I'm an absolute newbie. Help, please?

[izembo]

happens from time to time, just move, its not that hard, seriously carebear servers are boring before level 30

[Koul]

I've had so much fun on PVP servers it's insane. If you know how to play the game then you should be fine when an asshole comes and tries to kill you. Unless you're lvl 26 and a 60+ comes around....

I remember on my horde pally I was doin a quest in un'goro and two asshole warriors around my level come up and start attackin me. I was prot and I slowly whittled them down and when I killed the first war and got the second one to low life... slowly followed him as he tried to get away..... only to kill him too and camp their dumbasses for 25min.

another example would be today on my druid I was questin in southshore and this hunter 10 levels above me comes and tries to kill me. I slowly lure him to Tarren mill where I throw roots on him and let the guards kill him. I then camp his retarded ass.

I'm a carebear at heart though. Only camp em if they showed hostility first.

[Wintermute]

I gank if the opportunity arises on my Rogue, though I never go for others who don't give Honour, i.e I don't gank lowbies.

I actually trailed a mage yesterday for 2min as he tried to ditch some aggro which he managed just outside a safe zone and instead of walking in where the guards would protect him he stops right outside and starts to much on food.

Silly mage got dropped.

Frustration wise I'd say ganking is about as bad as getting to a slightly crowded camp in FFXI and then having a pack of dipshits who can't go over 5k/hr waltz in to a crowded zone and camp next to you.

As others have said, if another player kills you the only penalty is a quick jaunt back to your corpse, if a mob kills you though you get a 10% Durability reduction on your gear and a repair bill.

Personally I've only been corpse camped once: I tried to gank a mage at level 32 and it took me 3 tries. When I finally got them they called out 4 70s from their guild to harass me.

Annoying? Sure.
But I found it hilarious that someone on a PvP server acted like I had killed their dog over a gank.

Some zones are also notorious for ganking, and you quickly learn which they are. In most cases ganks are few and far between in my experience.

With the new expansion everyone's grinding to 80 so you shouldn't see that many ganks anyway.

[Kyo]

So I was heading over to darkshore I realize dthey change dthe darkshore dock to the northrend boat, which boat takes u to darkshore now?

[izembo]

boat from stormwind

[Kyo]

Ah thats fuckin lame, walked through wetlands for no reason, thanks izembo.

[Plow]

If you're leveling a mage, you should check out faxmonkey's old vids.


This one in particular, "Stupider Mage Tricks," is my fav.

Stupider Mage Tricks

How hard some of this shit is won't really be apparent to someone that didn't play at 60 for a decent amount of time, but it still gives you some really good ideas on how mage can work.

Just remember, ice lance, water elem, etc, didn't exist during his vids.


There's also "Stupid Mage Tricks," "Even Stupider Mage Tricks," and others. I highly recommend any of them for a new mage, and everyone should see the first Stupider imo.


Also, his music selection owns.

[Correction]

I'm partial to Faxmonkey's AV vids. Especially when the Spellsteal exploit was first revealed: YouTube - Nerf Spellsteal By Faxmonkey

[Kenai]

This topic was really awesome!

I'm still a newb too, decided on Shaman (I always pick the unpopular jobs I guess ) and am closing in on 50. Shaman is real fun, but I get owned a lot in PVP. Poor Shams need more crowd control/self defense I don't mind the PvE servers, like someone else mentioned I absolutely despise people who feel the need to constantly gank people 30-40 levels below you (and it happened to me a lot, nothing like having an hour left to do an instance and getting corpse camped outside it because some level 30 something wankers had a DK friend with them). It happened far too often for me, if I wanted to do PVP I'd put my flag up or run to the Basin, tbh.

Anyway, I had a few questions also:

Good addons to have? Even the obvious ones, hold no info because I probably don't have it, lol.

What professions would one recommend for a Warlock? After I'm "done" with my mainstay resto Sham (my rl friends wanted a "non-moron healer", even though I lag sometimes) I'd love to take up a pet job and I'm thinking Warlock will be it (too many hunters for my liking, job seems nice though). My Shaman is an alch/herb man so I was considering Inscription or Enchanting but I'm open to ideas.

Is it common for people to invite you out of the blue? My shaman gets that a lot and I usually decline because I consider it annoying/rude. I expected it to stop but it still happens quite often in the 40s...

Thanks for all the other info.

[Tirrock]

I'm a bit of a newbie myself; nothing at 70, didn't help that I got hunter to 61 before getting tired of it and switching to another character... But I can throw in some add-on suggestions at least.

Auctioneer - Can't imagine the AH system without it.

Bartender 4 - Action bar mod.

SmartBuff - Buffing addon that keeps me sane on paladin. I don't even have a shaman, so I don't know how well it works for it.

SmartDebuff - Healing made easy. I've heard decursive is pretty much the same thing. I wouldn't know though, since for some reason decursive decided to stop working after I had it for only an hour. :/ (Tried reinstalling it with no luck. Probably a conflict with another add-on.)

Gatherer - Keeps track of mining points/herbs/chests/barrels that you collect and their locations. It also gives those locations to people using Gatherer in your guild and party. You can also just get the WoWhead gatherer database plug-in for gatherer and have the location of all these points anyway.

Quest Helper - Some people hate it since it takes away some of the fun of quests. It tells you what to do and where to go for most quests.

Cartographer - Map mod. Map doesn't take up whole screen, comes built in with instance maps and other goodies.

[Norellicus]

Fuck Cartographer, bloated garbage :(

Atlas gets you dungeon maps complete with marked boss locations and points of interest (quest items you have to pick up or such), and Mozz Full World Map gets you overworld maps with hidden areas 'revealed' (offcolor so you know where you haven't actually received exploration credit yet).


Addons I absolutely cannot live without:

Auctioneer/Gatherer suites - Already explained, seriously the best things since sliced bread

Bartender (I guess 4 is the current iteration? I never keep track) - Action bar mod like already mentioned, but to be more clear it allows you to add way more buttons on screen than the default UI does, and also lets you do nifty things like scale the bar(s) to larger or smaller sizes, as well as apply conditionals such as "only show this bar when I hold Shift". This mod also largely enables easy use of the G-keys on the Logitech G15 keyboard with some creative macro mapping.

Xperl Unit Frames - Very customizable player/pet/party/target/raid statusbars, lets you scale stuff, move it around, use color cues for when people are in certain states (cursed or w/e), configure different behaviors for different uses (raid, battleground, etc)

ClearFont - Can change the fonts on all the UI elements; you only get to pick from a presorted list, but there's something for everyone really, and a lot of them are vastly improved over the default fonts (particularly in the chat frame, dear god it's painful to read right after a patch before I remember to re-enable addons)

TBag - Takes all your bag slots and combines them into one window, autosorts your inventory (so if you have two stacks of 10 linen cloth, it will combine them into 1 20-stack, but its smart enough to know if you purposefully unstack something, it won't restack it), and will logically group your inventory by 'types' of items (these groupings are also customizable)...also works on bank slots, and makes your entire inventory (even across "mule" characters) searchable in case you can't seem to find that one epic gem you were storing for later.

Wardrobe - Can store "wardrobes" of preconfigured gear arrangements that can be swapped in and out with one click. Most classes this isn't important, but one that has multiple roles and different gear for each role (Druid being a particularly heavy one) makes this a must-have.


Mods that are super nice to have but not a deal-breaker:

Titan Panel - Think windows taskbar for WoW, lets you dock all kinds of useful info, and lots of mods have support for docking their addons to the panel instead of to the minimap like most do (that minimap ring can only hold so many buttons! D:)

Scrolling Combat Text - Shows damage input/output as floating numbers onscreen, easy way to eyeball your damage without having to use up space on the screen for the in-game combat log. Very customizable, can do things like show different colors for various sorts of damage (useful as a tank to know when you're suddenly taking shadow damage instead of physical or whatnot), or break things up into different parts of the screen for easy tracking.

FlightMap - Calculates flight time when traveling by flightpoints, and will 'auto calculate' time for long trips with multi-stop flight paths. Good way to set up a flight and know whether you should go make a sammich or just stay put.

Automaton - Automates a lot of menial tasks when they are available, such as selling grey crap to vendor, repairing your gear, accepting summons to battlegrounds or parties, declining duels, etc. Just makes it so you don't have to always remember to do these things, they just happen (though you do still have to remember to talk to a vendor that CAN repair, for example).

BuyEmAll - Streamlines buying in bulk from vendors. Need 60 threads for tailoring? Shift-click on the vendor slot, type in how many you want, it'll keep buying automatically until you have enough. Also has buttons to just 'round out a stack' (so if you have 17 and the stack is 20, it'll buy 3).

IgnoreMore - Expands the ignore list and allows you to tag explanations on your ignore entries. Also makes ignore lists transitive across all your characters on that server. Good if you can't keep track of who's on the list because they're a fucktard and who's just on it because they were being a whiny bitch in trade chat. (I'm an antisocial bastard and use my ignore liberally when someone starts to grate my nerves, and just clean it out often since few people are like that ALL THE TIME; knowing which entries to leave intact because they were jackasses in a group and I don't ever want to group with them again, etc, is handy.)

Gazmik Fizzwidget's ReageantCost - This one is "out of date" but it still functions, and the author doesn't see the functionality breaking anytime soon, on account of how it works. It teams up with Auctioneer to show you total costs to you to create an item in your chosen profession(s). Very handy for quickly determining profit margins or just to find the cheapest ways to skill up.

LightHeaded - Adds a sidepanel to the quest log that loads all the comments from wowhead for that particular quest. Really handy way to find quest info in a hurry if you don't want to leap to a full quest helper suite.

TrinketMenu - Lightweight movable frame that lets you swap your trinkets on the fly, keybind them for immediate use, and set up 'queues' so that while one trinket is on cooldown, it puts another one in play instead (this doesn't always work out so well though, since you're often still in combat, or the trinkets share cooldowns, etc). I just use it for the 'swap on the fly' since I have situationally useful trinkets. Not really useful to a newb but something to keep in mind.

Livestock - I'm a noncom pet whore. I had like 6 even before they made them not take space in your bag. Now I have like 12 and am always searching for more of them >_>. Livestock will inventory your noncom pets, and summon a random one anytime you don't currently have one out. It also works for mounts, randomly summoning one of those (using their handy dandy macro), and will intelligently pick flying over land while in outland/northrend, and never attempt to pick flying while in Azeroth.


That's the big ones I can think of, I'm sure there are others, I have lots D:

[Correction]

Cartographer is bloated garbage but you recommend auctioneer, xperl and titanbar? At least tell him to get the smallest auc install, as it's unlikely he's going to need the entire package.

Honestly I don't like the idea of someone brand new to the game installing a bunch of addons before they've become familiar with the default interface. At an absolute minimum I'd tell someone new to the game to install NECB, Omen, and that's it. Seriously. You don't need more than that unless you're healing groups or running raids.

[Tirrock]

I don't really think much about the size of the add-on. WoW isn't much to most recent computers. If you do have an older computer look up ACE mods, I've heard they're pretty light weight.

[Norellicus]

Cartographer is bloated garbage as far as map mods go, and I don't mean in memory usage, I mean in how it functions.

[Kenai]

Thank you for the suggestions.

I didn't really want to bother with the addons too much at the beginning either for most of the reasons you mentioned. Honestly this is my second (real) comp MMO (FFXI is/was my console onry) and I never bothered with a lot of this stuff on EQ back in the day (assuming it even existed). The one that really looked sexy to me was the multiple buttons on screen addon (made me drool to think about on Shammy after like...35), but I was still learning about the basic interface at the time. Hell, I still am.

That mod will not keep those macros on-screen if i switch to another toon, yes? This and possibly that questfinder/gathering one are the ones i am truly interested in. Maybe some kind of AH history thing if they have it (something I miss dearly from FFXI). I am nervous about game additions/addons and such since I have no experience with it and didn't want to bork something. I can't even figure out the Mother 3 download yet. QQ

[Osede]

Cartographer is bloated garbage but you recommend auctioneer, xperl and titanbar? At least tell him to get the smallest auc install, as it's unlikely he's going to need the entire package.

Honestly I don't like the idea of someone brand new to the game installing a bunch of addons before they've become familiar with the default interface. At an absolute minimum I'd tell someone new to the game to install NECB, Omen, and that's it. Seriously. You don't need more than that unless you're healing groups or running raids.

what I recommend to some one who totally new is just an addon with coordinates, thats it. Since it makes your questing life much more easier. :D

about omen, you can install it when you get to 60+, unless you are hunter then you might consider getting it during low lvls.


My current addon are only DBM, omen, recount, itemrack, tankpoint and atlas(to familar with some more new dungeon that i havent go before).

[aers]

How can you stand to look at XPerl frames anyway :/

[Norellicus]

I tried pitbull and didn't like the way it configured or something...I don't remember what my issue was exactly. Maybe I'll try it again ;x

[Guitarman]

I use koordinates. Real tiny box that gives you x and y values of where you are. Great for locating things quicker. I hated questhelper and all its garbage on my screen so i just used koordinates and read thottbot or wowhead.

[Kyo]

Well same shit happened to me that happened before, I got my mount and got bored :l