Dugi’s Ultimate WoW Gold & Profession Guide

Clear, Concise Warcraft Gold Guide With Some Hidden Gems

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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