Before 60: World of Warcraft Tips

This entry is a continuation of “Intro to Valley of Trials: Warcraft home of Orcs, Trolls”.

Heading Out To Quest

Gornek has given us a nicely-challenging “starter quest”, so let’s get to it! Turn around and head back outside of The Den, and back into the Valley of Trials.

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 Mottled Boars may be easy or difficult. You might want to take a look at the Zone Map before you run too far away from Gornek and Kaltunk - 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 Valley of Trials 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 boars. 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.

Boar-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.

Mottled Boars are level 1 creatures, however, so they won’t attack you first and won’t try to defend their fellow boars 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 10 Mottled Boars and picked up all of the loot from their corpses (keep everything!), head back to the Valley of Trials town so you can turn in your quest to Gornek in The Den. 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.

My troll hunter chose the leather gloves.

Cash For Training

Now that you’re level 2, you get referred to your class trainer in the Valley… 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 Butcher, 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 Valley of Trials than I’ve written here, so stay tuned for part three, coming soon :)