So you finally caved.  You’ve heard about how great this World of Warcraft is and you’ve decided to take the plunge.  You opened up the game and watched that epic cinematic and probably decided what class to play based on which one looked the most awesome to you. J  But now that you’re sitting in the game world you find that there aren’t quite as many directions as you need to level up quickly and get your end game on; that’s where How to Wow comes in:

The next several posts will be detailing several of the most important things I feel a new player needs to know and understand, starting with the basic WoW User Interface.

Here’s a run through of the default User Interface and what it does:

Basic Interface Layout

1.  Player Unit Frame

This frame displays several important things about your character:

• Health – This is the green bar under your character’s name.
• Resources – This bar is under your health bar.  It shows rage, mana, energy, or runic power depending on what class you are.
• Several Icons that indicate your pvp status (only applicable on a PVE server really), combat status, your current level, and your resting status (this will be covered in a later post about basic leveling.

2. Minimap

This frame shows a small version of the world map with information about the things around you such as quests, dots for things you are tracking, and also shows pings when people in your party click the map to “ping” locations usually used to show you somewhere you’re supposed to go.

3. Chat Log

This is where all your game messages show up for /say, /party, /raid, and any custom channels you are in, as well as important game messages of all kinds.  Right clicking on the tab lets you access several customization options such as changing colors of text, creating new chat windows, and moving the windows around.

4. Ability Bars

This is where you will drag your abilities to cast them.  You can go into the interface options (Push escape and click interface) and enable extra bars around your screen, as well as going into the escape menu and binding keys on the bars.  The up and down arrows on the right side of this area are to switch between “pages” of buttons.  You can also set custom key binds to switch pages.

5. Mini Menu

From left to right: Character Pane, Spell Book, Talents (when you reach lvl 10 and they are enabled. Not in screen shot), Achievements Pane, Quest Book, Social Pane, PVP Pane, Looking For Group, Menu, and Help Request (to report bugs, get help with the game, or several other uses).  I will go over each of the different panes in a later post in detail.

6. Bags

This is where you 4 bag slots and backpack are.  Clicking the bags opens them to access what is inside.

7. Tooltip

When you mouse over most anything in the game world information is displayed here about what you have your mouse over.  There are several mods that put a lot more details in the tooltip and are very helpful when leveling.  These will be explained in later posts about addons.