• Early in the game, you will probably find yourself running out of room in your backpack as you embark on quests and collect items. If you’re willing to be patient, you can save the money spent on a pouch by waiting until you find one on a dead monster or NPC. Pouches aren’t common loot, but they do turn up.
• You won’t always get quests from NPCs. Pay attention to signs, flora and other things that can be right-clicked (you’ll notice that your cursor changes to a symbol that looks like a gear when you pass it over the item in question). Right-click on them and see what happens.
• If you have a ranged weapon, use it to draw out your enemies by shooting them and bringing them toward you. This comes in handy when you see a lot of monsters nearby and don’t want all of them to attack when you go after one of them. Don’t forget to keep firing at that monster until he gets too close for ranged weapons.
• You’ll notice that all of your enemies have a patrol radius. Pay attention to it when you want to get around them without drawing attention. Sometimes those patrol radii overlap, though, in which case you could wind up with more than one enemy attacking you if you get too close. You can often hug the foot of a mountain line to make your way around the bad guys. If you try to keep your back to a shoreline, though, you might be surprised by what jumps out of the water and comes after you.
• In the early levels, around one through three, enemies don’t attack on sight, so you can wander to your heart’s content. Once you move out of the starting area, though, certain monsters will come after you as soon as you intersect with their patrol radii. Generally speaking, the various types of boars and many of the winged creatures will ignore you until you attack them, although there are exceptions, such as the vampire bats faced by Undead characters.
• When in trouble, run! Monsters will chase you, but eventually they will give up and head back to their spots. If you’re near a town with guards, head in that direction and they will step in to help you out. Try to avoid running near other players, however, as the monsters in tow may stop chasing you and go after them instead, which will likely earn you a bad reputation.
• Unless you’re in a group, you can only earn experience points and loot from the monsters you damage first. (In a group, the points are split among everyone, while the looting depends on how the party leader has configured that option.) So you won’t receive any experience points or loot if you stop and aid another player in distress, but you will likely earn yourself some digital karma.
• When you die, notice the invisible radius around your corpse that allows you to resurrect without having to stand right next to it. If you’re surrounded by nasty beasts, try to resurrect right along the edge of the radius. (Height makes no difference — if you die at the bottom of a cliff, for example, you might be able to resurrect while standing on the top, assuming your body is close enough to the cliff wall.) Then get back some health points with a potion or a spell as soon as you come return to life and run in the safest direction. If you’re deep in enemy territory, you might have to die and resurrect multiple times until your corpse is close to safety. That’s better than resurrecting in the graveyard and losing some of your armor and weapons’ durability, but you may need to take the hit if you simply can’t get out of there.
• Your weapons, armor and some other items feature durability ratings that decrease as you use them. While their effectiveness doesn’t decrease with their ratings, they become unusable if their ratings hit zero. You can restore their complete durability when visiting a merchant — if you can afford it, simply choose to restore all your items each time you visit a vendor, just to make sure everything remains in tip-top condition. No one wants to discover that their sword has become useless in the middle of a fierce battle.
• When sending a message to everyone else that you have something to sell, you can shift-click on the item to instantly add it to your message (note that it only works in trade channels, party chat, guild chat and private messages). Those who see your message can put their cursor over the name of the item to see its stats.
• When chatting, pressing the Return key automatically accesses the last channel you spoke on, such as your guild chat or the general zone-wide chat. If you have no previous channel, it defaults to a speaking mode, normally accessed by typing “/s” or “/say,” that only allows those in the immediate vicinity to “hear” you. To switch to a different channel, type “/p” (or “/party”), “/g” (or “/guild”), “/1” (for the general zone-wide chat), “/2” (for the trade channel in your current zone — shift + click to link items) or “/y” (or “/yell,” which “yells” your statement to everyone in the current zone).
• If you’re into role-playing, you can type “/em,” followed by text, and other players will see it on their screens as a description of what your character is doing. For example, “Phelwind laughs at the dead Night Elf Druid at her feet.”

Prerecorded Phrases

You can also take advantage of some prerecorded phrases while around other characters. For example, typing “/lol” will make your character laugh while “/v silly” and “/v flirt” will make him say a random silly or flirting phrase. In addition, you can type any of these commands to say something more specific:

• / charge
• / flee
• / oom
• / wait
• / cheer
• / rasp (short for raspberry, as in to jeer at someone)

Note that what your character says and how it says it will be specific to its sex and faction (Horde or Alliance).

You can also type certain commands that will make your character perform an action, such as “/dance,” “/bow,” “/wave” or “/lie down.” Some actions, such as dancing and bowing, can be directed toward another character or NPC if you click on that person first.

Other commands simply help you navigate the game:

• /chat, /chathelp: Provides a list of chat commands
• /ghelp: Provides a list of guild commands
• /who: Lists the players who are online at that moment
• /played: Reports the total amount of time you’ve played the game with that character.
• /cast: Allows you to cast spells by name. For example: “/cast Fireball (Rank 1)” will cast your rank 1 Fireball spell.
• /macro: Brings up the macro user interface, which allows you to bind commonly used commands to certain keys.
• /#, /c, /csay: Send text to a specific channel number.
• /announcements, /ann: A toggle to join or leave the announcements on a channel.
• /afk, /dnd: Sets Away From Keyboard or Do Not Disturb flags near your character, which alerts others to your status.
• /ban, /unban: Ban/unban a player from a channel.
• /chatlist, /chatwho, /chatinfo <channel>: List channels or channel members.
• /cinvite, /chatinvite: Invite a player to a channel.
• /join, /channel, /chan: Join a channel.
• /kick: Kick a player off a channel.
• /leave, /chatleave, /chatexit [channel]: Leave a channel (or all channels).
• /mod, /moderator, /unmod, /unmoderator: Change a player’s moderator status.
• /moderate: Toggle moderation on a channel.
• /mute, /squelch, /unvoice, /unmute, /unsquelch, /voice: Change whether or not a character can speak on a certain channel.
• /password, /pass: Change password.

Guild Commands: Some of these commands can only be used by guild leaders.

• /ginfo: Gives basic information about your guild.
• /g <message>: Sends a chat message to all members of your guild.
• /o <message>: Sends a chat message to all officers of your guild.
• /ginvite <player>: Invites another player to join your guild.
• /gremove <player>: Removes a player from your guild.
• /gpromote <player>: Promotes a player one rank within your guild.
• /gdemote <player>: Demotes a player one rank within your guild.
• /gmotd <message>: Sets the guild’s message of the day.
• /gquit: Removes you from your guild.
• /groster: Gives an entire guild roster.
• /gleader <player>: Sets another player as the guild leader (guild leader only).
• /gdisband: Disbands your guild (guild leader only).

More commands…

Join a guild. They can help you when you need additional party members for quests, have questions about the game or otherwise need assistance. Not to mention adventuring with familiar faces will greatly enhance your enjoyment of the game. Some are Mac-centric, such as Reservoir Dogcows, Clan MacAddict and Clan mAc.

Need more resources? Try these web sites:

• Thottbot (Features a database of quests)
• World of Warcraft Basics (Official site)
• Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Knowledge Base (Official site)
• WorldofWar.net (Unofficial site; hosts in-depth maps of both continents)
• WoW Status (Allows you to check which game servers are up.)
• WarAtlas (Easily find any location in World of Warcraft very fast.)

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