COMPLETE World of Warcraft Beginners Guide 2024 (Retail & Classic)

it's 2024 and while is 20 years old and if you are new to World of Warcraft I know how confusing it can be how to start what to play and where to begin I've been making guides for World of Warcraft that has been watched by over 8 million of you in the past one year and I figured in the 20th year of the game it's time to make a beginner's guide on how to play World of Warcraft so this guide will serve as the only beginner guide the most comprehensive guy out there on the internet in terms of how to start World of Warcraft and is meant for players who are entirely new to the franchise this guide will be a lengthy one to cover every aspect of the game you need to get started that said timestamps are provided for each section so feel free to jump around as you like as you can see from the length of this video it took me countless hours of editing and producing to get this video out if you like the content all I ask is you hit the Subscribe button we are so close to 100,000 subscribers and your subscription is free to you but it would mean the world to me so let's get started before we talk about the differences in the two main versions of while you can play it's important to understand that World of Warcraft is a subscription based game to access the full game players are required to pay a monthly fee of $1 15 us though slight discounts are available for multi-month subscriptions know that down the road season Wild players have the option to purchase their monthly subscription using a significant amount of in-game gold to buy what is known as a wow token and this can be bought from the auction house which we'll cover later in this video now for newcomers World of Warcraft offers a free trial allowing game play up to level 20 this trial is a free and great way for new players to get a few for the base game it allows for the exploration of multiple characters and classes since its launch in 2004 W has undergone numerous expansions that enhance the story they introduced new zones classes and gameplay mechanics in the first half of 2024 the latest expansion is dragonflight with another expansion the war within planned for a release in the second half of the year as you can see from the drop down menu men to the top left there are two main branches of World of Warcraft the first is what the community calls retail wow which includes all the expansions up to the current expansion and then that's classic World of Warcraft classic W features servers that replicate the original game as it was at launch decades ago and classic W itself can be further divided into various versions which I will cover in a later section take note that by subscribing to the game you gain full access to all the classic wild server experiences and all the retail wow expansions except for the latest expansion in retail wow so if you want to play retail wow on top of paying your monthly subscription you need to buy the latest expansion too and if you're coming into 2024 you should just buy the wall within the latest expension scheduled to release in the second half of 2024 now if you pre- purchase this before it's release assuming you're watching this video before the release of the expansion you will also get the current expansion at the start of 2024 which is dragonfly completely free as part of the prepurchase regardless of which version of the W within you buy and if you're a beginner I do recommend just buying the basic version you can always upgrade in the future if you like to do so but regardless of which the wall within you buy you get a free level 70 character boost which means you don't have to play through every single expansion released in the past and you can instantly jump straight into the game and max level for dragonflight and play with everyone else if you're watching this video when the war within has already released you can jump straight into the new expansion with your level 70 character and simply level to the max level cap of 80 that comes with the wall within naturally if you choose to create a new character and play through all the previous expansions you can as well so now let's talk about classic Wow versus retail wow and you can see on the game launcher here and we'll cover how to install the game launcher later but you can see that there's retail W that my cursor is circling and there's also classic wild that my cursor is circling now and you might be wondering which one do you play my advice is to try all of them before you decide but let me explain their differences so selecting live World of Warcraft this is retail W and Retail W is the latest version of the game and has benefited from many expansions over the years that made the game easier to play all these quality of live improvements that they have introduced over the past 20 years this is reflected in retail well the game play is Fast and the questing is very streamlined retail while also gets new stories areas to explore features and things to collect pretty often if you like upto-date varied content like more classes to play never seen before Dungeons and raids new PVP modes and collecting Cosmetics you probably prefer retail W meanwhile classic wow is more about the feeling of the original World of Warcraft the gameplay is slower and it takes longer to finish your quest lines and because of that people often work together more closely it's a very Community focused game so for someone new to W classic will show you why this game became so popular when it first came out 20 years years ago playing classic wild is experiencing those nostalgic good days and this is extremely popular at game mode these days as you can see from the launcher over here there's two types of classic wild experiences the first is the classic expansion experience as you can see titled rra of the Lich King Classic so over here blizzard has recreated the old expansions as we step into 2024 the latest classic expansion is RF of the Lich King which is probably the best loved W expansion ever but depending on when your watching this video blizzard plans to re-release Classic cataclysm later in 2024 so cataclysm classic might be the role that you are seeing instead the second type is the Original Classic experience without any expansions that you see me hovering over this type of classic well is then further divided into three kinds of servers launching the game real quick for classic W you will see at the bottom of the screen here there's three different kinds of tabs and they correspond to the different types of wild classic experiences you can have namely you have seasonal classic era and hardcore the three kinds of servers each have their own rules so depending on which server you choose to play on you get a different version of classic W so where it says hardcore this is also known as classic hardcore servers over here if your character dies it's gone forever it doesn't matter whether you die to enemy mobs whether you fell off a cliff whether you die drowning the moment your character dies you need to restart a new character this mode is exciting and is pretty popular but it can be very very challenging for beginners I do not recommend you start here if you're new to well and even though it's popular you probably only enjoy the thrill of possible death as you get more used to World of Warcraft I think Veterans of the game will probably enjoy this game mode the most then you have the seasonal tap this is also known as the season of Discovery service introduced towards the end of 2023 these types of classic servers adds new spells and abilities to The Original Classic W putting a fresh Twist on things introduced towards the end of 2023 these servers add new spells and abilities to The Original Classic world when all these new spells didn't exist back in those days so it's pretty much a 20y old game but with a fresh twist thanks to the new abilities and currently at the end of 2023 the level cap is at level 25 it also features some new rate bosses that has never been seen before but take note that the level cap will gradually increase with each seasonal release of this particular game mode I would say 2024 starts the year with this being the most popular classic game mode and then in the middle tab you have the classic era servers these servers offer the unchanged Original Classic well experience just like 20 years ago my advice try them all since you're paying for the same single subscription anyway though maybe skip hardcore classic at first if you are a beginner start with retail while classic Seasons or classic era see what you like the most and go from there now let's move on to talk about how to actually launch or start the game now first things first you need to create a Battlenet account just Google search battl net account battl net accounts are what you use to log in for blizzard games it's a very simple signup process as you can see from the screen just walk through all the instructions and once you have created your account you need to First download the Battlenet launcher which you can find online by Googling battl net launcher this is Blizzard's own launcher this is where you start World of Warcraft so once you have opened the launcher and you logged in you probably are on the home screen you want to look for World of Warcraft say icon and click on that you probably can find it under the games tab as well under World of Warcraft and once you're on the World of Warcraft page you can click on this drop down and you can select which version of w do you want to play retail W the classic expansion experience or the Original Classic experience click on any of these and instead of the play button you should get your button saying install click install let all the data download and you're pretty much set to play the game going moving forward in this guide I'll cover information that is useful for both retail and classic well there might be some slight differences in terms of how things look how things are arranged on your screen and a few features that only exist in retail well because they are added as part of expansions but most of what I'm going to cover in the remaining sections of this video they would apply for both versions of World of Warcraft so whether you choose to play retail or classic the rest of the sections will still be helpful to you and remember if I use footage from retail well it usually applies in the same way to Classic wow as well so let's talk about logging in for the first time whether you choose to play retail W or classic W one of the first decisions you need to make is which server to play on let me demonstrate so I'll connect to the servers here and because you have zero characters the game will prompt you which server do you want to play on also known as realm selection so let me start by explaining classic well servers and then I'll cover retail well servers later on so when you enter the server selection screen from classic you will see the three tabs that we already went through in the previous section of this video but if you click into each tab you will then see different types of servers there are PVP servers and as the name suggests these are player versus player servers in contested or enemy territories you automatically marked for PVP and you can't turn it off and then you have normal servers normal servers don't automatically flag you for PVP you can choose to enable PVP if you want to but if you don't you won't be ever attacked by any other player then there's the RP service d stands for role playing servers they are just like normal servers but with more social rules and a focus on community activities players often have to stay in characters for example lining up to use the bank NPC and then you have RP PVP servers this is a mix of RP and PVP rulle set servers that combines role playing with the PVP experience now when you selecting which server to play on you want to consider where your friends are if you starting World of Warcraft solo then any server is fine the only call out I have is note the servers with au behind the server name the refers to servers that are hosted in Australia so expect High latency if you are not based in Australia latency is basically how quickly The Game responds to your action the further away you are from the servers the higher your latency the more unresponsive the game feels and now Switching gears to retail service by the way I forgot to mention when you open up the game for the first time you might be greeted by a cinematic and you might not know what the hell is going on don't you worry at the end of this video I have resources that helps you catch up on the story of World of Warcraft everything that has happened in the past decades so you can skip the Cinematic if you like but anyway connecting to the servers of retail you will note at the bottom via the tabs here hey they actually categorize the servers differently from how classic does it this is because retail while categorize its servers by regions so you want to select the region that you are based in or is closest to to minimize your latency now within each region then you will see only two types of servers normal and RP because you see unlike classic retail well doesn't have specific PVP Realms instead you opt into PVP by enabling something called War mode on normal servers and just to demonstrate you opt into war mode by clicking on this button here to the bottom right on your talents menu and don't worry we'll cover talents in a later part of this video but you can quickly access it by pressing n on your keyboard that's the default keybind for talents and by clicking on the bottom right icon over here so when you toggle War mode on it puts you in the same instance as other players who have chosen to PVP enabling War mode offers extra XP and currency gains to balance the risk of PVP en counters meanwhile you also have RP servers RP servers in retail while are similar to Classic it focuses on role playing but you can also enable War mode on RP servers now once you have selected your server the next step is to create your character and the game will prompt you to choose a race and you'll see that there's all these different options so what's going on over here you see World of Warcraft is set in a fictional world of Azeroth which has two main factions on the left here you have the alliance and these are all the alliance races and on the right you have all the H races every single race has unique perks known as racial abilities and you can rightclick on the portraits here to know more about their racial trads for example pandas have the ability to get twice as much rested XP and increase benefits from eating food same thing goes for the alliance Racers as well they all have their own Specialties but just know they will not significantly impact your game performance so I wouldn't worry too much about racial traits I played this game for 20 years and I've done all the endgame content if there's anything I would say I advise you to pick a race you really like and you feel good about playing because remember you might be looking at your character for months or even years like me so it's very important to pick something you enjoy also keep in mind the size and shapee of racers will vary so for example if you play a gnome or you play a goblin versus a torren or a blood elf the smaller corrector models like gnome and goblins will naturally have armor that looks way smaller compared to the larger Racers like Torrance who can then show off those big pieces of armor more noticeably because the gear would scale with your character model so those are races on the left and on the right and as you select different races you will notice that hey the classes that are available at the bottom are different as well now before we get on to talk about classes you first need to understand roles in World of Warcraft because your preference for roles will determine which class you probably will enjoy playing you see like many other MMO RPGs World of Warcraft classes fits into one of four different roles there's tanks there's healers there's melee DPS and range DPS and if you're new to RPG games here's a quick overview first up we have the tank its main job is to attract the attention of enemies also called holding Argo or holding threat to protect the rest of the group from taking damage from humu enemies tanks often lead the way in Dungeons and they set the pace of fights they don't deal a lot of damage but are crucial for drawing enemy attention but you're often expected to know your way in dungeons then you also have healers as the name suggests healers keeps everyone's health bars full this role requires anticipation especially in endgame content to prepare for incoming enemy damage and then you have DPS classes now DPS stands for damage per second DPS is also known as damage dealers and your objective is to do damage to enemies while avoiding taking damage yourself there are two types of DPS melee DPS who fights close to the enemy in melee range or you can be a range DPS who fights enemies from a distance so when choosing a class you need to think about which role you enjoy the most in the game and do you like leading or protecting people as a tank do you like the idea of keeping your teammates alive as a Healer or you simply like to see big numbers then in that case DPS probably suits you now with rolls out of the way we can now talk about classes now as I go through classes in retail while just know that not all classes are available in classic there's a handful of these that are only introduced in other retail while expansions and for these classes I'll call them out specifically so let me walk you through all the classes I'll tell you concisely what is important for each class how it FS to play a certain class and what's the flavor of the class fantasy and what roles can they fulfill know that each class can be further divided into specializations which similar to RPG games have you add points to a certain Talent Tre to become a specialist performing a specific role but we'll get to that when we cover talents later on so let's start with Warriors Warriors are the quintessential battle Harden fighter you excel in melee combat with weapons and in while you utilize rage to execute powerful physical attacks as a warrior class you can fulfill the role of a tank or a melee DPS and then you have paladins paladins are plate wearing holy power wielding classes they combine Marshall prowess with Divine magic its play style is very versatile you can fulfill three different roles you can tank you can heal or you can be a melee DPS next up you have a hunter Hunters are a master tracker and Ranger that is skilled in combat range combat specifically and animal companionship it's often seen as a good beginner class because of the use of a pet and that makes questing way easier it is known as a range DPS with different options for direct damage traps and survival skills although note in retail well you can play as a m DPS Hunter as well so you fulfill the role of a range DPS or M DPS then you have the Rogue now your Rogue is your typical RPG stealth class Rogues and body assassins who work from the Shadows they have high burst damage and single Target Crow control they fulfill the role of a m DPS only and then you have the priest a priest is a wielder of both holy and Shadow Magic balancing the aspects of healing and harm and because of you straddling holy and Shadow you can fulfill healing roles with the power of the light and a range DPS role based off Shadow Magic and then you have the death Knights this is a class introduced in the rough of the Lich King experience so the OG classic experience will not have death Knights the name stems from a warrior that specializes in undate Magics harnessing runic power and necromancy to do battle in melee range you can fulfill the role of a tank or melee DPS and then you have a shaman this is a class that is in tune with the spiritual plane with a strong command over the natural elements and Spirits you can fulfill the roles of a Healer M DPS or range DPS next up you have the Mages this is a typical RPG Style spellcaster you can wield the Arcane fire of frost magic the only role you can fulfill is that of a range DPS then you have the Warlock this is another typical RPG sty spell caster and this is a master of demonic magic cursors and summoning you fulfill the role of a range DPS with a focus on damage overtime spells and summoning of demonic minions and then you have the monk the monk is a class introduced during the mid of Pandaria expansion so this is not available in classic W you essentially are a mobile martial artist that draws on mystical energy to fight you can fulfill the roles of a tank A Healer or M DPS and then next up we have the Druid now a druid is a very versatile class this is characterized by your ability to shape shift into different forms and you are also seen as very attuned to Nature you can fulfill the role of a tank A Healer a melee DPS and a range DPS it is the only class that can fulfill all those four roles and then you have a demon Hunter this is a class that was introduced back in Legion think of it as a very agile melee class that wields the power of demonic fa magic you can fulfill the role of a tank or melee DPS and then you have the evokers and you will quickly know that when you select evoker they will lock in your race to be a draer that's the only choice you have now ioka is a class introduced in the dragonfly expansion so you don't have it on classic W and ioka is a dragon based spell Caster it uses Powers unique to the dra race you can fulfill the roles of a Healer or range DPS even though it has a specialization that is more support oriented I honestly will not worry about picking the strongest class if you are new to well just know that you can have more than one character anyways and that is why I have at level cap every single class because parts of the joys of playing a new MMO is to learn all the different classes so just have fun honestly don't worry too much about which is the strongest class pick what resonates with you and start with the character somewhere down the line once you're more seasoned with the game you can always switch your Mains around so once you have selected the name that you want and by the way you can click on randomize here to get a randomized name and you can randomize your appearance here let's say you have decided right click on next and they will ask you what is your starting zone I strongly recommend you start on exile's reach for beginners to the right is always the zone that is historically linked to the class and the race that you selected but Exel reach is a brand new W feature that they introduced in recent years to help beginners like yourself get into World of Warcraft so I would always select exile's reach click on finished and after that hit enter World and the loading screen for exil reach will basically start loading at the bottom you will then get a cut scene you can choose to listen or you can choose to skip it like I mentioned earlier there'll be links for you to catch up on the law and story of Warcraft later on in this video now Exile reach is meant to be a tutorial session to help you understand what World of Warcraft is like and so you will see all these tips basically appear and teach you how to play The Experience on exile reach is very beginner friendly because they are basically guiding you what to do right like talk to this guy warlord Breer Grim X and you need to right click on him in order to start interacting with him and you can accept Quest and then it will tell you all right go to the dummies and basically use your abilities right and so you get all these popups on screen I wouldn't repeat what the tutorial is about to teach you but just know that it's a great way for you to learn all the different part s in the game right so for example it teaches you the idea of key binds over here now if you're playing classic while just know that the Exile reach experience is not something that classic while people will have access to this is for retail while only anyway complete the objectives turn in the quest and just keep following the tutorial on so Exile reach will be a useful exercise for you but I think what will be more helpful for you now is if I switch to talk about the different parts of the user interface on some of my lowlevel characters and Retail while and classic while both have some very slight differences in terms of how the user interface elements are arranged and I'll cover the nuances but most of them generally the same so let's go through the different parts of the screen to talk about the things on screen also known as part of your user interface so the most obvious one just like any RPG game is probably you know your character portrait this basically tells you how much health you have in this case I have 100% health I have 320 HP this secondary bar that is currently zero if if you play a spellcaster this will be in blue it tells you how much Mana you have for a Demon Hunter as you attack things this will basically build your class resources in World of Warcraft a lot of the times you are spending your class resources on certain abilities which brings me very nicely to the bar over here also known as your action bars this is where you use certain abilities for example clicking or using the binds I'm able to use certain abilities like that and you might be wondering wait where do you get all these abilities what your horses don't worry we'll get there also on the screen you will see something called The Experience bar you can see this XP bar at the bottom this is how your W would look like most likely if you're playing retail W for the very first time now you probably have seen other fancier user interface that pertains to World of Warcraft I myself maintain free customized user interfaces for all the classes in World of Warcraft both classic and Retail and you can see from the gameplay here it looks so different from your current user interface right as you get more seasoned with World of Warcraft a lot of people start dabbling in add-ons that customizes your user interface but this is a guide for beginners so I don't want to go down the route of add-ons and we'll cover that later in this video let me turn off my camera here and I'll show you what's on the bottom left so what's on the bottom left is basically your chat panel and how you type in well is to press the enter button on your keyboard and you can see this thing pops up that says say and I can say hello world and I press enter and it sends hello world but this is me saying out loud right there are actually different ways to communicate with people in well that is actually the save function there's also the whisper function and to see all the different ways you can chat what you can do is press enter again and in this text box here you can type slel right and it says slash chat for a list of commments so I type slash chat and it says wow there so much things to know what are all these commands to talk to people let me tell you the basics and by the way you can change the phone size by clicking on the tab right clicking here and you see this thing called font size you can put let's say font size 18 there's also ways to move all these different elements I'll cover them in a bit but what I like to cover here is the whisper function SL whisper type the name of the person you want to whisper in this case I'll just whisper myself my name is zman Hunter and I'll just say hello world right and you can see that I said hello world to myself therefore I received a whisper a whisper is like a private message only the recipient can see what you have said and then you have party chat SLP short form and you can see this has changed into party and I can say let's start the dungeon and you press enter to send but because I'm currently playing alone no one's in my party there's no point sending that message but it's just to tell you the different kinds of chat settings then there's also slash raate if you are ever in a raid group you can see inal orange and then you can say whatever you want to people let's start pulling the boss for instance right I'm not in a rate now so when I enter it says that you are not in a rate group but that's another command to know then you have/ Guild space and you can type whatever you want to the guild now I'm currently not in a guild as well so it wouldn't work but that's the point of communicating with the guild and then there's yell SL yspace or slashy l in space and say I'm yelling and this is essentially an opposite of say it's more like a yell right so the font it's now red in color versus what I first typed and if you ever go to any capital city and obviously this doesn't look like a trade City you can actually enter the trade and the general channels as well and these are usually allocated as slash1 which means the channel for General so everyone in this current zone madom is able to see my general message whatever I type here if you go into a city and you type slash to it will basically flip you to a trade function but because I'm not in a city I'm in the open world now SL two doesn't do anything trade is normally where you want to buy and sell certain things but that's getting into too deep a territory I only wanted to give you a sense of what the chat feature is like now beside the chat feature here there's also a combat lock so it basically says like what has happened to you in combat it's as simple as that and then individual Whispers will appear as different tabs over here another hack for chatting you can click on this speech bubble on the bottom left and you will say which channel do you want to talk in oh I want to talk in the party chat or I want to talk in the guilt chat you can click on this and it will basically prompt you to switch channels it's really simple further down the line you can write click on the general Tab and you can see there's all these different options here you can create new chat Windows you can change the font size you can change the background color you can even customize all right what kind of message do I want to receive what kind of channels do I want to join as you can see including trade here that I mentioned earlier there's all these customizations that we wouldn't go into detail now because it doesn't really help a beginner very little impact but that's the chat feature on the bottom left then let's move anticlockwise we've already covered the action bar very soon I'll teach you how to assign abilities to the action bar how to change your key binds because you can see currently one corresponds with this ability it's very faint right this tiny numbers beside the ability you see as I press one the icon basically lights up right it means that I'm pressing the button one on my keyboard and I'll teach you how you can change the key binds so instead of one maybe this is q and we'll talk about that later but move your eyes over to the bottom right you'll see all these icons this is basically Blizzard's default micro bar where you can find everything related to the game that you need to open the icons look different in classic well by the way but the functions are the same and I'll go through that in a bit but you have the character info panel where you click and it will show you oh okay this is my character he's currently level eight and these are all the items they have equipped all the way from the headit slot the necklace the shoulders the cloak the chest the wrist the two weapon slots I have my hands my waist my pants my feet my two rings and my two Trinkets and by the way we'll talk about gear later on so don't worry about gear for now I just want you to focus on the user interface it also then tells you your attributes it says agility how much agility you have when you Mouse over the stat it also tells you oh what does agility do well for a Demon Hunter it increases the magnitude of your attacks and abilities meaning you do more damage if you mes over stamina it tells you oh it increases my health and then armor reduces physical damage enhancements are basically what we also call secondary stats there's a few kinds there's things like haste things like Critical Strike there's things like versatility and M don't worry about these I know it sounds a bit confusing but to start as a beginner you just Mouse over the term and it will tell you what it does oh Critical Strike there's an additional chance for extra Effectiveness on attacks and your heals in other words they can crit then you have haste it determines how fast your attack speed and spell casting speed is it's as simple as that then you have the reputation pain it tells you oh how is your reputation with different factions as you advance through the game certain factions as you become more friendly and on closer terms of them they're able to sell you some special reputation gated items or gear again not too important for a beginner then you have the currency tab this basically tells you for all the currencies that doesn't go into your bag how much of it do you have I wouldn't worry too much about this either but that is the character paint then in the second slot you have the spell book so clicking on the spell book here some of you might already guess ah so this is where you get your abilities on the action bar indeed very quickly as you go through the spell book it will tell you at what level do do you learn additional spells if you Mouse over it it tells you what does your spell do and you would see that you normally have two important icons that you need to know one is your class I'm a Demon Hunter this second icon is related to my spec but because I'm a low level now I have no specialization and we'll talk about specialization later whatever icons that you see in your spell book you can actually drag it all the way to your action bar you can do so by left clicking on the icon and then holding left click and dragging the icon onto the action bar and releasing it so for example I drag spectral side onto this icon here and I release my left click and it says CV which means control V if I press control+ V on my keyboard I activate spectral site so there's a very quick tutorial of what a spell book actually does there's also a general tab that tells you oh this is where you can use your ratio in this case my ratio is Ain Toren which is this one if I click on it you can see I use my ratio there this is also where you get to see all your different passives for your race etc etc then you have professions professions are basically trade skills and I have a whole different section dedicated to professions later that we will talk about but this is where you see your current progression in terms of your professions and then you have specializations and talents right and it's not available until I'm level 10 because the way retail well works is that until you get to level 10 you have no specialization so I've just logged in on my level 51 priest and you can see way more abilities because I'm of a higher level but now you can see that hey when I open the spell book oh there's a secondary icon that I can access and it say shadow you see Shadow is my specialization like I mentioned in the class section earlier every class they have specializations and how do you know your specialization this third icon to the bottom right is specialization and talents also known as the keybind N so when you click on it this will appear and you will see on the first tab here specialization you can activate different specializations holy and discipline is the Healer version of a priest I'm currently the shadow version of a priest which is a range DPS and then if I click on the talents tab here remember this earlier we talked about war mode this is where you turn it on and off and then your talent tree also has some points that you can assign different Talent points into but we'll talk about talents later on and then you have this thing called The Quest lock and I have a lot of different quests because this is an old character but if you start fresh you probably have zero Quest and we'll talk about where to pick up quests later so don't worry but for now just know that when you open a quest lock in while they have made it very easy where you should go next for example this thing the call for allies you see that this exclamation mark wants me to turn in over here because it says oh if I Mouse over this it says the call for allies oh so that's where I should be headed in order to turn in the quest right as simple as that and so that's the quest lock next you have this thing called guilts and communities right now I have no guilts but if I have a guilt this is where I'll be able to see details regarding my guild this is also where you can find other guilds to join right depending on your search criteria you can click search and you'll tell you oh these guilds are recruiting and then you can click on this eyeball that says group finder so what does the group finder do like the name suggests this is an interface that helps you find certain parties or groups to do certain things like Dungeons or rids anything that is not a pre-made like the dungeon finder here basically means that you can simply just queue up and the game will look for someone to match you in the queue as you can see from the bottom right here it says time in queue less than one minute so it will help you find other tanks and DPS to play with but if you want a pre-made group it means that the game will not find it for you but you can start a group to find it yourself again as a beginner you probably don't need to worry about this but just know there's a PVP equivalent for the dungeon finder you can find quick matches in the Arenas or the Battlegrounds the same idea here so that's what the eyeball icon is then you have collections which is is a whole entire different mini game by itself because you can collect things like a mount and there are ground mounts there are flying Mounds like a dragon and all these different kinds of Mounds that you can go around playing the game over 20 years to earn all these different mounts then there's pet journals it's kind of like Pokemon but World of Warcraft style you can collect all these battle pets and you can battle them against other pets in the world or other NPCs or you can just simply collect them you can also summon them for example you right click on this click summon and you can see it summons a pet beside me this basically it's my pet also known as egg bir and then you have toys toys are basically a fun stuff that they added in the game for you to just you know have fun for example if I click on this bugie black heart's handsome hat it succumbs me to the Curse of the Black Heart and suddenly I'm a pirate with basically a a a SE true kind of like body so there's all these different things that you can play with you can put out a fish right and if I click on the fish I can kick the fish right so there's all these things you can do in your toy box and again these are all collectibles then there's heirlooms heirlooms in short are gear that you can equip that helps you level faster but if you're new to W you won't access these you won't have it so I won't cover that and then you have appearances this is where you can mix and match your different hats and you can see oh okay if I basically have this hat and maybe this chest and uh maybe this cloak uh I can put them together to look like this or maybe something like this the world is your oyster but this is basically where I'm just trying to show you you can access your collections then you have the adventure Guide this book you can click on this book and you'll tell you like oh this is your Travelers lock your Travelers lock is a bit like a battle pass system if you play other games it basically says as I play more well I get to ACR more points and using these points I can exchange for certain rewards including Cosmetics like in this case you get to summon the butter cup companion but under the next tab here it says suggested content it basically tells you like oh you're new to the game well you can check out these things then you also have dungeons under the Aventure guide and it basically says oh for your current level and expansion if I click on the dungeon it will tell me oh this is what the dungeon storyline is these are the different bosses and I can click into them and it says all these different things about the boss ah as a Healer I need to do this as a tank I need to do this and you can Mouse over the boss's ability and learn what the boss does so when you are new to the game and you're learning a new dungeon you can pull up the Aventure guy just to read what the dungeon's about what the boss does and it varies for different bosses right so this is the icon called overview you can then click on to the loot icon that tells you oh this boss drops this Pon and drops this ring if I move between the bosses you can see that the loot table changes so depending on what you're trying to farm for this loot icon can be very helpful then there's abilities it tells you specifically what the boss does in great detail and it says oh as a tank this affects you as a tank so tanks take note here and then you have models which is basically just tells you how does the boss looks like so that's Dungeons and then the rates is exactly the same thing click into the rate tells you the different bosses tells you what it does tells you the loot table tells you the different ability it does obviously raids have way more abilities because well the bosses way more complex right right there's a lot more to coordinate in a rate versus let's say a simple dungeon that is only fivan party a rate goes into double digits of rate members and then you have item sets that basically tells you oh these are all the sets you can work towards to to collect and that's basically the adventure Guide then you have the shop which is the in-game monetization option just for you to know there's all these different options where you can buy boost right if you don't want to level you can buy boost you can change factions for example I'm currently Alliance I want to go to the H side well you can pay to change them but normally once I decided I don't have a change uh you can change your race change your name um you can buy certain Cosmetics over here all I'll say all these are completely optional I've played well for 20 years the only thing I've really paid for is my subscription I've never bought anything for the cash shop before except maybe a few level boost and character transfers the other things you really don't need to buy them because you can overcome them with time for example level boost right you can just level yourself with a new character but also on this shop you'll see something called The W token and it says the wild token can be sold on the auction house for gold so by spending 20 real dollars you get a wild token that you can put on the auction house and you can get gold in return likewise later on when we cover the auction house you can also search for wild tokens to buy with 270 gold you buy it and then you will add to your subscription time so you don't have to pay subscription fees so that's what well tokens are I just wanted to call it out since we are here anyway closing that if you move past that you come to the game menu which is probably the most most important icon to know this big question mark at the bottom right if you click on this you get all these different wonderful menus and before we talk about options or edit mode or any of these other things I want to finish up what you can see on your user interface so let me come back to the game menu later but I want you to draw your eyes upwards towards objectives but if you click on objectives it tells you oh these are all the objectives you currently have you should work on them and uh if I click on any of the quest You'll tell me like oh I have to go here okay gotcha so as you guys can see it sends me to different parts of the map as I click through it so that's the quest lock keeps you on track if I minimize this you'll now see the mini map this circular icon over here now what a lot people don't know is that if you put your mouse over the mini map here top right and you just move your scroll wheel up or down you can zoom in or zoom out of the mini map the mini map is helpful for you to navigate on the goal it tells you what direction you're currently walking in now for those who find it very hard to see a tiny mini map Rejoice there is a solution move your mouse up to this part above the mini map where you say Stormwind Embassy obviously it will say something different for you when you are in a different part of the world but if you simply click on this Stormwind Embassy then this map will appear and you can maximize it if it's too small by clicking on this Arrow over here and it says well now you are towards the top right near the Stormwind Embassy but this is the map of the entire city so that's a very quick way to check whether you're lost or you're not lost then you see these icons beside the storm wind Embassy which is where the map resides these are known as Buffs but we'll talk about Buffs and debuffs later in a dedicated section but for now I wanted to walk through everything that is an element that's on your screen and with that I basically walked through the important ones you should now have a basic understanding of what your user interface comprise of now before we talk about my recommended settings for beginners very important settings I want to switch to Classic wow because I can give you a good sense of how the user interface differs very slightly all right so I'm in classic wow now and this is actually the default UI looks different doesn't it let me turn off my camera here you see classic wow and Retail wow UI is different because there was a huge UI revamp in the dragonflight retail expansion that's why I wanted to at least show you this so you don't feel like oh you're so confused by what you're looking at on classic W the same elements you kind of apply right you have your portrait that tells you your health and your Mana bar clicking on any Target you see your target unit frame appears tells you their levels H their name to the bottom left here you have your chat function it's the same way to chat same way to chat you press enter and you can say anything you want and speech bubble appears you can also click on this speech bubble and it tells you which kind of chat do you want to swap to let's say yell I'll say hello and basically that's how you operate the chat function very similar you see the action bar also is kind of different in the texture and the look but the functionality is the same and then you have the experience bar here which is the same you've seen that now note where the user interface differs earlier you had a mini bar right the micro bar we went through left to right here is kind of the same but when I click on character pain you notice oh wait why is it that the stats are all different it is different because it's classic well the same principle actually applies you Mouse over the stat and you say strength increases attack power with melee weapons so when in doubt you just Mouse over what the stat says and it explains to you what the stat does right it's as simple as that then you have the reputation tab which is the same for retail W and you have this thing called skills back in the days there is something called weapon skills like are you proficient at a certain weapon and then you have honor which is really more PVP how many PVP people did you slay but that's the character paint then you have a very similar second icon the spell book right so in classic W it's a bit different in retail W is just your class icon and your spec icon in classic W there's no concept of of specs that's where you find the spell book you can also check out the default Quest lock by pressing this Quest lock button at the bottom and it will basically tell you oh these are the rewards where can you find The M and you can see on classic well it doesn't give you much hints on where to finish your quest right so certain things like reading your quest lock becomes very important it says something like pumpkin is usually over at the breckwell pumpkin patch to the East and Beyond the mle farm so you then got to triangulate like okay where the hell is the farm and this is probably where the princess bar is that I need to slay so that's what it does you can press the world map or M to see where you are currently and then you have this computer icon which is the main menu and this is pretty much the same as retail well so I wouldn't go through and then there's this thing called Help request where you can file for a ticket under customer support and you can buy additional bags to basically equip here to expand your inventory right so these are your back slots in retail W the same thing applies you can click on B in order to activate your backpack the mini map to the top right is the same right it looks exactly the same and then you have the Buffs to the left of the mini map and that's pretty much it so that's the classic W UI that I wanted to walk through those are the tiny nuances all right now that I gave you an overview of the UI I do want to cover something special in the retail uid though that is not available in classic so there's this edit mode function when you press the Escape key which is also this question mark on the bottom right this edit mode only exists in retail well because this was a new feature in dragonfly so one of the cool things that they've allowed you to do with your basic UI is you can actually edit everything individually it's like modular in nature right so you can click on the player frame and you can organize things like oh you want your class bar to be beneath your portrait uh you want this to be way bigger for instance you can just drag the slider you can just removing my camera here you can even change uh how the chat frame looks you can drag it wherever you want you can increase the width you can increase the height there's all these things that you can do with the retail W UI that you were never able to do in classic right drag the XP bar around move the mini map um your quest objective tracker you can even make it transparent or opaque there's all these fancy things you can now do even like your bars right how many rows uh you want less icons do you want bigger icon sizes there all these things that we were unable to do back uh in classic well and it's all very self-explanatory this is not supposed to a UI tutorial video so I won't go into details about what all these mean but they're generally very intuitive you just need to play around the sliders and you can understand like what does it mean right like oh if I want the bus to be hidden all the time um I can do this so it's like oh it's empty now right and you could even save your changes um and you can save it under different layouts so you can share it with your friends and whatnot I just thought it's a cool thing to kind of feature in this video for beginners because some people might come from other MMOs where it's a bit more customizable right your UI and then there's also other MMOs where you totally cannot customize your UI so this feature is unique to retail well unfortunately you do not have this for classic well just keep that in mind all right now I want to cover some of the M do settings for new beginners there's a lot of options over here and it can be very overwhelming and by the way to access this panel you can press escape to get the game menu go to options and be it classic or retail well when you first boot up the game it still feels kind of awkward and one of the first few things that you quickly realize is that the default keybinds is kind of strange because the A and D key has you turning your camera like that well in most video games when you use W ASD you are supposed to be able to move like that which is kind of odd and the reason is because W has this very weird default key binding that most people will unbind so that's the first thing that you need to do as a beginner go to key bindings under move movement key where it currently says A and D is turn left turn right try it out for yourself if you just press a this is what happens you press D this is what happens in reality I can tell you for sure this is suboptimal for gameplay nobody plays like that on the high levels so you should unbind a and d by right clicking A and D and then where it says strafe left and right try it out for yourself it's q and E by default press q and press e this is basically strafing this is supposed to be a and D's function at least in most other video games so the first thing I would like to do is basically to bind strafe left to a strafe right to D therefore W ASD is basically controlling your functions of movement so try it out for yourself now WD now finally feels correct like most standard video games is intuitive now a few other settings that is a must for beginners go to controls and you should definitely toggle on auto loot so what it does is that the moment you toggle on auto loot it basically loots everything in the vicinity so you don't have to right click on every single CS to pick up their belongings the next thing there is a quality of life is to check combined bags so most people will check their bags by pressing this button here right they press this bag and they'll like oh okay um I need to look at my other bags and I'll click on my BS or I can press shift b as you can see from the bottom right here press shift B to open up all my bags but the smoother way to do this is to click combine bags so the moment you toggle on your bags like that then everything appears in a very neat kind kind of grid and you know at a glance oh how many Slots of inventory do I have left so it's just a very good quality of life change it's the same in classic you should definitely do the same changes too something else to do is it says camera following style only when moving I can absolutely guarantee you in World of Warcraft you never ever want the game to adjust the camera for you all it takes is for the game to Pivot and tilt your camera at the wrong time and suddenly you don't see the mechanic coming your way and instantly you are kind of screwed so so one of the best things to do is basically to never let the game adjust your camera angle and let me teach you how to control your own camera angle what's the best way right so w ASD is how you control your movement right you control your movement as such the way you should practice controlling your camera is with the right click button so if you hold down the mouse right click and you rotate your screen you'll see that the mouse cursor on your screen disappears right but as you hold down the right click and you pan your mouse left right up down you are actually controlling your camera and this is the best way to pan your camera in game because combined with your left hand where you use W ASD you can also at the same time pan your camera as you do WD and this gives you a way better kind of control over where you're headed where you're looking for example I'm running straight like that I can like pivot off to the side and see okay what's going on over there I can pivot off to the other side to see okay what's going on over there something else is is worth practicing too you can actually also hold down the right click button on your mouse and with a single single finger press W but start using your right Mouse button to control where your camera is headed enhance the ability to turn your camera around and hit in a certain direction because you're pressing W right now right you're telling the game I will move forward but as you pan your camera you'll move forward in the direction that the camera is leading you and so because of this I can press W and I can change direction just just by moving my mouse I don't have to press a or I don't have to press any form of like arrow keys now the ability to do this is also why you never ever want the game to adjust your camera angles because you're just giving up flexibility in terms of controlling your movement another exercise to do is to hold down your left click button on your mouse left hand off the keyboard and just pan your camera around and see what happens and you will notice that hey now I'm panning my camera but my character is facing always in the same direction so that's the difference between panning your camera holding down the left Mouse button versus holding down the right Mouse button which I'm doing now now you'll see that my camera actually turns alongside with where my character is facing isn't it so the left Mouse button can also control your camera in a very fancy way so take for instance I'm a tank I'm running straight on but I want to see who's behind me so I can hold down W and hold down left click pan my camera around and see oh I'm running straight but hey there's a moop behind me right so I can quickly control my camera angle just by using the left Mouse button or the right Mouse button being held down and just moving my mouse around this is a very important skill set for people to learn another very Nifty trick is that by holding down the left and the right Mouse button at the same time your character is actually moving forward right so it's the same effect as pressing W I ran into something there but it's the same effect as pressing W by just holding down the left and right Mouse button and you might be wondering oh so what's the benefit of that the benefit is as you hold out both Mouse buttons you can pan your camera around by moving the mouse around so my left hand is off the the keyboard but I'm smoothly controlling how my character is moving around in game so this allows you to also at the same time use your left hands to maybe press some abilities like for example if I want to do my uh F Rush right I can use my Mouse um I can use my left hand to basically press my key bindes while controlling movement solely just using my right hand now I'm assuming obviously we are all right-handers here the left-hander folks will basically do it in reverse so those are very quick hacks that every beginner needs to learn in terms of movements everything I've just covered above trust me I've been playing well for 20 years that's all I need for movements you don't need anything else okay so we covered movement and camera angles let's now talk about action bars so right now I'm only level eight so naturally like I don't have much abilities right but earlier in the video you can see as I grow in levels I will learn abilities so how do I increase the amount of action bars I have so this is where you go to options and then you go to action bars and you can actually toggle all one action bar two 3 4 5 6 7 8 everything you need right and suddenly there's so much option bars on the screen so generally um two and three is all you need two and three is basically these and four and five are the vertical ones to the side normally two and three is sufficient for beginners you should always check lock action bars because if you don't it's very easy to drag the abilities of the action bars and In the Heat of battle maybe your mouse hand slips and you accidentally unbug a key ability which makes you you know Panic open your spell book and try and find your abilities mid combat it's a bad idea so always lock your action bars and I will even say show numbers for cooldown right because most wild beginners they play without add-ons so imagine let say I use f Rush right and now I can only tell my cooldowns from this like swipe that you see my mouse tracing over here but if I actually turned on show number cool down it tells me exactly how long I have to wait to use f Rush again 10 seconds so you intuitively start learning your internal cooldowns by toggling on this option it's very important because over time you probably get to calculate the optimal rotation and whatnot by just understanding how your cooldowns are like another very important tip that I have for people is under the options under combat you should check personal resource display and I think this is actually pretty important for beginners now if you are a non- beginner I would maybe just play without personal resource display but personal resource display is pretty handy because and let me demonstrate this so you can see as an enter combat here right what what happens here is that below my uh character frame it basically tells me my health and the amount of class resources I have built out basically this gives you a better sense of like oh am I in danger like for example if my health is low what should I do right um and it gives me a better sense of like whether I'm in danger and whether I need to run versus let's say looking at my um health bar over here to the bottom left right you can do that but it's just something that is harder for beginners to learn now in the long run I can tell you everyone actually disables their personal resource bar why because it's being overtaken by add-ons like unit frames like we orus but I think as beginners when you're new to World of Warcraft it's actually helpful to have the personal resource display appearing below your character now there's one more very important new beginner kind of trick that you need to learn and that is the ability to zoom in and zoom out so by default if you go to options and key bindings and you scroll down look for camera it will say zoom in and out is currently bound to Mouse wheel up and mouse wheel down I can tell you this is a very bad setup why because the mouse wheel up and mouse wheel down the scroll wheel is actually very valuable as well you can actually bind Mouse wheel up and mouse wheel down to some abilities that later down the line you can use as you move your characters around right W ASD then you can Mouse wheel up or down maybe to use a healthport for example so you won't interfere with your movement when you are using the extra action buttons the reason why I don't use Mouse view up and down for zoom in and out is because you seldom have to zoom in and out in combat so what I like to do is I normally bind it to shift Mouse wheel up and shift Mouse wheel down so that I free up Mouse wheel up and down for health potions DPS potions in fact I know some people buy Mouse wheel up to health pot Mouse wheel down to consuming other forms of Health replenishments like Health stones but while we talk about zoom in and out one of the things you need to quickly learn is that by zooming in and out it gives you very good control over your peripheral vision and the longer you play well I think the more you recognize the value of playing in a zoomed out camera function like that like being able to play really zoomed out from your character is very handy because in World of Warcraft a lot of things is about your situational awareness for example if this mob is throwing a fireball at me and I have the ability to S step the fireball right or there's a there's a path of lava traveling towards me I can see the path of lava way easier like that versus let's say if I was playing really closed up like that if you play it like an action RPG like that you can see it but you won't be able to respond as quickly Because by the time you see it it probably is pretty close to you but if you play it top down like that from a camera angle like that it's way easier to see it and sure you can't see your fancy transm or your nice weapons and whatnot as clearly but it's definitely far superior from a PV e PVP Vantage standpoint and all you need to do is just look at all the professional players who play well the top streamers on Twitch everyone plays with a relatively zoomed out camera angle right now how zoomed in is up to you but generally most people are pretty zoomed out like that I would say some people even play top down like that right and these are usually like healers rate leaders they got to have very good situational awareness so when you are new to W I would say practice all these good habits in the long run because once you get locked in into certain bad habits like okay by default when I first started playing well I have this bad habit of playing like that right just behind my camera like over the shoulder once all these bad habits starts forming in your mind when you eventually want to take this game seriously you need to unlearn the way you look at the game and you might as well take it from me who have been playing this game for two decades now start with the right habits and you would just go through less pain in your overall World of Warcraft Journey right so that's pretty much about uh the controls around camera movement and whatnot so now I like to talk about how do you interact with Mobs right so normally what happens is when you left click on a mop it basically targets it so if I click on this brute here it basically switches the target to this brute right same thing in classic well I know the frames will look different like that but it's the same idea now look I left click on the Imp here but you realize that I'm not damaging the Imp in any way right but if I right click on the Imp I will now start meleeing the Imp see this so I left click nothing happens but if I right click on the Imp imp you can see that I start to melee the Imp and this is an auto attack so when you right click on something you can see yourself getting into this battle stuns right so I'll zoom in here you can see myself in this battle stuns when I right click the M but let's say I cancel and press Escape right suddenly I'm idle again if I just left click on the mop nothing happens I'm not in the combat stuns but right clicking the mop suddenly I'm in combat stuns right if I move up you can see just by moving up I will Auto attack right so that's how I'm dealing damage fire Auto attacks naturally the idea is that auto attacks do land some minimal amounts of damage but the idea is that most of your damage should be dealt via your abilities on the action bar but I just wanted to tell you how do you interact with Mobs so now that we're talking about how to use ability on mobs some abilities are targeted for example look at this demon bite right number two I can't demon bite something without a Target right so say for example I have zero targets let's say I'm facing I'm facing the back here and I press demon bite nothing nothing happens it says there's nothing to attack however if I click on this rough Warrior and I click demon bite it just says out of range basically it's saying that okay now I find your target but now I'm out of range and that's because demon bite is a melee attack so if I run up to this guy and I press two you can see I instantly kill it with demon bite right so see demon bite one of the things that you need to learn as a beginner to wow is never ever click your abilities if there's any one thing that you want to take away from this video this is probably the most important lesson never click your abilities it's handy to do so I understand when you are at lower levels and you're lazy to learn and memorize your binds here your key binds and we'll talk about how to change it later I know it's convenient because you have very little spells to use right but eventually imagine you fill up all your action bars suddenly you have to click on three rows of abilities it's very overwhelming and you react way slower so learn to use keybinds trust me it will save you so much pain in the long run by learning how to use keybinds from scratch okay so enough about abilities targeting let's talk about how do I change my key binds let's say I don't like the default which is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Z how do I even reach nine and Zer with my left fingers right it's too far away from W ASD and down the line I'll make a more detailed keybinding guide so here's the fastest way to keybind in World of Warcraft without any form of add-ons click on this question mark or Escape go to options go to to your key bindings on the left panel here and then click on quick key bind mode once you click on this it would say you are in quick key bind mode Mouse over a button and press the desired key to set the key bind great now KES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 minus equals now let's say I don't like any of these binds I want to set it to Q E and 1 2 3 4 f r z x c v press okay and you can see at the bottom here the changes are now all reflected really easy isn't it and you can do the same for uh the top rows here I can put like F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 any keybind that you fancy really right anything you can put them all here um but you get the point you can then go to your spell book which we covered already bottom right here you can press P or click on the Spellbook icon and now you can start dragging abilities there so for example I can drag Glide um to here and I if I F1 is basically Glide although Glide doesn't really do much um and then like chaos strike I can put it on um f right so if I F is chaos strike now so that's the fastest way to get with key binds without going into any great detail around key binding here's what you need to know because your left fingers are always around W ASD you don't want to use keybinds that extends far beyond W ASD you want them to be roughly near W ASD so that you can quickly reach out to your keyb press it and then go back to controlling W ASD I generally like if I look at my keyboard now I like anything from 1 to 5 anything in the vicinity of Q EF Z xcv and then you can use shift modifiers so what do I mean going back to quick keybind mode for example I use Q over here I can actually set action bar two button one to shift Q if you hold down shift and Q at the same time you can actually still reuse the Q button which is fell rush but I can use shift Q for something else obviously I haven't bound anything but you can see I'm pressing shift Q right now from the UI right um and let's say I drag let's say this uh to shift Q I can shift Q to use it now so that is an example of how you can reuse keys that is near WD by using what we call modifier keys and the variants are being able to use shift control and Alternate although control and Alternate is a bit more Awkward to press shift is way more easier to use as a modifier key because if you place your fingers on W ASD your pinky can easily reach Shi shift or control alternate is a bit more Awkward maybe your T needs to reach alternate but again I'll do a proper key binding video later down the road but I just wanted you to have the principle first so you can at least start key binding in the general right directions now one of the things about classic wild is you don't have the quick keybind mode because that is a quality of life thing so that's why I wanted to cover it here so the way in classic W that you bind your keys is go to action bar and you just need to manually assign it it's like 1 2 3 4 5 6 90 right you just need to well manually assign it yourself basically what I've just done so it's just a bit more inconvenient so you start to understand why I mentioned that there's a lot of quality of life stuff that comes with retail while versus classic while here's a very good example but other than that largely it's still the same you will realize that oh there's no like personal bar here in classic W to it's just one of those things too but the most important things that I mentioned about practicing your movement and whatnot being able to unbind your key binding for movement keys do not use a and d as turn left and right there a cardinal sin controlling your movement is the exact same thing right you control your movement using a mix of w ASD as well as using your mouse to pen left right up down and that's how you can basically control um your movements tldr everything I taught applies in classic well too all right Switching gears to retail while I'm on my max level Paladin I want to show you what the talent system looks like I want to cover Talons in detail so if you remember from earlier in this video I said you can access the talent Pain by going to talents and specializ ation bottom right here click on this icon and I'll cover how classic works and we'll talk about that later because classic talent trees and Retail talent trees look different so retail talent trees with the introduction of dragonfly talent trees will now largely look like that and they have confirmed that in the next expansion the wall within this will look roughly the same there will be a class related talent tree and there's a spec related talent tree and in the wall within there will be hero specific talents which is really just an additional layer of specialization but maybe more fancy when you open the talent panel you can change your specialization in the cities so if I click on retribution it will change my specialization and you can just move to cancel it right so currently I'm on the protection spec I'm running as a tank and I've already picked all my talent points so as you start going through the game and you start assigning points to your talents you will start picking up certain abilities for example this add Defender it says 1.4 minutes cooldown when I pick up this talent I will learn this ability so certain abilities are picked up through your talent tree then there's also passive talents like B work of order as you can see it's a passive ability learning this Talent would improve an existing capability or ability it doesn't give me something new to press so when you learn your new talents you need to know whether it's actually a passive or whether it gives you an extra button because if it gives you an extra button like this eye of tier you need to remember to bind it bring it in into your action bar if not you learn your talent for nothing right you're wasting your talent points and you can find all these in your spell book and professions right so when you learn a new Talent earlier like I said eye of the year it's here right it's your talent basically you remember to bind it to your action bar else is a complete ways of learning your talent so going back to your talent tree since we are here this is also where you enable War mode and I previously talked about this in the earlier parts of this video you can opt into PVP so when I opt into PVP when I enter into the open areas I'll be placed in the same contested instances or shards of the servers where other human players have also opted into PVP if I turn off War mode I will never ever be placed on a shot or instance where I will face any human players who want to PVP me because I'm not flaged for PVP so that is essentially talents for retail let's talk about classic and I've also picked my Paladin so that I can show you what the differences in talents are so I'm a Max Level paladin on classic servers if I click on this icon talents if I click on this you can see that hey why is it my talent tree look so different versus retail W it's meant to be this way in classic wow there's no concept of specialization because that is something introduced in World of Warcraft history in the later expansions so in the Original Classic there's no such thing as specialization so I can at the same time let's say I have 51 unspent Talent points I can put like 20 in holy 20 into protection and 10 into retribution it's actually up to you now naturally there's some cookie cutter builds you should follow because if you're new to World of Warcraft this is very overwhelming right just follow a template and I'll give you those resources at the end of this video don't worry about that but the point is the talent system is very different right so imagine I'm allocating points allocating points allocating points I can do it however I want right and through this you will notice that you are also able to learn some new abilities through just uh picking up some talents like for example holy Shield right you get to learn this as a new ability and you will find it in your new spell book and they have this flashing icon to tell you hey you have learned something new please remember to bind it right so holy Shield is over here so that's how I know that okay there's something new uh for me to pick up over here as well I must remember to bind my newly learned ability so anyway that's how talents work and then you'll be like wait hang on how do I unlearned talents so in retail while you just need to right click on the talent in any rest City in classic W you can right click to unlearn so the way you need to unlearn is you need to go to your class trainer in classic well and we'll talk about NPCs later and where to find NPCs so when you finally locate your class trainer in classic and you talk to your class trainer there's an option that says I wish to unlearn my talents and you click on that and you will say are you sure and you say yes I do and they will say do you want to pay gold to unlearn your talent and you can but just know that every time you reset it gets more and more expensive right and now you can see all my unspanned talent points have came back to me all right now that we have talked about talents and we have talked about learning new abilities as you level up it's important to introduce the idea of a combat rotation to you to be clear this is not to ensure that you know your optimal rotation after watching this segment no that will take quite a bit of time for your muscle memory to set in but I want to introduce to you the concept of combat rotations you see in WoW or most MMO RPGs a rotation refers to the optim order or sequence in which a player uses their character abilities as you can see from the background footage here there's a lot going on right I'm always using some form of ability and all this is based off a rough priority system I have in my head which is also known as a combat rotation a combat rotation is what you follow to achieve maximum Effectiveness in battle and it's class and spec dependent right so whether I play a paladin or a warrior a warlock a priest all my rotations are different because their play styles are different for example example warlocks can be more dot heavy which is damage overtime heavy where you need to manage debuffs on your targets versus certain M DPS specs that is more reactive to procs or also known as sudden Buffs and we'll talk about Buffs and debuffs later but the point is no one class or specialization plays the same and their rotations are all pretty different but you need to start having in mind as you start leveling up like oh I noticed this ability does more damage than the other ability so when whenever that ability that does more damage comes up and is ready to be used maybe I should use it more often again showing you the background footage here is not to overwhelm you is to give you a sense of oh at end game this is what happens right obviously your UI looks different and all that and we'll talk about it later and rotations is not just a single formula it also depends on the setting of combat for example if you have three or more targets right is what we normally call a AOE setting so abilities that hit multiple targets at the same same time will output more damage versus single Target abilities however if you're fighting a big rid boss and there's only one boss in the room that's a single Target fight so your single Target rotation versus your multi-target rotation might be different and so because of all these layers of complexity here comes the fun of playing an MMO like wow the more you practice your rotation the more instinctive it becomes you essentially want to get to a point where you build muscle memory and don't you worry I'll give you resources where you can find your optimal rotation and there's even add-ons that would guide you and teach you what your optimal rotation is so take it with a pinch of salt for now I just need you to have this idea that in the long run there is some form of priority system for how you want to use your abilities it's not just you know you play wack a mo on your keyboard it's not as simple as that all right so earlier we briefly talked about NPC right we talked about the class trainer let's dive deeper into NPCs now or also known as non-plan characters so you see all these dwarfs here these are all non-plane characters and there's different types of NPCs that are very helpful in this game so let me go through some of the categories that you need to know and where to find them so let's start with where to find them because I think that's more important to help you navigate the world of azero right if you're a new player the most handy thing I can teach you is when you are in a big city find dudes who are standing idle beside like entrances and whatnot and you go up to them and you right click on them and they will say what do you need directions to these are guards and you can ask for anything you can say hey where is the class trainer and he'll ask you wait what class trainer are you looking for and you can say oh I'm a paladin and you'll say oh this guy he is over here in the Hall of mysteries and then you open up your map this icon over here also known as keybind M at the bottom over here and they will Mark out with a red flag like oh this guy is over here so I just need to walk all the way there to look for the NPC so talking to the guard is helpful because it tells you other stuff like um where can I find the auction house and you say oh it's right across the gates um over here when you enter the city right and it's marked over here so look out for these guards they will help you um look for what you need all right now let me swap to retail well and it's actually the same thing you can look for all these guards click on the guard and they'll say wait are you lost and where do you want to go right and this is where you can get them to point you in the right direction of where all the NPCs are for example the bank and I can see that okay so where's the bank uh the bank is marked out here on my map so let's talk about some important vendors that you need to know so I think the first most important one to beginners is any NPC that has a exclamation mark above their head these are Quest givers and Quest givers essentially would basically hand out quest to you and as a beginner to while you are probably leveling so doing and completing Quest will give you XP to level up so that's what the exclamation mark mean on top of their heads now the exclamation mark turns into a question mark a golden question mark on your head when you're ready to turn in the quest after you've completed them now vendors come in all kinds of shapes and sizes for example even the basic inkeeper right you can talk to the inkeeper and you say let me browse your goods and you can sell him anything from your bags so you can see as I Mouse over my bags here it will say what the sell price is right and I just can right click on any of them to sell uh the inkeeper any form of items so any form of vendor is able to do this thing where you sell them items and you free up backspace and as a beginner it's important to know as you start questing and you start leveling you pick up all these junk on the floor right and you run out of back space eventually so every time you come to an NPC that um allows you to interact with them to buy or sell something you can instantly sell them by right clicking on any of your um inventry in your bag while you have this shopping pain up with them and there's also this function called sell all junks that they'll basically sell all their junks essentially uh so for example this is a cooking trainer right and even the cooking trainer you can say I would like to see your cooking wees and you can sell them anything here again so those are vendors now the inke keeper is an interesting NPC to know why because other than selling you stuff you can click on the NPC and say I would like to make this my home and the reason is because as you start playing well and you very quickly get this um when you first start playing the game you get this thing called a hearth stone and it says when you use your hearth stone it returns you to where you set your Hearthstone tool at various inke Keepers So currently I'm in the city of Val dracken I set it to this Inn I am out anywhere in azero anywhere at all I can just Channel this hear stone that you can see I'm channeling here and when I finish channeling I'll teleport instantly to this in it's as simple as that so that's why in keepers are important NPCs to know when you're questing sometimes you'll find inke Keepers on the road so maybe you want to save your hearstone here so let's say you finish questing in a cave right and you want to return to town to turn in your quest you can just hear back instead of running out of the cave and hitting back to town the next important one to know are flight Masters and you will find flight Masters in the game marked by all these griffins or any for of flying kind of models in the game and normally you will see um you know an NPC beside them called the flight Master if you open it up for the first time you will see a green exclamation mark on their head which means that oh you don't have this flight Point activated yet and so when you click on them for the first time you'll learn the flight point and all these feathery boots that you see on the map these are flight points that you learn and once you've learned them you can click on any of them and then you'll start flying on a flying Transportation Mount towards St so this is assuming you don't have flying so when you're leveling in the early days of w when you first start flight points are very very helpful because of that next has cover banking NPCs so in every city there's a bank and you know not just Val dracken any City at all there's always a bank and by going up to a banking NPC like this Banker here when you right click on that you'll be able to access your bank and they will ask you like all right so what do you want to deposit in your bank right and you can basically open up all these Banks and say all right I want to put let's say this uh ring in uh this slot and therefore it takes um stuff off my bags because my bags have no more space and we'll talk more about the bank in the later segment there's different types of banks as well another very important NPC that you need to know is that in certain cities not all cities by the way when you talk to a guard sometimes you'll be able to find an auction house right and it will direct you to where the auction house is and the auction house is really important and we'll talk about this in a later dedicated segment to the auction house but just know that the auction house NPC is where you can buy and sell anything that is listed by other players in the game right so there are NPCs that sell you directly because they are non playing characters and they have a set inventory to sell you but then auction house is where you can browse what other players are selling and you can also sell your own stuff here as well we'll cover this later but just know that these are special NPCs too another very important NPC you need to know is basically anyone who can repair your gear and the best way I can demonstrate who are the people who can repair your gear is there are NPCs out there and they are normally like you know black Smits and whatnot when you Mouse over them you can see when I Mouse over this um NPC which is on the mount by the way this is a special Mount that comes with NPCs when you Mouse over this NPC you see this blacksmith icon appear and if you right click on this NPC you will notice this Anvil icon and it says repair all items so why is that so and we'll cover this in the gear segment later but essentially when you Mouse over your gear you can see at the bottom of the twoot tip it says durability 57 upon 80 as you die and as you go through combat there's wear and tear on your gear so you need to repair your gear because if it reaches zero then the item is no longer effective so the last NPC that you need to know is basically people who can repair your gear so when you're questing and you're new to this game and you're out in the open world pay attention to those cams of NPC I can guarantee you one of them is always someone who you can uh talk to to repair your gear so that's really really important and since we just talked about repairing your gear it's a very nice seg way to talk about equipment as well equipment exists on your character paint where you have your equip equipments as well as in your bags uh based on what you have picked up right maybe you picked up a new sword from a boss a new trinket and let me just break it down for you and earlier we have already talked about like how do you know what strength or stamina do for you you can simply just Mouse over and understand that oh okay strength will basically increase my damage and increase my Parry chance and as you Mouse over all these different stats it tells you what does this stat do for me so versatility increases my damage and healing okay got it and leech basically returns a portion of my damage and healing as healing to me all right got it so you don't have to read very complicated like articles to understand what all these are you can just Mouse over and it really gives you a very good intuition about what stats is good for you so the purpose of playing an RPG at the end of the day is that as you venture through the game you will acquire and upgrade your gear so you become stronger as a character and you're more effective in combat regardless of whether you are playing PVE or PVP now when it comes to equipment and W one of the most important things to know is that there's something called armor types so depending on what class you play there's different kinds of armor types so I a paladin so the kind of armor I wear is a plate armor now if I play a priest I can wear a cloth armor I cannot wear leather armors leather armors are worn by your Rogues your monks Etc if I'm a Hunter I need to wear male armor and by the way you'll know what you need to wear by going to armor skills and it says paladins can wear cloth leather maale and plate armor and use Shields but they will also say something like starting at level 27 you receive a 5% increase to your St stamin for wearing plates so that's obvious hint that plate is your armor class and your armor type and even if you don't know as you start questing and leveling when you start getting Quest rewards they will also prompt you like to take this certain armor type right so if you're playing a priest you will keep getting cloth jobs and it's very obvious to you that you should use you know cloth as a priest or a mage or a warlock so that's kind of the idea behind like armor types so naturally if a boss drops a plate armor and you playing a priest you have no reason to say hey I want to take that plate armor because you can't wear it so there armors right so armors are basically across all these different slots which is basically your head your shoulders your chest your wrist your hands your waist your pants your feet those are armor slots and then there's accessories accessories are like your necklace that doesn't have an armor type your cloak which is basically that cloth that floats behind your shoulders your two rings don't ask me why there's only two rings in well although you have 10 fingers and then you have two trinkets which are meant to be also known as an accessory and then separate from all these accessories that does not have an armor type you have your weapons as well so weapons there's no such thing as oh what armor type for weapons is really around what kind of weapon can you use so if you go to your spell book and you can see weapon skills it will tell you that oh paladins can use AES meses po arm sword so just reading this I know I cannot use a stuff likewise a priest cannot use a two-and sword it's the same thing so you just need to understand what you can equip in terms of your weapon slots there are two-handed weapons where under the twoot tip it will say it's a twoand weapon and when you see a twohand weapon it means that it takes up both your slots here and then you have oneand weapons like this and what we call an offand an offand is an item that is one alongside a oneand weapon so that covers all the gear slots what I'll say is that trinkets are the most interesting gear slot because they give you unique properties right some trinkets will give you like very fancy effects and I can tell you one of the fun of endgame is to optimize your trinket usage and one of the fun is trying to find the best trinkets for yourself so that's gear slot now the next thing I like to talk about is your item level so you can see that regardless of whether you play retail or classic while when you Mouse over an item it will tell you what is the item level and naturally the higher the item level the more powerful it is the more stats it gives you the more strength more agility more intelligence more stamina it gives you and that's great naturally so part progression in well as to get to a higher item level right and all these items they give different stats as well as you can see some give Haze Mastery some give Haze versatility sub give crit Mastery so part of it is also the fun of optimizing all these statistics at the end of the game when you finally reach max level I won't go into optimizing yet again there's links for this at the end of this video it's more for intermediate players but just know that as your item level increases by doing harder and harder content you get better and better stats so you can acquire better gear higher eye level from different things right like doing harder Quest finishing the harder dungeons finishing harder raids crafting from certain professions and we'll cover professions later the other thing I want you to know is that you can actually enchant your gear as well so you can see as I Mouse over some of my abilities here there's this thing called like oh Enchanted to give um more agility and strength and stamina uh enchanted with watches LOM Enchanted to give 82 haste right so what is enchantment enchantment is actually part of the profession enchanting so these are people who can add Buffs and enhancements to certain slots um and when we cover the auction house data I'll talk about that when we cover professions I'll talk about that but just know that on top of equipping the item you can also buy enchantments to basically make your item more effective to give you more stats also there's some gear that has sockets in them so for example just look at this Elemental larat it has like three three gem slots here some gear have gem slots that you can socket gems that are crafted from jeo crafting and another profession I'll cover later now dual crafting did not exist in classic OG wow so that's just a card it came in the later expansions so gear is not as simple like oh I just got this new cloak let me drag it over here and replace my old cloak it's not as simple as that because there's also enchanting and socketing of gems and balancing the stats and this is why people like me you know you hot gear over time um and it's worth also talking about the different types of gear right you will notice that gear is actually colorcoded I have all of them in purple but gear is actually color coded you should know that gear actually comes in different forms um and I'll show it on screen here the different color codes correspond to the different Rarity of the gear naturally the more rare it is the lower you go down the list the better it is for the same eye level meaning for the same eye level Something of a higher Rarity will naturally be a better item like 99.9% most of the time and naturally it's harder to get the rarer items and drops those are usually from harder and harder content so that's just something that you want to keep in mind the last thing I'll say is that as you level up the general notion is if it's a higher item level equip the higher item level only when you get to end game then we can start debating like oh this thing is three item levels lower but it has better secondary stats so this is better for me that is you know further down the road for beginners just care about item levels when you level up speaking about level up very nice segue into leveling now why is leveling up important you see as you start leveling you unlock abilities and more content you get access to new spells new talents it makes your character feel stronger you can use new abilities that's kind of cool you also get to explore new areas because obviously if you're too low level you can't enter certain parts um of a new zone right like So currently I'm in elwin Forest let's say I want to walk all the way to westf westf is actually a higher level Zone all the mobs there are higher level than me if I walk in there right now they might just smack me to death with one hit so you need to level up in order to start seeing new content as well and also some gear are also limited by your level as well so if you're too low level you cannot equip let's say this epic dagger that can only be equipped by level 40 and above right so you also need to level in order to equip better equipment and you can level up by doing various things every time you quest or turn in a quest you gain XP when you kill monsters you get XP when you finish dungeons you get XP P you can even PVP for XP and whenever you discover new parts of the map for the first time you get some XP um another big tip is that when you log out at an in so right over here I'm also at the Go shy in right so the lion pride in and if I log out here what you will get actually is you can see as I Mouse over the blue component of my XP bar you see to the bottom right here the two tip it says rested XP 200% of normal experience gained from Monsters when you log out in a in or a capital city where your character has this zzz kind of like indicator it means that when you are resting in an area like that and you're idle you're building up rested XP so when you go out there and you start gaining XP in the world again you gain XP at a faster level up to the point of how much rested XP you build up now we won't talk about the math behind that but the reason why I tell you about XP bonuses from rest bonus is because when you level you want to log out at all times at a rest area so this is why earlier like I mentioned is good to set your Hearthstone so in this case I'm talking to inke keeper F right I can say make this in your home and if I accept every time I can just HF click on this he Stone and H back to this in and simply log out and that way it ensures I always have bonus XP the next time I log back in to play the game the last thing I'll say about leveling is that for a beginner hands down the best way to level is by by questing the majority of the quest will be picked up from the NPCs and we've talked about this during the NPC segment but the best way is to look for NPCs with a exclamation mark above their head without any form of add-ons you just can even just glance at what kind of NPCs are out there and you can see oh they have all these quests available for me that I can pick up a set and start reading through my quest log like okay I need to go and find this necklace U by speaking with Billy and Billy is located near the viney east of here right so by doing all these Quest thing you basically can gain XP at the fastest possible rate while leveling and not only that when you quest through the game they tend to lead you from one place to another so let's say I pick up all the quest here right and they'll send me to different parts of this Zone to finish the quest objective eventually you'll run into Quest that says hey can you run over into Westfall and do this thing for me so it naturally leads you to a brand new Zone that's the benefit of questing as well which also naturally means you get to sightsee you get to understand the story of Warcraft and the L of Warcraft a bit better and it's a great beginner experience now the next thing I like to talk about is death and I'm just going to die on purpose here so I can show you what know how it's like so I'm going to go argro all these BS um just to annoy them and make them kill me get this spider here as well we get this spider to kill me here as well so um you can see this is my health to the top left right and I'm dying I'm dying I'm dying going to die here so let's talk about death now um when you die in this game don't worry you can revive unless you're playing classic hardcore that I talked about earlier in this video in classic hardcore when you die it's game over your character has gone into The Ether you need to create a brand new character and start all over again now other than classic hardcore you can always release your spirit and now you will appear as a ghost in game and you know you're ghost from this like you know Fain visual kind of representation around your character you can talk to the spirit healer at the graveyard and say return me to life but you don't want to do that because you will suffer a debuff which will give you something called Resurrection sickness this greatly reduces your health or damage for a period of time you never ever want to rest with a spirit healer unless for some reason your corpse is stuck in some place and you can't retrieve it so the right way to do it is to always open up your map find the graveyard icon is like okay my Corps is there let me run to my corpse right because when you run towards your corpse you will be able to then resurrect or come back to life and you will see that in a bit so as you start nearing your Corp you will look for a popup on your screen right and you'll say resurrect now and you click accept and you'll see like okay you spawn with half Health right but then you're back to normal again now every time you die know that the gear that you're wearing will take a durability loss so you can see all these gear that I'm wearing the durability has gone down and that's why you need to find those repair vendors I mentioned in the NPC section there is no XP loss when you die either you do not lose XP unlike some other MMOs naturally when you die one of the biggest things that you lose is also time right sometimes you need to run back all the way to your Cs and it's a long run it might waste time but unless you're playing classic hardcore death is not a big deal if you're playing hardcore classic though then yeah death is essentially game over for your character time to start a brand new character all right now let's cover the concept of fast traveling so if you just look at the world map right it is absolutely massive in Azeroth I mean there's so many continents and if you were to travel just on foot it would take you forever so the name fast traveling suggests there are various ways in W for you to get from one place to another real quick obviously I'm assuming you don't have a flying Mount or you can't use flying in a certain zone so what do you do one of them we have covered briefly earlier is the flight Master right so trout Azeroth whenever you see any flight Masters and you see them for the first time they would have a green exclamation mark above their head just talk to them and you will basically learn one of these notes these notes are then interconnected and when I click on them it will basically fly me from one destination to to another so just demonstrate how it works when you talk to your flight master um let's say I want to fly here right instantly when you click on it you will start flying on a dragon mild and you can take your hands off the keyboard go grab some water or coffee and by the time you know it you'll be landing in front of the next flight master and earlier we also covered the idea of using your Hearthstone so in the NPC section we talked about the inke keeper where you can set your Hearthstone as a home location so for example if I use my Hearthstone anywhere as a of clicking on this hearstone here right it sends me to the Inn in valren because that is where I set my home too and you can set your Hearthstone to any home in Azeroth as long as it's a inkeeper NPC so when you see inke Keepers like that you can talk to them and say make this in my home and from there your hearstone will be bound to a new location but do note that the Hearthstone comes with a 15minute cooldown that is the only limitation now throut your time in while sometimes you will encounter these circular looking portals you can click on them and you know that when your mouse has turned into like a con wheel as you can see over here click on it and it basically puts up a loading screen and it ports you to the location something very handy to note is that most major cities they have a portal room and they can allow you to take different portals to different parts of Azeroth and the guards will be able to tell you where these portals are whenever you talk to them if you need a refresher I covered guards and City guards in the NPC section but let's take for example over here I'm in orria and I can basically take the portal to Val dracken right so this is the Val dracken portal I can click on it and then it ports me to valren it's as simple as that now something else that's very common in while and in especially classic W are more traditional forms of transportation like a zaplin so a zaplin can basically bring you from one continent to another you see like this NPC says this Zeppelin is departing to stranglethorn which is another continent so I can basically hop on this zapin and the NPC here says it goes from orria to the Base Cam in stranger Thorn Veil and sometimes you got to give it some time because well the Zeppelin is just waiting for people to Bard but after a short while it will depart as you can see the propeller is spinning now and we're about to take off and you can see that uh the zaplin will depart the major city and after a while there'll be a loading screen that pops up and before you know it you get to enjoy a bit of the view before the loading screen actually kicks in okay here we go the loading screen and you can see that we're transversing the different continents just by taking a zaplin and you can take ships as well those are also another mode of transportation so from Stormwind there's a harbor where you can take a ship it works exactly the same as a zaplin you wait for the ship to arrive you bought the ship and before you know it you are in a new continent and you can see over here we have landed in a brand new continent over here so look up for ships zepplins like that if you play alliance there's even a tram that you can use something else worth mentioning is summoning Stones so a summoning Stone requires you to be in a party to use it let's say there's three people in the group a B and C A and B is already at the summoning Stone a can Target person C click on the summoning Stone and there will be a bottal that basically appears person B at the summoning Stone can then click on the portal and person c will then receive a notification that you've been summoned and you can accept and you will instantly be teleported to where A and B is at the summoning Stone so summoning stones in azero basically looks like that you want to look out for these structures throughout the entire world when you're doing group content so the next time you in a group content and someone says hey can you help me summon what they mean is come to the summoning Stone outside help me click on the Auto so that we can summon the rest of the group here it saves everyone's time all right now let's talk about mounts now in retail well you access your Mount collection by clicking on collections over here and you can see on the bottom left tab there's this thing called mounts and you can filter by those that you collected and it's really all sorts of mounts that you can use and you can drag your mounts actually to your action bar like that so now it's on F3 I can press F3 to summon my mounts so take note that mounts have a distinction between whether they are flying mounts or not so in this case this is a b bear and um it's an old school bear and it can't basically fly right um however if I use a drake that you can see if I drag to F3 here and I press F3 I can basically fly on my Drake right so let's talk about mounts and what's their purpose right so a mount is supposed to help you travel faster there's hundreds of Mounds in World of Warcraft some of them look really gorgeous and it also is a fun way to kind of do collection and uh Chase achievements like a ground Mount is way faster than simply walking as you you can see right they allow you to transverse large distance way faster and you will obtain them as you do the leveling process the game will eventually guide you on where you can get mounts depending on whether you're playing classic or retail now in retail while once you hit the appropriate levels you will automatically be taught all the riding skills that you need to ride certain mounts in fact on retail bar once you hit Level 30 you'll be automatically given a quest called time to fly and you'll be awarded a free flying Mount so this is obviously a qu quality of life change that in classic W didn't exist so if you're playing retail while don't worry about learning skills about mounting but let's cover classic real quick just note that in classic wow there's no like collections tab unlike retail W where you can look at the amount of mounts you collected in fact how you actually use a mount is you going to go into your bag and you can click on the mount that you basically have like this white Ste that I have that I can also put on my action bars here right and there are different ways to train your writing skills in classic W and you can reference all the riding trainers that you see on screen here as NPCs that you need to seek out to train your riding skills in classic w at level 40 in classic W is where you get your access to land mounts like that and in classic W there's no flying yet flying was only introduced in the burning Crusade so if you're playing classic cataclysm classic rough of the Lich King those will then work you will have access to flying mounts but you also need to get a trainer to teach you how to fly it's the same principle as seeking out a writing trainer except you need to find someone that teaches you flying now in retail while remember there's no such thing you actually just learn your writing skills immediately when you hit certain level requirements what I'll say if you're playing classic well is remember to save gold at the start of the game don't spend your gold on buying items and grads from vendors you can buy consumables I think that's very helpful but beyond that I wouldn't buy equipment because you're going to upgrade them through your quest anyway so save gold because you need to go and learn your writing skills eventually and you definitely want access to ground mounts in classic one it just makes your leveling so much faster now switching back to retail W here there's so much mounts that you can actually collect in the game and you can actually sort it by things that you haven't collected and you can go out and South where you can actually get all these mounts right they actually tell you where you can get all these mounts and this is actually part of a mini game that a lot of collectors play there are people who play this game just to collect mounts and that's really because a lot of the mounts are really goodl looking in the game so that's something you can look forward to at end game as well all right the next topic I like to cover is Buffs and debuffs so Buffs and debuffs are temporary effects that can be applied to your character to alter your abilities or stats and it's really important you understand how they work because they can Impact gameplay very significantly so Buffs in an MMO RPG are basically positive effects they enhance your character's abilities your stats and they provide other beneficial boost and your Buffs can come from all different types of sources it can be your own abilities it can be you popping some form of potion it can be you eating some form of food that gives you a buff like for example this is a flask that I can use that increases my versatility for x amount of minutes so for example if I consume the flask you can see that I have this buff to the top right here and it says 30 minutes remaining versatility increased by x amount there are also buff that comes from your own abilities I'll give you an example so let's say I use this thing called Sentinel right and you can see from the two tip here it basically grants me the ability to reduce damage incoming so let me click on this and you can see that now I've popped this ability if I Mouse over this on the top right it tells me that I have 18 seconds remaining on this buff right and it ticks down now generally I don't like looking at the top right to see how long my buff is remaining but what you can do is later on you can download add-ons that make it way easier to track and we can talk about it later but I just want to introduce to you the concept of a buff now there's also a concept of a debuff now debuffs can be put on You by enemy Monsters by Bosses but as you already guessed debuffs are negative effects they hinder byed using Effectiveness they cause damage over time and there's also other types of negative effects certain Buffs and debuffs can stack meaning for example you can get one two three stacks of a poison let's say the enemy monster continues to cast poison on you it could stack on you and with each stack you take more damage so it's also important to track the amount of stacks now again there are add-ons out there that will take care of these that we cover later but I also want you to know if you play certain classes like for example I'm a paladin I'm able to actually cleanse certain types of debuff so if you see this cleanse toxin it cleanses a friendly Target removing all poison and disease effects now if you play some for healer most of them have the ability to dispel certain negative effects so that removes your debuffs now as a beginner what you need to know is that you need to familiarize yourself with what Buffs and debuffs your character can apply on yourself and on enemy mobs too you basically want to watch your icons very closely so in this case I'm targeting myself right you can actually track the amount of Buffs on your current Target and debuffs as well I'll give you an example so let's say I use Divine Shield it puts a debuff on me and you can Mouse over it and it says forbearance it means that I cannot use Divine shoe for the next X amount of time right and you can also see the debuff appearing here to the top right debuffs are always colored with outline in red that's just something to take note of but the point is you want to familiarize yourself with all these icons um on your buff and debuff so as you start leveling up you want to keep track of oh I can do this as a certain Class A Certain spec and when it comes to to end game and you're trying to optimize your rotation all these will come into play later now in a group setting it's also a good idea to buff your allies for example majers can buff people with Arcane intellect it basically gives a stat boost to everyone's intellect now you have learned enough about the basics and now I want to give you a teaser of what's to come when you hit nextx Level what is there to do at end game and this is where wow really truly shines in my opinion it's endgame and you hear it from Veterans of the game is truly the attraction of the game so what exactly is there to do well first there's dungeons these are shorter instance areas designed for smaller groups usually five people in a party at the end game players run more challenging versions of these dungeons in retail well often known as Mythic plus Dungeons and these dungeons they scale infinitely meaning for example A+ 10 dungeon will be way more difficult than a plus five dungeon in terms of the mob's Health the amount of damage the mop does and it can scale infinitely as long as you continue to time the key and complete the dungeon within a certain timer and with each level up of the key things get harder and this is one of the favorite end games for a lot of PVE players and then you have raids raids are larger and more complex than Dungeons they are designed for bigger groups usually between 10 to 40 players and they feature tougher bosses that require more coordination and strategy raids are a major part of Wild's end game with every major patch release the wild Community also does this thing called the race to world first where the world's best Guild compete to see who can take down the endgame bosses the fastest and these are new endgame bosses with every patch Mythic plaz and all these raid encounters offers the most difficult and most rewarding part of the PVE endgame and then there's PVP as well so there's lots to do in PvP end game that's Battlegrounds these are team based battles against other players usually on very large Playing Fields usually open air and then you have Arenas these are smaller scale they tend to be competitive matches it's like 2v2 3v3 and you face off in a more close most ended Arena and regardless of whether you PVE or PVP they give you different achievements they give you different things to collect different types of gear so there's a lot of things that you can work towards too but these are the main reason why people play World of Warcraft at endgame and since we're talking about PVE and PVP it's time to talk about the group finder option if you play retail while you can see this I icon at the bottom right and you can click on it and it basically brings this up this is where you can actually cue for certain things for example I can use a dungeon finder and say hey I'm a tank and I'm a dealer I want to do a specific dungeon and you'll sign me up and you put me in queue right so when the queue is filled by other roles you have found other human players to match you with then you can accept and you can enter the dungeon it's as simple as that you can use it for rate finder as well you can queue up for raids you can even do pre-made groups you can create your own group and say hey friends join me right and you can decide who you want to invite into the party this could be a very quick way to play with your other friends you just throw up a group ask your your friends to find your group name and they join your group and you can party together same thing for PVP you can find quick matches rated matches and you can even form pre-made groups so you can queue together so this group finder thing was really made by blizzard to basically facilitate people forming groups especially if you're playing alone this is a great tool because this is where you meet other players and you can form groups really easily to do group content next let's talk about guilds and you can access the guilt paint by clicking on the guilts and communities tab now you can use this guilt finder at the bottom to basically find oh what are the types of guilds that are recruiting take note that some guilds they also recruit in trade chat so you can keep your eyes open for certain guilds that are recruiting in trade chat some recruit on the wild forums official forums too and guilds come in different shapes and sizes essentially guilds are a group of players who are united under a common purpose I think most people who play well for the longest time they all have some for of guilts it's a key social aspect of the game and it lets people collaborate socialize and Tackle difficult content together so like I said you can see who are izing for guilds in the trade channels you can use the in-game guild finder to find guilds or you can just meet other people in game and ask them whether you can join their guilds and guilds often have specific focuses some are more centered around casual play some more on raiding some more on PVP even role playing guilts they exist now the more organized and hardcore guils they even have an application process like you fill up a form you tell them how long you've been playing the game and what experiences you have it's almost like applying for a job sometimes but being in a guil is definitely beneficial if you're looking to play World of Warcraft in the long run because it offers a social aspect and not only that the more experienced people in The Guild can definitely give you guidance and advice since you are a new player right to help you on your journey and guilts often have shed resources too like a guilt Bank where members can exchange items or materials and it's just way easier to ask in a guilt chat like hey is there anyone who wants to run this dungeon with me and most people will do it out the goodness of their heart so that's for Guilt I want to talk about professions next so under retail well in your spell book you see this thing called professions and there a lot of different professions that you can learn in game and the fastest way you can do so and even in classic while it works the same way go talk to a guard right and you can see that hey there's profession trainers and you can say hey what do I want to learn and you can learn all these things so let's quickly cover what all these things are on screen now the first thing you need to know is that professions is a core part of the game some people literally play professions as the end game they enjoy making money of multiple characters and multiple professions and in while professions are skills or crafts that characters can learn learn to gather resources to create items or to enhance your equipment and all these professions they add a layer of depth to the game they offer players different way to earn in-game money to create gear for other people or to provide services to other people now every character in well can learn two primary professions and several secondary professions so let's talk about primary professions first on the screen primary professions can be further divided into two categories Gathering professions and production professions Gathering professions like the name suggests includes herbalism where you collect herbs that is found in the world there's mining where you can mine ore and gems from deposits there's also skinning where you can skin all the wildlife that you killed for ladder and then there's production professions you have Alchemy where you create potions alixir and flusk you have black smithing that creates any plate type armor and weapons there's enchanting which we covered earlier it adds permanent enhancements to your gear like plus 50 stats to a ring then you have engineering which allows you to create gadgets guns Bombs all these fun stuff then there's inscription where you can create Scrolls you can create glyphs and you can create trinkets you also have Jewel crafting where you can craft jewelry you can cut those gems that I talked about earlier in the gear section and you can socket those gems and then there's ladder working where you can use to craft lther based armor or maale based armor then there's tailoring tailoring is about crafting bags and crafting cloth armor for other people and on top of that there's also secondary professions these are skills that players can learn in addition to their primary professions that's cooking where you can prepare food that provides temporary Buffs there's first aid where you can create bandages for healing yourself when you're out of combat there's fishing where you can basically fish you know bodies of water for fishes and these fishes are then used for cooking there's also archaeology that is introduced in the later expansions where you can uncover artifacts and learn about azer off's history but regardless of what you're interested in you can click on um the guts and they will tell you where the trainers are located in this case oh it's located here I just travel to the person and I talk to the trainer and they will basically be able to train me in whatever I need to learn and how do you level up professions so for example I have Alchemy here right so in order to level up you just need to craft all these things and as you get better at crafting you will level up and you will unlock new recipes p as you start leveling up your professions so here's a good example this is a mining trainer I can say train me and you just click on what you want to learn and you can just get them to train you now keep in mind you can only have two primary professions which is why this is great out for me right because I already have engineering and I already have Alchemy taken you can click on this to unlearn this profession this icon here and you just need to type a confirmation to unlearn it that's basically it for professions now let's talk about the auction house cuz it's also related to profession let's say you're crafting your GI here or you need to buy certain raw materials in order to craft certain things this is where the auction house is and just to be clear auction houses they exist in major cities you can also talk to the GS to know where the closest auction house is so I just go to a g I ask where is the auction house and they'll say let me mark it on your map and over here in Val dracken is just right here right so I walk in and I look for the auction house NPCs in this case these dudes now the first thing I like to point out is that earlier remember at the start of the video I talked about how how you can purchase subscription time using real gold in the game gold that you earn through playing the game it's basically through this function you can buy a wow token at the bottom left and you can say Okay I want to buy this but it's expensive as you guys can see but what it does is it allows you to add 30 days of Game Time To Your World of Warcraft account so there are people who just play professions and they get really rich and they basically just sustain their subscription by just using gold so that's entirely possible I just want you to know that and then on the tabs here you can actually shop for certain things like you can shop for certain types of armor uh you can sort them by Leather by cloth even by slots right I want legs or W or chest um you can even shop for bags that's created through tailoring so for example this is a 30 slot bag uh this are 28 slot bags all these are created through tailoring you can also buy gems right gems are basically crafted by dual crafters and you can socket them into um those sockets you have on your gear there's also item enhancements these are things that you can use on certain Slots of your equipment to boost their stats there's consumables like for example you can buy potions that replenishes your health replenishes your Mana uh you can buy bandages these are from first aid it basically heals you for a small amount there's all sorts of things there's trade goods right these are reagents like for example I want to buy enchanting trade goods and these are all reagents that I can buy to craft certain things that I need so this is the auction house and let's say you click into something and you want to buy it right you will say all right this is a lesser Cosmic essence how much do you want to buy I want to buy 20 of them and you will say okay it cost total price of this and you just click buy and you click buy now and it will basically be sent to your mail whatever you buy on the auction house go to a mailbox and you will receive a mail from the auction house and you click on it and he says well this is what you purchase and what you paid and you click on it to basically redeem it and you can see it basically appears over here in my bags it's the same system as selling so this is how you buy right and then there's a sell Tab and then let's say I want to sell back the same thing I bought I'll drag it over here and you'll say how many quantities do you want to sell so let's say I want to sell 10 only and you'll say how much do you want to sell it at well I know that currently is listed at 28 Silvers and there's 389 units of them available so if I want to be the lowest price maybe I go 25 Silver and how long do you want to put it up uh for auction you can put 12 hours 24 hours 48 hours um and you also need to Pony up a deposit for you to basically U put up something on the auction house and you create an auction and it will then go into your auctions Tab and you will say currently I'm selling this lesser Cosmic Essence for 25 Silver now there's a concept about buyout versus bidding for something as well bidding simply means that just like a regular auction you can bid for it and when it expires currently there's like time left on this auction right when it expires it will go to the highest bidder or buy out Simply means that you buy it out outright and you can get to collect it immediately for 135,000 gold the current bid is 126,00 gold so if you want to try a lck you can bid as well it's just that you have to wait for the auction to lapse before knowing whether you want or not so that's the difference between buyout and bidding now you need to be patient sometimes when you use the auction house sometimes let's say you're selling something very rare and there's only a few buyers it might take a while for you to sell your item but at the end of the day the auction house is Central to W's in-game economy prices will fluctuate based on Supply and demands that's why the same portion at the start of a patch could be worth something different at the end of a patch because it also fluctuates with how many players are currently using them over time you spot patterns you will know the best times to buy and sell just treat it like a mini game and you enjoy yourself now the next thing IID like to talk about is a bank so similar to how we basically figured out where the auction NPCs are you can talk to all these guards so I can talk to this guy in any big major city they will tell you where the bank is so in this case it's over here so I can run into the bank and I want to talk about how there's really two types of Bank Banks the first is your personal bank right you can talk to the banker to basically open up your personal bank and in your personal bank you can transfer anything that you want into your bank and the way it works is that you can right click to transfer them between your bank and your personal inventory uh really quickly now something you need to take note is that by default all your back slots here might not be unlocked meaning when you first start World of Warcraft your bank will only have these amounts of slots here where my cursor is circling then to expand your bank slots you need to purchase back slots once you purchase a back slot you then need to buy a bag from the auction house or find a tailor to craft you a bag then you drag it onto the slot that you unlock and it will give you more Bank slots so that's personal Banks a personal Banks also has a reagent bank that you can purchase and it basically will then free up a tab for you to place all your reagents so I can say deposit all reagents and it basically moves all my reagents from my back up instantly into my reagent bank it's as handy as that this is to also save you clutter in your bag and again the the same exercise if I right click on any of these items they are now then transferred over back to my bank really simple and then there's also this thing called a guilt bank so if you click on the guil bank it will say well currently you do not have permissions to view any guil Bank tab so it depends on how senior you are in the guild but guilts have their own bank that is separate from personal Banks where you can store stuff you can also limit what ranking of gu members can access the bank Etc so that's the banking system in World of Warcraft it basically frees up your inventory slot if you run out of like inventory you can Chuck them or in a bank next up I like to talk about the mailing system in the game so outside of buildings like the Inn the bank and the auction house you will have all these mailboxes and they look different sometimes right but essentially you will find them and you know it's a mailbox when you Mouse over it and you see this mail icon on your cursor so why is a mailbox important well firstly like I showed you earlier when you buy something from the auction house is delivered to you in your mail but also with a mailbox you can send your different character items so for example my warrior is called clap and win and I can say free gold and I can send my character 100 gold and I can also send them let's say certain reagents let's say cloth right I can send them cloth and I click Send and this will basically mail out directly to my own character so I can log on to my other character go to the mailbox and receive the items and the go now what is cod because I have sent money now right Cod basically means that cash on delivery let's say I agreed with someone on trade chat to sell something I'm going to sell you 199 shrouded cloth and I won 100 gold for cash on delivery meaning when he accepts my mail and he accepts the item I send in return the game sends his gold to me which is 100 gold it's basically like purchasing something in real life the only thing I also mention is that there's a postage involved very minimal amounts though and there's also a limit of how many items you can send someone in a mail right so you might need to break it up into different components so you might need several males to basically send items from one character to another if you're m migrating some form of inventory now naturally beside just sending items and gold to yourself you can also use this as a mode of communicating with other players so you can write written messages to your guildies uh which is is actually a way to leave them a message when they're not online but nowadays people use Discord something I'll mention is that if you send a mail to a new recipient right that is not your own characters the mail takes roughly an hour to reach the person instantaneous mails are only applicable to what you buy from the auction house also only applicable when you send mail from one character of yours to another character of yours that is when the mail is instantaneous but if it's from one stranger to another playing World of Warcraft even if the person is your friend even if the person is on your friends list it takes an hour for the mail to arrive in game for them all right now I'd like to talk about add-ons and I'll play some dungeon footage while I talk through them so in while add-ons are something that I think almost everyone uses I cannot think of anyone who doesn't use add-ons Maybe a few rare cases but most people use like one or two or three add-ons and all these are programs external programs that's created by the community to add or change or to supplement some features in the game and they enhance your gameplay feature as you can already tell by the gameplay that you see on screen here they provide additional information they make your user interface way cleaner and they automate certain task so a lot of people often ask like what are some must have add-ons which I think it really is very subjective but I would basically point out a few things for you so earlier in the buff and debuff section remember how we talked about how it's very hard to track the timers of buff and debuffs this is when certain add-ons like we or us they will come in handy so this is how my endgame user interface looks like all that I need to play this game is centered in the middle of the screen in this middle of the screen I can track what is my current Buffs what are the cooldowns of important abilities like this one has 2 seconds left this is a minute and 23 seconds it will tell me the health of my party and it will tell me for the mops that I'm facing they are colorcoded differently because one is a caser one does a frontal and there's all these things you can optimize and customize which can be very overwhelming to a beginner so there's really just two things that I will say a lot of people in this community they basically just wholesale import other people's user interfaces mine for example is entirely available for free whatever class that you play you can download mine it's already been used by over 800,000 I think close to a million of you in fact if I include uh the name plates you see on screen the user interfaces that you see in the middle of the screen it's been used by over a million of you already so all I'll say is that you'll find all the links uh to my user interface and my name plate profiles which are basically these these things on top of mops they are called name plates they're entirely free and I go through in excruciating details similar to this guide how to install step by step where do you import it where do you copy where do you paste um and that could basically jump start your add-ons installation process process when you first hit end game in World of Warcraft but I don't want to flood you with all these like oh these are must install add-ons because it's really meant to be a beginner guide so I'll just talk about a few that I think are actually important so first things first how do you install add-ons while hit which is a very good website for beginners and frankly even like experienced people Everyone uses bit these days has a very good article on how to install and maintain your add-ons including like oh what are the different ways you can install your add-ons the different platforms that you can update your add-ons as they get updated over time and all these wonderful things you'll find in the description below a section called useful links where you will see me link out to all these things that I think is very good resources for beginners and amongst which I'll link out to this page as well that you will see here and this is quite a Nifty trick right because you can sort all the add-ons by popularity as you guys can see over here and as I scroll through the page you'll see like what are the most popular add-ons in World of Warcraft that people use and you can click on any of them and you will basically explain what it does and I wouldn't enforce that people use any types of add-on but if you were to ask me I think damage meters are a must install not only do they track damage they track your healing as well so regardless of what role you're playing you can actually monitor your performance over time are you dealing more damage over time as you get more familiar of your rotation I would recommend downloading a Boss Mod as well daily Boss Mod or Big Wigs which is probably somewhere below here this one big Wicks Boss Mod either big Wicks or daily boss mods both very popular both equally good just personal preference basically they will give you alerts when bosses are supposed to do certain abilities it tells you to run away and stuff like that then there's vorus which is super duper powerful a very sophisticated add-on and I actually have another 1 hour and a half video master class on just vorus because it's a very powerful add-on I won't go into detail here you can check the link in the description to learn more about this the other one I recommend people inall is back none it basically groups up all your bank all your inventory and it just Mak makes things look really simple to track when it comes to inventory management and then there's a pler name plates I strongly recommend people get pler as well I also have a Master Class A 1 hour plus video on everything you need to know about pler every single setting but name plates are the ones that's above a monster or bosses model that basically says how much percentage Health the thing has how much remaining Health the thing has whether there's any debuffs that's being placed by you on the Target and how long it lasts a lot of things you can customize then there's a Mythic dungeon tools this is basically for people who push Mythic plus I would say this is irrelevant to beginners um and scrolling through further there isn't really anything that mandatory I think GTFO is pretty good it basically tells you like a warning when you're standing in bed stuff like fire and it basically gives you an alert which I think is good for beginners too and beyond that I would say nothing else is mandatory other than those things that I mentioned ah this is pretty helpful too heck priority helper so what this does is that it basically tells you uh what is the next ability to use it literally prompts you like oh if you're new uh to playing a certain class you can set that okay I want to be prompted to uh learn this spec and it basically pops up all these icons that tells you that okay uh this is the next spell to use and over time you build muscle memory like and it basically teaches you your basic rotation right it is not optimal at high-end gameplay but it helps you a ton when you're picking up new classes because it literally tells you what your ideal rotation is based off certain models that they have built into the add-on a very good starting tool but beyond that like I said I don't think anything else is compulsory at all and as you get more season you can slowly browse through all the others but since we on the website I couldn't stress enough how powerful wildad is wildad is everything you need honestly in modern day uh World of Warcraft when you play retail or you can click on this to switch to Classic or you can switch to ra of the Lich King which in Du call will be updated to uh classic cataclysm and regardless of which version of while you play they have all sorts of like guides um you can check your class uh guides on how to play certain classes certain specs you can check what's new in the patch story you can check all types of Mount you can search for anything you want you can search for items you can search for skills there's all these crazy things you can read on bhead it's super great I think this is like the number one thing you need to bookmark as a beginner you know wad also has this very helpful section that basically covers the law of wow and I would say this is a great place to start learning about World of Warcraft because it's 20 years worth of story lines anyway wad has a summary of the law of wow uh that is on this page that I'll link in the useful links in the description below but this is pretty insane because like you have a One-Stop shop of like reading all these things you need to know to understand World of Warcraft two decades worth of story to get you up to speed so you appreciate aerov and World of Warcraft a bit better but you know beyond that that's pretty much everything you need to know as a beginner playing World of Warcraft in the year 2024 this is really meant again to be a beginner's guide I didn't go into a lot of details about the more sophisticated part of playing World of Warcraft but all those are easily available found guides also on my same channel here on YouTube um you have a list of all these useful videos that I pinned in the description below as well including if you want to use my user interface you want to import my name plates profile everything wholesale step by step is all in the description below and with that let me just say a big thank you if you have made it to this part of the video it's a very long video but I hope it's been helpful for you as a beginner if you appreciate this guide all I ask is you hit the Subscribe button it is my lifetime goal to hit 100,000 subscribers on YouTube and we are so very close now so subscription is free to you but it means absolutely everything to me and if you find this video helpful you can also share it with other beginners I will see you in the next video

Channel: Quazii WoW

Views: 50,018

Keywords: world of warcraft, wow, dragonflight, shadowlands, quazii, quazii wow, quazii dragonflight, quazii clips, imquazii, quazii after dark, quazii twitch, quazii mmo, quazii world of warcraft, quazii ui, quazii weakaura, quazii ffxiv, quazii ff14, asmongold, quazii reacts, twitch, mmo youtube, dragonflight alpha, dragonflight closed alpha, quazii user interface

Id: JbAFi8b5moQ

Length: 129min 38sec (7778 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2023