World of Warcraft - Learn the User Interface

Steve Haines: Hi, I am Steve Haines, World of Warcraft expert. I am showing you some basic steps for leveling up a character in the online game World of Warcraft. Right now, let's a look at the user interface. When you start off in World of Warcraft you will find that your cursor is now a gloved hand. This allows you to select on anything on your screen that you need to choose from. You will see in the top left corner here a character portrait, which has a picture of your character along with your name, a health bar which shows how many head points you have, a Mana bar if you are a magic user which means this is the energy through which you cast spells. If you have a pet, your pet's name will appear below your character's name.

On the top right of your computer you will find what's called the mini map. This shows where you are. In this case we are in a large city. It also shows any quest givers. These exclamation points are quest givers. It gives you a layout of the city or the location in which you reside and you can move around your character and go to where the arrows are and that shows you who you need to speak with. Here at the bottom right you will see your inventory. You will start off with one bag which you can open or close with the B button. The inventory contains everything that you own in the world. You can have multiple bags if you have somebody make them for you. You can pick them up through the auction house or if you want to buy them and you can press Shift+B and you open all of your inventory bags, it shows everything that you have.

Next to the inventory it will show a lot of the game control functions. You can contact a G.M. for support in game. You can use the options to exit the game, create macros to change your interface options, how your game appears, you can change of your video settings. All of those details are contained in here. You can return to the game with the return to game button. You can also access that same feature pressing this gate key. This also allows you to work for a group. If you wanted to do an instance or to do a raid you can put in a request to other players to group up with them. You can also take a look at your social which is your friends list as well as your guild last stand or chatlog as well as your raid if you are in a raid you can close that. You also have on here your quest log which shows all of the quests that you are working on as well as your spellbook which shows all of your abilities and your character screen all of which can be accessed to using either the keyboard or your mouse by clicking on this icon.

Finally, on your user interface you will find your quick bar or hot bar. It allows you to control all of the functions of your character by quest spells to cast or what attacks to use. In this case, as a warlock I can summon a pet so I will do that by clicking on the icon for it. You can also press the corresponding number. Each one of these buttons has a number in it 1 2 3 4 press those numbers on your keypad and you access the same function. So, now I have my pet out and we are ready to start fighting. To populate your action bar you can use your character screen or your spellbook to place items that you are holding on your character or your magical spells into your action bar. In this case, we will grab smelting which has the ability to turn ore into metal bars; we drag that on to our action bar on the eight spot. Then you can click on that in order to show why you are able to smelt or you press the corresponding number key 8 and it opens up the same function. Now, you have quick access to all of your abilities and spells. That was the user interface. Next, let's take a look at character control and questing in World of Warcraft.