New Wanderer Seeking a Place in Azeroth

Guides New/Returning Player Questions & Guides
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Hello everyone, After a very long time away from MMORPGs, I recently decided to give one another try. A friend’s son kindly gifted me an old account, and that is how I found myself stepping into Azeroth for the first time. While learning about the world and its lore, one thing surprised me the most: the life on RP servers. Seeing the stories people create together, the social interactions, and the worlds built beyond the game itself has been genuinely fascinating to me. I ended up creating a Pandaren because, in many ways, they felt the closest to my own personality and outlook on life. Calm, curious, fond of good food, warm company, and simple joys. So my own little wandering monk, Jiuwei Long, was born. The truth is, I know almost nothing about roleplay. I have never done RP before, and my English is not very strong either. Most of the time I use translation tools and a bit of help from ChatGPT while building my character story and learning addons like TRP3. Sometimes it is honestly a little overwhelming. Azeroth feels enormous, and because I am a bit older than many players here, understanding everything takes me more time than I would like. I do read guides and try to learn on my own, but occasionally I still feel lost in such a massive world. So I wanted to write this post partly to introduce myself, and partly to ask for advice from more experienced players. I would truly appreciate hearing your experiences, suggestions, or thoughts about how a new roleplayer should approach the game and find their place within the community. I hope I have not wasted your time or troubled anyone with such a long post. I play on Argent Dawn as Jiuwei Long, and I would genuinely be happy to meet fellow players in-game someday.

Battle.net ID: jiuweilong#2883

May your roads be peaceful and your cups never empty.

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Welcome, Jiuwei! :sparkling_heart:

I hope you find a satisfying life in Azeroth.

I have just a few comments.

I’m sorry to have to tell you that the most urgent is that your account is in danger. Accounts cannot be “gifted”. They are tied to the name, email, and true identity of their original creator, and Blizzard does not allow transfers. In case of question or a need to regain access, you will have to produce ID in the name of the original creator. And you have just posted, on a Blizzard forum, an admission that this account is not yours.

I know that this is an innocent mistake, but at some stage it is possible that Blizzard will nonetheless close this account, since it is not originally yours.

You have put little time into this account so far, I hope. I would hate to put years into developing an account and my relationship to my characters, and then have it yanked out from under me.

I advise you to create a whole new BattleNet account under your own name and email, to avoid living under that threat. You can recreate a few weeks’ progress. I know it’s a loss, but avoids the risk of a greater loss.

Apart from that, as I look at the history of that account,
https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-gb/character/eu/argent-dawn/jiuwei/achievements
I see many achievements that you will be cheated of if you continue with it. For example, the Glutton for Punishment achievements. Those are cute and flavorful things that this account has already checked off , but you haven’t. It feels GOOD to earn even the simple achievements, like Duskwood Quests. It feels satisfying. You can never earn these, because your friend’s son already has.

I am sad that that has to be my first message, but I would be remiss if I didn’t explain it.

Ok, whatever you decide about how to continue, we can get on to happier topics now!

WoW is a HUGE game. HUGE. Whatever you are thinking now, it is bigger than that, much bigger. Be gentle with yourself as you learn. Enjoy all the little lessons, and little victories. Don’t be in a hurry to “grow up”. Enjoy the seconds, just fishing or exploring, while you can. There IS a rat-race. A lot of people DO try to keep up with the Joneses. That’s OK. That’s their game. There is also space for yours.

Having said that, it can also be frustrating, especially when you have the wrong idea about something, and are butting your head against things that make no sense. Take help from the Internet. The devs design the game to be played against an external backdrop of players sharing information.

This video is massively long, but broken into 1-2 minute chapters so you can click straight to the subject you are interested in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyqj414Se1Y

It will tell you things you didn’t even know you needed to know.

You need to bookmark https://www.wowhead.com/ for anything about quests and items. And ALWAYS read the comments. The comments are the content. They were written by people in the same situation as you when you came to look them up.

There are many more resources on the Net. If it’s in WoW, it’s on YouTube somewhere. AIs can be very helpful - Claude AI, Lumo Ai, Perplexity AI.

Just be aware, with any Internet source, that the game changes, but old posts on the net do not, so sometimes they may give you answers that are out of date. If so, search again for current expansion resources.

Don’t worry so much about being older. Our reflexes and fingers and eyes may not be what they were, but there are many of us in our seventies and beyond who still play. You won’t be chasing any World Firsts, but then, you don’t really want to. The people in the fast lane won’t bother you at all.

Now, about finding RP and people with your interests, I can’t help much with the specifics. I don’t RP. I know Argent Dawn is the place to be for RP, so that’s good. I know that there is also a less bodacious side to the RP communities - cliqueish groups and purity tests and infighting - so you want to steer clear of those when you see them. Become familiar with the Argent Dawn forum to start.
https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/c/argent-dawn/190

My biggest piece of advice is: join Discords.

Discord has become the communication network of WoW. There are any number of Discords centred on WoW. Guilds often gave their own. Join many. Lurk. Learn. Ask when you need to. You will have to search, but you will find your people. They are out there.

Here are a couple of Discords you can start with

Wownoob: https://discord.gg/wownoob
https://www.reddit.com/r/wownoob

WoW Porlal Room: https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-gb/news/24263355/join-the-adventure-the-wow-portal-room-welcomes-you

There are many more you can find, but I don’t want to overload you. :smiley:

Please ask anything else you like here!

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Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed reply. I really appreciate the warning about the account situation. I honestly didn’t fully understand the risks involved, so your explanation was very helpful. I’ll seriously think about creating my own Battle.net account before I invest too much time into this one.

You also made a very good point about achievements and experiencing the game properly for myself. I hadn’t really thought about that side of it before.

And thanks for all the resources and advice. WoW already feels enormous, so having places like Wowhead, Discord communities, and beginner guides will definitely help a lot. I’ll take things slowly and try to enjoy the journey instead of rushing.

I’m especially interested in RP and meeting people on Argent Dawn, so I’ll check out the forum and Discords you mentioned.

I also wanted to ask a few more things, since you clearly know the game and the community well:

  • Besides Argent Dawn, are there any other realms you would personally recommend for a new player interested in RP and a more relaxed/social experience?

  • Do you think I should stop leveling at a certain point for a while to learn the game better, or just continue naturally?

  • What’s the best way to find a guild that actually fits your personality and interests instead of just joining random invites?

  • Are there any beginner traps or habits you think new players should avoid early on?

  • And for someone mostly interested in immersion, exploration, RP, and community, what parts of WoW do you think are the most rewarding?

I’m trying to experience the world properly instead of rushing to endgame, so I’d really value your perspective.

Thanks again for the kind welcome and thoughtful advice.

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Glad to offer what I can :smiley:

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Argent Dawm is IT. The one and only place where RP is respected and practiced, and a chill and friendly realm even outside RP.

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My own view about the best way for a non-competitive newcomer to enjoy the game casually is to make a different character for each expansion. Different classes, different races.

Send one to Outland/Burning Crusade, one to Northrend/Wrath, and so on. You can do them in any order, and you can and probably should have all of them on the go at the same time, switching between as the mood takes you. If you want a nudge, I’d go Dragonflight first, since it’s a very smooth intro for a beginner, but if your Panda preference takes youto Mists of Pandaria first, that’s good too.

Why?

Once Upon A Time, just getting your character to max level was a serious journey. Those days are told of only in storybooks now. You level your character to 10. I prefer the native starting zone rather than Exile’s Island,which I call Cardboard Island. It is efficient at levelling and intro, but has no flavour, gives no background for your racial heritagem and some of those geritages are VERY important for understanding your race’s place in the world.

After 10, you go to Chromie in Stormwind (or Orgrimmar if you go Horde) and ask ger to send you to one of the expansions. You can complete an expansion’s levelling in hours. World record time to max is under 4 hours, using a specific trick; without that trick, it is about 5 hours. You won’t do that, of course, but what used to take weeks or months for a beginner - I took 4 months when I started - is now something you can complete in days.

This doesn’t give a beginner enough grounding time to really feel the game. And then you hit max level, and the game just EXPLODES around you with new and complex options. You Are Not Prepared! (That’s an in-game joke!)

You will get tired of questing around the zones. It will happen. But there’s no need to rush it. By taking one character per expansion, you expand the time you can play before hitting the horizon of max level play as long as you like.

Then separately, there is the question of finding what you enjoy. We have lots of classes, and specs, and they are all very different. You can preview them by looking them up on YouTube, like “Midnight Fury Warrior” or “Midnight Beast Mastery Hunter”, but the only way to know whether that class and spec is truly for you is to play them. By level 40-ish, they have all reached the stage where they resemble what they will play like at max level. Don’t judge them below 40, while they are still adding core abilities.

Questing in each expansion will take your character from 10 to at least 70.

This means you have covered the lore, and had the opportunity to learn how to enjoy many different classes. And you have many alts, which you can develop as you please afterwards.

Using game time alone, without buying Midnight, you can do all this. When you have squeezed as much of the juice as you like out of older expansions, you can buy Midnight and go on to max level.

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Finding the guild for you is the hardest challenge in WoW.

But the way is through Discord. The answer to everything in interpersonal space is Discord. The method is:

Join Discords → Find people → Join their guild.

Guilds are exclusive, and there is a vast wasteland of dead guilds. Most of them are traps.

Guilds often have Discords, for out of game contact, and they are not exclusive. Try those. Try different guilds on different characters when experimenting.

Look for RP Discords, Argent Dawn Discords, Casual Levelling Discords. Incidentally check out The Argent Archives: https://www.argentarchives.org/

Don’t worry too much about it for now. Justt keep yourself available.

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Beginner traps or bad habits? Not really. Wrong realm / wrong faction is the biggest one, but AD is very safe for you. It’s priomarily an Alliance realm, but because of the RP, Horde is also viable.

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Which parts? Different for everybody. Collecting is a big one - mounts, pets, appearances, achievements. Professions, maybe. Some get hooked on Goldmaking. Some people find their own challenges, like Ironman (levelling in White or Grey gear and never dying).

Think of it not as finding THE thing for you, but building the MIX of things for you.

Please keep the questions coming, as they occur to you!

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