Setting Foot into Classic Pandaria

It's funny that for all the preparation I did for my "Project Vale of Eternal Blossoms", I then ended up completely forgetting about the actual launch of MoP Classic. A former guildie who had noticed me being active again during Cata actually messaged me last week to ask whether I was still playing and I said I was taking a bit of a break until the actual MoP Classic release, to which his response was "it released yesterday I think" and I was like "oops".

It was no problem of course, as I'd wanted to avoid the launch day crowds anyway, but I still thought it was funny. When I did eventually log in, my first order of business was not to go to Pandaria but to level my archaeology. I'd had a bit of fun with it at the end of Cata already, but archaeology is one area where MoP made huge improvements, both by making surveying give skill-ups and XP for longer and by literally doubling the yield of each dig site. I breezed through the different tiers in what felt like no time at all, with Outland and Northrend barely being more than pit stops, and gained about half a level from the whole endeavour.

At one point I also ended up making a detour to Tol Barad, for no other reason than that I happened to walk past the portal and suddenly remembered that I quite liked the place back in the day. However, I did a round of dailies and it didn't really tickle my nostalgia. I also queued up for a Tol Barad battle when the time for it came around, and I don't know whether that's a bug or what, but the map wasn't actually showing who owned what, which was very confusing for a game mode where you're supposed to fight and hold specific nodes. Whenever I got into a skirmish I got my squishy level 85 ass kicked hard by people three or four levels higher than me so I eventually just semi-AFKed in one of the bases. We still won, based on the final scoreboard probably because the Alliance had twice as many players as the Horde.

Eventually I decided that it was probably time to at least get started on Pandaria and began the intro scenario. Just as I resigned myself to having to machine-gun down orcs from a helicopter again, I clicked on the chopper and... the quest just auto-completed without me having to do anything. I laughed out loud because it just seemed too bizarre that literally the very first quest in Pandaria would be bugged. Looking at the Wowhead comments, it sounds like this weird skip may actually be intentional, though I have no clue why.

I made my way to Paw'don Village and was surprised to find that things were somewhat different than I remembered them from Remix. In Remix, they'd designated the main storyline quests with shield markers like they've done in retail since Shadowlands, and everything else seemed to be pretty openly available to do in whatever order you liked, which did seem to align with my memories of Pandaria feeling much less restrictive in terms of quest progression than Cataclysm had been.

However, it seems that my memory in that area is clearly faulty, because once in Paw'don I had exactly three quests available to go to the orchard to the north-west (which I remembered being an optional side hub in Remix) and nothing else. I decided to ride around a bit to see whether I could pick up a different quest line anywhere else, but found very little (not nothing, but something like three other exclamation marks in all of Jade Forest). So there was clearly still a lot more pressure to do things in the exact order prescribed by Blizzard than I remember.

Still, I didn't feel like continuing to quest just then, so I just explored a bit and did a bit of pandaren archaeology on the way. I ran into a rare mob and decided to try fighting it. Considering that my gear was pretty bad I didn't expect to get very far, but it did nominally show as being the same level as me so I thought it was worth a shot. I laughed out loud when its first attack literally one-shot me.

I ventured forth into the Valley of the Four Winds and saw that Chen Stormstout had a grey exclamation mark over his head, so there was no skipping ahead either, or at least not until I levelled up. At least the cooking quests in Halfhill were available, so I made a start on those.

I'm still not entirely sure what my plan is going to be - my goal is of course to explore the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original pristine glory, and while I could probably get there already, it's a max-level zone and I'd probably not have a very good time, so it seems sensible to do a bit of questing and levelling in the other zones first, even if I don't particularly care about that part.