Early Weapon Costs on the Way to 20
The first 20 levels look free. They are not. Quest rewards fill one weapon slot and leave the rest of them open, the difference gets bought from a vendor or from another player, and the right to swing what you bought is trained at a counter. This is the bill nobody budgets for, written out separately from riding, repairs and trainer ranks.
Quest rewards do not fill every slot
A starting zone hands out weapons, and it hands them out with one picture of your character in mind: the obvious slot for the obvious class. A warrior gets something to hold in the main hand, a mage gets a staff, and the reward table moves on. What the table rarely does is fill the second slot, the ranged slot or the shield, because those depend on a specification the quest designer never asked you for. The result is a character that is armed in theory and half-armed in practice.
The classes that feel it first are the ones with 2 slots to keep busy. A rogue holding a single dagger is giving up the whole off hand, a hunter without a usable ranged weapon is a melee character with a pet, and a caster with no wand is a staff and an empty mana bar. Caster hands are their own problem, since the stats that matter there are discussed in weapons that carry spell power rather than in weapon damage alone.
An empty slot is not only a damage figure. It is longer fights, more drinking between them, more deaths on the slow pulls, and every one of those costs something. The repair side of that is already set out under durability lost in a death, which is why we keep it off this list and count only what you pay to arm the character in the first place.
The vendor floor and the auction house gap
There are 2 ways to close the gap, and they behave differently. General goods vendors and weapon vendors stock plain items with no stats attached, available at a fixed price that does not move with the server's mood. That is the floor: it is never a bargain, and it is never unavailable. The same counters run the other direction too, and what an NPC pays per item is the figure that funds most of these purchases for a character with nothing else to sell.
The auction house is where the stat-bearing low-level weapons sit, and it is priced by other levellers rather than by a design document. In the opening weeks those listings are thin on the weapon side and heavy on raw materials, because the free gathering manual turns most of the realm into suppliers rather than crafters. How that supply arrives and who is bidding against you is covered under what reaches the listings early.
A character that refuses the second option entirely is making a real choice, not a stylistic one: the gap is then closed by drops only, and the wait can run several levels. That trade-off belongs with levelling without the auction house, where the same empty off hand is a scheduling problem instead of a purchase.
Weapon skill is a separate bill
Buying the weapon does not grant the right to use it. Each class starts proficient with a short list of weapon types, and anything outside that list has to be trained before it can be equipped at all. Some of that teaching sits with the class trainer and some of it sits with a weapon master in a capital, which means a trip, and for a character under 20 a trip is made on foot. The fee is paid at a counter like any other training.
The second half of the bill is not gold at all. A newly trained weapon type starts its skill from the bottom and climbs only by being swung, so the first hour with a new axe misses more than the last hour with the old sword did. Switching types mid-levelling pays that cost twice. The practical rule is to pick the types you intend to carry to 60 early and buy inside them, rather than upgrading into whatever drops.
None of this appears in the usual list of outflows. Riding, trainer ranks, respecs and repairs are set out under where levelling gold is spent, and the income side of the same evening sits with a staged plan for earning coin. Weapons and proficiency fall between the 2, which is the only reason this exists as its own entry.
What we have not seen priced
We do not have confirmed figures for Forever specifically. Nothing in the announcement material gives a weapon master fee, a vendor weapon price or a stated change to how proficiency is taught, and we are not going to put invented numbers next to the ones that are confirmed. If the beta client prices these differently from earlier Classic releases, that will show up in testing before it shows up here.
2 further unknowns matter for budgeting. The first is whether any of the new recipes cover the early weapon range, because a crafted low-level weapon in volume would flatten the auction side of this entirely. The second is whether the Legacy tree touches proficiency or early gear in any way; the perks described so far concern gathering yield. Until either is settled, treat the early weapon bill as a real expense of unknown size rather than a rounding error.
For a second or third character the same bill arrives again, and it arrives before that character earns anything. We worked through that case separately under funding a character from scratch, which assumes the main is paying.
Questions
Do quest rewards really leave slots empty before 20?
They leave the non-obvious ones empty. Reward tables are built around a class's primary weapon, so the main hand is usually covered by something reasonable, while off hands, shields, ranged slots and wands depend on what you happen to loot. Dual-wield classes and hunters notice the gap first, casters notice it as soon as mana runs out mid-fight and there is nothing to attack with. It is not a flaw in the design so much as a consequence of reward tables being written for a single slot.
Is it cheaper to buy a vendor weapon or an auction house one?
The vendor is cheaper and worse. Vendor stock carries no stats, so you are paying for a damage figure and nothing else, and the price does not move. Auction listings carry stats and are priced by whoever else is levelling that week, which in the opening period means thin supply on weapons and plenty of competition for the good ones. For a slot you only need filled for a few levels, the vendor is usually the sensible answer; for a main hand you will carry into the twenties, it rarely is.
Does training a new weapon type cost gold or only time?
Both. The teaching itself is paid at a counter, with the class trainer or a weapon master depending on the type, and reaching the trainer costs the walk. After that the skill starts low and rises only through use, so there is a stretch where the new weapon performs worse than the one it replaced. We do not have the Forever fee figures and are not guessing at them; the time half is the part that decides most upgrade choices anyway.
Why is this not part of the gold sinks list?
The gold sinks entry covers the outflows that repeat for the life of a character: riding, trainer ranks, talent resets and repairs. Arming a character between 1 and 20 is a one-off that happens before most of those apply, and it is paid partly to vendors and partly to other players, which makes it behave differently from a pure sink. Keeping it separate means the sinks list stays about money leaving the economy, and this stays about money a new character has to find first.
Sources
- Official material on the Forever release, used for what is confirmed about levelling and professions — World of Warcraft official site.
- Reference for how weapon proficiency and weapon skill behave in Classic-era clients — Warcraft Wiki: weapon skill.