Official channels and community ones serve different purposes, and mixing them up is why answers seem contradictory.
Short answer
Wiki for facts, subreddit for opinion, Discord for live help, official forums for anything that needs a developer to see it.
- Use the wiki for mechanics, the subreddit for whether something is fun.
- Distrust any guide that does not say which version it is for.
- Write down what you changed, so you can undo exactly one thing if it goes sideways.
Twenty years of expansions mean half the advice online describes a version that no longer exists. Anything with an advertising incentive will overstate how urgent a change is. Discord answers fast and disappears fast — nothing there is searchable a month later.
Which place answers which question
Where two approaches both work, the one with fewer moving parts is the one to keep. Subreddits reward strong opinions, which makes them good for taste and poor for facts. The most useful community members are the ones who cite the patch they are describing. Nothing here assumes a particular playstyle beyond wanting the thing to work.
Third-party trackers and log sites are excellent for numbers and useless for context. Official forums are read by developers rarely but consistently, which is why bug reports belong there. What follows assumes you are on a current install and have not modified it.
How current the information is
Wikis carry a patch version; forum posts usually do not, and that difference explains most contradictions. There is no hidden trick here that the game is keeping from you. There is usually a fast way and a reliable way, and it is worth knowing which one you are choosing.
- Search before asking; almost everything has been asked already.
- Check the patch date on anything you are about to act on.
- Region and platform change more than people expect, so confirm both.
- Ask in Discord when the question is "right now", not "in general".
- Report bugs officially — nowhere else reaches the developers.
- Check the version you are actually running before assuming anything is broken.
Official channels
Everything below is framed around the current state of World of Warcraft rather than a launch-week impression. Treat anything stated without a version number as provisional. Do the cheap check before the expensive one — that ordering alone saves most of the frustration. The short version is near the top on purpose; the reasoning is there if you want to know why.
It helps to understand why a step exists, because then you can adapt it when your situation is slightly different. Half the pages on this topic were written for a build that no longer exists, which is why they stop matching what you see. Screenshots age faster than text, which is why this describes rather than shows.
Contributing back
The developers have changed their mind about this at least once, which explains the older advice. If a step reads as obvious, do it anyway — the obvious ones are the ones people skip and then wonder about. The community wisdom on this is roughly half right, and the half that is wrong costs the most time.
The awkward part is rarely the step itself, it is knowing which step comes first. If your result differs from what is described here, note what is different first rather than starting over. A single check up front replaces a lot of guessing later.
Reading community advice critically
World of Warcraft is not shy about hiding useful information two menus deep, so some of this is simply knowing where to look. If you are coming to this after a long break, the terminology has probably moved on. Patch notes move numbers around constantly; the shape of the answer holds even when a specific value shifts.
Where people go wrong
- Treating a rare edge case as the normal behaviour and planning around it.
- Copying a setup wholesale from a streamer without understanding what each part does.
- Skipping the prerequisite because it looked optional in someone else's summary.
- Assuming a guide from an older season still describes the current version.
WoW FAQ
How do I tell if advice is out of date?
Look for a version number. Advice without one is undateable, and undateable advice is usually old.
Where do I report a bug?
The official channel. Community sites cannot forward reports, however popular a thread gets.
What if none of this works for me?
Then something in your setup differs from the assumption — version, region or platform. Check those three before anything else.
Which source is most reliable?
The wiki, by a distance, because entries carry a version and get corrected. Everything else ages silently.
Work through it in the order above and armory stops being a question you have to look up again.