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 2-3: Targets and Tasks

By the time you finish your first 2 quests, you should reach Level 2.  Your next quests will expand your skills.  This is usually when you have to find and fight a stealthed target, a spy or lurker of some kind that semi-transparent and so is hard to see.  Hard to see if you don't have enemy name plates activated, that it.  Press the V key to toggle nameplates on.  Now even a stealthed enemy will have a giant yellow health bar over its head.

Use your TAB key to select one.  (If nothing selects, you are too far away.)  You will see a corresponding yellow circle at the feet of the selected mob and its name plate will appear in the upper left corner of your screen next to yours.  Make sure you have not targeted the wrong thing.  Tabbing when you are in a dungeon can get you in awful trouble, but now, as you play solo, it is a good idea.

Notice the sounds.  When your tab chooses a target, you get a short pfft sound.  When a stealthed character is near, you hear a fading tone.  The game brilliantly adds these to trigger your attention so your unconscious can do more and more of the work as you level up.

Click on the square badge next to the objective to activate it.

At some point here, you will get a quest that is a task to accomplish rather than one for mobs to kill.  Usually, you will be given an object that appears as a Quest Item in your bags.  And next to the quest description in the Objectives list on the right side of the screen, you will see a tiny badge.  If, say, you have to bandage an ally, you need to select an ally.  A dot appears in the badge.  If you are too far away from the target, the dot will be red.  When you get in range, the dot turns white.  Click the badge and the task is done. If for some reason you cannot see the quest item you must use on your objectives list, you can open your bags and right-click the item to use it.


Another bonus you may get here is that one of the mobs you loot will have a 6-slot bag.  When you loot it, it will automatically go into your backpack.  You have 4 bag slots in addition to the backpack.  More about bags 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.