I wrote earlier that Arena Pwnage was an ambitious project with a lot of potential, but it remained to be seen whether they could deliver on their promises. Well, 2010 has come and the Arena Pwnage guys have delivered. Since my first review, they have added guides and videos for nearly every class (unfortunately, mages are still not represented, but they say a video & written guide are in the works). The videos are a great crash course in how to play arena and cover the fundamentals you’ll need to do well. Just add some real game-time experience and you’re on your way to racking up the arena points!

The guide is divided into a number of categories:

• Advanced Tactics
• Arena Fundamentals For the Beginner
• Death Knight
• Druid
• General
• Hunter
• Paladin
• Priest
• Rogue
• Shaman
• Warlock
• Warrior

All the sections have videos which cover everything needed for people new to arena play. They aim to give you solid introductions and the fundamentals of playing your respective classes. For what they cover, they do a good job, and you can tell that these were made by long-time arena experts (according to the founders, they all have 2400+ arena experience with arena master achievements).

I like the videos a lot — they’re direct and don’t waste your time. On the negative side, a couple videos have audio levels that are too quiet (I had to crank my speakers up on a couple vids). On the positive side, the videos are VERY thorough, giving you the fundamentals, optimum speccing and gearing recommendations, macros, and even actual arena fights with analysis, which I think are really helpful in putting together everything they talk about. I hope in the future they’ll do even more of these, maybe even breaking down the fights and discussing exactly what happens in detail (since arena battles are so fast-paced, sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything that happens as it happens).

Their forum area is still new, so discussions are still developing, but you can tell that the site admins definitely intend for these to be good forums — right now they’re on it and are answering forum postings really quickly.

You can now feel safe in that Arena Pwnage is real and will not be vaporware. The founders have been making good on their promise to continue building out the site into a very valuable resource for arena combatants. It sounds like their goal is not only to have the video series, but to create a complete online arena-focused community with premium content. This is definitely ambitious, but if they can marshal the talent they promise, it should definitely be possible. Judging from the quality of what they’ve put up so far, I believe these guys will continue to produce high-quality content.

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Hayden Hawke’s Secret Gold Guide is a good way to get an understanding of the basics of making gold in Warcraft. While it doesn’t have the in-depth exploration of Auctioneer that Maylee’s Auction House Mastery does or the occasional surprising tidbit that you’ll find in Dugi’s guide, what you WILL find is a way to understand the fundamentals of the different ways of making gold in Warcraft.

The guide starts with an introduction which has some good basic advice. Chapter 1 is about the Auction House and covers the basics as well as some more advanced techniques and strategies. His treatment on Auctioneer is very brief, but he does go into detail on how to take advantage of another add-on which I’ve never read about in other guides. This additional add-on isn’t earth-shattering in its helpfulness, but it does make a couple of things very easy to do and has become a core part of my add-ons.

The next three chapters are devoted to the various professions in the game: Gathering professions, crafting professions, and secondary professions. Hayden outlines ways to make money for every profession in the game, supplying maps, routes, suggested sale items, and even price recommendations. Some of the sale and price suggestions have become dated since the release of the guide, but they still provide a nice place to start for beginners who are looking to get the general idea of what things are valuable for sale.

He then three chapters which address farming tactics specifically, including regular farming, instance farming, and dailies. Again, Hayden provides solid maps, routes, and recommendations. I like that he provides lists of BoEs to look for from instance farming which I thought was a nice touch. He also has some interesting recommendations of doing dungeon runs for lower-level players, which are a nice alternative to the usual grind.

The final chapters are on making money before level 80 and more “alternative” ways of making gold. The pre-80 money-making advice is good — if you’re looking for a gold guide and you haven’t made it to 80 yet, you’ll definitely find this helpful. The alternative gold-making methods are generally good advice, although he does give a how-to on begging for gold (and the last thing Azeroth needs is more beggars, in my humble opinion).

At the end of the day, this guide is great for beginners or people who are looking for a good, general introduction to how to make gold in Warcraft. Hayden touches on pretty much every method, is straightforward, well-organized, and offers a lot of solid, basic advice. If you’re looking for advanced tactics, I’d suggest looking at a more specialized guide like Maylee‘s, but if you’re just getting started or are new to level 80 (and only concentrated on power leveling in order to get there), this is a great way to get a good foundation.

UPDATE

Hayden Hawke gets the award for “First to Update for Patch 3.3″. Of all currently-reviewed guides, Hayden posted his updated guide for patch 3.3 first. The updates for patch 3.3 aren’t totally life-changing, but they’re definitely good, including suggestions for 3.3 items to craft, additional plugins, etc.

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Dugi’s Ultimate WoW Gold & Profession Guide is another good guide which will give you the fundamentals of increasing your Warcraft gold stash. It’s strengths are its frequent updates, its “short n’ sweet” writing style, and the fact that it covers all the basics of making gold in Warcraft. However, these are also its weaknesses: sometimes it’s a little too brief, and having finished the guide, I find myself still wanting some more advanced and thorough coverage of some gold-making strategies. Still, Dugi’s Ultimate WoW Gold & Profession Guide is a solid guide that fits the bill for a person looking to get the basics and also provides a couple great hidden gems.

It’s important to note that the gold and profession guide is one piece of a larger, more comprehensive Ultimate WoW Guide, which nearly every aspect of playing Warcraft. As such, I think that it would probably not feel as thin to me as it does if I were to read it as part of a larger, more comprehensive set of information. Still, you can purchase the gold guide separately and so that’s what this review will focus on.

From a presentation standpoint, Dugi’s guide isn’t visually compelling — he uses very basic HTML and lays things out extremely simply. That said, everything is presented in a clear, straightforward fashion. For my two cents I’d rather have good content that snazzy design, and on that point, Dugi’s guide delivers. Same goes with his writing style: very short and to-the-point. Dugi says what he thinks and doesn’t elaborate much. The end result is a guide with not a lot of verbal fluff that presents good information quickly, but without much in the way of hand-holding.

The whole guide is divided into three main sections: the Gold Farming Guide, the Profession Guide, and Other Articles. The Gold Farming guide provides the meat of the entire guide. At the time of this writing, he’s got 16 articles in the Gold Farming Guide, covering everything you need to know about getting gold in Warcraft, from good farming areas to specialized Auction House guides. The Profession Guide contains strategies for leveling up your professions to max. There’s nothing revelatory in this section — most of this content can be found in free guides on the web — but as a freebie with the gold guide, it’s nice to have everything in one place. The Other Articles touch on things like protecting your account from scams. The articles in this section are unhelpful at best and downright misleading at worst (without giving away his content, he gives some advice on how to do something which I think is just flat-out WRONG and is begging for you to get your account blocked). However, if you ignore the other articles, use the profession guides occasionally, and focus on the gold farming guides, you’ll still get your money’s worth.

There are some high points in the Gold Guide which do make Dugi’s guide stand out. I really like how he organized the farming guide, by picking what he thought are the best zones and then providing options for each profession in that zone. He has a daily quest guide which is great (again, you can probably put all this information together yourself from free sources but it’s very nice to have it done already for you and put in one spot). Plus, Dugi recently added a couple new auction guides on enchanting and inscription which are very good additions.

This brings me to what I think is Dugi’s greatest strength: updates. More than any other guide, Dugi is on it, providing new content, responding to patch changes, and so on. So many other guides create the impression that they got you to purchase and they’re not going to do any more work — not Dugi. While he doesn’t always get everything right (for example, he still has Wintergrasp listed as a no-fly zone), you can really tell that he is always trying to stay on top of it and deliver value to people who have bought the guide.

One thing that comes with these frequent updates: a lot of fluff. There are a number of lower-level articles which are either things you’ll probably ignore or are only relevant to The Burning Crusade. For me, it felt like he left these older articles in there because it makes the guide seem beefier. Also, there are a couple of articles that just seem strangely unhelpful (there’s an whole article on selecting quest items for max gold which is basically useless due to the huge number of great plugins that take care of this for you). However, the articles that are new and on-topic are good, and there’s enough of them that I don’t begrudge him having the older or weirder content in there.

The bottom line is that although Dugi’s guide does have it’s weaker points, its strong points more than make up for it. It’s good for beginners who don’t need a lot of hand-holding, and it’s got some hidden gems inside that were actually helpful even for someone who’s been playing at max for a while. It’s good value for the money.

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Mayle’s Auction House Mastery is an excellent Warcraft gold guide that skips all the other gold making methods and focuses on what, in my experience, is the most consistent source of high-volume gold: the auction house. While some gamers might feel like this is missing out on a lot of the game, I feel like Mayle’s focus in her guide allows her to cover this one topic EXTREMELY thoroughly. The end result is that once you’re finished with her guide, you’ll have the tools you need to make good, consistent money off the auction house. And all other guides’ “Auction House” sections will seem paltry in comparison.

The guide is presented in video format. There are three “Foundation” videos which get you up to speed on configuring Auctioneer correctly, finding items for sale, and strategies for pricing. These are excellent and truly do form the foundation for how you’ll be making money. There are then three “Advanced” videos, which cover refining and optimizing your auction selling strategies. These are definitely excellent and what really separate her guide from all the others out there. She then supplies four “Golden” videos which focus on some more obscure methods of money-making. These were hit-and-miss for me; while I see the value in them all, a couple are ones that I’m probably never going to use. One, however, is really simple and has made me a ton of gold. She also supplies five “Bonus” videos, which range from the very basic (such as how to install add-ons) to the suprisingly helpful (strategies for finding best-selling items). All in all, it’s a comprehensive group of videos which have a lot of meat and very little fluff.

I was surprised by how much I liked the video format of the guide. They did a great job with the music in the videos — so often, looping music can make you want to slash your wrists, but I actually found myself peacefully enjoying the music in these. Having the real-time visual reference is EXTREMELY helpful — particularly when you’re navigating around complicated interfaces, a picture truly is worth a thousand words. She doesn’t use any narration, instead narrating the videos through captions at the bottom of the video, which works very well — it’s easy to pause the video at any point if you need to keep some important info on the screen. It can get a little tedious alt-tabbing between the videos and WoW, but I usually end up doing that with other guides anyway.

Mayle’s Auction House Mastery is not without its problems. Auctioneer has been updated since these videos were made, so now some of the options are configured differently than in the videos. There are a couple videos which are very basic (as in, Have-you-ever-played-Warcraft-before? basic). Probably my biggest complaint is that there’s a lot of awesome material in here, but it’s hard to know what you’ll find in each video (or where you saw it). There’s no “table of contents” for the videos, so all that clues you in to what the content of a video will be is the title (which can only get you so far). Also, you’ll find a lot of “off-topic” gems scattered through these videos, which are great, but a couple times I found myself wanting to go back to something I saw earlier and not remembering which video it was in. It’s not that the videos are poorly organized, it’s just that there’s a lot in them.

The bottom line is that Maylee’s Auction House Mastery is truly an excellent guide. It’s full of useful information. I really like the video format — the visual reference is nice. There’s lots of good tidbits in it: you end up learning things that may be slightly “off-topic” for the video title but are really valuable. And at the end of the day, more than any other guide, this guide supplied the advice that I use most consistently in my gold-making endeavors.

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