A six-point launch-day checklist is going round, and two of its tips need a caveat

Three days out from launch, launch-day checklists are everywhere. One of them, a six-tip video the creator Fairbanks put up on October 31, cleared 34,000 views within a day, which makes it one of the more widely seen pieces of advice going into November 4.

Rather than repeat it, we ran each of its six points past the beta client data and the tester reports we already track. Four hold up cleanly. Two were good advice in Classic and are weaker in Forever, for reasons that are easy to miss.

The six tips, as published

From the video’s own chapter list: learn Cooking, use a bank alt, know where your first bag comes from, learn your professions, watch for Waylaid Crates, spend your early currency carefully — plus a bonus on planning for the Sleeping Bag, and a closing one about playing at your own pace.

The four that hold up

Cooking. This is the strongest item on the list and the reason is Forever-specific, not a Classic habit carried over. Cooking is no longer just buff food: the old Cooking Fire is now a Basic Campfire that creates a campsite with rest, vendors, repairs and profession workspaces. Every profession has three campsite objects, and the first is learned at skill 20 — low enough to reach on day one — from camping NPCs or profession trainers. Each gives a one-hour buff, which does not stack with the matching class buff. (Blizzard deep dive, plus beta client data.) Our professions pages have the per-profession objects.

Waylaid Crates. Worth knowing before you vendor something by accident. A Waylaid Crate drops as ordinary loot; reading its label turns it into a specific shipment such as Waylaid Crate: Apprentice Ingots. You fill it with any one bundle from its list — 20 Copper Bar, or 20 Tin Bar, or 10 Bronze Bar — and hand it in for Merchant’s Favor, which buys profession recipes. Testers place the Horde hand-in at a Durotar Supply and Logistics camp just west of the Crossroads. (Client data for the crates, tester reports for the camp.)

One honest gap: nobody has published how much Favor a crate actually pays, or what the recipes cost. The client does not store those numbers. Full detail on our Merchant’s Favor page.

Professions. Still two primaries plus Cooking as a secondary, so nothing new there — but one detail changes where you put them. Testers report the strong Merchant’s Favor recipes are Bind on Pickup. If that holds, the crafting profession has to sit on the character that will wear the gear, not on a dedicated crafter. Our alt guide plans a roster around that.

The Sleeping Bag. The bonus tip, and the maths is better than it sounds. Resting in it gives 1% experience per minute up to 3%, and it stacks with the 5% from a cooked meal — so 8% from level 1 if you pair it with the Cooking tip. Over a race to 60 that is hours. It is a five-zone quest chain ending in a jumping puzzle in Hillsbrad; the route with all five coordinates is on the site, along with the warning that Horde players have the longer run.

The two that need a caveat

The bank alt. Sound Classic advice, and Forever has quietly undercut the main reason for it. The client’s gold sinks show an Account Bank whose tabs run from 1 silver to 2 gold 50 silver, against 100, 200 and 400 gold for a character’s sixth, seventh and eighth bank tabs. Shared storage is now the cheap option by three orders of magnitude. There is also a Legacy perk, Personal Banking, that lets innkeepers open your bank.

A bank alt still has uses — a parking spot in a capital, a second set of hands at the Auction House — but “make one so you have somewhere to put things” is no longer the argument it was. (Client data.)

Where your first bag comes from. The chain most people point at is the Sleeping Bag chain, which hands out a 12-slot bag along the way. The caveat: a tester wrote on 4 October that they ran the chain mainly for that bag and found it nerfed, and nobody has posted its current size since. We cannot read it either — it is not in the datamined files.

So do the chain for the experience buff, which is confirmed. Treat the bag as a bonus of unknown size rather than your bag plan. The same chain’s food item, Student Fodder, has an unconfirmed level requirement: a level 23 tester was told they were too low to use it and never got an answer.

On the last tip

The video closes by telling people to take what suits them and play at their own pace. Worth repeating on a launch where the servers open at one moment worldwide — 3:00 pm PST on November 4, which is the small hours of the 5th across Europe. Nobody playing at midnight is going to out-level the people who slept.

What we could not check

We do not have the video’s spoken detail, only the creator’s own published description and chapter list, so this piece checks the topics rather than every number said out loud. Where the video and our data disagree on something specific, it is our data that may be out of date: the shipping client is build 1.60.1.70707, and the crate and chain reports above come from testers on 70205.

Our launch page has the rest of the day-one list.