World of Warcraft: Character creation and leveling up

Here are some of the basic classes of World of Warcraft:

Paladin
The Paladin is essentially a fighter/preist. Which means you will want to put most of your initial points into Strength (so you can do more damage) and then Stamina which gives you more hitpoints. You will want to do this probably until around level 12 since for the early stages you are essentially a fighter with a few priest spells. Once you get past 12, you may want to start adding some points to spirit. Don't waste points on Agility and there's no point to add points to intelligence until later on when you start to get more expensive and more powerful spells/abilities.

Fighter
The figher is the classic tank. At first, all your effort should go into Strength. When Strength starts to get more expensive, start putting more into Stamina. to get those HP up.

Mage
Mage needs lots of Intelligence to have more mana along with some spirit so that you regenerate it at a decent clip. But early on, you will want to make it mostly Intelligence and Stamina (so you can cast lots of spells before having to drink) and have enough hitpoints to take some hits.

Preist
Fairly similar to the mage really in strategy even if the tactics are different.

Rogue
The rogue is the thinking person's unit. Which means I don't use them. But in the hands of a good player they're lethal. They need good agility. Stamina is also nice to have as well. But agility is the main factor here.

Early Leveling Up:

Early on, make good use of the creatures near where you start. Each level becomes much more difficult to reach in terms of experience. Blizzard has made the first 6 levels very easy to get to. So my advice is to try to get most of that through killing creatures. Later on, leveling up will mostly be a matter of completing quests. Since the amount of XP you get is based on your level, it is better to kill the earlier, easier creatures when you start and then at level 6 focus more on the quests.

Beware of people who tell you about "power leveling". Places like the Dead Mines and the Stockade DO give you good experience IF you have a good party that can kill things quickly. But often times my friends would brag about how they went up 2 levels in the Stockade but when they ran the /played feature, the whole story wasn't the case. In my case, I got to level 22 in 2 days and 9 hours of playing. I wasn't really concentrating that much on leveling and that was by no means optimal playing. But other people were taking 4 or 5 days of playing to get to that level mostly because they would fixate on killing creatures instead of completing quests.

So I say again: If you want to level quickly, kill creatures only for the first few levels and then concentrate on the quests.

More on this later.