World of Warcraft Tips & Advice

I won't pretend I'm the worlds greatest WoW player. But I'm always trying to learn as much as I can about any game, and with time I learn a lot of useful tips on how to play a game "better". This is going to be an ongoing project, a collection of simple tips, and some subjective advice. I'll add stuff as I think of it. But feel free to write me at Tobold@GMail.com if you want to have anything added, including what name I should credit the advice to.

- The shift key is your friend. Holding down the shift key while right-clicking on a corpse or chest auto-loots it. Without the shift key, you only get the loot window open. With shift all the content of the loot window are transferred directly into your inventory, and the loot window is closed. Much faster. This also works for mining, skinning, and herbalism.

- If you hold down the shift key while right-clicking on an item in a NPC vendor buy window, you get a second window where you can set how many of these items you want to buy. Useful for things like spices, or threads, where you are likely to want to buy 20, without clicking 20 times.

- If you hold down the shift key while left-clicking on a stack of items in your inventory, you can split the stack. You get a window where you can set a number, and then the split amount sticks to your cursor and can be put into another inventory slot.

- All items are color-coded. Grey means that the item is pretty much trash, and can only be sold to a NPC vendor. White indicates items that are ingredients for something else, usually for some crafting recipe. Depending on how rare these items drop, and how much in demand they are, they can sell for considerably more money in the auction house to another player than if you just vendor them. Green / blue / purple items are magic, and give stat bonuses. These should only be vendored if they are soulbound to you, otherwise you always get more for them in the auction house. If you happen to have the enchanting tradeskill, you could also disenchant these colored items into components, even when they are soulbound.

- Far from the auction house? No problem. Make a new character on the same server, station him at the auction house, and send him all the loot you want to sell by mail. The cost of 30 copper is tiny. Even low level green items can easily be sold for twice what a vendor pays, so its sure worth doing this.

- Every character class in WoW can solo, which is wonderful. *BUT* the fundamental laws of MMORPG still apply, a group can kill much higher level monsters than a solo character. You can often get quests which are far too difficult for you to solo, but would give a nice reward of your level. Do these quests in a group, and get the nice items now, instead of waiting until you can solo the quest, and the reward is outdated. Of course you absolutely need a group for the instances and the quests marked as elite.

- The basic functions in a combat are dealing damage, receiving damage, and healing. If you solo, you need to do all three (healing with potions for those classes who don't get healing spells). In a group you need to reconsider your tactics, and concentrate on one of these functions. The warriors and paladins are best at receiving damage (tanking), and should try to hold the monsters aggro (hate) on them with taunting abilities. Priests, druids, and shaman should heal. Everybody else tries to deal as much damage as possible, but without drawing the aggro on them, so they have to attack the same monster that the tank is taunting.

- Don't neglect consumable items, they can make a big difference, especially when you are soloing. Cooking produces food that gives you 15 minutes of increased stamina and strength. Blacksmithing produces stones which increase the damage of your weapon for 30 minutes. And many potions can buff you for up to 1 hour, increasing your armor, strength, agility, and more. Potions can also heal you in combat, restock your mana, or increase your rage as a warrior, but you can only use one of these potions every 2 minutes. Engineering produces lots of items useful in combat, grenades, target dummies, and exploding sheep (yes, really, I'm not kidding you). Unfortunately most of these items can only be used by engineers themselves.

- Alan sent a tip by way of comment: Shift-clicking on one of the names in square brackets in the chat window is equivalent to a /who command on that name, and shows you that characters class and level. And did you know that if you click on the name without shift, you can send a tell to that person without having to spell his name? Quite useful if you see a good offer in the trade channel from a guy named Grywllytsqwyx. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 1:00 PM Permanent Link