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Now that you have your character chosen and created, it’s time to start questing. But before you go rushing off to find your destiny let’s take a couple minutes to have a serious talk. Sometimes, when a man and woman love each other very much… oh wait. Sorry. Wrong talk.

Ahem.

The first ten levels of WoW are pretty straightforward. The people with a yellow ! above their heads have a quest for you. When you accept the quest it turns into a gray ? and when the quest is completed the ? turns yellow (and they will also appear as a yellow dot on your mini-map). If you see someone with a gray ! that means they have a quest for you but you’re not high enough to get it just yet. Make a note to come back to them in a few levels.

Another important thing to know is the difference in aggressive and non-aggressive mobs. When you mouseover a mob, a little box will appear at the bottom right of your screen showing you the name and level of the mob. Like this one:

Notice how the text is yellow? That means that this mob is non-aggressive and will not attack you before you attack it. When you target a non-aggressive mob, it’ll look like this:

Not all mobs are this nice however. You will soon run into mobs that show up as red:

and

Red, or aggressive, mobs will attack you on their own once you get within a certain range of them (called the “aggro range”). Make certain to note which mobs are aggressive and which are not. Running through a pack of yellow mobs is fine… run through a pack of red ones and you’ll get to meet Mr. Spirit Healer.

Another important thing to note is the orange level number of the Vile Familiar just above this. This means that the mob is a couple of levels above you and you should probably avoid attacking it for now. A yellow level mob (like the Mottled Boar) is fine to attack. A red level mob should seriously be avoided. Remember Mr. Spirit Healer? Yeah.

With that said, you shouldn’t have too much trouble questing and leveling through your first few levels. However, after having watched my wife level her mage, here are eight additional tips to make your life easier.

1) Be aware of your surroundings. I realize that this is easier said than done when you’re just starting out. However, the importance of this cannot be overstated. Let’s say you are killing boars and you see the last one you need about 50 yards away. Before you run over to kill it, take a second and see what sort of beasties are in the way. Are you going to have to run too close to that bear? Maybe you should go ahead and kill it now when you can get a couple blows in first.

2) Save all White Items. I mentioned back in my money making guide that you should pick up everything that the mobs drop and either sell it or keep it to use. Allow me to expand on that point a bit: There are six quality levels of items, armor and weapons in WoW. They are, in order from worst to best, Gray, White, Green, Blue, Purple and Orange.

Gray Items are often called “Vendor Trash,” because they are essentially useless and can be safely sold to any vendor.

If an item is White then this means it is used for some purpose by someone somewhere in the game. Could I be anymore vague? Possibly. The item may be a reagent for a spell, it may be used in a profession, it might even be a quest item. Until you know what the item is used for, don’t get rid of it by selling it or destroying it. Keep it in your bags or put it in the bank. Once you know what it’s used for, then feel free to vendor, auction or use it. We’ll cover the other 4 quality levels in a later article.

3) Buy as many bags as you can afford as soon as you can. Having more bag space will simplify your life like few other things will. Head to one of these people and get a few 6 slots or even 8 slots if you can swing it. The bags will pay for themselves soon enough as you are able to carry more items to sell without having to come back into town.

4) Know how to talk to other people.. This is an MMO and there are lots of people playing it. If you need assistance on something, talk to the other people playing and see if they’ll help you. Some simple chat commands:

General Chat – Type /1 [space] and then type your message. This can be seen by everyone in your area.
Say – /s [space] message. This will only be seen by people within about 10 yards of you.
Yell – /y [space] message. This will also be seen by everyone in your area but it appears in red. People find excessive yells annoying. Don’t abuse this.
Private message (called a whisper or a tell) to another player – type /t or /w [space] [player's name] [space] and your message.
Reply to a /w or /t – just hit r and the text box will pop up automatically.
Party – To talk to your party members, type /p [space] and your message.
Guild – To talk to your guildmates, tpe /g [space] and your message.
Lastly, if there is another player you find annoying, simply type /ignore [player's name] and you will never hear from them again. You can also right-click their name in chat and choose ignore.

5) Declining group invites does not make you a bad person. If you are questing happily by yourself and you get invited to a group, feel free to decline it, especially if the person did not talk to you beforehand. This is for two reasons. Firstly, you may wish to continue questing solo. That is totally fine and you don’t have to have a reason why. Secondly, the newest trick by the gold farmers is to invite people to a group at random and then spam their gold advertisements. It’s gotten to the point where I decline an unannounced group invite almost instinctively.

6) Don’t be afraid to just run around and explore. A large part of the fun of WoW comes from exploring different places. The quests do a great job of showing you around each area, but there are lots of fun places you can find when you go off on your own.

7) If you loot a chest, loot everything in it. Every now and then as you explore and quest, you’ll come across random chests in the wild that you can open and loot. When you do find one of these, make sure to loot everything in the chest. There are few things worse than coming across a chest, opening it up and finding that the person who looted it before you took everything in it except for one [Light Leather]. As a courtesy to your fellow players, loot it all so that it can respawn later, full of items and money.

8 ) Lastly, don’t worry about professions until level 10. We’ll cover these in a later post.

Ok, that’s it! Go questing and I’ll see you back here around level 10!

Part Four of the Newbie’s Guide to WoW can be found here.

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