World of Warcraft Newbie Guide 3H: The Orc's Starting Area First Half

To go to the second half of this starting zone, click here, or here to return to the main article.

When you play a character for the first time, you will get a cutscene briefly describing your character's race with some nice visuals, like below:

From the Orc cinematic

However, if you want to get on with the gameplay, you can skip the opening cinematic at any time by pressing the Escape key and clicking yes to cancel.

You can do this with most ingame cinematics

When the cinematic ends, you will be placed in control of your character. In this article, you are now in the Valley of Strength, where the Orc Warrior, aptly named Tutorial, begins.
 

The User Interface

Before moving on, let's quickly go over some parts of the User Interface. At the top left you will see your character window, which will display information about your character such as their health, level, and secondary resources. To the direct right of that would be the unitframe for your target, with a Green target being friendly, a Yellow target being passive or neutral, and a Red target being aggressive. There are also Grey targets, which are units that have been attacked by another player first, which will come into play later.

At the top right of your interface is your minimap which shows your current location as well as the location of important units. For instance, a quest giver is shown as a yellow (or blue) exclamation point, while a class trainer may be shown as a book. You can highlight these icons to see the name the icon is assigned to. You can also see the clock below the minimap, which shows the realm's time, which is based on the time zone the realm is assigned to, as opposed to your own. Other notable features near the minimap are the Calendar, the tracking icon, and the zone name/map button, which will be gone over later.

At the bottom left of the interface you will see a chat window. You can see chat based on the area you are in, with specific color codings, such as white for "say" chat, red for "yell" chat, and a beige/tan/light brown color for channel chats. You can also type chat by pressing Enter and typing in what you want to say. There are some additional commands needed to type in certain types of chat, which will be gone over later.

At the bottom of the interface you will see many things, such as an ActionBar, which shows abilities and their keybindings, if applicable. For instance, the "Attack" command is bound to "1", while the Warrior's Strike ability is bound to "2" (and your starting racial active ability is bound to "0"). Next to this you will see many tabs, which serve as a menu of sorts. You can use buttons to access your character sheet, Achievement list, and many other things, though most also have an equivalent hotkey. You will also see your bag bar, which is essentially your inventory. We will go over this shortly. Finally, right above this you will see your experience bar, which shows how much experience you need before leveling up.

At the bottom right you will see a tooltip window when you highlight something in-game, which can vary from a target's information (such as levels, associated faction or guild, and so on) and information associated with a selected ability.

Now that all that is out of the way, let us begin:

 The Horde Requires Bacon

(If you ever die at any point, refer to this.)

Before talking to the Orc in front of you, you should look at the game menu by pressing Escape. Then, go to Interface to enter the Interface settings.

From the Interface menu, go down to "Help" and uncheck "Tutorials" to shut off the Tutorials. While this is optional, I recommend it because the current implementation of the ingame tutorial is a bit annoying.

Now that you have done some configuring of the game, move forward with "W" and right click on the Orc to interact with him.

He will give you your first quest. Click accept below to accept the quest and run towards another Orc who is nearby, using "A" and "E" to turn left and right respectively if needed, who has a yellow question mark over his head, indicating you can complete a quest with that NPC (non-playable character).

Talk to him to and click Complete Quest to get some experience and open up the next quest.

Talking to the same Orc will give you the first major quest, which requires that you kill some Mottled Boars to toughen up. While the Orc isn't clear about where the boars are, if you look in the distance you should see some fenced areas which house the boars.

Once you reach the spot and start killing some boars by right clicking and/or using your actionbar abilities, you'll notice some yellow text near the center of your screen that alerts you of your progress.


While fighting the boars, you may notice that while you can see their health display in the top left, there's no indication of it on the units themselves. It is possible to enable them by pressing "V", which will show you health bars like below:

Unfortunate the graphics are a little ugly, but it can be improved with addons

This is very helpful if you want to find targets nearby or if you want to see the health the target has without glancing up at the top left all the time. However, if you don't like it and want to turn it off, you can press "V" again.

Something else you will probably notice is that dead enemies might have a bag when your mouse is over their corpse. This means you can right click to loot the mobs, showing a loot window like this:

You can then click on the loot that you want to put it into your inventory. It is recommended you loot everything possible for now.

Once you have killed all the boars, it's time to return to the quest giver for your reward:

As you can see there's a bit of a choice, so choose your equipment based on what you can use (if you highlight the item and it has red lettering you cannot use it). In general you should use the best armor type you can equip (Plate (level 40) > Mail > Leather > Cloth), but if you should also compare the attributes of the rewards, as something that may look inferior in type may be superior overall. Regarding the other rewards, you earn some experience, which helps you gain levels, and some money. Money takes the form of gold, silver, and copper, with 100 copper equaling one silver, and 100 silver equaling one gold.

By this point, if you are playing alone, you should be level 2.

Apples and Alliance 

Upon completing your quest, two more will become available. The first of the two is available from the quest giver you just turned the previous quest in to. The second quest is available nearby and can be found by looking for a yellow exclamation point on the minimap.

Before heading out of town to do these quests, however, let's adjust the User Interface a little more, starting with the chat:

The chat's font size can be adjusted (mine started out a little too small by default, but it might be different for you) by right clicking on the "General" tab and highlighting the Font Size within the settings, opening an array of sizes for the chat text.

Next, return to the Interface Settings (Escape -> Interface)

By default the Control setting will not look like this (although "Sticky Targeting" will now be off). The focus at this time is to turn on "Auto Loot" and turn off "Open Loot Window At Mouse." These two changes will allow you to loot items quickly from corpses and not have the loot window appear everywhere. If you want to individually loot items, you can hold Shift before looting.

Now it is time to quest. Firstly, you should open your map by pressing "M."

This is a portion of what you will see. Each number on the map will correspond to a quest and the location where you can do the objective. If you click each number, you may see an area where the objective can be done (but not all the time). If a quest is complete, it will show as a question mark on the map instead indicating where the quest can be turned in. As you can see, the quests are a bit of a distance away from each other. Let us go down first after the Northwatch Spies.

These are pretty easy, even though they are supposedly "stealthed" which means they are invisible until you are within a certain proximity of them. Some classes can also stealth or turn invisible, which is helpful to know in the future.

After finish them up, head north towards the Cactus Apples you need to collect.

I don't know how picking these doesn't hurt you.

The Cactus Apples will show up as plants that are distinctly brighter and have a shine to them. Right click on the plant (you will know because a "cogwheel" will show up when you hover your mouse over the plant) to gather them and once you have enough, head back to turn in the two quests.

From the second quest you may have noticed you can use the item. This is because it is classified as a food. However, at the time it's not important (but feel free to use them if you want) because at low levels health regenerates very fast. At this point you should be level 3.

Charging Into Battle

Upon completing the two quests, a few more quests should open up. However, this part will focus on a specific set of quests:

Take note that these quests may be a little different as they are designed based on class, but they are all similar in composition.

In general you should find the quest turn-in NPC nearby.

Complete the quest as normal and then start the quest the class trainer (Warrior trainer in this case) assigns you:

As you can see, you must learn the Charge ability and then practice using it. Talk to the trainer again and select the bottom option (this is now obsolete. Spells are learned automatically):

Click the train button to learn Charge, which will be bound to "3" and then go to the target dummies nearby and use your newly learned ability to Charge into the target. The quest is now complete and you can turn it in to the Warrior trainer:

You have now finished half of the starting zone. Click here to go to the other half.