WoW Guide Part III

Entering the Game

All races start out the game in whats called a starting area. Each race has its own starting area where you do low level quests and get a general feel for the game. Your default user interface will look something like this. (I will lable the different things on it)

Most people hate the default UI and opt to use addons to rearrange it. I will cover addons later, but basically you can change the size and position of everything on your screen. Move the map around, change its shape, add borders, move your action bars, add new bars, move and change your portrait, etc.

Here are some examples of user created interfaces

Example One

Example Two

Example Three

Movement and Controls

This is going to be very short. There are three ways to move around in WoW.

1) The arrow keys on the keyboard. Up arrow moves forward, down arrow walks backwards, left turns you to face left, right turns you to face right.

2) WASD - Same concept as the arrow keys. However, there are two extra keys here. Q and E. Q will make you sort of shuffle to the left, E will make you shuffle to the right.

3) The Mouse. For me, this is the best way to move in game. If you click the left mouse button on an area in front of you, you will automatically move to that location. Its basically just, point, click, move, point, click, move. However, if you hold both the left and right buttons down, you can move indefinitely. The right button also controls the camera angle. clicking them both at once will move and rotate the camera whichever  way you turn the mouse.

So if you want to turn right, hold down both buttons to start running, then move the mouse to the right.

Movement is the same whether you're running, riding, flying, or swimming. The space bar will make your character jump, x will make them sit down, and the \ key will make them just walk normally instead of running everywhere.

Your spells can be hot keyed to your action bars and will correspond with whatever keyboard key you set them to. Pressing 1 will activate whatever spell is listed under that key, 2 will activate another spell and so on. You can also combine keys, for example alt+1 can be keyed to a spell. Or shift+2 or whatever.

Macros

Macros are user created key bindings that will allow you to do more than one action with just one key. You can write out your own macros in the game and set them to specific keys, so instead of hitting three different buttons to perform three different spells, you can set them all to one button. I was never good at making macros, but I will try to give an example.

There was a daily quest (dailies are quests you can do repeatedly, but only once a day) that involved kissing frogs to find one that would turn into a maiden. In order to kiss the frogs you had to first use this special lip balm to prevent warts, then target a frog and type /kiss into the chat box. So every time you did this you would have to open your inventory, use the lip balm, then target a frog, then /kiss it. For every single frog. This got old after a while.

So I made a macro. To do this I opened up the create macro window and set it up as follows
/use Wart-b-Gone Lip Balm
/target Frog
/kiss

 Then I set it to one of my keys and after that all I had to do was press one key and it would do all of those things. Apply my lip balm, target the nearest frog, and kiss it.

Part IV