This is a community made brief guide to help out new players starting on the server.
Contents of this guide:
- How to play on the server
- Technical issues
- Loading takes forever
- My monitor's resolution is not in the settings
- My screen turned to black
- My addons don't work properly
- My talent tree doesn't work properly or is still the same as original vanilla
- I get disconnected 30 seconds after loging in
- My mouse is too sensitive
- Getting disconnected from the server as you log in
- All the names are gone
- RNG issues
- Things to know about when starting on the server
- Where can I see the list of the changes?
- Racials
- XP rates
- Changing account password
- Server population and uptime
- Currently available raid content
- Talent calculator
- Talent reset
- The Ironman challenge
- Rares, elites, and mobs in general
- The PVP scene
- Multiboxing
- Other oddities
- Making suggestions
- Helping the server
- Reporting bugs
- Community guides
- Customisation
- About
- Register an account on the website
- You may also want to consider joining the discord server
- Download, unpack and start the launcher
- Select the folder for your installation. If there is no pop up asking for this, click the
WoW.exe was not found...
text below the loading bar. - Wait for the launcher to download the additionally required files
- If you are a Mac user, make sure the extension of the patch file is capitalised, ending up with
<wow folder>/Data/patch-3.MPQ
- If you are a Mac user, make sure the extension of the patch file is capitalised, ending up with
- Make sure the
Clear WDB on launch
option is ticket below thePlay
button - Click
Play
to log in and enjoy the game
- Select the folder for your installation. If there is no pop up asking for this, click the
WoW.exe was not found...
text below the loading bar.- If you are a Windows user, make sure you don't install the game in a system folder such as
Program Files
or you will need to run theWoW.exe
as an administrator.
- If you are a Windows user, make sure you don't install the game in a system folder such as
- Click the
Install
button and wait for the launcher to finish downloading the files- If you are a Mac user, make sure the extension of the patch file is capitalised, ending up with
<wow folder>/Data/patch-3.MPQ
- If you are a Mac user, make sure the extension of the patch file is capitalised, ending up with
- Make sure the
Clear WDB on launch
option is ticket below thePlay
button - Click
Play
to log in and enjoy the game- Starting the game will create your
<wow folder>\Interface\s
folder.
- Starting the game will create your
- Install any non-modified 1.12.1 wow client
- If you are a Windows user, make sure you don't install the game in a system folder such as
Program Files
or you will need to run theWoW.exe
as an administrator.
- If you are a Windows user, make sure you don't install the game in a system folder such as
- Download the patch from the website and place it in the
<wow folder>/Data
folder- If you are a Mac user, make sure the file extension is capitalised, ending up with
<wow folder>/Data/patch-3.MPQ
- If you are a Mac user, make sure the file extension is capitalised, ending up with
- Change the content of your
<wow folder>/realmlist.wtf
to beset realmlist logon.vanillaplus.org
- Remove any previously downloaded cache by deleting the contents of your
<wow folder>/WDB
folder, if it exists- This step must also be repeated if you plan to connect back to another wow server with the same client later
- Log in and enjoy the game
The launcher will check for updates and do the necessary steps automatically.
If you installed the game manually the game will need to be updated with every new patch. To do this:
- Download the patch from the website and place it in the
<wow folder>/Data
folder- If you are a Mac user, make sure the file extension is capitalised, ending up with
<wow folder>/Data/patch-3.MPQ
- If you are a Mac user, make sure the file extension is capitalised, ending up with
- Remove any previously downloaded cache by deleting the contents of your
<wow folder>/WDB
folder - Log in and enjoy the game
These are the issues we seen keep popping up in discord time and time again. Check the list if you run into one of these. If your issue is not listed, ask for help in the appropriate channel, providing as much information as you can, so others don't have to interrogate you to be able to help.
Due to the custom modifications the loading time can be much longer than usual, however this is normal.
You can't find your monitors resolution in the video settings of the game
- Same steps as for My screen turned to black below
- You might also try the Custom Resolution Utility as detailed in here
You set the game to windowed mode and it turned to black
- Make sure your client is not running
- Add the following lines to the end of your
<wow folder>/WTF/Config.wtf
file (you can open it with notepad for example):
SET gxWindow "1"
SET gxMaximize "1"
SET gxResolution "1440x900"
SET gxRefresh "60"
- Set
gxResolution
to what you wish it to be. - Set
gxRefresh
to a multiple of30
Credit to: Admarel, Chuck, Thirinena, and so many more people...
Read all the points, if none of them applies, ask for help in the support or addons channel
- Check if you have installed it properly.
- The version of the addon has to be compatible with the game. Classic is not Vanilla. If the addons are for
Classic
, they will NOT work. The client's version is1.12.1
. If the addon was made for previous versions, you will need to tickLoad out of date AddOns
on the character selection screens bottom leftAddOns
menu. - Some addons need to work with large amount of data to work properly. You may allow for this by changing the
Script Memory (MB)
option to0
for unlimited memory access on the character selection screens bottom leftAddOns
menu.
The game does not allow you to put 5 points on a talent that should allow 5 points? The talent trees you see are not like on the talent calculator?
- Download the server's custom patch and make sure it is at the correct path (
<wow folder>/Data/patch-3.MPQ
).- If you are a Mac user, make sure the file extension is capitalised, ending up with
<wow folder>/Data/patch-3.MPQ
- If you are a Mac user, make sure the file extension is capitalised, ending up with
- Make sure you have no other custom patches that overwrites the content of
patch-3.MPQ
. The load order is alphabetical. - Delete the game's cache by deleting the content of
<wow folder>/WDB
folder.
You get disconnected after logging in when using the WoW.exe
to launch the game on a Windows operating system.
- Remove the compatibility mode set on
WoW.exe
by going to its Properties, Compatibility mode and unticking theRun this program in compatibility mode for:
option.
When your mouse is unreasonably sensitive, unexpectedly.
- Right click your WoW.exe, go to properties and select "disable dpi".
Sometimes when logging in, as the game finishes loading, you get a "Disconnected from server" message.
- Login in with a character that is located somewhere else
- If you don't have one, just create a throwaway one, that has a different spawn point if you are still level 1
- Log in with your original character
The names on the UI are not displayed properly
- Go to Video Options
- Change the scale of the UI
- Click Okay
You seem to get dodged after missing, after getting parried just to be dodged again? You have seen people alluding that the RNG engine of the server is not working correctly?
- Run your own experiment.
- We have proven again and again that the complaints are not valid. Feel free to ignore said complaints until actual evidence is provided.
To see the common chat, type /join world
. Prepare for at least moderate levels of shitposting, /ignore <player name>
is your friend. (You may shift click the undesired player's name instead of typing it out)
There is no comprehensive list of all the changes, partially due to the spirit of the server. Having such a list would remove the sense of discovery and experimentation that was not seen in ages in the vanilla community.
It's also a lot of work... Just ask the others in the discord if you are curious of something, or try it out yourself.
Click here to see the list of racial abilities
Partial credit goes to Rafale for making this list of racial changes.
Click here to see the list of priest racial abilities
- Kills: x2
- Quests: x3
- Elite & Dungeon Quests: x10
- Rested XP bonus gaining speed: x5
If you find these rates too high for your taste, you may lower them using .xp <number between 1 and 0.1>
to reduce it. For example .xp 0.5
would half your xp gain.
You may also turn your experience gain off by typing .experience off
and turn it back on later with .experience on
To change your password, log in, and type in the chat
.account password <old password> <new password> <new password>
On success the server will respond with a The password was changed
message
It is recommended to whisper something to yourself before typing it in to make sure your won't accidentally say your password out loud even if you make a mistake. (/w <your character's name> .
)
Type .server info
in game. The response will let you know the current active player count, the maximum player count since the last restart, the number of queued people and the server's current uptime.
- Lower Blackrock Spire (15 players)
- Upper Blackrock Spire (15 players)
- Onyxia's Lair (40 players)
- Molten Core (40 players)
- Dire Maul (10 players)
- Zul'Gurub (20 players)
- Blackwing Lair (40 players)
- Azuregos (world boss)
- Lord Kazzak (world boss)
- Kurinnaxx (world boss)
- Lady Hederine (world boss)
The debuff limit is currently 40.
The talent calculator linked in the launcher is currently NOT accurate. Use the talent calculator created and maintained by Thirinena instead.
The talent reset cost has been capped to 5G maximum and it resets every 3 days.
There is an ironman challenge for those who want to take part in it. When creating a character you get a buff that gives you marginal bonuses while you are leveling. Upon your first death, you lose this buff and an announcement is made to the server of the circumstances of your demise. There are no other consequences of failing the challenge currently.
If you do not wish to take part, even though there aren't really any downsides, just remove the buff on lvl 1 by right clicking it.
The badassery of reaching lvl 60 with the buff still intact are rewarded with four things:
- A cosmetic item proving the deed
- A one time, 15 minute invulnerability buff
- An announcement made honouring your glory
- The sweet release from the eternal fear of in-game death, as the original buff is finally gone.
Also worth mentioning that the challenge cannot be lost due to fall damage or being killed in PvP.
You may have seen that your character is a bit stronger than the vanilla equivalent would be. To compensate for this, the mobs have also been working out. Taking on a rare mob is often the cause of one's first death, as they rarely skip leg day and are always ready for some ass kicking, so adventurer beware!
Released battlegrounds:
- Warsong Gulch
- Arathi Basin
- Azshara Crater
The Honor resets on Tuesday midnight (CET).
To incentivise PVP, you get one mark per hour for queueing. Furthermore you may buy flasks with your marks. When there aren't enough players for the battleground to continue, it closes down, rewarding one of the teams randomly with 3 marks, regardless of the state of the match.
You may join the queue from anywhere, by typing .wsg
, .ab
or .ac
. This summons an invisible npc to talk to you. Beware though, once your battleground is finished, you will get teleported back to place where you joined the queue.
If the losing team is able to drag the match out for more than 10 minutes, they are also awarded a token for the loss.
Azshara Crater is a vanilla+ made MOBA-styled custom battleground, where the two factions, the Firebird corps (Alliance) and the Operation Rattlesnake (Horde) fight their battles, currently running in testing mode. This means it isn't finished, side objectives and quests are getting added with time, but reputation vendors and Honor rewards are available.
The pattern of AC seems like Alterac Valley: each team has five towers, General and Warmasters. Each team starts with 500 Initiative points, the team who gets 1000 Initiative points wins, the team who lost all Initiative points loses the game.
There're few ways to raise your Initiative points and to reduce enemy Initiative points: By controlling Crystal Depths (Tug-of-War middle point), you reduce your foe's Initiative. Destroying the enemy tower will reduce his Initiative and despawn one Warmaster per tower. To gain an Initiative, you should control Temple of Quel'Arkhana points or slay their ancient guardian.
To join a queue, use the .ac
chat command.
You may use the #azshara-crater-feedback channel to report bugs/suggestions related to the new battleground on the discord server.
You may turn in your Marks of Honors for money rewards at the entrances of the battlegrounds. For example looks for Sentinel Farsong on Alliance side, and Captain Shatterskull on Horde side with your Warsong gulch marks. The rewarded amount scales with your level.
When there aren't enough players partaking in the battleground, the battleground starts shutting down. If during this period enough people join, the match carries on, if not however, the match finishes and randomly 3 tokens are awarded to one of the teams and none to the other. This mechanic intentionally ignores the current scores and is NOT a bug.
Having two logged in clients run on the same computer counts as multiboxing, even if you are manually switching between them to control the characters. Multiboxing in general is NOT allowed, however logging in with different accounts for trading purposes inside cities is allowed.
Due to the low population, cross-faction cooperation was temporarily enabled so we can have fun together regardless of race. The developers promised that this will be removed once a satisfactory stable population is reached, so do not rely on this, friends will become foes again soon.
Summoning spells have been level limited to avoid people abusing them. Now to summon someone of a higher level, the summoner needs to be at most 10 levels lower than the person being summoned. A level 30 player will be able to summon a level 40, but not a level 41 player.
Also when a warlock does the summoning one helper is enough to complete the spell.
Meeting Stones, also known as Summoning Stones now require 4 players to be present to be able to summon someone. The first player's level is used for the level restriction calculation, the level of the helpers don't matter.
As it is being turned into a lvl 60 raid, the normal, low level SM is not available. Not to worry, the class quests leading to it are still doable, their text has been changed, make sure to read them.
There is an increased fall damage on the server.
There is also a phenomena, where suddenly out of nowhere you suffer a massive fall damage, which sometimes kills you. This is a bug and there is not much you can do to avoid it, other than avoiding the places where this happened. Think of it like your character just fall. This is one of the reasons, why you can't lose the Ironman Challenge to fall damage.
If you run into this issue, please report it using the link showed here, with details where the incident happened.
All of the action houses are connected. Horde, Alliance, Neutral, all of them.
Your first riding lessons at level 40 are free of charge
Some zeppelins and boats change their destinations. Talk to the NPC before boarding to make sure you don't end up somewhere you don't want to!
The drink and food containing barrels and crates have level requirements. They may look empty at first, but if you are high enough level, you'll find what you are looking for.
You can make suggestions in the #suggestions channel of the discord server. To make one you must start your message with !suggest
, for example !suggest Add Arcane Blast or make Arcane Missiles benefit from 20% increased cast time talent.
. This will show up as a suggestion with others able to vote on it showing how popular your idea is.
There are some technical limitations that the developers are unwilling to take on, and for a good reason. If your suggestion requires the WoW.exe to be modified, it is an automatic no-no, for it has the potential to make massive unforeseen issues. This is non-negotiable and no amount of pleading will make this change.
Don't. Just don't.
The server is free to play but the necessary upkeep is not. Donations are welcome and appreciated, but they are just that, donations. Find more information about this on the website, under the Support Project
and Rewards
menu points. You may talk to Landro Longshot for possible supporter rewards in front of your faction's auction house.
Here is the list of the possible supporter rewards
Bringing positive attention to the server is also a great way to help the project. A good example of this would be raising the attention of like minded individuals, such as creating content on twitch or youtube (see Hamsterwheel). A bad example would be spamming forums and competitors with links to the server. Committing acts of terror to coerce people to play on the server is also shunned. Please do NOT engage in war crimes to make the server more popular.
The official bug reporting tool can be found here. Before reporting please make sure that it is indeed a bug. Your best bet is probably to ask about in the discord first and actually wait for some responses before making the report to avoid wasting the developers time. Follow the example provided and provide as much detail as possible so they will have an easier time recreating the issue. Reports like "I died" is not helping. However a detailed report with screenshots, map locations, character information, etc will allow for quick recognition of an issue. While you will need a Github account, registering is free and only takes a couple minutes.
The guides in this sections are made by the community. This is just an attempt to gather them in one place. If you are up for it, think you know what you are doing and want to share your wisdom, write your own guide and it will likely show up here.
Druid:
Warlock:
Classic is NOT vanilla. When looking up information about customising your experience always look for information on the 1.12.1
vanilla client. Forgetting about this is one of the most frequently made mistake on discord.
There are some community developed addons that are made specificly for the server, but any addon made for 1.12.1
will work. Some have dependencies that you will need to install so always read the readme file.
You may also want to check the pinned messages of the #addons channel and may ask for help on Discord. If you can't find your addon folder at <wow folder>\Interface\AddOns
, starting the game successfully will create it for you.
- AtlasLoot Enhanced for Vanilla+
- BloodlustHelper
- FlightMap
- pfUI Vanilla Plus
- pfQuest Vanilla Plus
- V+Actions
- ag_UnitFrames
- BetterCharacterStats
- Hardiness
- SkelaCustomNameplates
- SpecialTalentUI
- TotemTimers
- WIIIUI
- decaedent.github.io/wow/
- Legacy-wow vanilla addons
- dkpminus vanilla wow addons - credit: Chuck
- Twinstar's github list - credit: Thirinena
- Bartender - An action bar addon
- Bongos - An action bar addon, credit: Cancermage
- HonorSpy - A honor information gathering addon, credit: Martinz
- MikScrollingBattleText - A scrolling combat text addon
- pfUI - An addon that reworks most aspect of the UI and more
- Postal - A mail helper addon
- SellValue - An addon displaying the sell value of items, credit: Zarb
- SpamThrottle - An addon that throttles spam messages, credit: FireStoat
- SuperIgnore - An addon that extands your ignore list, credit: Rist
To check that you have installed it properly, make sure that the structure in place is the following:
<Wow folder>\Interface\AddOns\<addon_name>\<addon_name>.toc
If the .toc
file is not in there, the game will not recognise the addon, and you might need to move the folders about. However if the .toc
file isn't there, don't just move the .toc
file, but move the whole folder, as it was originally extracted from the archive file (.zip
/.rar
/.7z
).
Also, if the folder's name is <addon>-master
, while the .toc
file is <addon>.toc
, then remove the -master
from the folders name.
Vanilla macros are harder to write as many beloved features were added to the game in later expansions and some functionalities simply don't exist in vanilla. But here and here are some great resources to take as an example what one can still achieve with a bit of scripting.
Another great resouce can be found here, credit goes to DBFBlackbull for the nice explanations. While his focuses on warrior macros, reading through his page helps understand how macros function in vanilla.
credit - Jaredc
Roid Macros is aimed to provide TBC like macros (including conditions!) while abusing Vanilla WoW's Lua API to go even further including things like executing macros from within macros!
https://denniswg.github.io/Roid-Macros/
Here is another forum entry with a spammable start attack button that you can combo with other abilities.
/run ClearTarget() TargetLastTarget()
Click here to see more
credit - Thirinena
You'll need an addon to enable it https://github.com/satan666/LazySpell.
Classic mouseover and bonus scanner are needed for it AFAIK,
so it's the only one you'll have to extract from the lazyspell-master
folder if you're not interested in the others.
Use the slashcommand /cmcast [Spell name here](no brackets)
or the CM:Cast("[Spell name here](without brackets)" function
credit - ! Johnny Gat !
In this example the macro will make you cast Lesser Healing Wave
on the unit under your mouse, or if none is found, on your actual target
/run s="Lesser Healing Wave" m="mouseover" T=TargetUnit C=CastSpellByName if UnitExists(m) then T(m) C(s) T("playertarget") else C(s) end
In this example the macro will check if your mousover target is friendly, and if so, cast Lesser Healing Wave
on them. Otherwise it casts it on the player themself.
/run s="Lesser Healing Wave" m="mouseover" T=TargetUnit C=CastSpellByName if UnitExists(m) and UnitIsFriend("player", m) then T(m) else T("player")end C(s) T("playertarget")
Click here to see more
A macro to cast the appropriate level `Arcane Intellect` buff, so we can avoid that pesky "Target is too low level" error./run b,C,l="Arcane Intellect(Rank ",CastSpellByName,UnitLevel("target") if l>45 then C(b.."5)") elseif l>31 then C(b.."4)") elseif l>17 then C(b.."3)") elseif l>9 then C(b.."2)") else C(b.."5)") end
To change it to another buff, just modify the "Arcane Intellect(Rank" bit, look up at what level said buff at a certain rank is learnable, (for example here) take away 11, and use that in the comparison parts (like in this case l>45 means that lvl 46 and above you can use rank 5 int buff as it becomes learnable at lvl 56 and 56-11=45
These are patches that changes the way the game looks. Use them with care, some may not remain always compatible, as they are not maintained by the sever, or the community. To make sure the load order does not break, ensure that the name of the file is later in the alphabetical order than patch-3.MPQ
. (For example patch-A.MPQ
)
- Very Dark Night Mod 1.12.1 - credit: Wizdom
- Leeviathan's WoD Character Models - credit: Thirinena
Should you want to help share information from this guide, you may click on the headers and the url in your browser will change. If you copy and paste the new url, the opener of the link will be directed to the selected part right away.
This document is currently maintained by KrekoG.
If you find any inaccuracies, grammatical errors or would like to suggest (or even write) additions, please contact me on github or discord.