Free Alternatives to WoW Guides
There are a lot of WoW guides out there that will show you how to level quickly or how to make a pile of gold playing World of Warcraft. Most of them will cost you $20-30. I haven’t looked at most of these guides - I bought one gold making guide and I wasn’t too impressed with it. I haven’t bought any of the leveling guides. I would suggest that people use the free alternatives and save their cash.
Kunzite’s Gold Guide is a very good guide to making gold in WoW. I particularly like his articulation of Opportunity Cost as a point that should always be kept in mind. He gives both very general strategies and very specific ones. I used most of the strategies that he outlines prior to reading the guide and they’ve worked very well for me. I’m not focused on earning gold so I’m not rich, but I have bought 3 epic flying skills and I’m just waiting for more toons to hit 70 to buy more.
Jame’s Alliance and Horde Leveling Guides are very thorough guides for solo leveling a character from 1-70. I’ve been using the Horde guides to level my druid and shaman and they make for very fast, straightforward leveling. I leveled my other toons through running a a fair number of instances as well as questing, so I didn’t follow the guides for them. I would recommend against using these guides for your first character as there’s a lot of fun to be had in exploring.
Blogs and forums are probably the ultimate guides to World of Warcraft, but the information tends to be rather disjointed. Once you have an idea what it is you want to know, I would suggest reading blogs that cover your chosen subject or visiting various forums such as Elitist Jerks, PlusHeal, TankSpot, MainTankadin, and many others.