Filed under: New Players' Guide

This week, we get to tackle a fun topic: personality disorders. I mean, how your personality type can help determine what class you might feel comfortable playing. Now, it's prudent I mention that I am not a degreed mental health professional -- heck, I'm not even a degreed writer. I tried to play a doctor on TV but was told I had a face made for writing, preferably in seclusion in a fortified compound. So, while these may do a good job at matching your personality type to a class, I'm not making any judgment on whether I think you're nuttier than a bar mix. There's also a certain amount of tongues and cheeks involved here, as well. In fact, if you pretend the guy that does the voice-overs for the "Real Men of Genius" ads is reading these you'll get an idea of how tongue in cheek they are. Aside: Holy Cow, the original Survivor vocalist does the background singing on those? I did not know that.

• The Tank: Your job is hold the monster's attention. Your going to have decent defense, but your main job is just generating threat. You may not contribute a ton of damage towards the kill, but keeping the monster's attention focused on you will make it a smooth ride.
• The Healer: Primarily, your job will be keeping the tank alive. Sure, you'll also be healing the rest of the party, but the tank will be your focus.
• Damage Per Second (DPS): With the tank contributing slow but steady damage, and the healer, well, healing, it's your job to actually bring the monster down.

Here are some tips every new shaman player should know. Casters can be some of your easiest kills, whether in PvP or PvE because Shock is your middle name and spell interruption is your game.

• Earth Shock, baby! At level 4 you'll get Rank 1 of this spell. Its cooldown is 6 seconds, just like all your shock spells.
• Keep Earth Shock (Rank 1) somewhere on your toolbar in addition to higher levels of the spell. It only uses 30 mana and it still stops an enemy in mid-cast just as effectively as higher ranked versions of the spell.
• Mages can be taken down easily if you're quick to get close to them and stop them from casting Frost Nova. Pound them quickly, continuing to shock them when casting.
• Level 24+ Mages and level 32+ Priests can stop your Lightning Bolts with Counterspell or Silence. Although both of these spells will impact your casting for up to 8 seconds, remember that shock spells are instant cast and can't be interrupted.
• In the case of Mages' Counterspells, their silencing effect only stops one school of casting. So if they hit you during Lightning Bolt (a Nature spell), you can still cast your Flame or Frost Shocks, but not your Earth Shock. You can also drop Searing Totem for damage.
  

After the jump, five more tips for shamans against casters.

Ok, you're done clicking sliders and choosing your race and class as part of the character creation process. You've watched the opening cinematic - you watched the cinematic, right? Did you stay through the credits to see the bonus scene? No? Good thing there wasn't one. Now you're sitting in starting area for your race, staring at the user interface (UI) for the first time and could be going, "Oh, man. What do all these buttons do?"

As far as UIs, World of Warcraft's isn't that bad actually. If you want to see a game with a horrid interface, take a gander at Second Life; that UI will scar your brain.

The WoW Insider New Player's Guide is a series of features designed to help those brand new to World of WarCraft get up to speed as fast as possible. It's our way of giving back to the community, without the paparazzi mob that usually follows celebrities when they try this.

As a Hunter, your primary role will be to provide ranged damage-per-second and crowd control with your traps. Actually, I lied, your primary role will be spent convincing everyone you group with you're not one of those brainless morons that seem to end up playing Hunters.

You see, Hunters, hands down, are the easiest class to level in the game. At level 10 you get your first pet. This pet will tank for you while you stand back and hail arrows at your target. This means that your overall deaths and repair bills will be lower than other classes, while at the same time your kills will be faster since your pet adds to your damage output.

Combat with your Hunter is fairly straightforward: send in your pet, wait a few seconds for it to build sufficient aggro and then start plinking away. It's worth installing an add-on like Omen so you can tell when you're in danger of out-aggroing your pet. You will need to do some damage yourself to get xp or be able to loot the corpse, so even if you're just out farming easy mobs, make sure you hit it once or twice with your bow.