Warcraft Bible

Azeroth Advisor is a new service, just launched. It’s mostly useful for new and intermediate players. You sign up for an account (currently on a 15-day free trial), load up an add-on in WoW, and log in on any (or all) of your characters. Then you upload the SavedVariables .lua file created for each character to the Azeroth Advisor server.

You can also do this process by running a desktop application that automates things, but I couldn’t get it to work on my Mac. The application crashed and burned every time I ran it. The add-on worked fine, although you have to poke around in your WoW installation directory a fair bit to find the right files to upload. The site provides clear instructions to walk you through the upload steps.

Anyway, once you get the job done, Azeroth Advisor generates a custom newsletter that gives you loads of information specific to each character. This includes stuff like:

• notes on talents you are about to train on your next level up
• your character’s current stats, including precise combat skill ratings
• a detailed custom map of your current location, with NPC’s and locations of specific interest marked (like your toon’s particular professon trainers)
• one or two articles specific to your class and current level, such as an Instance guide, a PvP technique, or some sweet gear you should quest or farm
• current game notes… right now, for example, a very nice summary of changes to your character’s class that took effect in the recent 2.1 patch

This is all presented with attractive graphics and a style that suits each race, character class and gender. You can view each newsletter/report online at the Azeroth Advisor site, and you also get a copy via e-mail.

It looks like there is no limit to the number of characters you can process in one account. If you’ve got 40 characters across multiple servers, you can have reports for every single one, as long as you log in on them.

You get a fresh report whenever each character levels up, or weekly for each character if you aren’t leveling. You also get a special supplementary map report whenever a character discovers a new zone.

All the content is attractive and well written. For newbies, it’s a gold mine of info. For experienced players, it’s a useful reminder of where each character is at, and a real help for those of you who are running several alts of varying classes and levels. Unless you are playing full time, it’s hard to remember what’s going on with all your characters, and these customized reports do a great job of providing reminders.

The maps are especially noteworthy. The graphics are custom drawn, and show the whole zone more clearly than the in-game WoW maps. They show the whole zone revealed, which will help many players find their way to quest spots more easily. And the custom labeling of locations and NPC’s, specific to the needs of each character, is a great feature.

This service won’t do a lot for you if you are focused on a single main character that’s already at level 70. But just about anyone else will find it useful.

Give it a try while it’s free!

http://www.azerothadvisor.com/

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I’ve been seeing a lot of in-game chat about Lord of the Rings Online, all the usual questions and rumors, is it better than WoW, is everybody going to migrate to LOTRO and so on.

With the open beta phase (read: free) of Lord of the Rings Online nearing its end, I finally gave in, downloaded LOTRO, and spend a couple of hours taking a quick look.

And it’s about what I expected. Lord of the Rings in pretty much a clone of World of Warcraft, and about 70% as good. The basic interface is nearly identical, the quest structure is an imitation, the gear, inventory and crafting systems are strangely familiar. You can pretty much use the same commands and key strokes you use in WoW, and never skip a beat.

The “70% as good” has to do with details and refinement. The graphics are pretty good, and extremely similar to WoW, but the landscapes, towns and dungeons are less detailed and interesting. The areas and maps are just like Warcraft, but pathing and interaction with the terrain is relatively clunky… a lot of unproductive running around to get to some point on the map, without any obvious reason why you can’t get from here to there. Grouping works just like WoW, down to the loot rolling and on-screen layout. But group chat is very weak. And so it goes.

There are differences too, and some nifty features that WoW players will enjoy. The available races give you basically the Alliance side of WoW: humans, dwarves, elves and hobbits (replacing gnomes).

But the classes are completely different, and this will certainly make for a fundamental difference in play. LOTRO has Captains, Guardians, Champions, Burglars, Lore Masters, Hunters and Minstrels. There are (strangely enough, given the Lord of the Rings lore) no Mages or Wizards. No priests. It seems like Minstrels are the primary healing class. Lore Masters seem closer to Druids than to Mages. Guardians and Champions are equivalent to tanking and DPS style Warriors, respectively. And Captains are more or less Paladins. The big DPS class is the Hunter.

On the whole, the distinctive class structure is a really positive feature, at least from the perspective of creating an alternative to World of Warcraft. It should make for a different dynamic in groups (Fellowship in LOTRO, as opposed to Party in WoW).

And that is about it for the pluses, I’m afraid. Admittedly, this is based on a very brief first look, and entirely on the most basic aspects of play - after all, my LOTRO character is at level 7 (the initial max level is 50), and hasn’t had a taste of any of the game’s more advanced features. But what are the odds that the higher levels will somehow rise up to meet the standard of WoW? Not very good, I’d say.

I am curious to see what the higher levels of the game will look like. There are some promising features described in the PR for the game, such as Realm vs Realm play, regular world events, and formal tracking of first kills. So I’ll probably take time, now and then, to advance a character and try out more of this new, high-quality addition to the MMORPG genre.

But with nearly 3 years invested in WoW, three level 70 characters, and another five coming along past 60, I can’t see shifting much of my focus to LOTRO. Because the bottom line is: Lord of the Rings Online is a clone of World of Warcraft, and nowhere near its equal in design and play quality.

Who will want to play LOTRO? Some WoW old-timers who are truly burnt on Warcraft, and just need a change. Newbies who’ve never tried WoW, and won’t know what they’re missing.

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• World of Warcraft PVP Guide: World, City, and Battlegrounds

I find well-written and researched game guides to be a big help in getting more value out of my play time in World of Warcraft. I don’t think I could have leveled at least one character to level 60 in every class and faction in the game, in the time I’ve had to play WoW, without the detailed information I’ve gotten from professional game guides.

Among the best, and my favorites, are the guides published by Game Guides Online. Game Guides Online has published a total of 11 World of Warcraft guides so far, including class guides for Shaman, Warlock, Priest, Hunter, Mage, Paladin and Warrior, along with a Gold Guide (how to make lots of gold in Warcraft), profession guides for Alchemy and Engineering, and an advanced Raiding (end game) Guide.

The latest in the series has just been released today, and it’s definitely one of the best.

The World of Warcraft PVP Guide: World, City, and Battlegrounds is an advanced guide, to be sure. The author assumes that you already know the fundamentals of playing each class you are interested in, and concentrates entirely on information that is specific to player-versus-player activity. Given that the PvP Guide is 67 pages (downloadable PDF format) of tightly-written content, you can believe that the information goes deep and specific.For example. The 3+ pages on the Priest’s role and abilities in PvP give thorough details of how each priest talent build in the post-1.10 World of Warcraft (in this recent patch, the Priest talents were radically updated) functions best. You will learn how valuable the Discipline spec priest can be as a damage dealer (because Holy spell attacks can’t be resisted); why the Holy spec priest should be almost impossible to kill in group PvP (and how to deal some damage when opportunity presents); and how to make the most of Shadow spec through Vampiric Embrace and Shadow Mastery.

Similar detail is provided for every class and faction combination. You get specifics of the challenges you face in one-on-one PvP versus each opponent class; strategies for team combat in instanced Battlegrounds games; extensive discussion of raiding major cities and defeating faction leaders; and thorough coverage of the rank system and its rewards, as well as detailed notes for using Engineering, Alchemy, First Aid and Cooking items to improve your PvP.

The World of Warcraft PvP Guide is very well written, entertaining, easy to follow and thorough. It will be especially valuable for players who have reached the end game without doing a lot of PvP; in this situation it gives you a complete grounding in every aspect of Player-vs-Player, thus opening up a whole new portion of game play that may revitalize your interest in World of Warcraft.

The PvP Guide costs $19.99 (US), immediate download after PayPal payment, and it’s a terrific value at this price. Like all Game Guides Online guides, it comes with lifetime access to updates - and they really deliver on this, by the way, their Mage guide is now in version 3, for example. Highly recommended.

Even better value, in my opinion, is the deal I’ve taken. Get the Game Guides Online World of Warcraft Strategy Chest for $74.99 (US), and you get ALL of the current guides, all updates for life… AND every World of Warcraft guide they ever release! It’s a killer deal, and I advise you to grab it while you can, if you’re a serious WoW player.

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