World of Warcraft Newbie Guide 5: The Class Trainer, Spellbook, and ActionBars

As you go through the game, you will acquire new abilities for usage by your class. This means you ultimately have to deal with your class trainer, the spellbook, and your action bars early on in the game. Because you will end up learning how to deal with these aspects of the game very early, having a tutorial on the class trainer, spellbook, and action bars is tantamount. Keep in mind this doesn't go over how to optimally use abilities or anything more intricate than is necessary at the earlier levels. Such aspects of the game will be discussed later on if at all.

Class Trainers

Note: Abilities are now learned automatically while leveling, thus part of this article is now obsolete. The advice given in this article is still very helpful for later.

Class trainers are the single type of NPC able to give you the tools that your class has at a small price. In addition to this, they also provide services that are helpful for character customization related to class mechanics (which will be covered in the future) and can hand out class quests from time to time to acquire exceptional equipment. Because of this, class trainers are among the most important NPCs in the game.

When you first meet your class trainer in the starting zones, you will be given a breadcrumb quest to learn some of the basics of your class trainer. However, these class trainers are special and will only teach you class abilities up to level 5. Once you leave the starting zone, you are responsible for finding your class trainer. There are a few tips and tricks that will help you find the class trainer.

• Class trainers usually only show up in the town that is in the same zone as the starting area (such as Sen'jin Village, Razor Hill, or Goldshire) as well as all capital cities.
• You can interact with guards to ask where a trainer is.
• You can also track the class trainer on your minimap, as shown below:

Upon finding your class trainer, you should take note of what makes them different from other NPCs. Specifically, you can identify them as a trainer by noting their title as <class name> trainer, like below:

When you talk to a trainer that isn't in the starting zone, you will have access to all of the (base) abilities that your class can learn. Keep in mind that these abilities require you to be a certain level, which the game will alert you to when you gain levels:

In addition, take note of the costs to learn abilities. You should make sure to manage your money and prioritize learning abilities when you can, since having a larger set of abilities can help you in your journeys by defeating enemies faster, decreasing downtime, or providing some other form of utility.

The Spellbook

The Spellbook is another menu object that is opened early on during gameplay. You can find it as shown below:

The spellbook is the book icon.

You can also open it by using the default keybind "P."

Opening your Spellbook will show something like this:

Your Spellbook may look different depending on your race and class.

The Spellbook is handy because it will show all abilities that are associated with your character. In the General tab (top tab), you can see your racial traits, weapon and armor proficiencies, and other miscellaneous passive and active effects associated with your character but not their class abilities. Class abilities are divided into three tabs. These named tabs will categorize abilities by "specialization" which will be more important later when you reach level 10. If you are looking for something specific, all abilities in the spellbook are sorted alphabetically to help you in your search. In addition, abilities in the spellbook may be greyed out and show a certain level you can attain that ability. This is a good way to quickly check when you'll learn new class abilities (among a few other things).

As you may also notice, the Spellbook has additional tabs at the bottom (up to five, depending on your class). They will be Spellbook (what we went over now), Pet, Professions, Mounts, and Companions, the latter four of which will be covered at a later time. You may also see an additional tab at the bottom that, when selected, explains specializations a bit. We'll take a look at that later. In addition, an additional tab will appear on the side if you are in a guild, another topic to be covered later.

ActionBars

As mentioned a couple of articles ago, the ActionBar is at the bottom part of the user interface by default and displays abilities that you can use. When you acquire your first few abilities through the class trainer, the new abilities will automatically be placed on the bar. However, by the time you level up enough, you need to begin placing abilities on the ActionBars yourself. In order to do this, open your Spellbook and hold left click on an ability you want on the ActionBar. Now drag it into a slot on the ActionBar. You can overwrite existing abilities on the ActionBar. You can also move existing abilities on the ActionBar around. In addition, some other active effects, such as from items, can be used directly from the ActionBar. Your ActionBar abilities by default will be keybound to "1" through "=."

In addition to all this, you can access additional ActionBars. There is a set of arrows to the right of the ActionBars that allow you to scroll between ActionBars. The number next to these arrows determines which ActionBar is currently active. You can also hold "Shift" and use the "Mousewheel" to scroll through Actionbars. This can be handy if you want to store additional abilities on your ActionBars that you don't use that often or have different sets of abilities for different situations.

However, this sort of play can be clunky. That is why it's possible to enable additional ActionBars to show up on the User Interface for usage. To do this, go to the Interface settings in the Game Menu (Escape), then go to "ActionBars." You should now see something like this:

From here you should check everything off. This shows the four additional ActionBars (keep in mind that when you scroll through the main Actionbar you will only have two when you do this). The result will be something like below:

As you can see, there are now four additional ActionBars ready for holding additional abilities. However, the drawback is your User Interface may end up looking cluttered. Thus, you can remove ActionBars based on their location by unchecking the respective option in the Interface settings. These ActionBars will have no keybinding set to them by default, so you may need to map some keybindings (also in the Game Menu). I'll go more into detail on this later.