Before 60: World of Warcraft Tips

This entry is a continuation of “Intro to Deathknell: Warcraft home of Undead”.

Heading Out To Quest

As an Undead, you’ve already learned a lot about moving around and interacting with the game in a way that other races haven’t had to do yet.  If you got lost in the graveyard to the south of the town of Deathknell, or if you have already taken time to explore a little bit, you’re way ahead of Orcs and Trolls who haven’t had to worry about getting lost yet.  From here on in, however, the playability-difficulty is about the same for all races.

Shadow Priest Sarvis has given you a “starter quest” designed to get you to give you a bit of battle experience and get you to level 2, so let’s get to it! Turn around and head back outside, then continue north along the town path, down past Deathguards Bartrand and Randolph and through the gate they guard.

Always re-read your quest objectives before heading out to fight. As your Quest Log (the letter “L” on your keyboard to bring it up) fills up, reading quest objectives and planning your attack becomes more important.

Depending on how many other brand new players are running around, finding Wretched and Mindless Zombies may be easy or difficult. You might want to take a look at the Zone Map before you run too far away from the Deathguards - by hitting ‘m’ you can bring up a map that is much larger than the minimap. The You-Arrow appears on this map so you know where you are and what direction you’re facing just like in the Minimap. The Deathknell area is rather small compared to the rest of the map, so take a bit of time to memorize where the town is, where you’re standing right now, before you head out to take on the zombies. Being able to use the ‘m’ map to find specific spots in a zone is crucial. The World of Warcraft is HUUUUUGE. Start your good habits early.

Zombie-killing Tips

Since you’re in a newbie zone, most of the quest targets are named in yellow, meaning they are ‘neutral’ in status towards you, and you can walk by them without any fear of them lashing out and drawing you into battle. Each newbie zone DOES have a small selection of ‘aggro’ mobs/enemies, however, so be aware! Once your targets get to level 4 or so, they’re likely to also be named in red, meaning they’ll attack if you get too close.

Wretched and Mindless Zombies are level 1 and 2 creatures, however, so they won’t attack you first and won’t try to defend their fellow zombies who are being killed beside them. This first quest is designed to be an easy fight for a new player who isn’t interested in experiencing game death quite yet. You should be able to go into this with confidence, just looking to have fun and explore, and you’ll do fine.

Choosing Between Quest Rewards

Once you’ve toasted 8 Mindless Zombies and 8 Wretched Zombies and picked up all of the loot from their corpses (keep everything!), head back to the town of Deathknell so you can turn in your quest to Shadow Priest Sorvis. I’ll bet you’re level 2 by this time - congratulations! When you turn in the quest, you’ll be presented with a choice of equipment reward before receiving your cash and equipment reward for the successful completion. If you forget what equipment you’re already using, you can type ‘c’ while the quest-solve window is open. As a brand new player with barely any equipment, you’re best to choose the equipment that is NOT colored entirely red (meaning you cannot equip it as the class you are playing) but DOES have the highest AC (armor class) rating.

Cash For Training

Now that you’re level 2, you get referred to your class trainer in Deathknell (probably in the same church as Shadow Priest Sarvis)… but if you haven’t sold the loot you picked up from the boars, you probably can’t afford to train anything! Go find a vendor, like the General Goods vendor or the Apprentice Armorer/Weaponsmith, and sell the junk you picked up.

I’ve actually got a macro for selling “garbage” (grey) items that I’ll share in a later post and link here. Eventually. If you’re savvy, look for ’sell grey items’.

Get into the habit of picking up every piece of junk dropped by things you kill, and selling them at vendors. At a low level, the wee bit of cash this gets you can be the difference between not training skills every two levels and being able to not only train skills, but upgrade your equipment from vendors as you run across them in time as well.

Stay Tuned For Part III

There’s a lot more to Deathknell than I’ve written here, so stay tuned for part three, coming soon :)

Karma is two things to me:

The thing that keeps me from getting mad at not getting a specific outcome from a specific person.

And

A third-party addon developed for World of Warcraft.

I’ll be talking about the second incantation of Karma here. You’d have to find me in a more philosophical blog to be talking about the first incantation of it.

Karma The Addon, What’s It Do?

Basically, it lets you award or remove “points” from other gamers, so as to remind you next time you interact with them how you already feel about them. The other gamer doesn’t get notified, and there’s no “Karma sharing” function as far as I know, so really, it’s just for you and your own memory.

Personally, I guess I’m a bit of a snob. Certain behaviors annoy me and since this game is about fun to me, part of why I’m using Karma is to help improve my own fun and lower my frustration. Namely, I am in a large guild with my 60 now and want to have SOME kind of understanding of who I’m going into instances with so I don’t go in repeatedly with people who annoy me. Mainly people who are selfish in a team situation, wanting to play like they solo instead of working with the team in a smooth way. I figure it’s not too much to expect at level 60 that ‘for the team’ etiquette would have developed.

Where To Find It, Basics Of Use

I found the Addon here and it installs like any other Addon. To get the command list once it’s installed and you’re re-logged into the game, do /karma.

Unless I’m actively partied with someone, I have to manually add them to my karma list before I can give or take karma points from them. There doesn’t seem to be a quick and easy way to do it from the Karma GUI (found by doing /karma window) but the command to add an online person to your Karma list is:

/karma addmember [player name]
ie:
/karma addmember Valdesta

Then from there, I tend to go into the GUI view (/karma window, find the person in question, and do the Karma rating changes manually with the slide bar. I also put in notes to remind myself why this person has been given or had karma removed. The interface is pretty self-explanatory once you get to it, I believe.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t cover the whole “same person, alt toon” thing but copying and pasting isn’t all that hard once you learn this is just another alt you’re dealing with…

Determining Points Given or Taken

Everyone on your Karma list starts out at 50, so those below 50 are effectively “below average” in your determination, and those above 50 are “above average”. I don’t think Karma can go outside of the 0-100 range, either.

So then, I’ll be giving points to some players and taking points away from others, and I have to figure out what my strategy is going to be for that so I get consistent, useful results over time. This is going to be the thing that takes the most mental time now that the Addon is installed. How much do I give to or take from people in terms of Karma for their actions which I personally deem to be ‘for the team’ vs ‘for myself, screw the team’? I don’t know the answer to that yet.

Right now, tho, I think I’ll award 1 point for everything that makes me think “Hmm, that rocked” and 5 points for everything that makes me think “holy shit, THAT ROCKED!”, and just reverse the sentiments for deductions. It’ll be interesting to see how all these complete strangers online start to stack up now that I don’t have to worry about ever sharing the information or doing anything about it other than avoiding instance parties with the ones who really really suck!

I’ll let you know how it goes :)