Your Ultimate Beginner Guide For World Of Warcraft Classic
Aside from your character's appearance and starting zone, your race also affects your combat effectiveness with its unique racial abilities and passives.
Author:Callum FraserJul 03, 2025280 Shares13.3K Views
Just getting your feet wet in WoW Classic and not sure where to begin? We've got just the guide for you! Today, we'll walk you through all the essential things every new player should know about Classic to understand the basics and set off on the right foot.
So, if you're ready to dive into the old-school Azeroth, let us roll!
Factions And Races
The very first choice you'll make during character creation is picking a faction. The game has two factions, each with a set of available races:
- Alliance:Humans, Dwarves, Night Elves, Gnomes
- Horde:Orcs, Undead, Tauren, Trolls
Aside from your character's appearance and starting zone, your race also affects your combat effectiveness with its unique racial abilities and passives. As a beginner, you shouldn't worry about min-maxing your character right from the start, so just go with the race that feels right or looks coolest to you. You'll have plenty of time to learn about builds and optimization as you go.
Roles And Classes
The second major decision you'll need to make is which role you want to play, because this will directly affect your class choice.
There are three main roles in group content (raids, dungeons, group farms, etc):
- Tanks are responsible for keeping enemies focused on them, taking the brunt of the damage so their allies can do their jobs safely. They're usually very durable and have many abilities that help mitigate incoming damage. Classes: Druid, Paladin, Warrior
- Healers are the ones who keep everyone alive during fights. They have a rich toolkit of healing abilities, from direct heals to various heal-over-time effects. Classes: Druid, Paladin, Shaman, Priest
- Damage Dealers (DPS) are all about dishing out damage. Their goal is to kill enemies quickly using single-target or AoE attacks, as well as utility spells like crowd control, interrupts, slows, and stuns.
All classes in Classic can perform a DPS role, but they deal damage at different ranges:
- Melee DPS fight up close and personal (e.g. Warrior, Rogue)
- Ranged DPS attack from a distance (e.g. Mage, Warlock, Hunter)
Every class in WoW Classic is unique and fun and brings something special to the table. Our advice once again is to pick whatever matches your playstyle and preferences instead of forcing yourself on a meta class that you simply won't enjoy playing.
Questing
Quests are multi-step tasks given by NPCs that reward you with experience (XP) and other loot. Available quests are marked with a yellow exclamation mark. If the exclamation mark is blue, it means the quest is repeatable and can be done multiple times. Likewise, when you're ready to turn in a quest, you'll see a yellow or blue question mark, depending on the type of quest.
Most of the quests you'll do early on are story and side quests, and they all can be completed solo, but there also are dungeon and raid quests, which require a group.
Leveling
Gaining XP and leveling up will be the core of your Classic experience until you reach the endgame. There are several main ways to level your character:
- Questing is the easiest method and the one you'll start with
- Grinding mobs means killing enemies in the open world to gain XP
- Dungeon farming is about running the same dungeons on repeat
Each of these methods has its pros and cons, so a healthy mix of all three is often the most efficient and enjoyable way to level.
Training Skills And Talents
In WoW Classic, your abilities and talents do not unlock automatically. You'll need to visit your Class Trainer and pay to learn new spells or upgrade existing ones. This is not cheap, so you shouldn't mindlessly train every single ability right away and rather focus on the ones you'll actually use in combat. You can come back for the rest later when you have more gold to spare. Also, don't forget to manually drag upgraded abilities from your spellbook to your action bar, or you might end up using an outdated lower-rank version without realizing it!
Starting from level 10, you'll earn Talent Points each time you level up. You can invest them into different specs to build your character into a particular playstyle. Be careful, though: once you commit points, that's for good. The only way to respec will be to visit a trainer and pay them to reset your entire talent tree.
Weapon Training
If you open your character menu and take a look at your skills, you'll notice that each equipped weapon type has its own proficiency level. Higher weapon skills guarantee more successful attacks, with fewer misses, dodges, or blocks from enemies.
You increase weapon skill by simply using that weapon type in combat. If you want to equip a new type, you'll first need to learn it at a Weapon Master.
Gold
WoW Classic goldis the primary in-game currency. It's hard to come by, yet there are quite a few things you'll be spending it on, like:
- Training spells and abilities
- Buying gear and consumables
- Repairing gear
- Buying mounts and learning to ride
- Leveling up professions
- Buying crafting materials
- …and much more
Luckily, the game offers plenty of ways to earn gold. For example, you can:
- Sell quest rewards
- Farm mobs for raw gold and valuable drops
- Craft items or gather materials for sale
- Flip items on the Auction House (buy low and resell at a higher price)
- Use your class abilities (e.g. sell Mage portals or Warlock summons)
If you want a steady and reliable income, we highly recommend not limiting yourself to one or two methods. Try to engage in multiple gold-making activities—this will keep things fresh and simply give you more ways to make a profit.
Professions
Professions are a vital part of the game, as they allow you to gather resources and craft items that you can either use yourself or sell to others.
There are 12 professions split into two main categories:
Primary Professions (You Can Have Up To Two):
Crafting Professions:
- Blacksmithing creates mail/plate armor and weapons
- Leatherworking makes leather/mail armor
- Tailoring produces cloth armor and bags
- Alchemy crafts potions, elixirs, and flasks
- Enchanting allows you to enchant gear
- Engineering makes bombs, gadgets, and ranged weapons
Gathering Professions:
- Mining gathers ore and stones
- Herbalism collects herbs
- Skinning skins animals for leather
Secondary Professions (You Can Pick Them All)
- First Aid creates healing bandages
- Cooking prepares food with buffs or healing effects
- Fishing catches fish and other aquatic items
You can learn a profession from a Profession Trainer in any major city or starter zone. Trainers also help you unlock new recipes and higher skill levels.
Gearing Up
Gear plays an essential role in your progression, helping your character grow stronger and take on tougher content.
All the items you'll obtain come in different rarities, indicated by their color:
- Gray (Poor) - vendor trash
- White (Common) - basic usable gear or materials
- Green (Uncommon) - decent quality, may have bonus stats
- Blue (Rare) - better stats and often harder to get
- Purple (Epic) - high-end items from raids or rare drops
Each item may boost one or more of the stats: Strength, Agility, Stamina, Intellect, Spirit, or Armor.
Mainly, you'll be getting weapons and armor, but there are also other gear pieces like rings, trinkets, shields, cloaks, and more. All those can be either BoE (Bind on Equip), meaning it can be traded or sold until equipped, or BoP (Bind on Pickup), which becomes character-bound immediately and cannot be traded.
You can earn gear through quest rewards, mob drops, dungeon and raid loot, or get crafted pieces (make them yourself or buy on the Auction House).
Callum Fraser
Author
Callum Fraser isn't just a writer about Scotland; he's a product of its rugged landscape and rich history. Born and raised in Perthshire, with the Highlands as his backyard, his love for the nation's stories was kindled by local storytellers and long walks through ancient glens.
This passion led him to pursue a degree in Scottish History from the University of Edinburgh. For over 15 years, Callum has dedicated himself to exploring and documenting his homeland, fusing his academic knowledge with essential, on-the-ground experience gained from charting road trips through the Cairngorms, hiking the misty Cuillins of Skye, and uncovering the secrets of traditional recipes in his family's kitchen.
As the Editor-in-Chief and Lead Author for Scotland's Enchanting Kingdom, Callum's mission is simple: to be your most trusted guide. He combines meticulous research with a storyteller's heart to help you discover the authentic magic of Scotland — from its best-kept travel secrets to its most cherished traditional recipes.
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