Official channels and community ones serve different purposes, and mixing them up is why answers seem contradictory.

Short answer

For anything time-sensitive, the Discord will answer in minutes where a forum takes days.

  • Distrust any guide that does not say which version it is for.
  • Use the wiki for mechanics, the subreddit for whether something is fun.
  • Read the whole sequence once before doing the first step.

Twenty years of expansions mean half the advice online describes a version that no longer exists. Discord answers fast and disappears fast — nothing there is searchable a month later. Subreddits reward strong opinions, which makes them good for taste and poor for facts.

Which place answers which question

What follows assumes you are on a current install and have not modified it. The most useful community members are the ones who cite the patch they are describing. Anything with an advertising incentive will overstate how urgent a change is. The short version is near the top on purpose; the reasoning is there if you want to know why.

Wikis carry a patch version; forum posts usually do not, and that difference explains most contradictions. Official forums are read by developers rarely but consistently, which is why bug reports belong there. A single check up front replaces a lot of guessing later.

Reading community advice critically

Third-party trackers and log sites are excellent for numbers and useless for context. Most of the disagreement you will find online is two people describing different builds. If a step reads as obvious, do it anyway — the obvious ones are the ones people skip and then wonder about.

  • Check the patch date on anything you are about to act on.
  • Search before asking; almost everything has been asked already.
  • Expect one number in every guide to be out of date; the method is what matters.
  • Report bugs officially — nowhere else reaches the developers.

How current the information is

The awkward part is rarely the step itself, it is knowing which step comes first. Everything below is framed around the current state of World of Warcraft rather than a launch-week impression. Half the pages on this topic were written for a build that no longer exists, which is why they stop matching what you see. Where something depends on your platform or region, that is called out rather than glossed over.

Where two approaches both work, the one with fewer moving parts is the one to keep. 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.

Contributing back

Patch notes move numbers around constantly; the shape of the answer holds even when a specific value shifts. The developers have changed their mind about this at least once, which explains the older advice. World of Warcraft is not shy about hiding useful information two menus deep, so some of this is simply knowing where to look.

Screenshots age faster than text, which is why this describes rather than shows. It helps to understand why a step exists, because then you can adapt it when your situation is slightly different. Anything that behaves differently on console than on PC is flagged where it matters.

Official channels

If your result differs from what is described here, note what is different first rather than starting over. There is usually a fast way and a reliable way, and it is worth knowing which one you are choosing. Nothing here assumes a particular playstyle beyond wanting the thing to work.

Where people go wrong

  • Rushing the last step, which is usually the one with the actual requirement in it.
  • Trusting a video thumbnail that promises a result the video never actually shows.
  • Grinding a method that was patched months ago because a thread still ranks well.

WoW FAQ

Do I need any mods or third-party tools for this?

No. Everything described here works with the base game on any supported platform.

Is the subreddit worth following?

For sentiment and news, yes. For mechanics, check what it tells you against the wiki first.

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.

How long does this take?

Minutes if it goes cleanly, an evening if you hit the edge case in the caveats list. Neither is unusual.

That is the whole of it — if something here stops matching World of Warcraft, the game changed, not the method.