People play on PvP servers for various reasons. Personally, I play on mine because that's where my wife played, and she played there because her friend played there, who played there because her friends played there. I enjoy PvP a great deal, but I hate getting ganked while I'm questing. I constantly have the opportunity to kill alliance characters on my mage, and I'll be honest that quite frequently I take those opportunities. But typically it's a one shot thing where I one shot you, throw you a wave and then continue on my way.

If you're lower level and we're not in horde territory, then I usually run up and wave at you, then give you a moment to respond, and if there's no hostility then I'll try to have some fun with you for a minute before I go on my way. I found a group of level 40 allies going down to run BRD the other day while I was searching for Molten Core (no clue where it is, but I need a shield from there for my paladin) and could see from their health that a single Blast Wave would have killed all of them. But we all stood around playing with emotes and what little we know about horde<->alliance translation before I essentially escorted them down to their instance by killing everything in their path. Then I threw them a wave as they went inside and went on my way.

This is the first time I've heard of camping being taken this far. If they were all using emotes on you, then I assume you didn't release and go back to your body, or else they wouldn't have been able to target you. Just in case you aren't aware, if you don't release then they can target your body and see that you're still sitting there looking at them. If you release, then they can't target you but they can see your body sitting there. At that point they have two options (1) assume that you released and are on your way back to run, or (2) assume that you logged off and leave you alone. Generally they're going to go with the first option because everyone tries at least once to flee, at which point your body becomes bones and sends up the red flag warning to them that you're alive in the area and need to die.

If you raid a low level town though, I'm going to hang around and kill you until I'm bored or you have obviously logged out (as in I've been sitting on your face for an hour and half with no rez). If you try to run after you rez for the first time then I'll probably let you. But if you run only to return and do it again, then not only am I going to camp you, but I'm going to call in the rest of the guild so that not only am I camping you, but I'm also going to raid and wipe your closest cities (yes, plural) and camp everyone in there too. Hopefully you're not such a noob that you have no friends, because I really do want to kill all of your friends too if you're so stupid as to keep on attacking.

I was ganked so many times when I was leveling up my main that I now feel it my duty to protect all those who experience the same. Since my server is very low population and very Horde-heavy, it doesn't take long for the horde to completely overwhelm the alliance. I've spent more than one evening kicked back in a chair sitting in an alliance inn taking short breaks to go kill all the respawns and and flagged players.

But, I'm not a punk-camper like these guys obviously were. Setting up the fire on your body and sitting down around it was going too far in my opinion. If you had gone in and attacked all the low levels in the area or something then you might deserve it, but otherwise that was quite tasteless. And I will agree that Alliance players (in general) seem to be far more disrespecting and outright mean than any horde that I play with or against on my many servers.

I prefer to level solo, but grouping doesn't bother me. I generally prefer solo because there are so many gathering quests where you have to get "X of Item A, and Y of Item B" or whatever, and I don't like having to spend twice the amount of time (or more in bigger groups) to get my quest done when I could spend 15 minutes on it myself and then move on to something else. When it comes to kill quests or trigger quests (the ones where you have to trigger some event) I love being in a group because each person's actions impact the progress of the whole group so something that would have taken me 15 minutes now only takes 5.

I can't say that I've ever been nervous to party with someone, but that's largely due to the fact that I don't care. Because I solo so often, I really don't care what you think about how I play my character as I can just as easily leave the group and continue on like I always do. That's not to say I don't contribute to the groups, just that I don't care what you think about me once we're in the group.

A good group, even if it's only one other player, can make up for the lack of an active guild. Especially if the player happens to be social and doesn't mind chatting to you while you play.

I level solo, and my wife levels grouped. The difference that you find between our play styles is rather obvious, but worth noting. She wants to see to the needs of group members more, even if it means sitting there doing nothing for 2 hours while you go through each others' professions to find every item that might be of value to the other before doing a 2 minute quest. While I'm not an impatient n00b that wants to rush in and get moving before everyone's ready, I am the type that doesn't want the whole group held up while someone's off doing something that could easily wait to be done later. If I really wanted to sit there doing nothing, I'd go watch tv. Take care of your trading, crafting, training, etc on your own time buddy, not on mine.

Right on the money, Gnomeaggedon. Global Cool Down is the death of your macro there. And yes, with the [nomounted,harm] line in there, it will not cast it unless you have an enemy target because of the "harm" part. You can just drop that part of it and it will cast it only when you're not mounted, and regardless of which target (if any) you have selected.

I've been knocked off my mount more than once while I had MS activated, so I'm not sure that it works the way you think it does. I'll do a little more testing on it either tonight or tomorrow and see if I can verify for you. Mana Shield doesn't stop you from getting hit, it just absorbs the damage into your mana instead. If they hit you with an attack that dismounts you, you're still going to get dismounted regardless. Just respond to that with Frost Nova > Blink > Blizzard, and you'll end up with some exp and loot for the inconvenience.

If you don't want to use the resetting one I have above, then I would suggest one like the following:

#showtooltip
/cast [modifier:alt] Spotted Frostsaber, Mana Shield

This one will always cast Mana Shield for you, unless you hold the Alt key with you press/click it, at which time it will mount you instead. So you still have both spells in one action bar slot, but one ability fires with the Alt key. If you find that you mount more frequently than you use Mana Shield (doubtful, imo) then you can just switch the order they appear in the macro so that MS is cast with the Alt modifier and the mount is summoned by default.

I use a lot of macros like that last one there. My 1-4 keys all use it with the default being my primary fire spells, and the Alt keys being similar spells but from the Frost school in case I need to switch for immunities or I need to slow something down rather than just blast it away, or I just need faster access to the insta-cast Ice Lance to finish off a mob that's low on hp.

I also use if for Arcane Intellect, with Alt setting off Arcane Brilliance instead so that I can hit the whole group when needed but not waste bar space on it. I also use the same thing for my second action bar which hold my teleport/portal spells so that I can switch to the bar and default to teleporting myself, or I can hold Alt and open a portal for my party.

Since I happen to be somewhat of a collector of mounts, I use a /castrandom macro for them but I also include a [modifier:alt] for when I want to pull a slower mount (when playing with low level party), and [modifier:ctrl] for when I want to only summon my favorite mount (which is usually my newest one at the time).

My Deathknight (hate the class with a passion) uses a macro similar to the first one I showed you, which cycles through all of the attacks that he uses in a sequence that will allow me to simply hit that one button over and over and never have to worry about a cooldown getting in my way. It has an automatic reset built in for a time limit as well as entering/leaving combat.

Nice review.

Addons can handle any brainless tracking I need for questing, and they're free. What you need to farm always depends on your professions, and whether or not you farm in the first place depends on your play style. That being said, there are still free addons that can track farming locations for you as well.

PvP is an ever-changing world of stat boosts and spell uses, so I would much rather rely on an active forum and/or PvP guild than a written guide, regardless of whether or not the written guide was updated frequently (even on a daily basis).

And as often as you find free guides that are "never as complete as you want them to be" - neither are the ones you pay for. As you mentioned with the layout and color contrast issues here, if I'm going to pay for a guide of some kind then I want some full blown dedication to making the product look good. It needs to be easy to use, easy to read, appealing to the eye enough that I wouldn't mind reading through it for more than 5 minutes, and it needs to show me that the person who put it together did so with dedication to the product rather than the money (s)he intends to make from selling it. I'm not saying the guide can't be simplistic in its design, but I don't want to see big red title bars with yellow outlines being the extent of your design capabilities.

And what all that means is, I don't pay for guides. If my addons can't tell me and my guild can't tell me, then I turn to the wealth of free information on the net. And if I still can't find it, then it's either not worth my time to find it in the first place or I'm looking for the wrong thing to begin with. If I really wanted to just start the game at level 80, I'd turn to E-bay like so many alliance players do these days and put my money into a character that already had everything I needed to play. Or better yet, I'll just enjoy leveling the guy myself.