Wrath of the Lich King - The beginning of a new Journey (+ starting tips)

After a few days of thinking and reminiscing about my past experiences with world of warcraft, where I had the most fun but at the same time to provide some content that would be a bit more unique in current times and in this community, I have decided to play the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I was first going to go with Classic but there are so many playing it and I've been playing it quite a lot lately as well and I would bore myself and my future readers posting about it and in my opinion WotLK was one of the best expansions in the history of WoW.

In this post I wanted to start out with something that many newcomers maybe may not get to find out or bother with from the start but it's something that is important to get to it as early as possible for your performance late game. If you are new to this game and reading this, I highly recommend checking this out at first before you get started with your journey. I decided to simplify it for starters and then later on we can add more to it if required (WotLK has a lot of abilities/macros it will require you to use so you will surely need to add more).

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Clicking vs. Keybindings

There's been the good old debate between players that click a majority of their spells and abilities compared to those who have everything keybinded. Long story short; just keybind. Do it as early as possible, get used to it and stop attempting to sway the majority opinion that keybinding is in so many ways better than clicking on abiltities.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about right now, here's a screenshot of the character I am going to be leveling first, a Warrior.

As you can see in the action bar at the bottom of the screenshot there's an Axe on your "1" key on the keyboard, the Heroic Strike ability on #2 and the racial active ability of Orcs at #3. Although no one is debating that the usual keys close to your W, A, S & D movement keys are normal for everyone to use, the debate is that "if you get used to it, you'll do just as well as those who keybind the rest of abilities they need to be using in the game during fights, whether for PvE (Player versus Environment (NPC's, boss fights, etc) and especially for PvP (Player versus Player) which is so much more fast paced and unpredictable than PvE.

So to keep it simple, the best way to play and move your character at the same time (majority opinion and mine) is to keybind as much as possible and as long as those binds are easily accessible (i.e. don't keybind letters all the way on the right side of the keyboard cause there's no way you can efficiently press those and get back to your W, A, S, D in time without your character standing still like a complete noob =P) you will outperform those who have to let go of their right mouse button to move their character in different directions to move the curser over an ability and 'click' it instead.

So again, keybindings and using mouse right click to move your character around instead of using the A and S key to rotate your character at a certain pace outperforms clicking on abilities any day.

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Easy starter keybindings

Before you start setting some simple keybindings I'm about to recommend you'll need to unlock more Action Bars as those first 12 will not be enough, not even before you hit level 30 or so. So, press esc, go to settings, then interface and click on these shown in the screenshot. I personally don't need the Right Bar 2 which would add another row on the right side of the screen but depending on late game amount of macro's you need or professions and easier accessible abilities you might want to add them there to click on. (not everything needs a keybinding and not all keybindings need to be easily accessible depending on how often you need to use certain abilities and when, but more about that later)

PS. the "always show action bars" is not required, I just did it here so you can see where the action bars are in the screenshot, also don't mind the changes from the first screenshot, I'll be talking about Addons in the next part.

Alright then you press Esc again and this time click on "Keybindings" and here you will need to scroll down a bit to get to the first action button page:

Alright so a couple comments on why I choose these buttons. Anything after #6 is way too far for the normal human hand to be able to click while still holding your hand over the W, A, S, D keys, especially the W forward movement key. You'll want to most of the time be able to move forward while pressing other abilities. The reason I go for Q and E is because I don't use strafing in game at all since my movement relies on my mouse at all times. Strafing basically let's your character move 45 degrees to the left or right, i.e. he runs to the sides, but you can simple just hold your right mouse button down and press A to accomplish the same (for left side and D for the right side, of course). Then the R key is usually used to reply to whispers but for that I bind it to ctrl-R as it's not something that needs to be that easily accessible. So bear in mind it will unbind your reply to whisper command but you can also simply click on a player name in chat to accomplish the same. The T key is also pretty close and easy to press while moving forward so most of these keys have the same thought process behind them, same goes for C and V (mind that C will unbind toggling your character panel).

Here's the next part for the action bars above these first ones, you'll have to scroll down a lot more until you land on the "BottomLeft Action Button"'s.

This one is a lot simpler to explain and will hopefully mean this post won't be as long as it looks like it is getting right now, but we're covering a lot of important ground. Basically everything as below but with the shift key.

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Addons

Alright so Addons are not as much of a 'requirement' as getting keybindings out of the way early for later benefit but they are a nice touch on your wow experience. Think of it as a UI upgrade compared to @peakd and @hive.blog ;). If you go back and look at the first screenshot you'll already notice a big difference compared to this one:

Here's a list of the Addons I added:

and for anyone who wants direct links to download the Addons in question for the WotLK expansion, here they are for simplicity along with explanations of what they do and why I chose them:

Bagnon, this addon will combine all your bags so you don't have to use shift-b to "open all bags" and can just keep one keybind for it + it just looks more neat.

QuestHelper, this one is not that required and I really dislike the arrow they add (but it can be removed as I do in the gameplay video below) as the map and minimap automatically shows you were quests are in this expansion but it's a nice addition and I may be trying to get to 80 as fast as possible here while still covering other necessary things you'll need for your economy and to maximize your stats late game which are professions, but more about that as we get there.

Gatherer is a good addon for your gathering professions as ores and herbs will at some point start spawning in the same locations with little variety in zones so if you're out there grinding that you'll want to know where they usually spawn so you'll save yourself unnecessary routes.

Recount/Skada counts your and your parties damage and healing done, even pets and stuff. Can be set up so it either shows each fight in between combat or for the full dungeon/raid and can be changed in between. This is for those who want to be competitive and risk dying at times by attempting to stay at the top of the meters to brag about it. ;)

Quartz is a really sexy loading bar so this one is pretty much just for that extra visibility and for my Warrior it won't be needed that much except for swing timer of weapons.

TidyPlates this one is really good for hp bars above friendly and enemies heads and also their targets and buffs + debuffs. Also looks really great compared to the original Blizzard UI.

Grid although I prefer this one a lot more for my healing characters it's still a lot more neat when you're in parties and raids to have other players HP bars and stats visible like shown in the screenshot on the website than the original UI.

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Gameplay

Alright, so without further ado let's get to the gameplay.

First video is of class deciding and customization and luckily no one had taken my username ;)

This is another short video of the beginning zoom in to your zone and short overview of Durotar, I believe there should be some voice over here usually but wasn't working this time around

Alright now to the main video of me leveling in the starting zone, there's some things to be discussed about the gameplay here and why I do certain things so I'll add timestamps and comments under the video for you watching it.

Started off thinking viewers may want to read the quests but that would go against me wanting to speed run this as much as I can so just pause if you want to read the quest. =P

0:59 killing my first boar, here you can see the swing timer of my two handed axe which the addon quartz provides. This is something you might want to know about because the swing timer is like a global cooldown kind of thing where you don't have to be targeting and having a mob (monster/npc) on autoattack for the swing timer to reach the next swing. Meaning you can hit a mob and knowing it'll take another 1.9 seconds for your next swing to go through you can take the time to loot or move closer to the next mob to save time and be thinking ahead. This is what I do here with the boars.

3:40 selling some items that mobs dropped cause I'll be needing them to be able to purchase skills which get more and more expensive each level and you'll also need to pick up a profession or two and start using the auction house to sell them to make gold for your abilities for all three talent trees, mounts and in late game enchants, gems, etc. Better start early and remember to auto loot anything and sell to vendors whatever you don't need. I'm saving the cloth here so I can level up my first aid once I find the first trainer for that secondary profession.

12:11 a quest reward here is a one handed axe (for main hand only), even though I prefer the two handed axes with longer swing timers and potentially higher critical hits this item is such an upgrade that it's worth the damage outcome and time saved to switch even if it means starting to skill it up from 1, something you'll have to do at some point either way especially if you're going to tank at some point with a shield. :)

19:36, first death! This was of course just to showcase what it looks like when you die and have to run back to your body or release at the spirit healer where you land but at later levels it will start costing you a lot of damage on your items that will cost a bit to repair and also adds a debuff wrecking your stats by 75% for 10 mins past level 20. See, if I hadn't died you wouldn't know all this so that's why I did it of course, it wasn't like it was impatient and didn't wait a second to regenerate some health before attacking that one unique stronger mob in that cave. =P

22:31 after I went back to my body and killed that mob to pick up the quest item he drops I use my Hearthstone to get to the beginning faster to hand it in and decide to skip the next quest that takes me back to the cave. I could've done things differently so that I'd end up doing both of the cave quests at once but if my memory serves me right there's another follow up quest after those two are done and I was already so close to level 6 at this point that I decided to move on and just kill some mobs on my way to Sen'Jin Village where our next destination is.

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Let me know what you think of this kind of content, if it's entertaining and educational. If you're interested in knowing where I am playing let me know and I'll give you some links.

I've been asking my gf to create a banner for this series but she's been busy with her work lately and my patience was running thin so I decided to get it started and will add it later on. Hope ya'll having a good day and staying safe out there. Peace and of course: For the Horde! =)