World of Warcraft Bestiary (Brady Games Official Strategy Guide) (Brady Games Official Strategy Guide) (Brady Games Official Strategy Guide)

Rating:

When I heard Bradygames was making this guide, I was excited! Wow, comprehensive information about all the denizens of World of Warcraft in my lap! No more looking them up individually online!

Sadly, this guide is woefully lacking such key information as:
- Where they are located (even a general zone would've been helpful)
- Immunities/weaknesses
- Elite/Non-Elite

Because of this, I find myself not looking anything up in this guide, and still go online for all of my bestiary needs.

If you just want to know how many different creatures inhabit World of Warcraft, and want to see what so-and-so boss looks like, then this guide is an interesting read. If you need any crucial information to keep you alive in an encounter, or even just to FIND a creature, this guide is really no help at all.

Rating:

I concur with the other reviews of this book. Without disclosing the actual location of NPC this book is not very useful. Considering the other Dungeon manuals also include the loot that drops from bosses this information could also have been included.

Pass on this book and get the strategy guide or the dungeon guides instead.

Rating:

This book is purely academic, with no applicable use in the game. Yes, it gives you the stats, etc, but nothing else. If the book was going to be of any use, it needs to include the location of the mobs, what they drop, and any quests (if any) they're the target of.

Rating:

Excellent product and is a pretty good help for looking up beasts info in the game. It does help to let you know what you may be up against in a given area.

Rating:

Why do most folks want from a book like this? Well, you would expect to see a fairly comprehensive listing of the monsters that you meet in World of Warcraft, but you should get more. An effective book would not only provide very basic information, but indicate where these monsters roam and maybe a line or two of information about what/who they are. You won't find any of that extra information here and it is very disappointing. Thumbing through the book, you stumble upon interesting creatures and you wonder, "Hmmm where will I see this one?" yet the book provides zero information in this regard.

The book's organization is rather odd, they don't put similar monsters together because they state that more significant mobs of that species deserve their own entry. Nice concept, but in the end that means there is zero reference that those other significant mobs exist if you only read the main entry for that species. To make matters worse, they have placed an index in the back of the book requiring you to look up mobs by other names that aren't indicated by those other names in the main listings.

Part of the biggest attraction to Warcraft is the extensive lore, and Brady missed a large opportunity to provide fans with lore/context/history on all of these monsters. In the end, it is more of a pretty picture book with information that could have been gleaned online with much more detail. Brady Games really missed the point of a book like this and how valuable it could have been. It just leaves you wanting more than it offers and doing more research on WowHead or Thottbot to get that info. For that reason, the book loses two stars in my review. It might be better to pick up this one on the markdown table somewhere.

One interesting item that it does show you is how often Blizzard utilizes the same character models with just a few different colors!