Customer Reviews

World of Warcraft Dungeon Companion

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This well written and photographed guide comes in very handy for both beginners and seasoned players. The listing of all the available dungeon quests for both Horde and Alliance allows you to collect as many quests as you can before venturing in. Detailed pictures with quest information and location are listed as well.

The tips on "Who To Bring" are helpful. After all, there's no reason to attempt these instances if you don't have the right group profile. Going to Uldaman?- yep, bring 5 people. 2 chain-wearers (I assume the guide means mail), 1 plate, someone who can snare, and a healer. Good to know. Did you know that Uldaman has a back door?

There's all kinds of helpful information and maps in this guide. Studying these dungeons can make questing or raiding a cleaner and more successful experience for you.

Finally, a manual with maps of instances! The original strategy guide offered very little in the way of help with dungeons other than mentioning they existed. (Not to mention there are no in game instance maps. Getting separated from my buddies in the heart of gnomeregan, then hitting the M button to bring up the map so I could see where they were just before I realized all I was gonna see was a stupid map of the world got kinda old.)

But this baby more than makes up for it. Even if some of the tips are kind of vague. The advice on who to bring into the dungeons is rather by the numbers. Bring a tank, healer, dps, crowd control and backup tank is the common advice given. It's like, thanks for stating the obvious. Still, it's the thought that counts.

Not only are all the five and ten man instances covered but it also covers the twenty and forty man epic dungeons. Sweet, I finally get to see what Ragnaros and Nefarian look like since I'm not going to see them in the game anytime soon, if ever. Naxx isn't covered but it is still the best 40 man reference guide I have seen (it's the only one I've seen)

P.s. This is a minor observation but why are almost 90% of the screenshots in the book horde? Every time you see a party fighting an instance boss it's a horde party. It doesn't really affect the book or the advice but it was mildly amusing since I've never really played the horde side that much (I have a few horde characters but none of them are over level 30) It's a side of the horde I don't see much. It's like 'oh yeah, the horde quests too, they don't just hang around Southshore and try to kill me' and that's what books like this do. They open your mind.

This book contains detailed maps and clear strategies, detailing positioning, group roles, ideal group makeups, and timing information. It also includes a list of quests that can be completed in each dungeon, as well as a list of frequent drops from each boss. It's an invaluable tool for guilds and players that frequently raid and run instances.

My only issue is that it cannot be updated, and with the release of the Naxxramas raid dungeon, it is already out of date. Otherwise, this is a fantastic book.

Brady Games is not renowned for a stellar track record when it comes to World of Warcraft guides; their first WoW guide went to print with quests, items and mobs from the original WoW Beta, and the infamous Binder Incident is often retold.

They got their Dungeon Companion right though. What an incredible resource for new players. Not only are the maps and notes accurate this time, the strategies are useful. It includes every dungeon and raid instance in the current live game (except Naxxramas, which could fill a guide of its own...). For a new player approaching the game, it's an invaluable resource with which to prepare for new challenges and to base your own strategies for the future.

It's been said that this information is all available for free, on the Blizzard forums and elsewhere. This is true. However, those resources are often sewn with misinformation and plenty of egotistical grandstanding. Take it from a raiding pro, you're better off with this kind of presentation. You get a consistent, objective explaination of every encounter from Hogger to C'thun, and that's worth a lot. Once you've learned the basic strategies, you're in a great position to develop powerful ones of your own.

The only downside to buying this book is that the Burning Crusade expansion is just around the corner. Oh well, 2 years too late, but still an excellent book.

This reference work may have been more helpful when it first came out, but now it lags behind the actual content that it is attempting to reveal. The work covers all of the instances from the original game (before any patches) and does so in alphabetical order as opposed to a more-helpful level-of-instance organization. On its own merits, it provides a sound basic understanding of the instances level 1-60 players may encounter. In addition, it also goes into the single and chain quests for each faction that are part of each dungeon--especially helpful if you want to go after Onyxia, for example, which involves the longest chain in the pre-BC game.

The work does suffer from several problems, though. Blizzard has released numerous patches and updates since the book's publication, rendering much of the content obsolete. The typeface and layout of the book tend to be quite wearying on the eyes, so spending a lot of time reading it in one sitting is not advisable. Finally, Brady seems to have cut the budget for proofreading, as there are numerous spelling and typographical errors in the work. This last point may seem trivial, but if WoW had as many mistakes in it as this book has, gamers would have run away from it in frustration long ago.

While this work is still helpful in several aspects, its age (in computer gaming terms, anyway) prevents it from being an end-all, be-all for the WoW gamer. The reader should use it for a general overview of what a dungeon is all about, but then should use the constantly-updated resources online to give the specifics as to how to run each dungeon and to keep up with all the modifications that Blizzard has made since this work's publication.

I'm impressed with BradyGames' World of Warcraft Dungeon Companion, up-to-date as of Summer 2006. It's sooooo much better organized and written than their recently-released "WoW Master Guide, 2nd ed." strategy guide. However, many of the strategies espoused can be found on the Blizzard forums and elsewhere for free. Yet everything's altogether in this one book, unlike the internet. Naxx is not included, but I'm confident BradyGames will include it in their next update. For casual gamers like me, this is one good guide. BradyGames got this one right.

I was skeptical about buying this book because there are so many good sites out there for information. But no other source is as complete as the Dungeon Companion. All the horde, alliance, class-specific, and faction-nuetral quests are outlined. You'll never be missing a non-sharable quest in an instance again. I also love the full-color maps. Significant locations are clearly marked and explained. You'll never get lost in Uldaman again.

Ok...I have a gripe with BradyGames. This is a great resource for WoW players. The maps are beautiful and the walk throughs actually work. However this is just greedy marketing. When WoW came out they offered a binder that would be updated as the game matured. As of today it has been updated to the Temple of Atal'Hakkar. The content that is in the Companion should have been made available to the people who bought the binder a long time ago instead of packaging it seperately and asking us for another $24.99. I am very disappointed in this company's decisions.

I had ordered this book along with World of Warcraft, it was very helpful.

Lets talk about what this book is not:
-covers all dungeons up to blackwing lair
-does not cover burning crusade dungeons, nor is there a dungeon companion for the burning crusade (yet) The burning crusade players guide only covers the first 2 hellfire citadel dungeons and the first 2 coilfang dungeons, I don't know why.

To WoW newbies doing dungeons, this book is very helpful, as it lists what level you should be, all the quests you can get, and a walkthrough of the dungeon.

If you were to get a quest for a certain dungeon, you could take a look in the book, get the rest of the quests for that dungeon, and finish the dungeon with confidence, knowing you won't have to come back for another quest if you hated that dungeon.

While great for anybody questing up to level 60, people over 60 will have little use for this book. It could be useful if you go to an old raid spot like Zul Gurub or molten core, but pretty much nobody runs lvl 60 dungeons anymore. Like scholomance and Stratholme.

The biggest problem is the maps of certain dungeons, mainly the large ones. If its your 1st time to blackrock depths or blackrock spire, and you consult the map on where to find a certain NPC or boss, its not going to be of very much use to you, because of the multiple levels of those dungeons make it hard to read a top view map of those places.

overall, A great book for the still-learing WoW player thats very useful when the others in your group don't have a clue of what to do

Especially if you like to study ahead or do things all the way, this Dungeon Companion will truly be your companion as you meet bigger and bigger dungeons in the game.

It lists:
- quests available in each dungeon
- what kind of mobs will be met in each dungeon
- what kind of drops can be found and where
- as well as a walk through of the instance
- it also includes good general information about raids