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Average Customer Rating:

Quite Poor

Customer Rating:

Some game guides (such as the ones for Final Fantasy XII or the fantastic hardback for the Collector's Edition of Fallout 3) are well-designed mines of information that deserve to be almost permanently open by your side when playing the game. You would think from its size that this guide deserves to join that illustrious company. Think again. Full colour printing may seem like no expense has been spared, but most of the screenshots here are pretty ugly, uninformative, too large (so they are pixellated) or so small that they tell you nothing at all. Visually, the book has very little pleasure to offer. As far as content goes, the story is even worse. There are some useful tips on dungeons and the quest series for the new class (Death Knight) but nothing so useful that you would really want it, and telling players who have already devoted over a hundred hours to the game (on several occasions) that they are going to need a healer, a tank and DPS for an instance is a waste of time. In some cases the guide is actually less informative than the in-game information. It doesn't list cooldowns or casting times on spells and only gives the same text that you can see in the game, with no further advice. In the case of the Death Knight class you are given some pointers on abilities, but no real information at all on the talent paths. For no talent does the guide tell you the percentage enhancement: possibly for fear that the developers will change this and render the guide obsolete. Nevertheless - even if you make allowances for the fact that the guide was produced as the game was being balanced by its creators - the talent trees in this book are less useful than any on-line calculator because the icons are not even labelled with the name of the talent. This is unforgivably bad design, because you would have to remember the icon and find on the next page if you wanted to make sense of it. I spent some minutes trying to find information on the new Priest top tier ability (Penance) before realising that the authors have separated spell abilities available to all members of a class from those awarded by talent points. (I think that most players will want to be able to find a list of the things they can put on their spellbar separate from the talents that affect the mathematics behind the game.) The way in which abilities are arranged (alphabetically rather than by the level at which they become available) is also confusing. For ease of use, I'd give this book a very low overall score. For the new Inscription profession you get a list of all glyphs but no account of what effect they have, which again renders it almost completely useless as a guide. There should have been a guide to all the glyphs for each class since existing players will want advice on how best to employ a powerful new enhancement system. Page after page is taken up with lists of quests with no account of how to complete them or the stats on the quest rewards. No one with an up-to-date quest add-on will even bother with this, whereas really useful knowledge about developing appropriate stats on characters is completely ignored. This book is quite cheap given all the work that went into producing it, and obsessive fans of the game will certainly find some useful pages here and there, such as the detailed list of the new Achievement system. If you don't buy this, though, you really aren't going to miss it.