Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning: Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Official Game Guides)

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.

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.

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.

this book gives an excellent description to character classes, especially on how to play them and to help play against them.

If you're looking for a fluffed up clas guide this is for you. There is more real information in the pamplet that came with the game. The most this guide may do for you is help you decide what class you want to play otherwise it is wothless.