Questions from a returning player

Guides Returning Player Help & Discussions
1

Hello, helpful and informative forum readers! As someone who played when classic was new, and then came back because classic was new again, I’m finding that I really like playing on the retail servers. But it looks like there is a lot to this game, more than there used to be, and a lot of things I need to figure out. At the risk of revealing myself to be the newbie that I am, here are the ones on my mind right now:

1 – The group finder / dungeon finder. OMG, this is great. Especially the group synching tool that lets anybody group with anybody. (…even though it took me one disastrous group to see that my retribution paladin couldn’t simply join a group as a tank without respeccing. I entered the instance relatively naked and buttonless and had no idea why, lol. Got it figured out now though: A retribution paladin is DPS and won’t be a tank or healer without changing specs. My second attempt was much better.) My question is that the dungeons on my list all have specific level ranges. For example, Wailing Caverns is 17-60. Scarlet Monastery is 28-60. After I turn 61, can I still do these dungeons? Or is it Sorry-Too-bad-That-ship-has-sailed-60-is-the-maximum?

2 – Seems there’s an achievement available for doing every quest in the game. Wow! …… EVERY quest?!? Is there a handy-dandy checklist somewhere that I can use to tick them off the list as they happen? How many characters would one have to make for this achievement? One per race? Does this all have to be on the same server? (…… in which case, one per race is obviously not do-able.)

3 – As a DPS character, it sure would be nice to have an easy way of targeting the enemy that the tank is targeting. Is there a shortcut to do that? Short of programming some sort of macro? Like, shift-F2 or control-F3 or something like that? In the groups I’ve been in, it seems like everybody is picking their targets willy-nilly, and we’re successful that way, but when things get harder, I’m thinking we should be more strategic with our target selections, that we’ll need to be more efficient about quickly reducing the number of enemies by all picking the same target.

4 – Heritage gear. I’m fortunate enough to have a more experienced rich friend who took my newbie character to a big city and treated me to a set of Heritage gear. But now I’m finding quest loot that is better (at my current level) than the Heritage gear. As I keep finding gear that’s slightly better than the Heritage gear, I have to wonder…. Why do people buy Heritage gear? If at, say, for example, Level 55, it isn’t quite as good as the stuff that comes along at Level 55, then why would anybody buy it? What am I not seeing here?

5 – Tradeskilling. Is there ever a point at which it’s worth it to do Tailoring, or Blacksmithing and Mining? I’ve been doing them with, respectively, a priest and a paladin, but the stuff I’m making isn’t worth wearing. If I continue with them, will there be a point at which I’m glad I’ve continued with them?

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(1) Once you outlevel a dungeon/raid range, you can no longer use the automatic queue LFD/LFR systems for them. You can still from manual groups and head to the dungeon like the old days. (Or just wait until you’re high enough level to solo them. For Vanilla dungeons, that’s probably around 70.)

(2) Those achievements don’t require every quest, just a large chunk. As I recall, the starting zones aren’t included in the achievement, so you can get them on one character if you so choose. Also, some horde stuff will give credit for the equivalent alliance stuff without doing it on alliance. (And obviously the reverse is also true.) Imagine my surprise when mounts when account-wide and I had the Wintersaber on my alliance toons without ever doing the grind. I had done the horde-equivalent Venomhide Ravasaur grind.

If an achievement is account-wide (it will have a blue background for the title) then the individual parts of that achievement can be done on different characters (even on different factions and servers.) Each part of the achievement will have to be completed by a single character (unless that part is itself an account-wide achievement with different parts — it can get a bit recursive.)

(3) In modern WoW, it’s pretty easy for tanks to maintain threat on multiple targets, so for casual content, kill orders can be pretty sloppy without issue. Kill order will only really matter when something does something particularly nasty and you want them dead ASAP. It doesn’t come up much in content you can queue up for, even at max level.

Still, the easiest non-macro way to follow the tank would be to set the tank as your focus and then just target what they are targeting. Beyond that, if someone throws up a skull, attack that and don’t worry too much otherwise.

(4) I assume you’re talking about heirloom armor. (Heritage armor is race-specific cosmetic armor you can earn for some of the races. Allied races get theirs just by leveling to 110 or 120, and other races get theirs by doing a scenario at max level. Not all races have heritage armors at this time.) Heirloom armor is the armor that scales in level with you.

The primary reason people use heirlooms these days are for the bonus to experience. Also, you don’t upgrade all your pieces every level, so heirlooms do spend a lot of time being as good or better than other gear since they do upgrade every level.

There are also slots that are harder to fill by while leveling. Heirloom gear can let you fill those slots at level 1.

Another reason people will use heirloom gear is that since it’s something you can wear throughout leveling, it lets you transmog the gear without having to worry about spending gold to “fix” your outfit with every upgrade. (Slots without heirlooms I’ll usually just hide in my transmog since hiding is free.)

(5) Crafting professions aren’t that useful while leveling these days. (And sadly, many are pretty limited in usefulness even at max level. Alchemy has been the most consistently useful/profitable at end game. The other ones sometimes get their moments to shine, though.) Doing double gathering and selling the mats on the AH for some gold is the common strategy while leveling these days. (And mining and herbalism now give you XP for gathering nodes! And you can track both at the same time!) It’s what I recommend. Then, at max level you’ll be in a better position to evaluate if any of the crafting professions will be useful to you.

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3

Udiza, thank you so much for your reply. (And yes, I was talking about heirloom armor. I’m glad you were able to see through my mistake.)

4

I presume your’e talking about the Loremaster achievement here. I did that back in Cataclysm, all on a single character. The best way to go about it is to pick a zone, and quest there until you get the achievement for completing the quests in that zone, then move on to the next. While this is best done after level 60 (when you can purchase a Flight Master’s License), you won’t get much in the way of XP or useful gear rewards as you start outleveling the zones.

For earlier zones, each sub-achievement can be tracked separately, and should indicate which questlines you have completed, and which you still have to complete (completed ones will have a checkmark next to them). Just go into Achievements > Quests > (region), and you should see the ones you’re looking for.

5

There are a few ways to keep track of your quests. Icy-veins and Wowhead both have tools to check what quests a character has done. There are also addons you can use in game. I use Wholly and Grail. (It’s two addons. Grail is a database, and Wholly is a front end. You’ll need both.) I believe there are some other addons that also use Grail as a database if you want to mess around with different front end options. They can make it easier to see where you still have quests you can do.

6

Regarding tailoring as a profession. Tailors are the only people who can make bandages. You can level 1-300 in basic level tailoring just by making bandages requiring a minimal amount of cloth per skillup point and then cherry pick the recipes you need for gear.

Most of my bank alts are level 10 tailors with 300 in tailoring and the same in enchanting from DE’ing stuff made with excess cloth.

For many of the other expansions, you can level quite a way through tailoring for that expansion with just bandages.

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