World of Warcraft Complete Beginner Guide (Retail)

[Music] world of warcraft is the most popular mmorpg out on the market today even 16 years after its release but even though this game has been out for so long a lot of people have still never played it and i know getting into an mmorpg for the first time as a brand new player is an extremely difficult and daunting task so today i have created a complete beginner guide to world of warcraft covering everything you could possibly want to know or have a question about as a new player while a lot of other websites usually tend to cover a lot of the core mechanics for the various expansions and whatever what you need to know for all of those systems i do feel that there is a pretty big lack in terms of a guide that goes over the base mechanics to the game the very first steps and just how everything in world of warcraft works at a at a base level so today this is what my guide is going to cover as you guys can tell this is a very very long video but it is meant to be watched in pieces as you need the information but if you want to go ahead and tackle the whole guide so you know everything right off the start you are free to time stamps to all the different sections are going to be in the description as well as pinned in the comments so you guys can jump around the video as needed but without further ado let's get into dots gaming's world of warcraft complete beginner guide this first section is going to cover the free trial how to purchase the game recruit recruiter friend and expansions world of warcraft runs off of a subscription model which means that you do need to subscribe to the game in order to access it but if you want to actually try the game before you subscribe to see if it's something that you like you can simply do that by going to world of warcraft's website and clicking the play free button you're able to play world of warcraft for free up to level 20 to see if it's something that you like you could try out a bunch of different classes and stuff but do keep in mind there will be some restrictions on your account since you do not have a full-fledged account but if you do decide world of warcraft is for me and i do want to play it you do have to subscribe to gain access to everything the good thing about world of warcraft now compared to the way it was in the past though is that in order to gain access to basically everything except for the latest expansion or the latest content release you just need to be subscribed to the game and you will have access to everything except for like i said the latest expansion if you do decide though that you want the latest content and such as the latest leveling as well as the latest endgame content you are going to need to purchase the expansion from the battlenet shop from blizzard's website now if you do choose to buy the game right now when i'm releasing this guy this is going to be basically near the end of battle for azeroth in the beginning of shadow lands you are going to need to buy bfa if you want to hop in right now into that max level content and also buy shadow lanes if you want the current or the content that is going to be coming near the end of 2020. uh but once shadowlands is released more likely than not battle for azeroth will be lumped into your subscription cost so if you are watching this in a post shadowlands world you will pretty much only need to purchase shadowlands from the blizzard shop to gain access to the rest of the content because as i said bfa will be lumped into your subscription and moving past shadowlands and beyond the way that i imagine it's going to work based off of the new system of all past stuff being included in your um subscription is that any expansions when they're released will become the content you need to purchase and any previous expansions will automatically be bundled into your subscription cost now along with your subscription besides to world of warcraft retail you will also gain access to wow classic if you want to play the game like it was back when it was originally created now if you decide that you are a world of warcraft player but you want your friends to join the game you can have them join through the refer friends system which can be done in game by opening your friends list and clicking recruit a friend and basically what you're able to do is you're able to send your friend a link by clicking the recruitment button and that person can follow that link and join the game now when they join the game using your link you will get rewards every month for a year and then after that it will be every three months and you can also get rewards from doing certain activities with your recruited friend inside of the game and you guys will get access to some other features such as being able to port each other increased experience etc even though world of warcraft does operate on the subscription model it does still have a micro transaction shop although the things that are available are different than games where this is their main payment model if you want to access the shop you simply can from in-game by hitting escape and clicking shop then from there you have a wide variety of options of things you want to take a look at it'll show you the featured item at the given time you can get game upgrades to purchase the latest upgrade for any current expansions that are going to be released if you have one available to upgrade on your account you can also see various account services such as character boostings uh faction change for your character race changing character transfers to different realms etc although some of these will require you to log out of the game since these do involve you know changing things about your character on the back end so you can't be logged in on that character during that time you can also purchase a wow token if you want to which you can sell on the auction house to other players for gold where players can actually purchase this token with gold if they want it to give them 30 days of game time so yes theoretically if you do make enough money in world of warcraft you can basically purchase your subscription with in-game gold the micro transaction shop does also include mounts and pets but with that being said world of warcraft is an extremely robust in-game pet and mount system and the majority of pets and amounts can only be earned in game and the micro transaction shop does have a limited amount but it has certain you know mount skins that if you do want to purchase them will only be available through the micro transaction store with the same logic also applying to toys and then there's also bundles from past expansions that have you know variety of deluxe edition items that you could have only gotten in the past but they down bundle them and put them on the micro transaction store world of warcraft runs off of a realm system which basically means there are various sub servers that you can put your character on in the game and as you can see the list is pretty long now you might be wondering well thoughts if i play on one server and i play my friend plays on another server are we going to be able to play together and the answer to that question is yes world of warcraft has a lot of cross realm a gay cross server technology that you are able to utilize if you want to play with your friends if your friend is on one server but you guys still want to run a raid together or pvp together you guys can still communicate to each other invite your friends to groups and still play together with some minor uh some minor trade restrictions but besides that realm really only matters in terms of things like the in-game economy as well as guilds but otherwise it's so like i said there's so much cross-roam tech that you're able to play with each other across the various realms the only restriction with playing with your friends is going to come from your factions which i'm going to cover in this next section this next section is going to cover character creation factions and the max level now there are two factions in world of warcraft you have the alliance and you have the horde and on each faction you have certain races that can only play for that faction you have a neutral race called the pandaren and then you also have allied races that can also play for the individual factions as well but these require certain in-game quest lines and achievements earned in order to actually be able to play on those factions if you want to play any of these races feel free to google them and you can find out all the information on what you need to do to be able to play these ones but the core races are what you're going to have access to at the base and like i said you can see here on the left which races are able to play which factions but the races we will be going over them in the next section when you actually do choose to create your character though you can just select whatever race you want go to customize and from there you're able to adjust things such as skin color your face hairstyle hair color facial hair or just randomize them you're also able to change your gender as well now do keep in mind though guys that what i'm showing you right now is the battle for azeroth character customization this character customization is going to get a pretty significant upgrade come the release of shadow lands and you will see some higher higher textures for certain things you're also going to see a couple of more options for various races so do keep in mind that this system is getting a pretty awesome upgrade with shadowlands now at the time of recording this in battle for azeroth the maximum level in the game is 120 but that is going to be squished all the way back down to 60 once shadow lands is released and then who knows what's going to happen after shadow lanes where you know who knows if we're going to start leveling back up or how they're going to do things past then but the max level will obviously kind of vary depending on the current expansion but at time it is 120 and with shadow ransom shadowlands release it will be level 60. now something really cool about world of warcraft that i'm sure you can notice looking at the screen right now is that you can either create a class brand new or you can make a class trial if you just want to try out the class see what it's about and see if it's something that you like so what you can do is create a clash trial of the character and you'll go into this little mini tutorial on how one of the specs of your classes work it'll give you a little run through show you how to use your some of your skills how to use them in quick succession and basically just give you a a little bit of insight into what the class is about and how it plays and what it feels like to be on it if you do decide that you enjoy the character that you're creating you can either choose to use a 110 or boost from the store or whatever level boost is going to be when shadow lens released you could use a character boost to level them up or you can just delete the clash trial create the class brand new and start from level one but i just wanted to mention in this section that the clash trial is something that is available so that if you're you know kind of on the fence between a couple of different classes and not sure what you want to do this is something that you have access to world of warcraft has 23 races in the game each with their own passive and active abilities but in this game certain races can only be certain classes like for example here you can see that pandaren can't be warlocks it can be paladins druids or demon hunters so there are lore things tied to the races and you know what classes they can actually play as there are more reasons for that which in my opinion is pretty cool now one of the good things about world of warcraft though is that the races for the most part are kind of just like a cosmetic thing um the difference in effectiveness between the quote unquote best race and the worst race for your specific class is only going to be a couple of percentage points um so you don't need to worry about making an incorrect choice when you choose your race in this game like compared to other games where there's way more uh importance to your racial choice the racial passives that the various races have are overall pretty minor but the big thing is that the races have different active abilities and those usually will come in the form of utility which will have more importance i think in my opinion at least in pvp and pat encounters compared to pve encounter so if you do pvp you might want to look into what utility your race is going to bring to a fight but if you're on more on the pve side of things you can obviously look to see which race is going to eke out the most damage but overall the difference is going to be relatively minor now i believe there are 23 races in the game at the time of recording this video and there are some that could play on the alliance some of that could play on the horde and we have the pandaren here who can play on both but we're going to start with the alliance for this our first race is obviously humans and for the human racial we also their uh like racial ability that utility i was discussing they have what's called every man for himself which removes all stun effects and this can share a cooldown with other similar effects that will remove stuns from your character and this will have a three-minute cooldown we also have dwarves that can play on the alliance as well and their racial skill is going to be stone form which removes all poison disease curse magic and bleed effects and reduces all physical damage taken by ten percent for eight seconds the next race that we have are night elves and the night elf racial is shadow meld which allows them to basically slip into stealth reducing the chance for enemies to detect their presence it lasts until cancelled or upon moving and any threat is restored versus enemies in combat upon cancellation of this effect but i will discuss threat at a later point in this guide our next race is going to be gnomes and the gnomish racial is escape artist which is on a one minute cooldown and allows him to escape the effects of any immobilization or movement speed reduction effect we also have draenei on the alliance and the draenei racial is a gift of nature which allows them to heal themselves for 20 of their total health over five seconds we also have the worgen race and you can see uh morgan here in the background you're kind of like a like a beast werewolf race but you can also be a human outside of combat which i think is pretty neat and for worgens you have dark flight which will activate your true form you the power of your wear will form increasing your movement speed by 40 for 10 seconds you also do have the pandaren which can play on either the alliance or the horde and their racial is quaking palm which allows you to strike the target with lightning speed in capping them for four seconds but also disabling your attack to make sure that you do not break that type of crowd control because it is breakable on damage now we're going to move ourselves into the allied races for the alliance i figure we'll go faction by faction here and our first race that we have is the void elf now the void elf's racial active is going to be spatial rift which rips a rift in space and time and reactivating this ability will allow you to teleport through the rift so you can basically rip put riffs into certain locations and then activate them to teleport between them the next race that we have is the light forged draenei which as you can tell is a different version of just the original draenei and for the light forged draenei we have the lights judgment passive which allows you or excuse me active ability which allows you to call down a strike of holy energy dealing holy damage enemies within five yards after three seconds we also have dark iron dwarves and their racial ability is going to be fire blood which removes all poison disease curse magic and bleed effects it increases your primary stat by a certain amount and an additional amount for each effect of move lasting eight seconds so it's like a more offensive ability of the original dwarves ability we also have the cultirans which have the racial active of haymaker which allows them to wind up and unleash their might upon a foe dealing physical damage and stunning them for three seconds and knocking them back a substantial range and then the final race for the alliance is going to be the mechagnomes which as you can tell or just a mechanical version of regular gnomes and their racial active is going to be hyper-organic light originator which allows you to summon organic light to duplicates to distract your foe so you basically get to summon like little clones of yourself to distract foes and these clones will also taunt your enemies so it could be something very interesting for something like a tank now moving into the horde we have orcs as our first race and the orc racial active is blood fury which increases your attack power and spell power by a certain amount lasting for 15 seconds a very offensive racial we also have the undead who have as their racial will of the forsaken to remove any charm fear and sleep effects and this will share a 30 second cooldown with other similar effects so it's very very similar to the human racial every man for himself we also have the tauren race the mighty tauren and their racial is war stop stuns up to five enemies within eight yards for two seconds we also have trolls and trolls as a racial have berserking increasing their melee range and spell haste by 15 for 10 seconds we'll go over what some of these stats mean in a later section but just a quick shout out to haste haste just has to do with something like casting speed the uh speed of your global cooldown and and things that just affect your speed in combat we also have blood elves and the blood elf ratio is going to be arcane torrent which removes one beneficial effect from all enemies within eight yards and restores a portion of your class's resource we also have goblins and goblins have rocket jump which allows them to activate their rocket belt to jump forward a distance now the horde ally races the first one that we have is the nightborne and the nightborne racial is going to be arcane pulse which deals arcane damage to nearby enemies and reduce their movement speed by 50 and this lasts for 12 seconds we also have the high mountain tauren which as you can tell are a different version of the regular tauren and their active is bulrush which allows them to charge forward for one second knocking enemies down for 1.5 seconds we also have maghar orcs and their active is going to be ancestral call invoking the spirits of your ancestors granting you their power for 15 seconds just giving you a bit of a power boost we also have the zandalari trolls for your active that is going to give you the regenerating passive which allows you to regenerate 100 of your maximum health over six seconds which does get interrupted by damage now they also do have a couple of other actives that i want to point out they also have pterodact swoop which reduces their falling speed for two minutes and they have a really really cool passive ability that no other really race has and it's called embrace of the loa and basically what you're able to do is you're able to interact with different loa shrines around the world to give your character a different passive bonus based off of what you want and i think that's a really really cool feature so i did just want to mention it here in the you can find the list of passives online if you do a quick search for them and then the last race we have is a vulpera and the vulpera active is going to be bag of tricks which allows you to pull a chosen trick out of the bag and use it on a target enemy or ally they have a bunch of other really really cool passives too that are like a little active abilities very similar to zandalari trolls where you can make camps you can and then return to that camp so for example if you're farming somewhere you can drop a camp and then when you you know get a certain distance away from it you could use this and return back to the camp you can it's very similar to zandalari trolls with the bag of tricks you can change the trick that comes out of your bag so you can basically have different actives to serve whatever purpose you want so they have a very cool couple of abilities very similar to zandalari trolls now i did mention earlier in this section that the different races do have different racial passives and if you guys want to look those up i will leave a link in the description below where you can look up the various racial passives to see if any of those really kind of get your attention besides just either the appearances or the active abilities the next section that i'm going to cover is classes and specializations now there are 12 classes in world of warcraft but the majority of the classes having three specializations which you can kind of think of as subclasses and each of these specs for short can do different roles some can tank some can heal and some can be focused more on dealing damage and i'm going to go over what these roles mean later in the guide and if you want to check that section out now though to know what that means it is the holy trinity section it has to do with the roles in an mmorpg now there is a couple classes that only have two specs and one that has four but for the most part the majority of classes have three different specs now we're going to go over all the different classes really quickly and go over what their specs are and what you can expect from them now the first class that we have is your warrior which is a plate wearing fighter who strives for perfection in armed combat warriors fight and they generate rage which is like their uh resource that they generate which is used to power special attacks and warriors have three different specializations arms which focuses on a single two-handed weapon fury which focuses around dual-wielding weapons and you can actually either dual-wield single uh like single-handed weapons or you could even dual-wield two-handed weapons which is pretty cool and then there's also protection warriors which is your tanking spec which focuses on using a sword and a shield your next class is going to be the paladin now paladins are heavily armored fighters as well also wearing plates similar to warriors using holy magic to heal wounds combat evil and they can also tank as well and they focus on two-handed weapons for offense and then shields for defense for the tank for example now there are the three different specs are holy which is the healing spec which invokes the powers of light to heal and protect allies vanquish evil from the darkest corners of the world and your preferred weapons are going to be a sword and shield with warrior the two um the two like uh two-handed weapon specs so fury and arms or dps specs with protection being a tank spec but with paladin holy is going to be the healing spec and for the tank spec you're going to have protection where you're going to use your holy magic to shield and defend yourself again using a sword and board and then for retribution paladins that's going to be your offensive damage dealing paladins who use holy magic for their offensive capabilities and have a ton of utility to bring to a team since these are what's called a hybrid what you're going to notice is that classes that also have the ability to heal are known as hybrids when it comes to their offensive specs simply because they're able to do more than just simply deal damage they're able to bring other heels and utility that come to the class at a base level because all of the classes for example have uh base spells that all of these specializations have access to with the specialization or the quantum code subclass giving you access to a more specialized set of abilities the reason i'm kind of choosing to go over this now with paladins because paladin is the first you know hybrid quote-unquote that we're going on uh we're covering in this list so i figured it would be a good time to explain this information now but again retribution paladins two-handed damage dealers tons of utility and offensive capability now our next class that we have is the hunter hunters are at home in the wilderness and have a special affinity to beasts they rely on their weaponry and their pet to deal damage and in terms of your three specializations you have a beast mastery hunter which places a lot of focus on the pet itself and you will be playing this as a range play style you also have marksmanship hunter which puts more of the focus on you as the range damage dealer putting more of the damage on yourself and then finally you have a survival hunter which is actually turns the class into a melee specialization focusing on explosives animal venom and coordinating attacks with their pet so if you want to play the hunter more like a melee play style survival is going to be for you the next class that we have of course is our rogue our stereotypical stealthy damage dealer rogues serve as assassins or scouts though some are lone wolves as well rogues can often sneak around enemies or attack an opponent from behind finishing them quickly now rogues have three different offensive specializations so hunter had three as you can tell three damage dealing specs rogue also has three damage dealing specs so hunter has assassination which places a big focus on using poisons and dot damage and dagger strikes and daggers are going to be your preferred weapon of choice you also have outlaw rogues which are kind of like think of like a swashbuckler type deal they use agility and guile to santoto with their enemies and use axe mesa swords and fist weapons but a lot of the skills in their kits even can like pull out like a little pistol for some of their other abilities so it's like a very very swashbuckler type of play style and then finally we have subtlety rogues which is a dark stalker who leaps from the shadows to ambush unsuspecting prey with a preferred weapon of daggers so you might be wondering like well what's the difference between assassination and subtlety subtlety is more focused around um think about crowd control like stunning opponents and big burst windows while since assassination has more of a dot damage focus it tends to have a little bit more sustained pressure now our next hybrid class is going to be the priest my personal favorite class of choice so priests are well-rounded healers with a variety of tools however they can also sacrifice their healing to deal damage with shadow magic now he uh priests have two healing specs and one damage dealing spec and again similarly to the paladin priest is considered a hybrid because it is able to do these multiple different roles so you have a disciplined priest which uses a magic to shield allies from taking damage as well as heal their wounds and their preferred weapons are staff want dagger and mace now a little cool note about disc priests though disc is short for discipline that disciplined priests kinda have a very interesting play style where a lot of their skills actually heal their allies while the priest is dealing damage so if you want this like offensive healer hybrid type deal then disc priest is really going to be good for you puts a lot of focus on damage shields though as opposed to raw healing so that is something to keep in mind we also have holy priests which are a versatile healer who can reverse damage on individuals or groups and even heal from beyond the grave so when you die you turn into this huge archangel that heals your ally still and you can continue to heal your allies so for her weapons though are staff wand dagger and mace so you're going to this is just a stereotypical um healer and what you would expect from a priest now shadow priest my personal favorite uses sinister shadow magic and terrifying void magic to eradicate enemies now shadow priests are damage over time focus that is their main primary focus they do a lot of dot pressure a lot of consistent overtime pressure but the good thing is that they also bring a ton of utility and off healing from that base priest kit so if you like the combination of dot damage as well as being able to have a boatload of utility the shadow priest is going to be for you now our next class is going to be the shaman now shamans use the power of the elements to enhance their weapon damaging weapon damage or spells and shamans can summon totems in combat small objects that disable enemies heal or cause damage to enemies now your three specs for shaman you have two damage dealing specs and one healing spec you have elemental shaman which basically uses the power of the elements from afar so you basically turn into a range spell caster enhancement shamans you become more melee focused and you use them up close and then restoration shaman is your healer spec where you use the healing powers of water to mend allies wounds which is really really cool shamans have a lot of utility uh via the totems and other skills in their base kit so you have if you really want the power of the elements shaman is going to be the perfect class for you now we have the all-powerful mage in world of warcraft mages are the iconic magic users of azeroth who learn their craft through intense research and study and make up for their light armor with a potent array of offensive and defensive spells now the mage has three dps specs it's not a pure like the shaman and the priest it is a purely offensive class this is not a hybrid shot of the priest it's a purely offensive class so you have three specs again arcane so you can manipulate raw arcane magic destroying enemies with overwhelming power again preferred weapons of staff swans daggers and swords you have fire magic which again pretty self-explanatory you focus more on the fire and then you have frost where you put more of a focus on frost magic um i totally also realized i did stop going over the armor types warrior paladin are in plate hunter is in a male rogues are in leather priests are in light armor shamans are in mail mages are in light armor now for our next light armor class we also have the warlock warlocks cast fire or shadow magic to damage drain and curse their enemies and they summon demons as servants and again this is a triple dps class so we have three offensive specs with the first one being affliction a master of shadow magic who specializes in draining and damage over time skills so with a weapon choice of staff ones daggers and swords so for the warlock well if you want a stereotypical very dot focused class that is what affliction warlock is going to do for you now they have a more pet focus spec which is demonology or you can be the commander of demons who twist the souls of his army into devastating power so if you want to put again think of it like a different version of a bm hunter if you want more of a focus on your demons that is what demonology is going to be and then if you want to deal big powerful bursts with fire magic you're going to want to play destruction warlock which is a master of chaos who calls down fire to burn and demolish enemies really really big burst damage from afar to uses a lot of chaos magic still gets to utilize some of the demons as well so if you want a a demonic flame caster you got the warlock in the destruction spec our next class is going to be the monk our fist and hand to hand combat fighter monks are known for their skills and hands and fighting relying on their fists and feet as much as weapons monks can also specialize in calling upon restorative powers of their misty heel allies now monk is a leather wearer similar to the paladin though where they have one dps spec one healing spec and one tank spec the brewmaster is going to be our tank who is a sturdy brawler who uses unpredictable movement and mystical brews to avoid damage and protect allies we also have missed weaver monk which is a healer who masters the mysterious art of manipulating life energies aided by the wisdom of the jade serpent and then finally we have wind walker who is a martial artist without peer who pummels foes with hands and fists now the cool thing about monks is if you like a really really highly mobile class monk is going to be one of your favorites the healer the dps specs and the tank all extremely offensive you have preferred weapons are stabs and pole arms for the most part you could also use as wind walker fists axes maces and swords but if you want to feel like a true martial artist the monk is going to be the class for you our next class is the druid the only class in the game with four specializations the druid can pretty much do just about everything so if you're not really sure what you want to do in game druid is going to be a really good class for you to choose because they have a ranged dps spec a melee dps spec a tank and a healer spec so they could really do just about everything now druids are shapeshifters with an affinity for plant and animal kingdom druids can specialize in healing casting spells at range or taking on the form of a cat or bear to fight in melee our four specializations though are balanced balance is the first one and is going to be our range spec and it can you can shape shift into a powerful moonkin balancing the power of arcane and nature magic to destroy enemies feral druid you take on the form of a great cat to deal damage with bleeds and bites so it's a offense a melee offensive dot focus play style since you're going to be raking your allies with those bleeds we have the guardian druid if you want to take off in the form of the mighty bear to absorb damage and protect allies and then finally we have restoration druid where you can channel the powerful nature magic to regenerate and rebattle revitalize allies and you can even go into what is called tree form to just embrace the true power of nature to heal your allies very very fun class again you have the shape-shifting elements of it you can pretty much deal damage from up close or range and druid is also a leather wearing class our next leather wearing class is the only class with two specializations and that is the demon hunter now keep in mind demon hunters you do need to have a character that is at least level 70 or you will not be able to actually create a demon hunter now demon hunters as i said have two specs you have a dps spec and a tank spent they're not like the druid hybrid that has a little bit of everything demon hunters they can even tank or dps and you have one spec for each choice you have havoc demon hunters who focus on using war glaze and destructive power of fel magic and these are the war glades really really cool weapon and then you also have vengeance where you embrace the demon within to incinerate enemies and protect allies now demon hunters are the hero class that came in legion so they started a high level and demon hunters are dark outcasts that use forbidden demonic magic to hunt and kill their enemies they are the followers of illidan stormrage and if you want a highly mobile pretty straightforward class to play demon hunter is going to be for you now the final class is our other hero class that are they are the ex-followers of arthas the lich king and that is the death knight the death knight is uh starts at a high level as well similarly to the demon hunter not as high though death knights are a melee class plate-wearing melee class that focuses on damage using disease and dark magic but they can tank as well they are not just pure damage dealers for the tank spec we do have the blood dk a dark guardian manipulator corrupts life energy to sustain themselves in the face of enemy onslaught and then we have two offensive specs one uses a pet and one does not we have the frost dk which is an icy harbinger of doom channeling runic power which is your sub resource delivering vicious weapon strikes and you can either be two-handed going into shadow lands or dual-wield unholy who is also dual wield or excuse me also two-handed is the master of death and decay so if you'd like to focus on dot damage unholy is going to be for you spreading infection and controlling undead minions to do their bidding so unholy is also a very pet focused class so that is something to keep in mind also blood decays do tank with a two-handed weapon as well which is something to keep in mind they do not tank with a sword and shield like a warriors and paladins they tank with a two-handed weapon so i know this section was a little bit longer but i really wanted to go over all of the classes in wow and kind of go over their specializations aka their subclasses just so that when you guys do get started you can have a better idea of what all the classes have to offer and make a really good informed first choice on who you want your first character to be for this next part of the guide we are going to go over the interface in world of warcraft and with any mmo the interface can be something that's really daunting at first when you look at it which is why the section might be a little bit longer because i really want to try to go over all the different pieces of the ui so you truly understand what each piece does and aren't confused when you're looking at it i am running some add-ons on world of warcraft which for those of you who don't know what an add-on is it's basically exactly what it sounds like it's something that you can add on to your game to either have additional functionality change the appearance of something to be a little bit more uh likable to you etc i am running some but in general my ui isn't that different from the base so when you do log in it will look pretty similar to mine so don't don't you know be concerned that you know yours is going to look totally different than what i have so to start with going over these things though we are going to start at the top left move to the top right and then go down into everything else like the menus and whatnot and the first thing we have is our character portrait here this is going to show you your character's name a picture of them their level your health and any resources now if you want to target someone though you would just simply go and click on them now when you click on them you'll also be able to see their health their resource and a picture of them as well as their level the gold dragon means that it's an elite enemy and if it's a gray dragon it means it's an elite rare enemy so they're a little more challenging to find now let's say you're in a fight or something and you want to keep track of what a certain monster is doing or if you're in pvp and you want to keep an eye on a certain enemy player you can do what is called set them as your focus so basically what you just do is right click your character or excuse me your target pane and you can do set focus from there it just sets them as a focus target for you so you're always kind of able to keep an eye on what they're doing so let's say i decide to target somebody else instead i'm able to still see what my focus target is doing even though i'm physically targeting somebody else so just something good to keep in mind uh for when you are playing and if you ever want to clear this focus you can just simply right click and do clear focus now besides your target frames which added at the base are going to appear here at the top left and if you do want to move them you can just right click and do move frame and you can unlock and move them to wherever you'd like moving to the top right we have our buffs these are our buffs at the top right here so you can see any buffs currently running on your character and a buff is basically a beneficial effect that your character has now let's say there is a certain buff on your character that you don't want to be on your character anymore you would simply hover your mouse over it right click it and then it will take it off of your character any debuffs on your character which are negative effects are going to appear right here to the left of your mini map and you'll be able to see them listed here their durations and what their effects are now a lot of the icons surrounding my mini map are from add-on so you can basically ignore these three right here i just want to focus on the calendar and the tracking so the minimap as you can see here is going to show where i am you can see the arrow here and then a bunch of icons that i have set around me and the way that you set those icons is by clicking the uh magnifying glass here and from there you're able to check certain boxes to see uh you know highlight anything you particularly want you could also go to the list of townsfolk and see what townsfolk you want to highlight as well and you know if you want to always know where let's say a repair person is you can go over here and you can click repair so that it always shows you where um a blacksmith is whenever you go into a city so just something to keep in mind when you are looking at your mini map if you want to zoom in or out you can click the plus or minus sign and wow also does sport and in-game calendar so you can go to the calendar and your guild can set events here you can see where certain world events for world of warcraft are happening and and basically just sign up and schedule things here on the in-game calendar which is really really nice now if you want to access your map you can either click this little icon in the top right or click your about or your map keybind which of the default is m which allows you to bring up your mini map and take a look at it now the good thing is that your map shows your quest log here on the right showing you you know where maybe any quests will be located on your map and it will also show you the kind of sub areas where you are so this is the world you can go let's say drill down do azeroth zandalar zuldazar and then from here again you can see all these different places you can click the drop down menus and go to different places if you would like but it just kind of shows you like a little let's say like a file organizer of where you are in the world so to speak right click zooms you out and left click zooms you in and you can like i said see all of your quest progress here on the right you could also if you'd like to just click your quest log down here or use that icon but again it will bring up the world map and put your quest log here on the right now besides the mini map we do have our quests here uh so you can you know either hide that or show them if you would want to now a question mark means that the quest is complete and needs to be turned in uh otherwise you know it'll just show you know let's say for this for this quest right i need to get two torn pages of final truth so it won't show as done yet now if you do look here on the mini map the exclamation point means that there is a quest that needs to be gathered so i could go over to that quest and gather it a orange quest typically means it's a story quest a yellow quest means it's just a regular quest and a blue quest means it is a daily or even a weekly the orange can typically mean it's it's like more related to like the expansion so normally uh the orange for example i'm in battle for azeroth recording this so that orange quest marker has to do with something related to my necklace which is a specific battle for azeroth item so just kind of something to keep in mind with the orange exclamation points now from there we have our ability bar so at a base you're going to have the ability bars down here i expanded them to include extra ability slots because i needed them and you could also see your keybinds here now i'm going to go over combat in a little bit you know just kind of explaining what all these buttons you know kind of do and your goals with them but in general these are where all of your ability bindings are so by clicking certain keys or clicking the skill itself with my mouse i'm able to have those skills go off and if i do use a skill for example it will show the cooldown on how much you know when i could use that skill again so just something to keep in mind when you're looking at your skill bar um you can also make it so that your skills are locked to your skill bar so if i try to click and drag it off i won't be able to and instead i'll have to hold shift to click and drag it off now something really cool though about skills is that if you do want to have them target yourself i know this is kind of like a little bit um out of the way if you ever want to have them target yourself you can set a keybind in your settings uh if you go into interface and go into combat you can set a self-cast key to make a certain skills um target yourself and then auto self-cast will make it so that whenever you don't have a friendly target target it'll automatically go on yourself so just kind of wanted to throw that out there since we were talking about the skill bars but the the quick and dirty version of skill bars is that it'll show you what skills you have and the cooldowns on them now you also have your cast bar so whenever you're casting your cast bar will appear down here so just something to keep in mind besides that we also have our bag so here you'll be able to see your bags now my bags display in one window at a base it's going to show multiple windows one window per bag you have a base backpack and then four additional bags that you can get and you can get different bags with different sizes so be sure to visit a bag merchant or go to the auction house to purchase a bag for yourself and make sure to expand that inventory as much as you can besides that we have our character pane our character pane shows our you know gear shows what our character looks like it shows our various attributes and uh sub stats these are called enhancements you can see your character's item level which is the total level of all of the gear that your character is wearing you can see any titles that you have acquired from doing a bunch of different things in world of warcraft you can see an equipment manager and you can make different gear sets for different purposes let's say one for pvp and one for pve you can see your character's name and title uh your level and your subspec and class you also have another tab for your reputation which is reputations that you have with different factions in world of warcraft these are typically npc factions and you also have your currency tab which shows a list of all the different currencies that you have that basically are not gold gold shows in your bags here at the bottom but every other currency can be shown here in the currency tab of the character info pane we also have our skill book pane which will show you all of your skills for your class and spec as well as your passives you can also see the general tab which will show you any racial actives that you have racial passives any guild perks um and all of that just general stuff that doesn't follow to your class specifically you also have your professions tab which will show you your two primary professions and your three minor professions uh like sub professions so to speak so every class can and every character can have two main professions so i chose the herbalism and mining and then but i can't get any other main ones besides these two if i ever wanted to let's say pick a blacksmithing i would have to unlearn herbalism or mining to be able to become a blacksmith now i can't any character though can learn cooking fishing and archaeology in addition to their two primary professions you also have your specs tab now i kind of went over specs in the last section but if you want to you can change your spec here if you want to so right now i'm a shadow priest but if i wanted to play let's say a holy priest i would simply click holy and click activate very very simple simple way to be able to change between the different specs and then my talent book here my skill book here what uh update with the holy tab and i would be able to get access to all of those skills now besides being able to actually change your specialization you can see your talents here these are additional skills or passives that you get every bunch uh like every level grouping so for example i get one at 15 30 45 60 75 90 and 100 this is in battle for azeroth and these tiers and the levels where you gain certain passives are going to change to be different break points when shadow lens is released besides these bass talents that you get you also get specific pvp talents that are only active when you are in pvp you can also turn on war mode if you want which is going to activate world pvp it's a kind of incentivize you to be at risk for world pvp what this one does is you can increase the quest rewards experience but gained by 10 and it also enables pvp talent in the outdoor world you do have to go to your faction's main city though in order to turn this on but this can be turned off whenever you are in a city hub um any other city hub so just something to keep in mind uh besides the specs and talents we also have the achievements tab which will show you the various achievements that you have completed on your account the achievements in general are account wide some are character specific but in general achievements are account wide which is pretty cool so you have your achievements you can see guild achievements and just various statistics about your character you also have your quest tab which i went over earlier you have your guilds and communities tab so basically this will show you any guilds that you're in and any communities that you have joined a guild is a group of players on a specific server that can play together you have access to a guild tabard a guild bank and it will show a little thing under your character's name when you're running around the world showing what guild you are a part of now community on the other hand think of it as like a cross server guild basically but you don't have the tabard or the bank um or the little like thing under your character's name when you're running around it's just kind of like for the chat purposes or to be able to you know be able to get other people to to run dungeons with or pvp with it's just it's exactly what it sounds like it's a community of players across a lot of different servers and if you guys do play on horde n a you can feel free to join the dots gaming community link is going to be in the description below and it will include directions on how to actually get into the community now if you are looking for a guild though as a new player you can feel free to click the yield finder and you'll be able to search for any guild that you want to uh or you might be interested in joining now besides the guild tab we also have the group finder tab which is going to allow you to search for dungeons raids or you can even go into the pre-made group finder and let's say you want to find somebody to run a heroic raid with you would go to raids find a group and you'll be able to find a group here in the list for player versus player you could do a quick pvp match a battleground uh battlegrounds i'll go over a little bit later in the guide you have rated pvp and then you also have pre-made groups for player versus player activity so let's say i want to go do ranked arena because in ranked arena you can't just queue up for it you do need to find a partner before and get a full group before you queue i just click arenas find group and then from there i'd be able to search through the uh available groups and you know sign up for one if i'm interested in playing with somebody or i could start a group myself set the parameters and somebody can sign up to play with me when it comes to dungeons and stuff like i mentioned earlier you just basically want to choose your role so you can either do dps healer or tank if your class is able to tank and then you can either queue for a random dungeon or a specific dungeon and queue specifically for the dungeons that you might be interested in same thing with raid finder uh you could actually play the raids which is the endgame pve content at the looking for raid difficulty which is the lowest raid difficulty in the game and you're able to again queue for your roll of choice and then queue for any specific part of the rage you might want to now there are i'm going to go over raids in general later but when you queue for a raid it is the lowest difficulty if you want to do the higher tiered raids to get the higher tiered loot you are going to need to actually find a pre-made group which is what the pre-made group finder is for you could also see your mythic keystones which is a typically an endgame activity but it basically is just you're able to keep track of the highest difficulty dungeon you have done mythic dungeons are the highest difficulty and then you can further enhance those with mythic keystones but i'm going to go over that a little bit later in the dungeon section but this will show you your highest keystone for the week besides the dungeons we also have collections where you can see your list of mounts your list of pets your list of toys uh any heirlooms that you have for your account which are basically kind of gear that you can create and use while leveling up and then any appearances that you can use for your character to transmog i am going to go over transmog later in the guide but it's like basically like a outfit changer so you can see any appearances that you've collected here and you could use these appearances um to make your armor look like different you know look different so it will show you the list of what appearance appearances you have here we also have our adventure guide which shows you you know suggested content you can look into the different dungeons what bosses there are what loot they drop same thing for the raids and then you could also look into different item sets that you could potentially have access to we also have access to the microtransaction shop which i went over earlier in the guide so you can click that by clicking the shop link and then you also have help or by you can access this by clicking escape and you have access to a bunch of different menus you have help shop you can see what's currently new and wow uh you have your system settings interface edits keybinds macros uh you can look at your add-on list log out exit game or return the game but that pretty much covers everything on the ui oh i just have the chat box you have your chat box here on the bottom left you can see uh it's like just like a general chat that has all of your chat stuff you have your combat log and then i also made a separate window for whispers so basically what you can do is if you want to mess it with your chat box you could just right click it and it gives you a bunch of different settings you can either rename window create a new window go into settings and mess with all the different settings for your chat box but you can totally customize the chat box to your liking down here but at a base you're just going to have the general which is going to have all of your various chats in it and then your combat logs so you can see what actions you've taken and what actions have specifically happened to you so let's say you get killed by something and you're not sure what killed you you can go and look through the combat log but one more thing that i do want to mention with the chat box is the general chat windows and and what you can expect when you want to type to other people so if you do slash one that'll be your area's general chat slash two if you're in a major city will give you the trade chat which spans across all major cities uh slash three is your local defense so basically let's say you're on the horde and the alliance is attacking you know your camp in a certain area you can type in the three channel to basically say hey we're under attack i need help uh slash four is going to be usually any communities that you're in slash p is your party chat slash i is your instance chat so let's say a dungeon or a battleground slash g is your guild chat there are other ones but those are the main ones that you want to pay attention to you could also do slash whisper and then do um someone's name so if i want to whisper let's say one of my uh battle net friends i could do slash whisper and then start typing in the person's name and see if they're online but you know in this case no one's on if you do get whispered you can type slash r to respond to whispers but just figured really quick i would go over a couple different chat commands so that you're able to talk to people more easily while playing world of warcraft that is the entire ui for world of warcraft so hopefully that does give you a better explanation of what you are looking at on your ui when you first log into the game the next section that i am going to go over really quickly is add-ons now as i mentioned in the last section add-ons are things that you can add onto the game to add additional functionality to the game or change your game's appearance now i'm going to make a separate guide covering my specific add-ons my settings for the add-ons and how my entire ui looks like and what my entire ui looks like and like kind of how to you know duplicate what i have but if you are interested in installing add-ons you can technically install them manually but there's a much easier way to do it and what i would do is download the twitch app to your desktop or your laptop and use the twitch app to download and manage all of your add-ons so basically what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to download the twitch app you're going to want to click the mods tab and from there you're going to be able to see the list of add-ons for your specific game so you can click world of warcraft and you could see what add-ons you have installed or click get more add-ons to search through a variety of add-ons that you can get for world of warcraft and install for yourself to make your user interface look however you want it to look [Music] the next section of our guide is going to cover inventory and banking now as i mentioned in the user interface section of the guide you do have a base bag size here at the bottom right you have just a default backpack that's going to give you a certain amount of space but you can extend this space with four additional bags and basically as long as you purchase a bag from either an auction house or from a bag vendor you're able to get additional bags as you can see i have four 30 slot bags here which add an additional 120 slots to my inventory i also do use the bagnon add-on to put them all into one window which i find extremely helpful so this just is a way to get additional inventory on your character now if you do want to store stuff on your character without keeping it in your bag you are able to go to the bank note that this bank is character specific when you go to the bank you are able to basically have the exact same type of user interface as you do with your bags you have a base bank size and then from there it needs to be expanded with additional bags now in order to be able to use additional bags in your bank you are going to need to purchase this bank space uh excuse me these bag spaces from the banker itself so do keep in mind this will cost you a little bit of gold in order to get the um the initial investment to be able to unlock these slots once you unlock these slots you are able to place bags there similarly to what you do with your actual player inventory to expand your bank space now if you do choose to purchase it you can also purchase the reagent bag which will extend your uh your bank inventory by quite a lot and this is used exclusively for reagents so this is like ores and herbs and just things used for crafting you have a specific storage space for that so that is not crowding up the rest of the space in your regular bank slots but this is just a quick overview of uh bag space and banking and how it works in world of warcraft the next section that i'm going to cover is titles and reputation now i do know that i gave these a nod in the user interface section but i really wanted to highlight reputation especially one more time just because it plays a very important part in world of warcraft so by opening your character pane uh you're able to see titles titles are gotten from doing a variety of different things and wow from getting reps to certain points to getting achievements it's basically just a way to show off your um your achievements in wow and just basically have a certain title attached to your name to show this is something i have done i am this person that has done this thing so it's just like again a really cool thing that you're able to show off your uh your achievements visually on your character besides just having them in your achievement log but the big thing i want to talk about for this is reputation now there are a ton of different factions in wow that you could technically earn rep with is the ones for your specific faction one's for and ones for the specific expansions now getting these ex uh these reputations high is very very important for a lot of different things and sometimes certain character progression does require you to grind reputation with a certain faction in order to get you know certain things that you might want and reputation is just kind of how a faction looks at you are you just very friendly with them are you revered by them are you the champion of their cause or all you exalted and do they just appreciate everything that you've done for them you know basically the tldr is have you grinded enough quests and done enough things for that faction to have them like you enough to be able to get the things that you want and the reason that's important and just to kind of use an example um from when you're in battle for azeroth the current expansion of when i'm making this guide you are able to get essences for your necklace and you can basically just think of essences like other passive and active perks that your character can have now one of the passive things that i'm using is called breath of the dying and my spells and abilities have a chance to strike my target for extra damage and heal you for 50 of the damage dealt and grant me extra corruption resistance which is a specific system with the battle for azeroth expansion i'm just using this as an example to show why rep is important if i want to get the next rank of this skill of this uh essence and make it better i need to be revered with the uldum accord so that i can come to the uldum accord quartermaster interact with them and actually purchase the token of death's glee which will give me the rank up for the essence that i need there are also there's also a different achievement that is called pathfinder which will generally allow you to fly in the current expansion where a lot of times you need to have certain reputations grinded up to a certain level a certain point so you're actually able to fly in those specific zones so paying attention to your reputation with certain factions and groups is really really important just so that you can you know be able to do certain things or purchase certain things that you may want to get and how you actually increase and improve these reputations with different factions is going to depend on the faction it's going to depend on many different things so feel free to give your fashion a quick google search if you want to see how to improve your reputation with them the next portion of this guide is going to cover key binding and movement and while i do plan on releasing a standalone guide to cover this i do want to give it a shout out here in the complete beginner guide just so that if you do watch this video you understand how to start off in the game with good keybinding and movement habits so for those of you who might not know anything with this what is key binding key binding is simply assigning your keys to do certain actions so for example m is your default amount um map keybind you know that is what a keybind is you press your key and something occurs now what you're going to want to do in world of warcraft is you are going to want to keybind all of your various ability slots to a key on your keyboard although you can technically use your mouse to left-click the skills and have them go off it is infinitely more efficient to keep mind your skills to keys it is just so much quicker it is a good habit to develop you will you will 100 of the time be more efficient than somebody who clicks the skills you're just able to react faster do things faster have quicker access to everything it is just the best way to go about doing it now in addition to actually keybinding all of your ability skills i also do recommend changing the way you move as a default so when you default you know start playing world of warcraft you're going to have your w key moves you forward your a d is going to turn you to the left your d key is going to turn you to the right and your s key is going to have you back pedal now in my opinion you are going to want to change this as if you can see when you make actually keyboard turn with the keys the arc is pretty wide with how you turn but if you for example were to mouse turn i mean you can move as fast as you can shake your mouse you know so you're able to more easily actually turn your character and move your character in the direction that you want to go so what i would recommend doing in terms of uh movement keybinds is i would use w to move forward a to move left or to strafe left rather d to straight right and use your right hold down right click to actually turn your character i know some people have a lot of really weird movement keyboards with how they choose to do it but i think that just using wad is a really really easy way to learn into how to properly move in wow without like totally rethink like reinventing how you think about actually moving in a video game especially you know an mmo so that is how i would recommend uh changing your your movement and again like i said reason you want to do that is just because it allows you to move around way more efficiently than if you are keyboard turning i mean look how much faster i'm able to jump around and still continue in a straight line by doing like a 360 turn but if i was keyboard turning like i you know can maybe go 45 degrees in a single jump you know so it just allows you to move your character around much more quickly and much more efficiently now in terms of how to actually keybind your skills though i know you're probably looking at my bars and going dots you have a lot of skills you know i don't really know how am i supposed to keep behind that um one thing that will absolutely help and i will leave a link to uh to it in the description below as you could absolutely get an mmo mouse um i personally don't play wow without one um i use a razer naga trinity myself i will leave a affiliate link in the description below if you want to support the channel pick one up for yourself um i typically use that for my arena targeting uh that's typically what i have on my mouse so i have my mouse to all of my targeting and my left hand on my keyboard do all of my skills that has just been an effective way that works for me again you develop your own systems but that is what works for me uh i will typically then use one through five as my primary skills that i use all the time um you know and then again you have to develop your own system so i usually use q for my stuns e for my interrupts or silences um i'll use f if i have another cc t is always my execute uh shift one through shift five are always big cooldowns that i have in the game uh so basically uh cooldowns are skills that will um go on like so so a cooldown is like how like when you use the scale how long until you can use it again so for example i'll put long cooldown skills skills that i can't use very often and can only be used pretty infrequently i'll put that on the shift modifier so that i don't accidentally miss click them i don't fat finger them and so they're in a comfortable enough of a location that i can hit them with ease but not so comfortable that i accidentally clicked them you know what i'm saying so you need to just develop your own systems and typically the way that i did it is that i used all the keys that surrounded my movement keys so i have one through five uh qert s f g z x c and v and then um i think i said g and then i also use six and then i shift modify all of those with the exception of six i don't shift modify six um and then because like that's like a huge reach for me and then i use tilde to do my mount and then i do shift space for my flying mount so again you develop your own systems but i do recommend setting up yourself some key binds pretty early on um think of a system and how you kind of want to do it if you want to pause the video and take a look at how i have my keybinds you could absolutely copy my system if you'd like to um but i would recommend key binding from your very early days in wow because i remember when i first started playing world of warcraft i keyboard turned and clicked on my skills and when i started playing arena with one of my friends and he started to teach me how to actually keybind and move properly i had to unlearn a lot of my bad old habits in order to actually start doing it properly but if you start playing properly with your movement and keybinds from day one you are going to develop good habits and you are going to be able to learn how to be more efficient much more quickly than someone who doesn't do it properly the next thing that i am going to cover is macros macros are basically like custom skills that you can kind of write yourself um so for example well what you do is you just hit escape you click macros you have general macros that are across your entire account or specific macros for your character now i'm just going to go over i'm going to make a separate guide for macros eventually because you can get pretty deep with these but i'm just going to kind of give you a rough idea of what some macros can do now the most common macro that you will typically see when playing world of warcraft is a focus macro focus macros are probably your like the most common ones you'll see so for example i have a focus silence now i did go over what a focus target is in the user interface section so if you haven't i would go give that a watch now what my focus silence will do is it will cast silence at my focus target so what i'm able to do is i'm able to do you know pound show tooltip silence so we'll show the tooltip for my silence i hit enter i do slash cast target equals focus space silence and i use the brackets now the thing is like let's say i'm trying to um silence this guy right here jahi right if i'm trying to if i'm trying to silence him i don't say i have him focused now what i would need to do while playing is i would need to let's say i'll go okay okay he needs to be silenced i would need to click him and then click my regular silent keybind okay and let's say i was attacking this moth right here right and i wanted to attack him i want to attack him but i noticed john he was casting a skill like like i said i'd have to change target to jahi cast the silence and then change back to the moth as you can see there's a couple steps in that process but if i have a macro that just automatically casts the silence at the focus target i can just with the click of a button hit shift e and without dropping my target without changing anything i am able to instantaneously silence my focus target so that is what macros are really really good for um same thing with i have a defensive cooldown called dispersion on my shadow priest that puts me into kind of like the status where i don't really take a lot of damage and i'm able to move around pretty quickly but i i can't cast or really do anything while i'm in that form and now let's say i'm dispersing right and i'm you know running around trying not to die and i need to get out of my dispersion really really quickly to do something right i'll say i need to get out to do something and i would have to go bring my mouse to the top of my screen right click it and then i would get rid of the buff or i make what's called a cancel or a macro where i do slash cancel or a dispersion and if i just click the six button on my mouse it will just automatically cancel my dispersion so as you can see macros just allow you to do things a little bit more efficiently than if you were to like not macro certain things um i'm gonna have a separate macro guide though that comes out on the channel very soon um depending on when you're watching this it might already be out that's going to go over all of the intricacies of macros but i just wanted to give you a rough idea uh in this guide here what they are the next thing that i am going to cover is guilds and communities now i did kind of cover these in the user interface section but again i do just want to highlight them here so that you can get a full understanding of what they are so a guild is exactly what it sounds like it is a group of players that plays together in world of warcraft it's just like a guild from any other mmo you have all of your various players in the guild you have different ranks that you can set uh you have a you know your roster that you can look at if you click the guild tab down here you can have your roster that you can look at you have different perks for being in a guild as well which is why it's very beneficial to be in a guild um you get the mount up passive which increases your outside of battleground and arena movement speed on your mount by 10 it reduces the cooldown of your hearthstone by 15 minutes it gives you access to a mobile bank it increases the health gained when resurrected by 50 percent increases movement speed while dead about 10 again not a bg arena and you also get guild mail which allows you to send mail between uh guild members instantaneously so you do get some cool perks for being in the guild you can buy some cool things from the guild too like guilds just have a bunch of benefits so it's definitely good to be in one uh you can also see any info about your guild here uh but basically guilds are just group of players that play together whether it be pvp pve etc and you can use when you are you know running around in game like if i run over to let's say a different player here right you can see underneath this guy's name you can see into these brackets you can see the name of his guild so you can display what guild you're in now guilds are server specific so that is something to keep in mind you cannot be in a guild with somebody from a different server however you can be in a community with somebody from a different server so depending on your needs you might want to focus on being in a guild or a community but you optimally want to be in both so i have my guild for a certain purpose and it's for if i ever want to do heroic raiding um and to get access to these specific perks but my main focus is my dots gaming community which if you are interested in joining like i said in the user interface section there is a link in the description below now think of a community as kind of like a cross server guild while the guild has access to the tabard you know which is going to you know be a tabard on your character so you can kind of change the depending on what your guild's crest looks like you could wear that crest on your character you get access to a guild bank which you can access by going to any bank area and there'll be somewhere where you can click for a guild bank um you have all the perks and stuff the main focus of a community is to just be a cross-realm group of people that have a common interest common goal um etc that want to be able to talk to and communicate to each other now these communities are region specific and faction specific so you cannot have um let's say alliance and horde people in a community um guilds are realm and region and faction specific but communities are just region uh faction specific so for me in my community people on horde n a are able to join and so the the main benefit of the community is just again it's able to you know have people from the dots gaming community able to talk to each other chill and chat while we play world of warcraft if i ever want to run bg's to somebody run arena uh if we ever eventually have enough people we could do maybe some easier raids able to get people in from the community invite them all to a big group and be able to play together this also gives you a chat windows as well where you can chat and ask people questions so just a way to meet people with common interests and if you don't know any guild or any communities you can feel free to go to the community or guild finder um which will allow you to find guilds and communities and apply to them if they seem to interest you or seem like something you want to join but typically i would recommend if you're really looking for a gilder community you can go check out reddit you can check out the official forums and you can find places there that you are able to join this next section is going to cover gearing stats item level durability and rarity and i'm going to kind of explain this section backwards from the way that i just listed it because i think explaining it that way is going to make understanding the gearing part of the process a little bit easier and actually gearing will vary a little bit on the expansion by expansion basis but i'm going to try to explain things in general terms just so you have a rough idea of how it works now in terms of item rarity there are a bunch of different rarities in world of warcraft which orange is being the highest and gray is being the lowest orange is going to be legendary you have purple which is epic blue is rare green is uncommon white is common and gray is poor so obviously in general the higher the rarity the better the item is going to be you also have item durability so as you can see on my gloves here i have 55 out of 55 durability once that durability hits zero my piece of armor will break and i do need to go to a person to repair the item generally you will be able to see that person on your mini-map as denoted by an anvil if you go to them they can repair your gear and your gear will actually work again now speaking of items there's this other thing called item level you're going to notice right here on my character sheet that you see at the time of making this i'm item level 462. now that is the average item level of your equipment now what is item level though it's exactly what it sounds like it's the actual power level of your items so in general the higher the item level a piece the better it is so again in general a four using bfa numbers a 475 piece is going to be better than a 465 piece it's a higher item level which means that it should have more stats there are some cases where an item level upgrade is not actually an upgrade um just based off of the way that the stats in the game work but for the purposes of this guide i'm not going to get too much into it for you guys just remember in general the better the item level of a piece the better the item is but with that being said there are certain stats that items have that you're going to want to look for each class and spec has different stats that they're looking for that are most beneficial to its class so for example on my shadow priest for the secondary stats haste is going to be my most important secondary set and then from there it depends on what activity i'm doing in the game but there are a bunch of different stats in the game critical strike which is a secondary stat gives you your skills a chance for greater effectiveness on attacks or heals so basically if they crit they'll either do more damage or more healing haste will increase your attack speed and spell casting speed it will also increase the speed at which your dots take which is something else to keep in mind too you have mastery now mastery is basically something that each class and each spec has they have their own mastery their own stat unique to that class and spec so mass increasing your mastery will increase that specific stat that your class spec has i know i just had class and spec like 800 times but if you go into your spell book and scroll all the way over to your mastery you'll be able to see exactly what it is and by increasing the mastery on your gear you will be increasing that passive you also have something called the versatility which just gives you a flat increase to your damage done and healing done and also give you a flat decrease to damage taken and then the final stat is going to be leech which returns a portion of your damage and heal uh returns a portion of your damage and healing as additional healing to you there's one more secondary stat that's not on here called avoidance which increases the dam uh reduces the damage taken from aoe effects so in general though the four secondary stats you're going to be paying the most attention to are crit haste mastery and versatility those are kind of like the big four for secondary stats now in terms of primary attributes or primary stats there are five different ones each class will pretty each class and spec will pretty much use three everyone's gonna have access to armor which is obviously the actual armor value of your various armor which reduces physical damage taken you also have stamina which increases your health and then the final stat is going to vary based off of your class and spec in general magical users will use intellect intellect is the stat that increases the potency of spell attacks for plate wearers you will use strength which is going to increase the damage that your skills do and then for any male or leather wearing melee or physical damage dealer um you will use something called agility which is like again so strength is for plate wares but agility is for male and leather physical damage dealers so hopefully that clears that up so again you're a magical user you'll be looking for intellect plate wear is strength and everybody else is agility so those are just what your stats are going to look like for your various gear pieces um we've also gone over durability and rarity and item level so how to actually gear your character that's the big question i've reached the end of the game how do i get gear so again this is going to vary per expansion but i'm going to give you a general look at how you can gear yourself there's four primary ways that you get gear world quests pvp dungeons and raids in terms of world quests i don't even know what a world quest is what is a world quest dots gaming and world's quest is a it is exactly what it sounds like it's a quest located on a certain part of the world map in general when you hit the end of the game um and you quest through all the zones you will unlock world quests for that zone which allow you to get a bunch of different things from doing them and it's rng on which you know what thing the world quest gives you as a reward but for example if you look at this quest for glump ma if i do this and kill him i'm able to get glottmod's ring which is an item level 410 ring so when i first start gearing it's going to be really good for me to look out for these world quests that drop gear because it will help me progress my character's gear pretty fast you also have these things called emissary quests which well basically if you complete as you can see i have an emissary for the vol deny which will give me an item level 445 piece you know if i do four of the world quests for the vol deny i'll unlock this emissary cache i can then go to the emissary turn it in and get that armor piece so paying attention especially at the beginning of expansions or right when you're first starting your gearing process paying attention to the world quests and the emissaries to see you know what who offers what gear is it's a really good thing to pay attention to but once you graduate past world quest you're going to be looking for that next step and for most people it's going to be one of these three things or multiple of these three things like i said pvp dungeons and raids in terms of raids the more difficult the raid the more of a chance you have to actually are the better the gear will be excuse me so obviously a mythic difficulty raid is the highest will drop better gear than a lfr rated dungeon which is the one that you can just excuse me raid which is the one that you could just queue for so by running the different raids you can get gear from those harder the raid better the gear same thing with dungeons there's normal dungeons there's heroic dungeons there's mythic dungeons and there's mythic plus dungeons gonna explain this more in the dungeon section but again similar to raids the harder the dungeon is the better gear will drop from the dungeon also now this part's going to vary like i said based off the expansion there's usually a chest or a cache or a vault or somewhere in the different expansion that will give you better gear based off of the hardest difficulty dungeon you have done for that week it has a chance for a random piece of gear so in addition to just you know being able to get gear from the dungeon you also will have a chance at a random piece from this cache or vault or whatever based off of the highest difficulty dungeon you have done so you're going to want to try to do as high of a mythic plus dungeon for the week as you can to make the piece that you can get from that random item cache as good as possible now the final activity you can do for gearing is pvp and pvp gearing has varied a lot over the last couple expansions blizzard has been changing the way that pvp gearing has been done for a while but in general you earn this currency from doing ranked pvp activities called conquest now as you fill up this conquest bar you're able to get a piece of gear and if you fill up the conquest bar and earn conquest you're able to get a random piece from a cache or from a vault or somewhere it's very similar to the mythic plus or once you've you know get so much conquest for a week you're able to get a piece of a random piece of gear related to pvp now this is a specific mention to shadow lands and hopefully this is the way it stays moving forward by also earning honor points from uh unranked pvp or conquest points from ranked pvp there also will be a vendor located in the main city hub for the expansion that we are in at any given time that will sell you pvp gear and could potentially upgrade it for you that is what it's going to be looking to to be in shadowlands we're still learning more about that system but the general thing for pvp gearing is unranked pvp can give you some gear ranked pvp will give you better gear and the higher your rating in ranked pvp the better gear that you can get unfortunately at the time of recording this all of it is rng but it is looking to give we're looking to have a little bit more choice in shadow lands but i don't want to you know go over those systems too in depth because those are still in development but it's just i want for this section i just really wanted to explain the different avenues and the different ways that you guys can get gear at the end of the game so you know you can understand that the progression is going from world quests to either like uh let's say mythic zeros which are just basically the base level mythic dungeons and doing um maybe like an easier raid and then from there you're going to want to get into ranked pvp the mythic pluses and then higher tiered raids it's just kind of like that vertical progression that way if you have any questions about this feel free to leave a comment below and i could do my best to explain it a little bit further the next thing that i'm going to cover is how to interact with various players and npcs in world of warcraft now while in other games you typically do this through keybinds and wow it's mostly done through left and right clicking various things so for example if you want to take a look at options that your own character pane has you could just simply right click it and you'll be able to see a bunch of different options while left clicking it will actually target yourself in terms of npcs it's a very similar thing if you left click the mpc you will target it right click you can see options on the frames or if you right click the mpc you're actually able to talk to it one of the cool things i just want to note this simply because i chose this guy on purpose guards in towns will allow you to see points of interest so for example if i wanted to go hey dude where's the bank i could click that it will show me an icon on my mini map of where the bank is so do keep in mind that especially if you see this uh icon where my mouse is like the little scroll that you know that's a guard that you can talk to very similar thing with something like a blacksmith um if i know that i want to interact with let's say drix here left clicking him will again target him but if i right click him you can see the picture of the anvil which means that i'm able to get repairs from him similarly with this person on my right mojudishu again left click will target the bag means that this is generally a vendor or somebody i can purchase something from so by right clicking i can interact with what that person has now besides just the interaction with npcs if i was looking at let's say an enemy npc left clicking again would target it right clicking would then initiate my auto attack so if i am at a you know using a bow it'll initiate my bow auto attack if i'm in melee range it'll initiate my melee auto attack so we're gonna discuss that a little bit more in the combat section in terms of actually interacting with other players if again if i walk up to a player and left click them it'll bring up that person's name and character portrait if i right click the player um again if they're an enemy player i will be able to attack them but again for actually interacting with the player you're going to want to right click their portrait right here so by right clicking the portrait you can see the option to invite whisper you can inspect them to see what gear they're wearing what talents they have uh things about their pvp rating etc you can compare achievements trade you can do this thing where you follow them so for example if you're running from point a to point b and you don't want to you know control your mouse and you just want to allow that person who's leading to lead you can follow challenge them to a duel a pet battle duel which i'll go over a little bit later uh you can then move just move the frame entirely report player copy character name cancel so you have a lot of different things you can do but generally again it's done through left clicking and right clicking the various frames this next section is going to go over the basics of combat and tab targeting in world of warcraft so the combat style in world of warcraft can be summarized with two things by two phrases cooldowns and tab targeting so tab targeting is exactly what it sounds like when you press tab you target something and to cycle through your available targets you just click tab that is where the nickname tab targeting obviously came from if you want to target something done manually besides cycling through with tab you can just left click it to target it and then right click will initiate your guy to actually try and attack it so as you can see i instantly went into a combat stance to start attacking but because i'm gonna using a melee weapon i'm obviously not but if i was in melee range i would be auto attacking with my weapon um if you have for example if i had a bow in my hands right now i would be actually shooting this guy right now with the bow with my auto attacks by right clicking and again if you're in melee range and i could show you um as an example on one of these guys right here if i walk up to them right click you see how i'm auto attacking with my weapon you know just auto attacking with my weapon just sitting here not doing anything and just using my weapon to attack now from here you have a couple of different options to use other skills so what i could do is i could if i could want to i could either press two to apply my dots and press tab to cycle through them i could also click it with my mouse but as i explained in the previous section i absolutely recommend using keybinds instead um and obviously when my target's health reaches zero they die it's the wow's combat in general is pretty simplistic it's not like uh like in terms of its face value it's not like other combat systems where you have to learn how to dodge and block and i do those things actively which is called action combat this style of combat you you don't have to aim anything you pretty much just you know click your skills they automatically lock on and attack your target so by just simply pressing my four key now i'm using my mind play you press tab to switch my targets apply my dot press my one key press my four and then targets die now if you for example would like to cast a skill on an ally though uh you would need to target the ally you wouldn't be able to use um like damaging skills you would only be able to use skills that heal or skills that shield or skills maybe that buff so for example if i wanted to cast a skill on the zandalari fishmonger i wouldn't be able to use my shadow word void which is an attack skill because it's an invalid target but i would be able to use something like my power word shield since it's a defensive skill and can assist in on my uh on my allies so as you saw green enemies or excuse me green targets are friendly same thing with player friendly players are obviously friendly red means their enemy and yellow means neutral and generally with yellow enemies you can interact with these guys and talk to them no problem but because they're neutral to you you would be able to still attack them so let's say this guy i was like you know unlike the way you're looking at me i would still be able to attack him anyway and deal damage and normally out in the world the uh a like a neutral target if you start attacking will attack you back um but i guess in this case the guy just decided not to now whenever you do use a skill though it does go on cooldown so for example if i look at my master spell it's got a 30 yard range costs mana has a cast time but as a 45 second cooldown while my vampiric touch has a cast time 40 yard range but no cooldown so if i was to go and use my mask to spell i now can't use it again for 45 seconds okay because you might be looking at my bars and going well dots it really seems like you have a lot of skills on your bar like how do you know which ones to use and how do you know what to do in general most classes depending on the difficulty the class will have like i'd say maybe like a three to eight button general rotation you want to go through so um i'm gonna explain rotation in a later section but the tl dr is basically it's an order that you want to click your skills for maximum damage or healing basically and i have skills that i can click on a regular basis so normally i would do my two key into my one key a bunch of times until my five key glows like it is and then i would click that and then i'm in my void form and just basically i bounce between one and five whenever they're on cooldown and use four as a filler but you that's only five buttons i didn't say explain it like that so you'd understand my rotation it's just simply to show you the general rotation that i have is like five buttons okay the rest of this stuff is all situationally used okay so for example let's say i need to heal myself while still dealing damage i could use vampyric embrace here which will allow me to heal a nearby ally or myself for 85 of any single target shadow spell damage that ideal let's say i want to go into my burst and deal a lot of big damage i can use my shadow fiends to shum in a shadowy fiend to attack my target for 15 seconds as you can see though this has a three minute cooldown so you want to i want to use this skill really really sparingly and only when i absolutely need it same thing with vampiric embrace and it's a two minute cooldown so i really should only use this skill when i absolutely need it i also have dispersion which is my big defensive cooldown so what this does is this disperses me into pure shadow energy reducing all damage taken by 75 for six seconds but i'm unable to do like basically anything while i'm dispersed but again two minute cooldown so you don't want to just be like okay i'm taking five damage let me just disperse you want to save it for when you absolutely 100 percent need it i do have some other skills though that i could use you know maybe in a defensive pinch like you can see that my power would shield will apply a shield to myself i have a heel from my shadow mend okay i could use this to just simply heal myself with no problem so it's just again the the skills that you choose to use and how you want to use them all depend on the situation that you are in now something to note though that if you are let's say targeting let me go back to um using my shield and my ally for example added default there is a key that you can use to self-target yourself and that is the control key so basically we have huck over here so if i wanted to apply the power word shield to him i would just click r and he would get the shield if i wanted to apply it to myself while still targeting him i would hold ctrl and then click r and it would apply to myself it would also automatically apply to myself if i was targeting nobody or targeting an enemy but this section and the key binding section as well as the uh rotation section are pretty much going to go hand in hand so if you have any questions about combat i would give those sections a watch but tab targeting cooldown combat is in general pretty simple to understand at a base it has a kind of like a low floor of understanding and it's relatively straightforward but once you get more into the higher tiered parts of the game understanding when to use your cooldowns and the most appropriate time to use your cooldowns also while going through your rotation that is when things get interesting and that's what separates the best of the best the next section that i'm going to cover is what's known as the holy trinity in mmorpgs and then it has to deal with the roles of the various characters that the various characters in wow can fill and you have a tank you have a healer and a damaged dealer which is known as dps for short now each of these roles plays a specific part of the raid group and they all do share equal importance the role of your tank is that you're willing to protect allies from harm by ensuring that enemies are attacking you instead of them so the tank's goal is to basically get all of the various monsters and enemies in an area to attack them so tanks are usually beefy they're hard to kill they have tons of armor and skills at their disposal that help with defense and they're just really really what's called tanky that's where the term tanki comes from when people refer to enemies being tough to kill in mmos it comes from that tank roll the tank is then kept alive by a healer and a healer is exactly that they heal their allies they heal the tank they heal the damage dealers and their job is to keep everybody alive so you have your tank which is preventing your enemies from attacking anybody else in the party and taking and soaking all the damage you have your healer who's keeping that tank alive but then you also have your damage dealer so your role in the in the dungeon or raid party is to deal the actual damage to the enemies so as you can see these all play a role in a group you know it's really easy to see how the puzzle pieces fit together the tank gets all the mobs to attack them the healer keeps that tank alive and then the damage dealers kill all of the things while they attack the tank so that's what's known as the holy trinity of mmos that's what all the different rules mean and what they fill so when you are looking at a character and you go okay you know what does this mean when he says that this spec can tank you know or this spec deals damage or the spec heals like these are how all the roles work and this applies to all mmos but this is how specifically it does work in world of warcraft the next thing that i'm going to cover is specializations and talents so i did kind of go over this a little bit in a previous section but i just want to cover really quick what specializations are again so specializations are basically like a sub class for the class that you're playing so for example i am playing a priest and i have a choice of three different specializations that i can choose from i have a shadow damage dealing priest i have a disciplined healing priest and a holy healing priest and the way that discipline and holy go about healing is different they have different skills and access to different things and like i said it's just kind of like the sub class for your main class if you want a full list of the classes and specializations i recommend going back to section six and giving that a watch where i go over all the different classes and specs and give you a rough idea of what you can expect from each class but once you choose your spec which can be done at level 10 from there you get to choose your talents now the talent tree here is going to look a little bit different come shadow lands right now i am making this video in battle for azeroth so it will look a little bit different in terms of the levels here on the side but take those numbers aside basically what a talent treat is is a choice of three different talents per tier and it either gives you access to an additional passive ability or an additional active ability or maybe it changes one of your active abilities into something else basically every so many levels i'm not really sure what these breakdowns are going to become shadow lands but right now it's 15 30 45 60 75 90 and 100 um you know i don't know if this is going to be every how many levels this will be but regardless you get your first talent at level 15 and then every x number of levels you would get an additional talent so for example on my 30 talents here i could choose between having my shields make me run faster i have a option to make my vampiric embrace have a lower cooldown or i have an option to have my dispersion have a lower cooldown and heal me i can only have one of these active at a time and i need to be in a rest area to change these talents i'm going to go over rest areas in a later section but basically um any main city or an inn is considered a um it's considered a rest area and i know as i say that i run the wrong way just to show you guys what it looks like but basically your talents really help define your character's build along with your stat choices like i mentioned in section 14. you know your stats play a huge role in your character and certain characters have better stats than others but when it comes to talents talents play a huge role as well so for example let's say when i pve i like to use shadow word void deals a lot of damage but it has a cast time and generally when i play arena i'm the one always getting attacked by enemies they might interrupt my spell cast so i like to use shadowy insight so my shadow word pain one of my dots has a chance to make one of my instant uh one of my skills that deals instantaneous damage but it does have a cast time has a chance to make it instant cast so as you can see the different talents fill different niches and and serve different purposes depending on the type of content that you're dealing or dealing with but like i said basically talents just give you access to more passives they augment your skills they can morph them into different versions like as you can see this will replace one of my skills with the new one so it just gives you access to more things you also will have access to pvp talents during battle for azeroth you have access to four but come shadowlands it's looking like you're going to only have three you won't have this gladiators medallion that'll be from an item but you will get these three additional skill uh passives and again you can choose between having more passives or you could choose to get additional skills so i could get the cyphen skill or the driven to madness passive it just depends on kind of what i want for my particular build and depending on what i'm doing and these things are only active in pvp combat or if i have war mode turned on which i explained in the user interface section if i turn on war mode back in orgrimmar i will get access to these talents out in the world not in dungeons but out in the world uh but this is just a quick overview of what specs and talents look like and how they're going to be incorporated into your character's build the next section that we are going to cover is threaten aggro and this section is going to mostly be appropriate to tanks but i still think damage dealer and healing players should know what threat is in aggro and how it works just so that they can make sure they don't you know steal threatened aggro from their tank in a dungeon or rate it's just good that everybody has at least a very base understanding of how this system works now i'm going to use the wowgamepedia.com uh their article on threats i think it does a really good job at explaining it but i do want to expand on some things and just maybe explain some things a little bit more simply just so that they're easier for you guys to understand so ins while in other mmos you need to individually taunt all the different um mobs or enemies in order to get them to attack you or even the raid bosses in while you go off of a measure of threat which is a measure of the npc's aggression towards a player and each npc has their own threat table and a unit towards the top of their threat table is going to be the target of its aggression and this is all like i said also what's known as having aggro now the way it works is that every unit is added to a threat table upon getting in combat and it's removed at the end of combat and when you enter a fight everybody has zero threat and every npc looks at the threat of all of the different enemies or basically us that it's it's looking to attacking now the way that you can generate threat against an enemy is in a bunch of different ways you can either deal damage to the enemy heal one of your allies or buff friendly targets okay so by basically doing more actions you are generating more threat against the enemies the enemies see you as a greater threat if you're doing a lot of healing or if you're dealing a lot of damage or pumping out a lot of buffs you are generating more threat so the goal of the tank is to try to generate more threat than his his or her allies to make sure that they are being attacked at all times now you can override the threat that is being generated towards one of your allies as a tank if you do use a taunt ability there are taunts that will override the aggro table for a short period of time and give you a chance to regenerate that threat to make sure that you are the greatest threat to that enemy now your allies as a tank right your allies can exceed your threat and get aggro if they generate 10 percent more threat than you while in melee range or a ranged enemy if it generates 30 more threat while outside of melee range so if a range if a range ally generates a 30 more threat they will take aggro now the good thing about tanks is that tanks do have threat modifiers because you might be thinking as a tank like how am i supposed to deal enough threat on top or do generate enough threat on top of taunting and doing everything else more than my allies who are dealing all this damage and all this healing but thankfully you do have threat modifiers that increase the amount of threat you generate quite by quite a lot and each class has its own threat generator so for example tanks have a five times threat modifier from blood presence for dks bear form for druids stance of the sturdy ox for monks defensive stance for warriors and righteous fury for paladin so you're always going to want to keep those things up to make sure that you are greatly increasing the amount of threat that you are generating against your enemies now many roles have the have the ability to reposition themselves within a threat table like i said threat tanks will elevate themselves to the top of taunt now good thing as dps and healers okay is that you will have access to certain skills not all classes do but some do that have the ability to either put your taunt on or put your threat on somebody else or reduce threat so for example i play a priest so i have access to fade so it removes all of my threat for 10 seconds so for example if i start getting attacked and maybe i'm only one position ahead of the tank in the threat table if i just fade it removes all my threat instantly puts the tank back at the top same thing with misdirection as a hunter you're able to let's say you're generating too much threat you can misdirect to your tank and all of the threat that you generate is now generated towards the tank with tricks of the trade which is a rogue skill basically the same thing redirects all threat you cause towards a different party member so again you would use that on your tank and you could also completely drop threat if you were to go invisible or become uh you know not seen by your enemies anymore so you're using invisibility for mages or vanish from rogues which is a good way to do that but that is basically how tanking works i i'm gonna just give this summarize it in a little bit of a more simplistic way too because i i did kind of just read through the article and give some little you know annotations along the way but the quick and dirty version is that you need to just generate more threat than your allies threat is generated through taking a bunch of actions from attacking to buffing to healing as a tank you have skills and passives that make you generate more threat than others so while you're dealing damage you can make sure to deal the most threat which will then cause you to have aggro but if for some reason an ally does take aggro from you you do have taunts to make sure that you can override that aggro to make sure that the enemy is take is only attacking you so you can generate more threat against it the next section that i'm going to cover is your rotation now i did kind of hint to this in the combat section but i did want to give this just its own section just to give you guys a rough idea of what a rotation is and what you should be thinking about when going through your rotation now obviously rotation is going to vary from class to class so i'm just going to speak in terms of my class which is my shadow priest now a rotation is defined as an optimal way to click your skills to do your goal most optimally whether or not that is dealing damage healing or generating threat your rotation is just clicking your skills in an optimal order on a rotation to do things the most efficiently and but what that really means is like you go through it multiple times so it's not like you just do it once and bam you're done you have that rotation it literally it's literal term you rotate through it you do it over and over and over again and it's the most efficient way to deal damage so for me as a shadow priest my general rotation would be to apply my damage over time skills use my instant cast skill mind flay which is like kind of like my filler until this skill comes off of cooldown or i get into my void eruption i then use my void eruption and then basically just alternate between using shadow word void and void bolt and then if i need to fill at any point i could use half a mine flay but then i basically just bounce between these things until the void eruption runs out and then i rinse and repeat and go through that full rotation when i'm obviously trying to go for more big burst damage during maybe let's say a boss fight i can then use either things like shadow fiend to generate even more damage i could use memory of lucid dreams which is an azurite trait that i have to um excuse me in essence that i have to generate more of one of my resources that just keep me in my void form which is like my my damage dealing form keeps me in that form for a longer period of time so your rotation again will will generate per what will vary per person per spec per class but that's just kind of what it is so you know when you do see like guides and stuff talking about rotation like that's what that means so just to give you an example we go dot instant cast instant cast this guy died really fast but then i go mind flay this comes off cooldown so i use it again mind flay okay now we see i have my void eruption so i go vampiric touch void eruption shadow word void void bolt i would have used half a mine flay there then shadow word void void bolt and then only refresh my dots when they need to be refreshed so as you can see it's just finding the most efficient way for your class to deal damage that's basically what a rotation is same thing applies to healing you go through your heels you apply them in a certain order you know how to layer them technically though healers and tanks so it'll be a little bit more situational they don't have as much of a set rotation as damage dealers do but still they do to a certain extent have certain heels that they want to use in certain situations and rotate them to keep things as layered as possible on their allies but just wanted to give you guys a quick rundown of what it is and so that when you see that term being thrown around you know what it means [Music] the next thing that i want to cover is enemies and rarity and i kind of went over this in a previous section but i did just want to touch on it in its own section just so you guys had a rough idea of what it was so enemies that have their health bars are red and you can see that they are red and then you have the the sword icon when you hover your mouse over them that means they are an enemy unit if you walk by them you will generate aggro and they will start attacking you just to kind of show you if i walk near this guy instantly starts attacking me because i'm within his aggro range and i did explain aggro in a previous section so if you want to know what aggro means you can just feel free to go give that section a quick watch so besides enemy units you also have neutral units neutral units will not attack you unless you attack them you're able to attack them but you're also able to interact with them and have a friendly interaction with them but if you do choose to attack them they will become hostile to you and start attacking you instead um not all neutral units will do that you know a lot of times like the city guards and stuff or your reputation to them is still neutral like it just has to deal with you know more of a rep grind thing and not as much of a combat thing but that general the yellow neutral color of the allies more or the enemies mostly applies to just when you're out in the world now allies that are have a green health bar or have green names to you that means that they are friendly they can't be attacked you you can't you know attack them or mess with them at all you can though heal them and buff them but it just means that you're able to interact with them in a friendly manner and they won't attack you if you walk by them now if an enemy has a gold dragon around their unit frame it means that they are an elite enemy so they're going to be a much tougher enemy to fight so for example all bosses when you're in a dungeon will be an elite enemy all of the trash mobs will a lot of times the trash mobs will be too but just in general an elite thing here this just means that it's a much tougher enemy than let's say something that doesn't have the dragon now if this dragon was gray and not gold it would mean it's also an elite quality enemy but that it's rare so it's you know doesn't pop up as frequently has a much lower spawn timer and generally will have a chance to drop some special loot so you can feel free to kill rare enemies when you see them to have a chance at special loot but that's just a quick overview of the different uh ally and enemy types that you'll see in game like what the dragon indicators mean and how you can interact with different uh npcs in the world the next section that i want to cover is healing now i did explain earlier in the holy trinity part of the guide that you will in dungeons have a specific person in your group to actually heal you called the healer so that when you take damage and lose hp they can heal you back up to full but let's say you're just out in the world questing and you're by yourself and you're out questing and stuff and someone starts to attack you and deal damage to you let me just like try to actually take damage from these things i'm just going to show you as an example um what you can do when you take damage let me just have all these guys actually deal a little bit of damage to me as a class that has the option to heal itself you can just simply use your own heels so for example i can just simply use my uh shadow mend now that i finally took a little bit of damage i could use my shadow meant and heal myself up back to 100 i could also just use my damage shield and shield myself from these guys attacks um so i have a lot of options that i could do but what if let's say you're like a warrior or something and you don't have a lot of self-healing at your disposal what are you supposed to do when you take a lot of damage out in the world and you can't heal yourself back up well you have an option to actually eat food so for example i have seasoned loins which will restore health and mana over 20 seconds in this mushroom i must remain seated while eating so let's say for example i'm out i'm fighting enemies and i need to heal up and don't have heels i could just quickly sit down outside of combat eat some food and it will regenerate my health back to full quickly and then i can go back out and get into the fight you also have certain uh classes that can generate food through their skills like mages can generate mana buns and you also have a classical warlock who can generate something called a health stone which gives you an item where when you use it you heal yourself for a certain percentage of your hp so these are just some of the different ways that you can heal yourself in wow and there's just things to keep in mind when you're in uh out on your adventures or in a dungeon party the next thing that i want to cover is quests and leveling up so there's a lot of different quest markers out in the world that when you first see them you might be a little bit confused and i did kind of allude to them in a previous section but i did want to give them their own specific section so you'd be able to quickly reference it when you're out in the world and you want to see that a npc has a quest for you or a non-player character or just like a computer player has a quest for you to do that you can go on and do various things for experience and for maybe some rewards and some money you can see that they have the yellow quest marker above their head the exclamation point so you can go and talk to that person and either accept or decline that quest you also have blue quest markers which indicate daily repeatable quests that are quests that can either be done once a day or sometimes even just only once a week um and those things are repeatable and you're able to do those over and over again to continue to get the same reward each day you also when you are done with a quest unless you want to turn one in the exclamation point above somebody's head will turn into a question mark and you're able to walk up to that person you're able to right click them to interact you can just hit continue complete and you will complete that quest and gain experience as you can see i just gained 4 600 experience on my palette in here and it now shows here at the bottom this is where your experience bar is going to be and you can see that you the more experience that you gain the higher your level will go so as right now i have 23 000 almost 24 000 experience out of 144 000 needed for my level and i am at 17 total experience so the more experience you gain this bar will increase and when it fills up you will ding next level and for example for me i would go from level 58 to 59 and you can gain experience from doing a multitude of things you can either just you know complete quests uh do world objectives around the world like sometimes for example you'll see on the right it'll say like world's objective and then you can go and actually complete that world objective and gain experience or maybe some other rewards through it or you can just actually kill enemies which is why i'm trying to drive out here so i can see if i can find something real quick that's still alive so if i go up to this uh this thing this crust buster and i actually uh attack and kill it i guess we're going to attack the hellfire pig as well when i go and i kill it as you can see i just gained 1300 experience so as i kill enemies i will gain experience as well just kill this thing real quick boom 1340 experience so you're gaining experience from killing things from quests and from world objectives and all these things contribute towards your experience bar to get you closer to leveling up this next section is going to cover dungeons and raids in world of warcraft which are the primary endgame pve for the game dungeon party sizes are five members where one you have one healer one tank and three dps and the difficulties scale from anywhere from normal which is the lowest difficulty heroic which is the middle difficulty and mythic which is the hardest difficulty now past mythic dungeons you have something called mythic plus and i'm going to display um an overview of what mythic plus is from wow ahead because i think they have a really good uh way of explaining it mythic plus dungeons were epic you're at the higher base eye level than other sources besides raiding so as i explained earlier and how the gearing section works mythic plus dungeons give better gear than just regular mythic dungeons heroic or normal dungeons and are the best way to get high to your uh high eye level gear mythic plus dungeons have levels for example a level three dungeon will be more difficult than a level two but less difficult than a5 so the higher the mythic plus key is the more difficult it is and the mythic plus key is an item that you get from doing a mythic dungeon that makes it harder to do it's a physical item that you have to actually put a group together to go to the dungeon place the key in the dungeon and it will actually turn it into a mythic plus now enemies in the dungeons will deal more damage and have higher health pools with each level your party conquers and the higher the dungeon is the more difficult they are higher level mythic plus dungeons will also give higher eye level loot so the higher the dungeon the better the loot and at certain levels the dungeon gains what's called in a fix that changes the way that enemies will act and add additional complexity to the content so it basically adds other challenges to doing the dungeon besides just the dungeons based mechanics and each week players will receive a guaranteed a piece of loot based on their performance in the previous week's mythic dungeon lockout so basically the higher mythic plus key you do the better your random loot piece of gear will be from either the chest or the vault depending on what the expansion has the following week now there are things in world of warcraft called dungeon lockouts mythic plus dungeons do not have lockouts but regular mythics do and what that means is that you can only actually do a mythic dungeon once per week but mythic pluses do not have the same type of lockout only the regular mythics do in terms of raids they have a similar lockout feature where you can only do the raid once per week otherwise you are going to be locked out to the content so you can't repeat the same raid over and over and over again now speaking of raids raids are going to be like dungeons on steroids they're more difficult have require more players and generally have more mechanics now a raid can have anywhere from 10 to 30 people in it and the raid will automatically adjust based on the number of people in the group similarly to dungeons there are four difficulties of rating there is looking for raid which is the you can queue for a raid itself and be automatically matched up with people and that is the lowest difficulty of raid that you can do you also have normal difficulty of rating heroic and then mythic one thing to note though about mythic rating is that the party size is locked at 20. so mythic raids will not automatically adjust to your party size it's a fixed difficulty so you have to have a fixed number of players now speaking of queuing for things you can absolutely use a cue finder or a group finder for dungeons and raids you can do that for dungeons you can do random normal dungeons and random heroic dungeons or you can get some extra loot or you can also queue for specific dungeons you might want to do same thing for raid finder you can queue for the looking for raid difficulty but for mythic dungeons for mythic plus dungeons for normal raids heroic raids and mythic raids you do need to manually find a group but blizzard does have a pre-made group thing in the game so if you go to the dungeons and raids tab and go to premade groups you can go to wherever you want so let's say i wanted to do a raid i would click find group and i'd be able to find all of the different groups for the current raid or whatever rate i'm looking to do and i can see what raid here or what group is kind of going to meet the activity i'm trying to do and try and join that group same thing for dungeons let's say i wanted to do a mythic nine for example a level nine mythic dungeon i could go find a group and scroll down for a level nine i would click it and then click sign up and if the group leader likes the way my character looks and the amount of gear that i have they can accept me into the group and i can join doing mythic plus dungeons and raids are some of the best way to get gear in the game so if you are looking to get high tier equipment from pve content this is the way to go about doing it this section is going to cover setting instance difficulty and instance locking i actually did explain instance locking in the last section but i will do it again in this section instance locking basically means that you can only do certain raids and dungeons once per week you are literally locked out of relooting these items more than once a week so for example when i go to farm transmog items or appearance items in icecrown citadel 10 player heroic i can only do that once per week and i have to wait two the following week uh when it resets on tuesdays before i can do it again so if you go to your friends list tab go to raid you'll be able to click raid info and you'll be able to see the various lockouts from you know the different raids and mythic dungeons you're locked out for do note that you can be locked out of mythic and mythic dungeons and raids you cannot be locked out of mythic plus dungeons so that is something to keep in mind heroic dungeons on the other hand have their lockout daily so just something to keep in mind if you are looking to farm dungeons and raids now besides the lockouts themselves we also do have manually setting raid difficulty so if you want to set the difficulty for an instance that you're about to go into you're going to right click your character's portrait and scroll down to dungeon difficulty or raid difficulty and from there you're able to set what you're looking to do so if you'd like to do a heroic raid you can select heroic from raid difficulty if you want to do a mythic dungeon you select mythic from the dungeon difficulty so by right-clicking your character's portrait and scrolling here you're able to set the difficulty of your instance for your group's party the next section that i'm going to cover is player versus player also known as pvp in world of warcraft so world of warcraft has two different types of pvp it's got quick match pvp and rated pvp and from there you have different types within those you have battlegrounds which are the horde and the alliance the two different factions fighting against each other in a specific instance area so this could either be with a certain objective like capture the flag or like a king of the hill type game mode and the number of people that fight in that battleground depends on the specific instance with random epic battlegrounds on the other hand they are more massive large-scale fights that have different mechanics and different goals with you have 40 people on each side so they truly feel like an epic battle and then you also have arena skirmishes which are 2v2 or 383 death matches where the last team's standing wins and those are your quick match pvp options you simply go to the group finder click quick match and you go to your bonus or specific battlegrounds that you could choose to queue for q for that and then you'll be able to join you also do have a rated pvp i haven't been back to wow that long quite yet so my rated pvp things are really bad but anyway you have 2v2 and 3v3 arena where you can fight to gain rating this is ranked pvp so there is no just like let me q to find teammates you do need to go to the pre-made group finder go to arena find a group and actually find teammates to play with or if you have anybody that you know you can you know queue with them but then once you have your you know two-man or three-man group you're able to actually queue for the arena the joint battle button will glow and you'll be able to click that and join the battle and throughout the course of the ranked season you will be able to gain rating and as you do the stuff weekly you can also gain items from it you also can get a mount each season for being above a certain rating you can also get all these new cool new titles other mount rewards special cosmetic things etc for being highly rated in arena this is my favorite type of gameplay so i really do enjoy it you also do have rated battlegrounds which are like these random battleground matches but with a ranking assigned to them and there are 10 v10 game modes and again if you do want to look for either a rated battleground team to fight for or an arena team to fight on you can simply go to the pre-made group tab and look for a group there another thing to note about pvp too is that let's say this will mostly i feel like applied to the horde if you are playing on the horde side and you're noticing hey these q times are taking a really really long time what you're able to do is you're able to go to one of the cities known as dalaran and you are able to go into the sewers and talk to somebody in order to make yourself a mercenary so by going to the dalaran's uh sewers and then talking to sergeant wilson you're able to talk to him and queue for the alliance in a battleground concert on the flip side though you could also if you would like to q as the horde if the queues are ever in balance and when you do swap sides you do get a corresponding ratio to your race so it will be replaced by something else but this is just a quick overview of pvp in world of warcraft and the different modes that are available or this next section of the guide we are going to go over professions in world of warcraft now there are 11 primary professions and three secondary professions in world of warcraft you can only have two primary professions at any given time but you can have all of the secondary professions at once and these are on a per character basis now the different professions in wow are going to be displayed on the screen right now you have some gathering professions and some crafting professions herbalism involves gathering herbs throughout the world mining is mining ores and stones and raw gems from veins and deposits skinning is skinning the corpses of certain creatures for their hides leather or scales alchemy has to do with the creation of potions elixirs flasks oils and more blacksmithing involves creating weapons male and plate armor enchanting has to deal with obviously creating enchants for gear in engineering has to do with creating a wide array of mechanical advices from trinkets guns goggles explosives and mechanical pets as well as some cool utility things that you can use for your character you have inscription which allows you to create glyphs playing cards and you learned the ability to do some other things as well i'm also going to go over some shadowland specific stuff in a bit you have jewelcrafting which allows you to create gems leather working which allows you to create leather and male armor armor kits and capes and then tailoring finally is for cloth armor bags um and things of that nature now one cool thing about going into shadow lands is that some of these professions the crafting ones specifically are going to be needed to create some of these starting items for the legendaries at least it was said um that was kind of like talked about a little bit before the expansion comes out i hope it still is that way when it comes out um but crafting professions are important for creating those items come shadow lands but otherwise they're just really really good for the creation of items now i know people are gonna ask you know which profession should i go with as a new player my recommendation for you is to go with two of the gathering professions either mining and herbalism or some combination of mining herbalism and skinning i just think it's a lot easier for as a new player you're questing going through your adventures you know you see some herbs you see an ore vein you mine it you pick the herbs it just allows you to gather resources while you're playing the game sell those resources on the auction house and make some extra cash that's still what i prefer to do while i'm just you know around doing my world quest and doing things i just prefer to have mining and herbalism so that i'm able to just pick things up as i go but if you want to get a little bit more into the crafting side of things feel free to pick up the a crafting profession and you could if you want to make it easier also pick up maybe a corresponding gathering profession so for example for alchemy pick up herbalism for blacksmithing pick up mining for leather working pick up skinning etc could be an easy way to do things and you know we i could go more into the specifics of um how to make more money with some of the gathering professions but i think that's a little bit more high level for this guide and so i kind of just wanted to stick to the service level talk about what all the professions are and which i do believe are the best for a new player but i definitely would recommend you know whenever you find a professional trainer you can use the little magnifying glass on the minimap to find some pick up these professions as soon as you can so that you can start leveling them from early on in the game [Music] in this next section i am going to cover pet battles now pet battles is an actually pretty robust system so i'm not gonna go over everything about the system but i am gonna go over it just at a base level the first thing though that you do need to know about pets the pet system is that it operates just like you know pets do in any other game if you want to summon a pet you just click the pet you click summon and you're able to summon it and it's able to walk around with you but if you do choose that you want to engage in pet battles it's almost kind of like a pokemon type system in a sense you can assign three battle pets to your battle pet slots and you can either challenge other players to pet battles or just battle with other um wild pets out in the world again kind of like you would expect from a pokemon type game the pets have their own types with various passives and they have things that they're strong against and things that they're weak against they have their own abilities that have strengths and weaknesses they have their own power speed and rarity they have hp pools they have levels if your pet dies it does need to be healed and revived so this is a pretty robust system that you can get really really in depth with but one thing that i do like about the pet system is that a lot of the pets the overall majority are earnable from in-game activity so whether you're doing achievements or just looting things you're able to get pets from a variety of sources making people who do love collecting pets like you can get really really crazy and in depth with the system there's a lot of different types a lot of cool pets to collect and if you do choose you want them to battle you can absolutely do that or if you just want them to follow you around and look cool you could do that as well the next part of the guy that i want to cover is the auction house so the great thing about world of warcraft is it does have a central auction house and blizzard has made a ton of improvements to their auction house over time and i used to run some add-ons for my auction house but nowadays me personally i don't even really feel that i need any because the base auction house in the game does so much you're able to basically purchase anything you want weapons armor bags gems enchantments consumables etc but i think the strength in wow auction house comes from the new selling interface so basically let's say i want to go sell these 10 tide spray linen i have i just simply right click it puts them in to sell quantity 10 and it looks at the various unit prices that people have listed at and has me listed for the lowest item price so i can very easily just come here right click all my items and very very quickly list them all for sale without having to interact with it at all since it automatically pretty much goes in at the lowest price make it really easy to sell my items as fast as possible so very very straightforward system central auction house in the game you could simply just come here in any of the uh faction capitals buy what you need get whatever you want uh when you do purchase something it'll be delivered to your mailbox so you can just come to the mail open this and you will have your items in the mail or if you just need to come here you could just come here list things for sale and then they will automatically be listed at the lowest item price available the next section that i want to cover is mounts in world of warcraft in wow you have an absolute ton of mounts available at your disposal some can be purchased off the micro transaction style shop but for the most part most of the amounts are earned in game through a variety of sources pvp pve achievements uh rep grinds it's different things for your class for your faction for your race there's just so many different amounts that you can collect in world of warcraft so by going to the collections tab and going to mounts you can see the wide variety of mounts that you're able to purchase you're able to get your first mount at level 20 you're able to get faster amounts at level 40 flying mounts at level 60 and then from there you're able to increase the speed of your flying mounts at level 70 and level 80. and you are going to need certain mount permissions to and like learn certain amounts to be able to actually use the mounts at your disposal there's also as you can see there's flying mounts and there is also uh there are also ground mounts that are specific to just you know riding around on the ground but flying mounts can be used in certain zones um if you come here to a flight master the flying trainer um you can see this person in a bunch of different cities you're able to learn apprentice journeyman expert artisan and master writing the apprentice writing is just like i said the base mount trining journeyman writing increases that speed by a significant amount expert writing is your initial flying speed and then artisan and master riding will increase it further than even further and make your amounts even quicker for a uh for a gold price and like i said this is based off of your character's level if you do want to fly in certain uh places certain of the later expansions you are going to need to complete pathfinder achievements so let's say you want to fly in the legion areas you just google the legion pathfinder achievement and you will be able to see what the requirements for flying in those areas are but at a base you are able to fly around in the uh some of the earlier expansion zones as well as the base game zones with your flying mounts um but like i said some of the newer expansions will require that achievement in order to fly around but like i said level 20 is when you get that first mount and you won't have to walk everywhere all the time one last point about mounts is that certain classes actually learn mount skills from their level up process classes like paladins death knights and warlocks all get various mounts from their class kit demon hunters also do get a specific amount from just simply being a demon hunter and druids even learn flight form to be able to shapeshift into an animal of choice that is able to fly now as we all know fashion is end game and in world of warcraft your various outfit styles can be earned from looting items around the world from different raids um dungeons pvp etc you're able to you know ever you get an item you learn its style and you're able to transmog that style onto any piece of gear that you want by going to a transmogrifier so if you go here and go i want to transmogrify my gear you're able to take any gear that you have earned for that items uh armor type onto that piece of armor so for example my grasping crown of the deep looks like my merciless gladiator satin hood which is a piece of pvp gear from like a very very long time ago i think this is season two um so it's really really old but i'm able to make my gear look like uh this old gear that i really really enjoy the appearance of same thing with my weapons my weapons actually look like the legion artifact weapon even though i have just a corrupted gladiator's gavel on so any single time you pick up a piece of gear you learn that gear's appearance and you are able to use that gears appearance on any item of the same weight so for example i can't use this hood appearance on a plate armor helmet i can only use it on um a piece of cloth armor same thing with mail and with leather you can only translate leather into leather mail to mail plate to plate et cetera when it comes to weapons it's kind of the same thing you can only make maces into mesas you can't turn them into daggers um you can only make uh staffs into stabs pull arms to pull arms but like i said any appearance that you learn you can transmog into something else it just cost a bit of a gold fee if you do want to uh change what it looks like what is really cool is that you could also set up uh transmog sets if you want to so every time i make a set that i like i'll just hit save and i'll be able to save it so i'll be able to quickly shuffle between my different options and make my character look however i want him to look since world of warcraft is such a big game there are a obviously ton of websites that have to deal with world of warcraft and give you tons of information and guys on them so i just want to highlight here some common community website resources that i really recommend that all new players favorite i do plan on having some own information on my own website dotsgaming.com which you can find linked in the description below where i'm going to have in the future some written versions of some of the more shorter wow beginner guides that i make i'm also going to have shadow priest guides pvp guides and a lot of good stuff coming in the future so if you just want to check out my website and have it favorited for the future when that stuff is released feel free to check it out but in terms of other websites that i personally use i have i think up here at the top i have one two three four five six seven websites that i personally use a ton and my first being wow head wowhead has like anything about world of warcraft you could possibly want to know whether it be wow retail or wow classic it is like your encyclopedia for all things world of warcraft so this is one website i would definitely recommend having favorite it if you play wow another really good website is icy veins icy veins has pretty much a guide and build for every class and every role in the game pvp pve whatever you're looking for it's got raid guides profession guides it's got guides for basically anything you could want to for a bunch of blizzard games and i obviously am using it for world of warcraft so it's another website that you'll definitely want to check out for really good and up-to-date information a really good website to have favorited for when you start getting or if you start getting into um end game like pve pvp etc to want to if you want to see if your gear is an upgrade or not if you have like a piece that's questionable and you're not sure is raid bots basically what raid bots is able to do is it is able to simulate your um character and you're able to let's say compare one piece of gear on your character to another piece of gear and it will tell you in like a vacuum situation if that piece of gear is an upgrade or not so really recommend it has some other great features as well but that's primarily what i use it for my next favorite website is raider dot io raider io is going to be your gold standard website for looking at people's mythic plus scores um this is used by a lot of people to tell whether or not someone is really you know worth taking into a mythic plus or not what their highest achievements are for mythic plus is just what their general experience is so you're gonna see raider i o score and stuff mentioned a lot especially when it comes to endgame pve content so this is definitely something that you want to know about my next favorite website that i use a lot for pvp is i use check pvp.fr and basically what this does is it lets you look up people's um character names and realms so you're able to look somebody up see their pvp experience their achievements what their recent ratings are and just allows you to look into people's pvp rating before you play with them to see if this is you know if they're lying about their rating or something in group finder you're able to just look up their information here the next website that you want to use for endgame pve is warcraft warcraft logs this just allows you to look up uh how you know people are currently doing on their classes in specific grades so if you're curious like i wonder what the best dps is right now what are people pulling how you know and just take a look at the various damage meters and stuff for anything that has to do with any pve warcraft vlogs is going to have you cover and then the final website that i recommend is thelootdistrict.com it has tons of information about player versus player talks about the different breakdowns and class representations for the various classes shows you the most picked honor talents uh anything you could want to know uh regular talents races factions uh role representations etc for related battlegrounds and for arena so that if you're getting into arena and you're like i wonder what other people use the loot district is going to be able to show you the most common combinations of things used in wow pvp so you can compare that against your own spec to see if maybe there's something that you could change or not to improve your own gameplay there are two types of groups in world of warcraft you have the party and you have the raid a party can have up to five members in it with one person being the leader and during the party there are no restrictions you could also communicate to each other via party chat and you're able to still do quests run dungeons do whatever you want but once you get more than five people up to 30 you enter what is called a raid group and during a raid group there are some different restrictions that are placed on your group that aren't in a regular party and certain types of quests cannot be completed in a raid group i did just want to mention this here in its own section because i didn't want you as a new player to maybe join a raid group maybe you're doing lfr or something or you're just trying to join a big group that's trying to uh kill something just keep in mind that during those group sizes certain quests are unable to be completed and others are so just keep that in mind for when you are joining groups while you're playing world of warcraft something else to keep in mind is that when you are queueing as a party you are only able to queue as five a group of five people for random battlegrounds as well as lfr content you can't go and queue into these things as a raid group you must be in a party you can however um queue for rated pvp as a group of 10 people but obviously when it comes to queueing for a quick match or when it comes to queueing for a dungeon you can you have to be in a party not a raid group the next thing i want to talk about is fast travel in world of warcraft and there are two primary types of fast travel your hearthstone and your flight paths i guess three also if you technically consider your flight masters whistle but that is kind of closely tied to flight paths now when you have your hearthstone in world of warcraft basically what that means is you're able to return yourself to an in of your choice it has a 30 minute cooldown if you are not a guild any 15 minute cooldown if you are in one so basically if you see this person the innkeeper here when i hover my mouse over them i get the hearthstone icon when i talk to this person i have the option to make this in my home which sets my hearthstone here so that anytime i use this hearthstone and fully channel it it will allow me to return to this inn so setting your hearthstone to a you know an in a popular city that you visit a lot or a home location that you find yourself at very frequently is really really good to allow yourself to travel there extremely fast now the other type of fast travel is flight paths now flight paths are similar to fast travel in other games where you learn flight paths as you discover them so let's say this flight path here in orgrimmar wasn't discovered doros would have a green exclamation point over his head and by talking to him and interacting with him i would be able to learn this flight path now by clicking the flight path you are able to travel to other flight paths you have learned so you're able to trap you know fly all the way to these different places but keep in mind it does not happen instantly you do actually go through the travel process now besides flight paths and hearthstone you are you i don't know excuse me you also have your flight masters whistle which is something that can only be used in certain zones and this allows you to request a pickup to the nearest flight master and it will be specific to certain zone expansion so do keep that in mind when you use them they're all there are also these things for horde cities called zeppelins which allow you to travel from one place to another and if you go to the zeppelin master it'll tell you exactly where it'll take you so for example this one will take me to stranglethorn vale in addition in the variety in the various um capital cities you also will have portals that can take you to other places too so if you want to you can come here use those portals and you can travel to a variety of different places so those are all the different methods if of fast travel in world of warcraft and how they can move you around the map crowd control and diminishing returns work a little bit different in world of warcraft than they do in other games and i just want to touch on them a little bit for this section just so that you guys have a base understanding of how it works going into world of warcraft so for those of you who don't know what cc means cc stands for crowd control and basically what crowd control is is it's anything that causes you to lose control or function of your character there's multiple different classifications of crowd control some just prevent you from moving some slow you down and some completely prevent you from making any actions entirely now the way that these crowd control things can be removed from your character is via certain skills like for example as a forsaken character i have the will of the forsaken that removes any charm fear and sleep type crowd controls from my character and we'll share a 30 second cooldown with any other similar type abilities there's also the gladiators medallion that in bfa is a perk that you can get from your talent tree which removes any impairing effect or lots of control from your character with a two minute cooldown for example that would share a small cooldown with will the forsaken that 30 seconds that was mentioned and then going into shadow lanes that's actually going to be an item that you need to equip to your character that you can bind to your uh bars to remove crowd control from your character but you need to be very selective with the crowd control that you removed because as you can see this has a two minute cooldown now you might be wondering well dots if i remove a piece of crowd control from my character what's going to happen if i get crowd controlled again how is that going to work and that is going to work off of the diminishing return system so all of the different cc's in world of warcraft like i said earlier have different classifications and if you want to find a list of classifications just simply search wow diminishing returns on google or something and you'll be able to see all of the different classifications but the way that it works is that any cc that shares the same classification will have have diminishing returns so for example i have a skill called psychic scream that will fear my enemies for five seconds or excuse me that will fit that will disorient my enemies for eight seconds now if a another character decides to disorient right after i disoriented them it will be cut in half so the disorient their disorient will laugh half as last half as long if somebody then does a third disorient it will then be cut in half again being a quarter is long and then if you try to do it a fourth time it will the person will be immune until the diminishing return duration expires and then at that point the person can be uh disoriented once again which is why in certain types of combat especially in arena pvp it's really good to chain crowd controls with different classifications to make sure that you maximize how long you crowd control your opponent so for example i have this eight second psychic scream followed by a four second fear followed by a four second stun and none of these share the same cc classification so all of them would get their full duration i just wanted to give a quick overview of what the system was just that when you saw the terms being mentioned and thrown around you would not be confused when looking at that conversation the next thing that i want to discuss is the faction capitals as well as death rested experience and mail this is just kind of like the miscellaneous section of things that i couldn't think of where to put them anywhere else so the different factions horde and alliance do have their own capital cities each of them at the time of recording this having five for the alliance you have boralus darnassus exodar iron forge in stormwind city for the horde you have orgrimmar silver moon city thunderbluff undercity and desar allure i think i pronounced that correctly so the main faction capitals though within these cities are stormwind city for the alliance which is the human capital and orgrimmar for the horde which is the orc slash troll capital those are your two primary capital cities or the various factions you also do have non like uh non-faction-related capitals like to the two versions of dalaran uh potent depending on the expansion as well as shattrath city with from burning crusade but these are the other faction capitals those are the main ones you're going to be dealing with and then usually each expansion has its own capital city so shadowlands will have its own primary capital that you're going to reference and then moving forward into other expansions usually new ones will add it will be added sometimes they are not faction specific other times they are faction-specific now something else to note in terms of rested experience is that if you take a look at my character's unit frame you will notice above my level i have like what looks like a sleeping um chat bubble with all the z's basically what that means is that my character is rested it means i'm in a basically a safe location so if i go to log off in a rested area it will instantly log off or instantly have me exit the game if i try to log off or exit the game in a non-rested area there will be a 20 second timer before i log out now something else to note be uh to keep an eye out for as well is that if you log out in a rested area you will make it so that when your character logs back in you will gain rested experience which means that you get 200 experience gain from specific sources for a certain amount of experience because you logged out in a rested area so really good to make sure that you always log out in an inn or a city or something so you can make sure to get that experience boost especially while you are leveling the next thing to cover is mail mail can be sent to a variety you know to other players on your faction um but only on your server you can't send mail cross server across this cross that you can only send it to people on your faction on your server um typically also when you buy things from the auction house they'll come here as well so what you could do is you could just do send mail and you can send mail to a bunch of other places you are though able to send things that are account wide via the mail system across um across the different servers so for example i could see my list of alts here so if i do have something that is account wide for example like my marks of honor i would still be able to send those across the multiple servers in general though things are are for the most part server specific but items that do note that they are account bound can only be sent uh it can be sent across your whole account they're not server specific you also can send things instantaneously to your guild as well one of the guild perks lets you do that and also mail that goes to your own character is instance who and like say an alt on your account or something that tends to be instant but mailed to other players will take some time the next thing i actually want to talk about real quick before i talk about um death is the binding system for items in world of warcraft there are a couple of different types you have bind on pickup binds on equip and you have soul bound bind on equip means that the item is not bound to your character until you equip it once you equip that item it becomes soul bound it is completely bound to that character bind on pickup means that once you loot the item it becomes bind it becomes bound to your character becoming soul bound but when you do loot an item from a dungeon most dungeon items tend to be bind on pickup you can know for a two hour time period trade that item to another member of that dungeon party and then but if after that two hour time period passes the item is not tradable anymore or if you you know modify the item in any way it is not going to be tradable the final option is soulbound which you can see here on my blade of the black empire soulbound means it is completely bound to this character cannot be sent to at alt anything on another part of my account can't be sent anywhere it is completely bound to this character we also have the like example the marks of honor they're account bound which means that i can't send it to somebody else's account but can send it to any alts on my account the next thing that i want to show you guys though is what death looks like so we're gonna take a i think i'm gonna land in the water no way good we hit the bridge so when you do die i can't man if i landed in the water that would have been hilarious when you do die um you are able to basically have your spirit go into like the spirit realm so to speak and you have two options for how you want to resurrect yourself you either can come to the spirit healer talk to them and you can resurrect yourself at the graveyard so note what this says if you find your corpse you can resurrect for no penalty if i resurrect you all of your items will take up to 25 durability damage equipped and inventory and you will be inflicted with resurrection sickness for 10 minutes which greatly reduces your combat effectiveness for 10 minutes so basically if you don't want to deal with that debuff you just go you find your corpse you stand next to it you click resurrect now and then you come back to life and your corpse just turns into a skeleton but that's going to be like the rest of the miscellaneous things i have covered and i think at that point i pretty much hit it all so guys that is going to be it for my world of warcraft complete beginner guide i've only made a guide like this for one other game when i played elder scrolls online i made this guide for that game and it was always one of my biggest undertakings that i ever did but it was one of my favorite videos to make simply because i understand how hard it can be as a new player coming to an mmo the games have so many systems so many things that are just bombarding you at once and it can seem like it's really hard to figure everything out and how to tackle everything and what to approach and how to approach it you know when you just kind of get a little bit of information overload so my goal with these guides that i make for the mmos that i play at any given time is that i want this to help new players get into their mmos with as few headaches as possible so they can really enjoy the game and understand the various systems i do understand that this guide was long but like i did say in the intro you know i wanted this to kind of be like an encyclopedia where if you just weren't sure about something and you wanted to learn about it you could just quickly come to this guide click the time stamp reference the section and understand what i was talking about but i had a great time making this i'm so happy to be able to make it for one of my long time favorite mmorpgs world of warcraft and i really hope that you guys enjoyed this and learned a lot from it and truly feel equipped to handle your adventures in azeroth and i really want to thank you all if you did sit through to the closing remarks i really really appreciate you watching the video and i hope you did enjoy it if you liked it of course smack a like on it please share this with any friends that you have that are getting into world of warcraft and you know hopefully this can help them get started like just like it helped you if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below of course subscribe to keep up to date with the world of warcraft content i post here on my youtube channel i know this is probably going to be my first video back into wow in a really really long time but i do plan on outputting an absolute boatload of wow content in the future i am switching to wow as my primary game so please feel free to subscribe to keep up to date with what i put here on my channel i also do have a world of warcraft horde n a community if you want to join that link will also be in the description below so guys thank you very much i really appreciate you watching good luck with your inventors of azeroth as always i'm dotsgaming and i'll see you all in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Dottz Gaming

Views: 531,574

Rating: 4.8919916 out of 5

Keywords: world of warcraft, wow beginners guide, world of warcraft beginners guide, wow guide, world of warcraft new player guide, wow total beginners guide, wow tips for beginners, wow beginner guide, how to play world of warcraft, wow, wow beginners guide 2020, wow complete beginners guide, shadowlands, wow shadowlands, wow retail beginner guide, wow getting started 2020, wow tutorial, wow beginner guide 2020, wow complete beginner guide, world of warcraft complete beginner guide

Id: L9D1V6oKzac

Length: 155min 10sec (9310 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Man_of_words]

I love this idea of getting some beginner guides out there for people new to the game or coming back after a long hiatus.

That said, I think your video could be cut into different aspects, or at least slightly reordered.

I see this video being helpful to two User groups, people completely new to wow, and those returning for shadowlands. A lot of the information presented is singularly useful to only one of those groups though.

For example, you end the video after talking about the spirit healer/rez sickness, which would only be useful to a complete newby. But before that you cover emissaries and world quest, which would seem overwhelming and honestly useless to someone completely fresh to the game since they won't be max for a while. Same could be said for M+ info, or pvp/arena

I think a lot of this information could be split into a couple of different guides, or at least reordered in terms of complexity. Additionally maybe for the complete lowbies they could gain some valuable insight to watching you completely start a new character, do the first few quests rather than hoping around dazaralor.

Anyways, props to you for creating the content, just wanted to share my thoughts!

[u/Dottzx]

This guide that teaches you about every aspect of WoW you could want to know as a new player and is the one-stop shop for anyone starting in World of Warcraft. This is a resource that you can always come back and check whenever you have a question regarding WoW for all of the base-level game topics.

I time stamped the entire thing so it can be referred to and looked at as needed. Don’t think of it as a video you need to watch straight through, but rather a “help manual” that you can always look at and refer to whenever you need help with something. :)

I hope all of the information in this guide is laid out in such a way that is easy to understand and makes sense to everyone. A lot of love went in to this video, and I hope you all enjoy it!