The depth of detail found inside WoW is truly immense. The environment allows for players to become very knowledgeable in a number of different areas, gear and talent specifications, instances and boss encounters, WoW lore, effective PvP combat and strategy, and questing plus general world playing. Good players must have at least an average familiarity with gear, instances, and questing. It is possible to attain the maximum level while being largely ignorant but it will be a longer and more tedious process than necessary.

Considering gear alone, there are many facets: item class, speed, damage, armor, secondary stats bonuses, special combat effects, passive effects, appearance, and integration with character persona (if role playing is your bag). To complicate matters, further characters are heavily shaped by which talents they choose and gear can accentuate or detract from your characters effectiveness based on your talent choices. The debate over the efficacy of certain talent builds and gear combinations are legendary, when spells or talents get changed these debates start all over again.

As an example, I chose for my priest a talent built which heavily favored shadow damage and not improving his healing abilities. A priest in this position is generally not considered to have sufficient damage output to justify the loss in their healing abilities for raid events, unless they have the proper (often epic and very rare) gear which will augment their damage. I realized that getting the gear to solidify my place as a primary damage dealer would be too time consuming and difficult so I chose a middle of the road approach. However in PvP combat scenarios shadow priests often faired much better than more healing oriented priests, given their damage output and talents introduced just prior to the release of the expansion. I had a set of gear which heavily augmented my healing that I used when assuming a healing role in raid events and another set of gear which augmented my damage output for all other situations. The debate over which healing gear was best given my lack of healing talents was a complicated one; the damage set was not easy either as priests in that role are generally considered an “off spec”.

Instances offer players the opportunity to form a group to conquer difficult content for consistently greater rewards than are available through world questing. Any player who reaches the maximum level will have entered at least one instance, often a dozen instances with hundreds of repetitions. Gaining instance specific knowledge is very important for efficiency and player sanity. No one will want to group with you if you’ve got no idea what your character should be doing in an instance. This knowledge focuses on which enemies to attack in what order, special abilities enemies have, environment gimmicks, flaws, loopholes, and how other players will most likely perform in a given situation.

Raiding knowledge takes instance knowledge to the next level; not only are the events much longer but you have to coordinate the actions of up to 40 people for a few hours. Raids are usually led by one to two people, and authority is then delegated to class leads that can pass specific instructions to other players of the same class. Raid leaders are expected to have comprehensive knowledge of game mechanics, the instance being attempted, strategy, command and passable people skills. On top of instance and boss specific knowledge there’s a great deal of gear and talent specification knowledge required so you can pass out loot carefully so the right players get what’s appropriate for them. Many times multiple classes will be able to use an item but it is a best fit with a specific one performing a specific task.

Warcraft lore is just as deep as the facts pertinent to a gear discussion. Current lore began back with the original warcraft strategy games Blizzard released in the 90's and continues on through the latest content patches for WoW and even some print material. Lore is one thing most players can skip on but still be considered to have above average skill as knowledge of lore makes very little difference in how you play the game. Many players find it rewarding to know as much about the lore as they can because it adds to their immersion in the world, and generally players who engage in role playing while in WoW are more concerned with lore than a non RP player.

When the game was first released, knowing the story and paying attention to quest reports and NPCs was more important than it is today. Having a reasonable knowledge could lead you to complete quests more quickly than you would otherwise because you’d have an idea of what characters, story and locations were interconnected. Now that so many players have reached the level cap with one or more characters and there are searchable WoW companion sites which detail how to complete quests, this knowledge is no longer as important as it once was.

PvP combat comes in two flavors: world and battlegrounds. All realms have certain areas which are designated for cross faction and even intra-faction PvP combat, and they also provide access to zones intended only for PvP called "battlegrounds". Defeating other players in combat is obviously much more difficult than defeating game controlled enemies. In order to be successful, players need to have an extensive knowledge of the capabilities of other classes, their possible talent specs, and their gear. Being able to recognize a player of a different class who has vastly superior gear and who is using a talent spec that may be difficult for you to overcome is an invaluable asset. This knowledge could be mitigated by add-ons that could bind multiple attacks to a single button, some could allow you to inspect the gear configuration of the opposition or know which spell they were casting and have a count down timer to when it would hit you. Much of the internal mechanics that allowed these sorts of mods to exist are being modified by Blizzard to produce a more level playing field, but the canny player with a programming background may find yet unknown flaws.

Evenly matched or not, once you’re in combat it is important to have a good strategy for defeating the other player. Developing this strategy builds on the one a player develops for beating regular world enemies, and then evolves to accommodate the creativity of their opponent and take advantage of game mechanics. If you’ve ever seen a PvP video on the web and noticed one player running around the other in a circle, this is because many abilities require you to be facing your opponent. The game will always face enemies it controls towards you (unless you mitigate this with an ability, but that’s beyond our scope here) and has a quicker reaction time. So while circling around a player opponent can be a good strategy to confound their attack, doing so in the same way for game controlled enemies is largely a waste of time.

Battlegrounds-based PvP is slightly different than world PvP in that it involves a team and requires teams to complete goals first to win. Of the three battlegrounds (I don’t have a lot of experience in the arena or the expansion’s BG, so we’ll omit those) there are unique strategies for each. You could think of them as mini-instances which require a good deal of geographic knowledge and goal specific strategy to win. Discussing battleground strategy is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice to say a seasoned group of battleground PvP players would be able to decimate a group of inexperienced but better geared players. Acquiring this kind of knowledge involves much more repetition than other aspects of the game because the environments are largely static. Other players make the experience unique, but you’re playing on the same map with the same goals each time.

Questing and world geographic knowledge comes with experience but is augmented by websites which detail how to complete quests and where certain items, quests, places are loaded. Obtaining this knowledge is still important because you don’t have to rely on searching websites to find the answers. You can progress through the game much quicker if you have a plan on leveling or acquiring items and you can execute it quickly. It is important to note that this specialty doesn’t just involve how to complete well known quests but also knowledge of lesser known ones with good rewards.

Along with this specialty is the knowledge related to reaching the maximum level in the quickest and most efficient way possible. Several leveling guides are available on the web for free download or purchase and they go into an impressive amount of detail. Each step the player should take is included, down to how much supplies they should buy and when they should break to go back to town is covered. Grinding guides are a subset of leveling guides which detail locations in the world in which monsters have a slightly higher chance of dropping an incredibly useful item or award better than average experience. This chance is usually one in a thousand or sometimes more for incredibly rare items. While a player who has reached the maximum level (and is of above average skill) may be able to work their way through a thousand enemies located in a lower level zone in only a few hours, enemies in high level zones can take days to work through. Even then the chances are approximations and can be influenced by other factors.

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