Newbie guide/Items

Item quality
Items are ranked by their quality in World of Warcraft, identifiable by the color of the item's name.

For all items, in order of increasing quality:
 * gray names indicate poor safe to sell these directly to a vendor.
 * white names indicate common quality; these items generally have a use in 1 or more professions or quests.
 * green names are uncommon. You will occasionally find these as you do battle against some monsters.
 * blue names are rare; these items are usually stronger than most uncommon items. These items also generally sell for large amounts of gold on the auction house.
 * purple names indicate epic items, generally found on high-level bosses in Endgame Instances.
 * orange names are legendary; these are extremely rare and of very high quality. There are only a handful of these items in the game.

Item binding
Some items in World of Warcraft can become soulbound to one particular character, making it impossible to trade them or sell them to other players. There are two types: those that will bind when first equipped or used, and those that will bind when they are looted or picked up. When looting, you will get a warning dialog telling you that looting the item will permanently bind it to you when you either equip or loot such an item. Once an item is bound to you, it will indicate in the tooltip that it is soulbound just below the name of the item. You can sell soulbound items to vendor NPCs, but not to other players. Destroying these items, selling them to a vendor, or disenchanting them (if you are an enchanter) are the only ways of getting rid of these objects; you cannot mail them, trade them, or sell them in the auction house.

Acquiring items
Items are acquired in several ways:


 * 1) Killing monsters
 * 2) Completing quests
 * 3) Getting them from other players
 * 4) * By trade.
 * 5) * By mail from other characters or your own characters (that are on the same server).
 * 6) ** Mail with an item in it takes 1 hour to arrive.
 * 7) ** Mail with just a message and/or money arrives instantly. The same applies to mail sent between your own characters, regardless of their contents.
 * 8) Making them yourself
 * Tradeskills provide items that are one notch above equal-level quest items. However, you can send items you make to your other character (and to other players) or sell them to vendors or auction them at the auction house.
 * 1) Buying them from vendor NPCs
 * Most vendors sell stuff appropriate for the level area they occupy. Equippable items found at most vendors are much worse than what you should be wearing if you do many quests.
 * 1) Buying them from an auction house

Item attributes
Most items in World of Warcraft have one or more attributes. Depending on what class you chose to play, some attributes become more important than others.