The Ultimate
World Of Warcraft Guide

- 7/10

Guide last updated: Updated for patch 2.4
Review last updated: 2008-07-12

The Ultimate World Of Warcraft Guide is a web based collection of guides covering a broad range of WoW topics. Since it’s updated often I have a hard time keeping this review 100% up-to-date, so check out their own presentation because there may be things included that I’ve missed here.

Let me first explain what you get on the inside, and then comment on it.

Here’s what it contains:

Class guides - talents, loot, macros

The Ultimate WoW Guide contains talent builds (specs) for level 70 for all nine classes. There are also comments on the various builds so you know if they’re good for raiding / PvE / PvP and such. This makes it pretty easy to figure out how to place talents if you need to. What’s missing is leveling builds, that shows you exactly in which order to place talent points.

A very helpful feature is the loot lists for all instances from 1-70, and even battlegrounds, class quests, and reputations. Since a lot of WoW is about finding better gear, you’ll always know where to find the best items for your specific class.

Also, what’s lacking is any gameplay strategies like how to actually play your character in solo, PvP, instances and so on.

Gold guides

There are several sections in the gold guide, one for World of Warcraft Classic, one for the Auction House and a few for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.

The WoW Classic part of the guide is more or less outdated. Some of the strategies are still useful, in fact even better than they used to be, but you have to test them to find out.

The auction house section was recently improved with almost 15 minutes of videos showing you how to profit from Auction House trading. This can be a very good way to make gold, and videos make learning that much easier.

As for the level 70 gold guides, they are okay. However, some of the strategies have been nerfed since the guide was written and won’t be as profitable as the guide says. Some of the tips should nevertheless earn you 100+ gold per hour. Added for patch 2.4 was a comprehensive guide to daily quests, both the new Shattered Sun ones and the "old" 2.3 ones. Good stuff.

Leveling Guides

The leveling guides show you how to quest from level 1-70 as horde and alliance. Sadly, some races’ starting areas are NOT covered (undead, tauren, dwarves, gnomes, night elves).

When I went to try it, I could hardly even figure out how to use it. Once I did, I found it was not user friendly at all. The info is there, but not presented in an easy-to-use way, so leveling with this guide would be a nightmare (compared to other ones).

There’s also an old 30-60 grinding guide included, which is best avoided like the plague since grinding is slower and more boring than questing.

Profession Guides

The profession guides included in The Ultimate WoW Guide are skill-up guides only (with a few comments and tips on the various professions here and there).

Since you’ll be having 5 professions (two primary and first aid, cooking and fishing) this will save you a lot of time, and it’s also a great reference if you want to drop a profession and pick up a new one. There are guides for all professions except fishing. Basically, the guides list what you need to make or gather, where you can get recipes for it, and what mats you’ll need. Where it’s warranted, like with skinning and herbalism, there are separate guides for horde and alliance.

Some professions, like leatherworking, also have specializations and in some of the guides there are separate skill-up instructions for the specializations.

Overall, the profession guides, though sometimes minimalistic, are a pretty neat part of The Ultimate WoW Guide, and considering that some people charge $30 for this information alone it’s a great deal to have them included.

Beginner’s Guide

There’s an entire 85 page beginner’s guide included in The Ultimate WoW Guide, downloadable in PDF format and as an audio book if you’d rather listen to it. I’ve seen guides like this sell for $20-30 alone. It’s written by an ex-WoW player and covers the basics including some of the Burning Crusade (the WoW expansion pack). However, the guide is not 100% accurate in its statements so you’d be well advised to take everything with a grain of salt. If your experience in World of Warcraft that contradicts the guide, trust your experience.

You probably won’t read it more than once before you move on to the intermediate and advanced stuff, but since it’s included for free there’s nothing bad about that.