Radiant Echoes: A Love Letter to Azeroth

Due to my current lack of excitement for War Within, I also ignored the pre-expansion event for its first week or so. It didn't help that what vague mutterings I caught about it usually complained that it wasn't fun for some reason or another. The other night though, I figured that I should really go and at least check it out, even if I wasn't that interested in farming it. I've taken part in the last two pre-expansion events, and it would have felt weird to miss this one entirely while I have an active subscription. Plus people were saying that it had been vastly improved since its underwhelming launch.

And I've got to say: I was positively surprised - except for the fact that the intro quest seems to be a bit buggy for max-level characters and doesn't always appear. Since it's supposed to be auto-granted, there's nothing you can do if it just fails to show up. But I just looked up where I was supposed to go on Wowhead and off I went.

The event, called Radiant Echoes, once again takes place in three older zones: Searing Gorge, Dustwallow Marsh and Dragonblight. The active zone rotates once an hour, and the general gist of the event is that you deal with manifested "memories" (which are basically group world quests) to fill a bar, and once you've done enough of them a big boss spawns (a memory of Rangaros, Onyxia and Arthas respectively). Then the cycle starts all over again.

I'll admit that doesn't sound very exciting on paper, but clearly a lot of love has gone into designing the memories, as they tend to reference a piece of classic content beloved by the community that takes/took place on the same continent as the active zone. So in Searing Gorge for example, you fight echoes of Hogger and Hakkar, hunt down Stranglethorn pages and relive the battles between Tarren Mill and Southshore. In Dragonblight, there are memories of the Argent Tournament and Thorim, so sometimes you hear shouts of "You face Jaraxxus, Eredar Lord of the Burning Legion!" and "In the mountains..." overlapping each other, which always cracks me up.

I had a good time doing a round of all three zones, but wasn't really that fussed about the gear rewards. One thing I noticed however was that a lot of people seemed to use the event to level alts, which is not usually something I want or need, but I realised only the other day that there's exactly one healing class I don't currently have at level 70: the paladin. I didn't want to make another Timerunner since I have a whole bunch of low-level paladins already, but what if... I took one of those existing lowbies through the event? Just to see what it was like? With everything being cross-server now, I could take any character from my old stable of alts and it would be able to play with my friends on any server in the future.

After brief deliberation, I decided to pick a level 25 dwarf paladin from my old Alliance server Darkspear. I chose the free gear upgrade and spent a few minutes feeling confused by the contents of her old bags, as they contained quite a bit of Outland stuff and I had no memory of taking her there whatsoever. She also had exactly one quest in her log, to kill two bosses in BRD. Okaaay?

At least the event intro quest worked fine on a low-level, which is how I learned that I'd been wasting a lot of time travelling to the different zones the old-fashioned way, as there's a temporary portal to Legion Dalaran right next to the Stormwind auction house, and within Dalaran itself there are three two-way portals to the relevant zones all right next to each other that also show you which zone is the currently active one and for how long.

I started my journey in Searing Gorge and rotated through the zones almost every hour, though I took breaks. I learned a lot of things that way:

• The first "cycle" of memories followed by a boss kill within the hour is always by far the fastest one, with huge crowds completing some of the memory world quests in a matter of seconds. I think this is because it's an obvious starting point, and it's easier to decide to take a break later in the hour. While groups kept working on the memories throughout the full duration of the zone being active, they definitely became a lot smaller over time.
• You get occasional gear pieces as rewards while taking part in the event, but for some reason they have a really low item level up to level 60 and are completely useless other than for transmog. This also means that - as usual - you become weaker and weaker as you level up. I initially thought that the people I could sometimes see just hovering on their flying mounts above the event area were "leeching" a bit, trying to get credit without doing anything, until I realised that many of them were levellers that were scared of getting into the fray as they had to worry about dying to something as small as a random knockback due to how squishy they were (something that happened to me multiple times as I got higher up in levels). 
• On top of that, phasing shenanigans can also screw you over. At one point things were rolling along super smoothly in Dragonblight when I flew to the next memory, landed... and found myself completely alone. I flew around to check on the other world quests, but none of them had any real activity, and all I saw was a couple of other levellers that seemed equally confused about where everyone else had gone. I don't know why the game thought that it was a good idea to separate us from the rest at that point. I followed the advice on reddit to go back to Dalaran and relog in hopes of landing in a better version of the zone on returning.
• There is a clear hierarchy in terms of how popular the various memories are. I've completed every single one at least once, but the single boss ones are easily everyone's favourite because they go fast, and they are pretty safe for even the squishiest leveller to take part in, as you just have to hit the boss briefly and stay out of bad stuff. The ones with lots of items to click on and mobs to fight are less popular because they're comparatively slow, and aside from the one with the frogs in Dragonblight, there are no real "non-combat options". Even the ones that look deceptively peaceful at first glance, such as the one to wake lazy peons, feature random mob spawns that attack you... which once again, is very dangerous if you're a squishy leveller as that random scorpid that suddenly aggros on you might well kill you.

Anyway, I didn't keep close track of how much time I spent on all this as I didn't remember to check the character's /played until after I'd started, but I think she was on about two and a half days of play time when I began my little experiment, and hit 70 after about five hours of grinding the event. She also earned just short of 50k of the event currency in the process. That strikes me as... pretty fast! It's not something I'd want to do over and over again, but it was interesting to do as a one-time thing.