Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not a strategy guide...
Comment: I browsed through this book, and I was not impressed. But my eye was beguiled by the lovely art, and I had a discount coupon in my pocket, and I would get an exclusive in-game item. So I gave in to temptation. And, as usually happens when you impulsively do something against your better judgement, I regret it.
Mike Searle starts off this book by saying online MMOs are constantly changing, so how can a book keep up? It can't! Therefore, instead of a book filled with charts and tables, we'll give you a guide to the strategy of using a particular race & class.
He then proceeds to give us a book filled with charts and tables...
... oh, and jokes. Really bad jokes. Not the 'good' type of bad jokes, no. The type of bad that you read and go, that's not funny. Not even a little bit; not even if I was four years old. These jokes are so bad, you resent the time spent reading them.
Other reviews have already mentioned lovely extra artwork, the tiny print on dark paper, and the grating, 'race-specific' writing style. What no one has mentioned so far is the fact that, if you are a MMO beginner, this book is just about useless. It is filled with jargon and slang, and there is no glossary or index, so if you don't know what PBAE means, you won't be any wiser for reading this book. There are no details about basic aspects of the game- how do you use a particular chat channel, how do you join a party, what is the difference between a white, a green, a blue, and a purple item, etc. Crafting isn't mentioned at all. There are, however, quite a few typos or other errors. For example, the Bright Wizard ability "meltdown" does damage based on the accrued combustion level of the wizard, and you do the most damage when your combustion level is between 91 and 375. This is good to know, except combustion can only go up to 100, and then you blow yourself up.
The 'strategy' provided in this guide boils down to which abilities to use, in which order, for each race and class. Which is fine, except most people will figure out their preferred action set long before they have all the abilities listed in the guide. As patches and updates accrue, and abilites are tweaked and changed, we are already past the point where we can expect the Prima-recommended order to still be the most efficient. In fact, with the release of the new character classes Black Guard for Destruction and Blazing Sun Knight for Order, the guide is already on its way to being obsolete.
In the back, there are a series of nice maps of the three warfronts, the tiers within each, and the rank of player expected to be running around in them. Each tier has a list of the public quests, but details are given for only one or two, and these details are only a list of the objectives- there are no helpful hints, like "this boss is particularly vulnerable to spirit damage," or "whatever you do, don't punch that drunk."
Still, the purchase was not a total waste. The exclusive in-game item, the Adventurer's Handbook, is useful, and you get one for every character on your account. Do I wish I had saved my money? Yes. Do I wish that trees had not died to produce this tome? Oh, yes. Do we still need a comprehensive guide to Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning? Absolutely.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Great
Comment: Good for class information, nothing on crafting, poor maps, only buy if you like to read about the classes when you are not playing the game, other wise skip this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Informative
Comment: Typically I buy a guide like this as a substitute instruction manual for the very poor documentation you see for MMORPG's. Well, it failed miserably in that regard. Bascially, it recaps what you can find out on any number of websites concerning the game in a more up-to-date and accessible format. It doesn't tell you the information you would really like to know, like, do which potions and effects don't stack and things like that. The stats it does have are rather limited by the fact that they are constantly being changed in patches to the game. So spell and ability descriptions are already obsolete. Really, I suppose the only truly useful elements are the maps, which I don't really care to use anyway. After all, why even use maps if you have any sense of adventure in an adventure game. Nevertheless, they are pretty to look at . . . so why not buy the Warhammer Online Atlas made by the same company for less. There really isn't much I can say to recommend this guide.
Customer Rating:
Summary: 50 pages of class abilities & 280 pages of filler.
Comment: Executive Summary:
This book is great if you want to see the entire tree of any character and what abilities they get at what level. Other than that, this book will provide you with absolutely no useful info. By January '09 when there are a few websites that shows you an easy to follow character class ability list, this book will be 99% useless. The 1% is that it gives you a code that grants an additional 10% XP on your char. It is usable 3 times, and each time you use it, you will get the bonus for 2 hours. So in total, this code will provide 6 hours of 10% additional XP per character you have.
Full Review:
As stated in the Executive summary, this book is very good at giving you an easy to follow table of the character abilities at each level. You will walk away from this book knowing what each class gets, and when. That is the only useful piece of info it gives, and really, probably even a month after release there is a website out there that does just as good of a job in showing you character/class abilities as this book does.
So how is this a 334 page book when the meat is about 50 pages give or take a few? They had this "Wonderful" idea to write the entire book in a first person POV from a master of the class. So when you are reading about a witch hunter, you will get a tale about how this whitch hunter when he was level 1-10 would use abilty x and ability y (very common sense stuff, nothing "Oh my, I never would have thought of that combo!")...and level 11-20 he used A & B abilities...etc. If this was meant to be a book and not a strategy guide, the stories still seem forced and not written well and I would still give this 1 star. As a strategy guide, the stories seem very much out of place and fairly apparently were just put in to ship a product out the door.
The first person stories can get extremely annoying (at least for me) when you read through the trolls "Nd evriethin iz riten liik dis." I started laughing at this point and thinking "They swindled me good on this one."
Some VERY noticable things that they did not have in it were detailed maps, any dungeon maps, drop lists, crafting lists, gear lists, general information about resists, skills, defenses, offenses, etc. The term "Strategy guide" on this is a bit of a stretch.
Bottom line:
If 6 hours of 10% more XP is worth whatever the price of this book is at the time, then buy it. If you want it for ANYTHING more than that, save your money.
Customer Rating:
Summary: my review
Comment: this book gives an excellent description to character classes, especially on how to play them and to help play against them.
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