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

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.

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.

I bought this guide hoping for details on everything like hot keys, commands, and more but the guide only told about the different classes and the playing areas. In my opinion it was not a complete guide and your money would probably be better spend on something else and the information could more readily available for free on various Warhammer Online fansites.

Pros:
great for learning about the differant classes abilitys and niches
some great lore bits
no hard numbers that get outdated
great illustrations
general public quest information
cons:
the language is used according to the culture, really grating
abilitys could be broken down better
maps should be bigger


bottomline: Good for comparing class abilitys but not much else.

Well, it's a gaming guide not a piece of fiction so what can I say about this? I'll start with the negative. The story-book style, each race written 'in its own language/lingo' can be clunky at times. Yes, you could say that it's rich in background and setting, but it doesn't make for an easy read at all from a gaming/quick help point of view. Also, although generally visually attractive, the dark background paper with black lettering can be difficult to read if you are not in very good lighting.

That being said, the guide is generally helpful, with strategies and input on many things, and pretty fair and helpful maps and even minor/minimal walk-throughs for the chapters of the PQ's. Overall I would rate the book as a 3 1/2 probably. It's not a must have, but it is worth a read and is useful.

I opened up the guide I ordered and literally was like "WOW, this thing looks good" -
Sadly, after that it just went downhill.
There's distracting layout errors - like one section spreadsheet says
"Range / Level "
then later it's listed
"Range / Level "

We all know the "FT" were supposed to go with range, because it's distance, but it's little errors like that which pop up all over which make me wonder if a professional wrote this book, or just someone who got paid money because they knew someone.

The absolute lack of substance in this book is masked by the author trying to be cute with dialogue and writing with accents and speech befitting the race you're reading about.

The idea that this is a STRATEGY guide is totally bogus.. it's just an introduction to the game with things like , "if you're a healer, don't forget to heal your party members!" - Yea, thanks there turbo, I wasn't sure about that.

So, it gets two stars, because it'd be nice for absolute beginners to MMOs and this game.

Thank you.

I do not have many problems with most guides especially ones for MMO's as what they write is usually obsolete with in the first week. Well Prima along with Mythic decided to do this one differently. They made the guide with less hard numbers and more lore, strategies, guiding and such instead. This is not the norm for a guide of this type. They make suggestions and such and do it fairly well. The review from Innocente did not seem to take this into account. He wants something that will hold his hand so to speak and guide him thorough it all and this guide was not build to do this. It was written to be helpful, suggestive and get updated as the game progresses on the internet. It is useful if this was all taken into account. That is what matters and what is all that should matter. I wish you all luck and hope you have fun playing the game instead of just reading and rushing through something :)

This guide does not have much real game information at all. It is mostly Lore and background. The text is written in the dialect of the individual races, making for very tough reading. Not recommended for anyone that is looking for suggestions and guidance.