most popular classes for a reason).  If you like your human avatar great. If not, start a new toon.  Leveling to 20 will be so much easier the second time.  You can decide if you like playing a hunter or want a different class that has a different style of playing.  If you prefer mixing it up fighting in close range, you want a melee character. If you like the distance fighting of the hunter, but want more raw damage power, there are other ranged classes. If you want to be able to heal yourself as you fight and don't care about hit power, then a priest is another ranged fighting choice.  Then there are hybrid classes that do a little bit of everything but are harder to learn for that reason. They are all fun in different ways, though most people tend to have favorite classes.  Changing races also changes the game feel, just not as much as class.  (My thoughts about the races here.)

Hunters are loved by some and called "huntards" by others. People who don't like them say that a hunter doesn't have to know how to play the game but just lets the pet do the work of fighting. I say for a "noob" that is fine.  You're still trying to figure out how to read the map, find your trainer, learn your professions, buy and sell items, all the while not dying too often (for you will die...it is not failure to die, just part of the play). Some of the hunter abilities you get include tracking so that you can see where  "mobs" (the game creatures who "mob" you) are in relation to your location even if they are hiding.  Also, as you get a little better at using your pet to take damage while you shoot from a distance, you learn the basic etiquette of dungeons.  (More on that later. You cannot go into dungeons before level 15.)

Objective Difficulty Color Coding

WOW has a system of color coding that can help you know your skill level relative to a quest or task: red, orange, yellow, green, and gray.  (There is another, slightly different color system for items you loot or craft.)

The color of a quest in your log represents its difficulty relative to your level.

RED means no.  You can't get any red quests.  You can"t gather items that show up red when you run your tooltip over them, even if it is your chosen profession.   If you select a mob and its level number is in red, you have to be skilled to take it out. 

ORANGE means good but dangerous.  You get high experience points (XP) relative to your level for completing orange quests and for orange-level tasks in your chosen profession.

YELLOW means just right.  You should be able to do any yellow quest, even if you are mobbed a bit.  Yellow gives you decent XP and when you craft a yellow item, you usually (but not always) gain a point in your profession.

GREEN means easy and low XP.  In every region you quest, if you enter at orange, the quests will be green or gray if you do every quest there.  You will level slowly and gain very little in your profession.  Move on.

GRAY means zero.  No XP.  No value gained for making an item. No point except that the quests may also give you reputation.  There are various ways of gaining reputation. Don't worry about that now.

Your quest log shows the quests in one of four colors.  When you select that quest, the bar highlighting it will also be in that color.  Similarly, when you open your crafting profession window, the items you can craft are listed in the same four colors.  (There are only 4 colors because you cannot get a quest or learn a skill in your profession at the red level.)

The wolf's level number is gray meaning the level is too to give XP.

These colors show up in all kinds of places and relate to experience and skill.  On the red end of the spectrum, the experience you get for any completed action like killing mobs is highest.  That diminishes until you hit gray where you get zip, zero, no levels at all. The only reason to do gray quests is for the reputation they give with a city or faction.  That can get you valuable rewards, but you shouldn't worry about that now.  Know that as you level, quests you have accepted change color, and you should abandon them once they are green or certainly gray.  You will not even see any gold exclamation marks offering you new low quests unless you turn on low level quests in the objectives
menu.

Knowing what the five colors mean can make your game play easier and more fun. It can save you from getting repeatedly mobbed and killed, from going out of your way to farm a mineral or herb only to realize your level is not high enough, or for grinding and grinding quests as you wonder why you are not leveling.

Action Bars

You can activate action buttons by clicking on an icon or by pressing the key that is bound to it.  The game default shows one row of action bars at the bottom of the screen.  The left half of this action bar is bound to number keys 1-0 and then - and =.  You can add more rows of action bars now or wait until later. You will definitely need a place to lay out your tasks as you get more and more options.  I do it first thing when I make a new toon.  If you go to your game menu by hitting escape or by clicking on the little computer icon in the bottom right action bar, you will see an option for interface.  Click it and you get a screen with a menu on the left.  Click the ActionBars menu and then select all of them.  Do not check to make them visible, so that you won't even know they are there until you want to put an icon into them.

 You can drag icons from your spell book to the action bar. You can rearrange them once they are there by holding shift and left-click as you drag the action to a new spot.  You can play around with it, but most people move their main rotation of hits/spells to the 1-2-3-4 keys.

You can also bind actions not in your spell book.  Go back to the Game Menu and select Keybindings this time. You will see so many options for binding keys it will be intimidating.  Don't worry.  Read through for future reference.  You can put mount/dismount on a key once you can ride. You have target functions and chat functions.  Play a while and then check back to see if there is a pre-programmed key-bindable action written for you to make your game play easier.

If you are going to bind to a letter key, however, scroll through the list to make sure you are not un-binding something important if you assign a letter to an action.  One thing I like is to have a key to stop auto-attack.  I put it on the C key, which by default is simply an action to sheath/unsheath your weapons.  It doesn't do anything active in the game, and so I don't mind giving up the key for that.

Don't go crazy with this. You can keybind so many items you might have a hard time remembering them all, so you want your most common actions on the main action bar in the left hand number keys.  That way you can press buttons to fight while moving around using the mouse with your other hand.


If you really start to jam up and have a hard time finding the right key for everything you want to do, you will have to start making macros, which are custom icons that you can write instructions for that combine and automate some stuff for you.  More about that later.

Level 5: Leaving the Start Zone

Sometime at level 5, you will finish all the quests in your start zone.  You will be given a request to report to a small town outside a major city.  This is where you will quest from for a while...maybe 10 levels.  At 15 you unlock the Dungeon finder, and your game play starts to include choices of where you want to quest.   The village may be a hike, but stay on the roads instead of heading straight across the map in the arrow direction unless you are not worried about being mobbed and killed.  Advice on travel by foot here.

You can change zones here if you like... I have favorite areas for leveling as do most players.  But if this is your first, you home zone will be fine, and save you from some possible headaches. For example, races that can not be shamans don't have any shaman trainers in the town at this level.

Questing: Caves–Finding them

Very early in the game you will have to go into a cave of some kind.  Caves can be hard to find if you don't know how to look on your map, and they are extremely easy to get lost in, making you go round and round in circles looking for an exit. (Time to hearth perhaps?)

Low level quests will put the quest objective number right over the entrance, but later quests may put the number locator over the objective inside the cave.  If you don't know how to find the entrances on the game map, you will search, get stuck, backtrack, curse, turn around, cry, want to throw your computer out the window like I did.  Once I learned that cave entrances show on the map, and once I got an addon that let me see the whole map even for areas I have not yet explored, it got a lot easier.

Head toward your objective marker.  If you see a cave entrance, great.  If not, open your game map. Your zone map will have miniature line drawings with the same configuration as game cave entrances.  Find the nearest entrance  and you're gtg.

Vendor Trash

Items in your backpack are color-coded into 5 categories: grey, white, green, blue, and purple. Grey items are considered "vendor trash." Most of them have no use in the game. Some can be equipped as weapons and armor, but their stats will be so low, the only time you will use them is if you have no item yet in that slot and cannot afford to buy one. There are addons that will automatically sell all grey items whenever you open a vendor window, and others that will suggest grey items to throw away if you are looting a corpse and have no room left in your bags.  Get rid of the stuff.

Sometimes there are white items that used to be useful but no longer are, yet Blizzard hasn't gotten around to changing their status.  And many white items are not really valuable to anyone else so you won't be able to sell them at the Auction House.   White armor and weapons, food and drink that does not have any buff stats, things that can be bought at almost any vendor and are now below your level.  All that should be considered vendor trash and sold for whatever you can get.

Keybindings: #1-Remove Basic Attack from Action Bar

Right off the bat, I remove the basic Attack or Auto Attack button from my action bar.  Hold shift as you click the spell icon and drag it off.  Dump it anywhere on your screen.  If you dump a spell, it is not gone from the game.  You can open your spellbook (type P or click the book icon on your toolbar), find it, and drag it down to the action bar again.

I remove Attack because I prefer to always right-click on my target when I want to do a basic attack.  The auto-attack kicks in and keeps hitting your enemy even if you don't do another thing.  (You can toggle auto-attack off...later.) What I do is right-click on a target while I am still way out of range.  Nothing will happen until I am in range, whereupon auto-attack starts doing damage.  This helps you get a feel for the range you should be in to engage your enemy.

While all classes have Attack, casters work from range and so shouldn't ever be hitting with a melee weapon.  (Melee weapons for these classes will disappear when Pandaria is released and we'll see if it works to cast a basic spell at that point.)

More spells will appear in your action bar as you train your first few levels.  I almost always more them around so that they form a 1-2-3-4 series in the rotation that I use most.  Out of rotation spells like heals I will put on the 5 if I use them a lot, or on another action bar if not.

At some point, the new spells stop appearing on the bar automatically, and you must place them manually where you want them. It helps if you already know how.

Level 1: Quest 2–Fighting Basics

Your second quest teaches you how to use your class abilities to fight.  You will see one or two buttons on your toolbar have icons.  Usually one is simply an attack or auto-attack button.  The other is a special class skill.  On the right, if your race has a spell it can activate, it will be in the 0 slot. Run your mouse over each one and see what it is.

Warrior Level 1 action bar has an attack button, a dark second button for Strike because it cannot be used yet, and on the right the Orc special ability called Blood Fury that increases attack power.  Not all classes benefit from attack power, but warriors sure do.  Many racial perks, like skill with certain weapons, only benefit some classes.

You will also see some mobs with flickering yellow nameplates.  You may have to move in the direction of a golden arrow on your minimap to see them.  The yellow name means the mob is neutral and won't attack you unless you attack it.  More about the colors on nameplates elsewhere.

The numbers on the attack bar correspond to your computer number keys.  Tapping the number 1 will activate whatever spell or ability is labeled with that icon.  Go up to a mob that has got the yellow name above it and hit your 1 button.  Just stand there and watch what happens.

If you have a second button, it may or may not be lit.  Warriors, for example, have to build up rage before they can use most of their skills.  Once it is lit, you can tap that one again.  It will go dark for a period of time called its "cooldown." Once it is lit again, you can use it.

You can activate a skill by right-clicking on the button with your mouse (control-click works too if you have a one-click Mac mouse. ) Or you can use the number buttons. You will use the number keys most of the time at upper levels, so start now.  Your most common spells/abilities should be on your 1-4 keys. (More on how to set up keybindings elsewhere.)

Once you start hitting the mob, its name will turn red.  Even if you are out of range, if you right-click to activate your auto-attack,  the mob's name turns red.