Project Noob - The patching

The poor bastard had to patch for about one and a half hour. His first race choices were blood elf, night elf or forsaken. But, he kinda liked Sylvanas in The Frozen throne, and he seemed to like the DPS/DoT/Debuff approach to the playstyle of a warlock, and said "forsaken warlock perhaps?". I made some jokes about mages and warlocks being sworn enemies and stuff but that I'd told my brother to roll warlock over mage if he wanted a caster because I think the playstyle suits more people and it's a flexible, fairly easy class.

He said "rogue might be fun?" shortly after and I said I liked the playstyle so-so and explained the difference between mana and energy, and combo points/finishers, and compared them to assassins from Diablo 2.

Then he went on to say "what class does Forsaken fit as?" and I explained that their racials had pretty little impact on what class he chose (if you are a troll, by contrast, your racials benefit the classes that benefit from haste or ranged damage) but that they made good casters cause of the male undead offensive casting animation (which I really like).

After some naming (no dashes, no spaces etc) issues he eventually settled on a greek name for his female undead warlock. I met up with him almost as he emerged from the Deathknell crypt (I ran my druid from Crossroads when he started making his character) and we set up some chat for him (a party tab) and made sure he got some basics down - right clicking initiates melee combat which is kinda inefficient if you are a caster, but pressing 2 tosses a shadow bolt that deals a lot more damage. Using WASD for movement lets you access your number buttons a lot easier than using the arrow keys (seems to be a prelevalent noob mistake) and when he was level 2 we managed to get him an imp. I taught him some basics about threat after he heard my quite audible Omen threat warning over Skype, and demonstrated the diffence in damage threat and taunts by use of Growl. He tried making sense of the skill/talent system by referring to Diablo 2 and I think he's got a grasp of how trainers got into the mix. Kinda tricky to explain "specs" with the talent trees not visible but I compared him to a necromancer in Diablo 2 and I think he got it. His mic was also kinda useless so I couldn't hear what he said half the time, but he does own a proper headset so that'll hopefully change.

He got ready for a party, thanked me for the crash course and we agreed on playing sumoar sum other day. A good start, if I may say so myself.