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 :)

As an Undead in World of Warcraft, without familiarity with the basic game concepts, it’s not immediately obvious what you should be doing when you first log in a new character. Other races are immediately faced with an NPC (non-player character, computer-controlled character) that has a bright yellow exclamation mark hovering above its head, but as an undead, you first need to climb the three flights of stairs in front of you and exit the underground crypt you’ve woken up in.

Thankfully, as soon as you exit the crypt and run down onto the grassy path, you run into Undertaker Mordo - with a bright yellow exclamation mark hovering over his head, demanding your attention.

Introducing Undertaker Mordo

Undertaker Mordo has a short quest to offer you. If you hover your mouse pointer over him, your pointer will change into a “chat bubble” to let you know that you can talk to this particular NPC. Right click on Undertaker Mordo to initiate your first conversation. If you’re not close enough to initiate a conversation, move closer. Notice the bright yellow arrow tip that’s part of the “chat bubble” pointer - it’s grey when you’re too far away to talk to an NPC.

Note: With a fresh install of World of Warcraft, the conversation with Undertaker Mordo will appear in a “scrolling” fashion in the in-game window that pops up after you’ve right-clicked on a quest NPC. You can modify your User Interface configuration to change this. Stay tuned for additional entries on the topic of basic configuration changes for Warcraft users.

The very first quest for Undead is generally called “Rude Awakening”. Once you click “Accept” at the bottom left side of the quest window, you’ll see the following text appear in your General chat window: “Quest accepted: Rude Awakening”, and a sound will be played. Undertaker Mordo no longer has any symbols hovering over his head.

Using The Minimap To Turn In Quests

This first quest isn’t really much of a quest - more of a basic assignment designed to get you into contact with another NPC who will give you an actual go-out-and-kill-something quest to get you started into the actual game. But, this quick assignment is perfect to introduce the Minimap’s usefulness when it comes to turning in quests as a whole.

In the top right corner of your World of Warcraft window, there’s a circular view of the nearby landscape, with an arrow in the middle, representing where you stand. The top of the circular view is North, and you can tell what direction you’re facing by looking at what direction the You-Arrow is pointing. Since we’re in Deathknell, the circular Minimap has a heading of “Deathknell”. If you click the X beside the location name, you can hide the Minimap. If you click it again, the Minimap will re-appear.

The view you see in the Minimap doesn’t reach very far, but it increases your vision beyond what you can see from your toon’s view quite a bit. Unfortunately, as an Undead, you’ve started the game deep in a graveyard, and you’ll have to do a bit of running to find where to turn in Undertaker Mordo’s assignment.

From the view of the Minimap, you want to run towards the silver arrow that’s just to the right of the “North” marker. From the view of your character, you want to follow the rocky path that heads down the hillside and into the town of Deathknell.

Once you get into the town, you should notice a small faded yellow circle displaying in the Minimap. This yellow circle represents a quest NPC waiting for your arrival. It’s faded because the NPC is indoors and you are outdoors, but if you were both indoors or both outdoors, the yellow circle would be bright.

So, head towards the faded yellow circle on your minimap! You’ll know you’ve found the right quest NPC when you are faced with an NPC with a yellow question mark hovering above it!

Quest Rewards

Quests are in place for many, many reasons in Warcraft. Different players enjoy different pieces of the rewards, but here are an example of some of the rewards for completing quests:

• Bonus experience points, money, armor and weapons beyond what are supplied by those things you’ve killed during quests (great for your own equipment needs especially when you’re brand new and have very little cash to buy new things!)
• Motivation to explore into new areas and find new mob/enemy types
• Visual cues as to whether quests or new areas of the game are good for your level or if they’re way out of your league
• Quests tend to be “chained” together, where a quest in one area leads into quests in another area, and without finishing the first quest, the second quest cannot be picked up or shared by other players. At the end of “quest chains” there are generally pretty cool rewards in the form of cash, experience or equipment, especially as your level gets higher.

Upon talking to Shadow Priest Sarvis in the church in Deathknell, finishing the quest nets you 40 experience and 75 reputation with Undercity, but no cash! The yellow ? immediately turns into a yellow ! and you’re then presented with a quest window for the quest “The Mindless Ones”. You can see from the quest details that once you kill 8 Mindless Ones and 8 Wretched Ones and return to Shadow Priest Sarvis, you’ll get 17 copper coins and also be able to choose between a cloak and a pair of gloves. Your first Quest Loot!

Stay Tuned For Part II

There’s lots to introduce a new player to! Check back for “Intro To Deathknell, Part 2: Warcraft Home of Undead” which will cover the following topics:

• Heading Out To Quest (”The Mindless Ones”)
• Lowbie-killing Tips
• Choosing Between Quest Rewards
• Cash For Training