What do you think would be the time it would take a brand new player to WoW to learn the important game play mechanics or at least the basics of playing their new class, so they could function in groups; dungeon finder, guild teams etc.
10+ years.
Kinda joking, kinda not lol.
At least if you’re gonna play with, and compete against, those that have stuck around for the longest.
Depends entirely on their level of knowledge of games, specifically RPGs and MMOs.
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if I’m teaching them, I can teach them in a few weeks, a week if they are intelligent.
if they r incompetent with video games and cant figure out simple cmputer issues then its impossible
Yeah this is a pretty key factor. Is it my buddy I’ve been gaming with on various other games for 15 years but who has never played WoW, or is it my sister whose furthest dive into gaming has been Candy Crush?
For someone who is a gamer, maybe an hour. “Functioning” in a dungeon is pretty elementary: Read the Wowhead guide and push these buttons in this order.
For someone who has never touched a PC game? Maybe a day or two. It depends on how willing they are to seek out guidance.
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It depends on how they approach the game.
If you throw them into M+ instantly, they will likely end up hating the game.
WoW for new players needs to be a journey.
When I first joined retail, I spent MONTHS trying to figure what/where/why/who.
I remember gathering Ancient Mana and I had no clue what it was for…
I remember reading about BFA path finding and stuff and slowly grinding it out.
So it was a journey for sure at my pace.
Granted, I already had MMO and WoW experience, but the Retail world was stiff brand new to me coming from Wrath pservers.
WoW has too much to offer to “teach” it imho.
It’s one of those games people must want to learn to play.
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It takes me hours to set up my alt’s WAs, binds, and UI, usually I do this while and after learning the rotation from IcyVeins and practicing on target dummies. It’s also a few more hours to learn the dungeons but this is usually once per role, and less to learn the second and third role. Learning about the customization options for the addons I like and how to use WAs could easily take 10 hours, maybe more, before you’re using them like a pro. Learning how to use macros and making them for your spec is probably an hour or two. Reading through talents and modifying them to fit your preferences might take an hour or 30 minutes if you use MurlokIO/warcraftlogs to immediately rule out ones that nobody takes.
I think if a player spends about 30 hours preparing, and then about 10 hours in future seasons, they will be great for M+.
It sounds like a lot and maybe it is, but if you enjoy M+ it could easily be 200+ hours of entertainment per year, so it might be worth investing time into learning it.
HourS? Plural? How lol.
I’m sorry what
I made over 100 WeakAuras this expansion, there are a lot of settings, and learning how to use them isn’t obvious. Macros are easier, you have
#showtooltip
To get the icon if you leave it as the ? Icon and show the tooltip
Then /cast spell lalala
With a bunch of conditionals in brackets [@mouseover,harm,nodead] [mod:shift] in whatever order you want them to be in
For healers doing help/harm macros (not recommended, clique is better) you might want for example, mouseover friendly heal > mouseover enemy damage > target friendly heal if no mouseover = target enemy damage if no mouseover; self heal if no target or mouseover]
So you just do that exact order with conditionals and the spell names in one line
Sometimes you have /use 14 for using trinket in second slot or /use tempered potion in there as well, you can put any off gcd thing in a macro before the gcd taking spell
My question was not how to make macros, it was how does it take you HOURS to do them.
Nono macros now are probably 15 minutes, learning how for someone who doesn’t know macros would take 1 or 2 hours
WAs take a lot longer obviously
I’d argue though that in the context of the question, customized WA’s and macros are a bit more advanced than what the OP was actually asking.
I wasn’t sure what they meant by guild teams. But I think someone could not know anything and press random buttons and be fine in heroic dungeons to be fair, 0 hours prep
Just today I did a heroic for the bag and 3 different people joined and left when they couldn’t figure out the mechagon workshop maze though, so who knows 
maybe some prep is needed, maybe not because we just 3manned boss 3 with no tank and then they could just skip it
It’s going to depend on the player, the time they invest, and how they use their time.
Out of the game’s I’ve been new to over the last few years, I would say Lost Ark was the closest to what WoW currently would be to a new player. I play a lot and enjoy actively improving in the games I play, and it took me around ~2 months to go from starting the game to being comfortable in the end-game content for both PvE and PvP. Probably more like 4-6 weeks if you omit the month it took me to slog through the campaign. There was still a mountain to climb, but I at least knew how to strap on my gear.
Effective learning happens at the edge of one’s comfort zone. If I were onboarding an entirely new player I would start them off on new player island for the basics, then get them into DF until 70. Ideally they would play in a self-directed manner while asking you questions, but if they really only want to participate in end-game content then I’d spam TW with them until 70, before having them do the campaign.
Once at max level I’d start with heroics to finish their general comprehension of combat systems. After that it’s a matter of keeping them in a position to actually improve. Once they can generally pilot their character I would move them to M0s to actually learn about the the interactions between their character and enemies. Then you just want to keep pushing them every time they get comfortable with the new difficulty. Might be worth putting together a group of friends and taking them through 1 or 2 higher keys so that they get a real taste of what mechanics will eventually be; hopefully that gets them to care about them even while progressing through keys where they aren’t actually lethal.
On the raiding side I would start LFR at the same time as heroics and progress in a similar way.
Reads thread.
How about just letting people play and get comfortable with the game on their own terms?
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Honestly, basic mechanics should never be a problem because people coming in a while for the first time it probably already played some sort of video game and they know what a mechanic is.
Now this particular form is full of hundreds of people who couldn’t understand a thing about mechanics and don’t want to. The posts prove my point for me.
Depends on the player.
Age, mental acuity, personality, stuff like that.
Then this is very important:
WoW isn’t a hard game. It’s a convoluted game. Not hard.
I feel no matter what game you play, what genre it falls into, or what your particular interest is in that game, everything takes time. I’ve been playing this game for 20 years and I still learn something new every time I login. I don’t think anyone could put a timeframe or a specific set of circumstances on what it would take for a new player to get good at their class or at this game. Time. Lots of time. No one comes into this game playing it perfectly.
Most new players to retail quit. It is not friendly to new players at all. Classic is but dev team keeps making Classic more and more like retail.
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The learning/difficulty curve of this game is whack.
Difficulty stays at tutorial level for way too long.
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