Turtle WoW: A Different Stonetalon & Wetlands

I mentioned in my last post about Turtle WoW that I set myself the goal to level up a bit in order to be able to explore more of their custom content. Their next full custom zone was designed for you to be around level 30, but according to their Wiki there were new sub-zones and quest hubs to be found in several lower-level zones as well, so I made it my priority to spend my time in the twenties questing in Stonetalon Mountains and the Wetlands. Both are zones that I'm reasonably fond of and very familiar with, but I'll also admit that their original versions didn't exactly contain a huge number of quests, so they seemed like interesting candidates for expansion.

Let's start with Stonetalon. This is a zone that I don't think I spent a lot of time in back in original Vanilla (I just remember a more experienced friend warning me that the Scorched Vale was a death trap) but at least from Classic onwards I became very fond of it as a more quiet retreat from the crowds. It feels like a bit of a backwater zone for both factions (though more so for Alliance) and there just isn't a whole lot going on.

By that I don't just mean that there aren't a lot of quests, but that the map as a whole is pretty empty because so much of it is just assumed to be uninteresting mountains (which we didn't really get to see from ground level). It's telling that when Blizzard rebuilt Kalimdor to be fully three-dimensional for Cataclysm, they added a whole bunch of new points of interest to the Stonetalon map and still also ended up creating quite a lot of minimally textured mountainside with nothing going on because there was just so much unused terrain in that zone.

I'm leading with all of this to say that this zone is prime real estate for anyone wanting to expand on it in Classic+ style, as it's not that far-fetched for a bit of mountainside to come down to reveal additional valleys to explore. In the case of Turtle WoW, I found a narrow path up even further up the mountain from Stonetalon Peak, leading me to a Horde troll base that I couldn't get a good view of because high-level guards were blocking all entry. (I could eventually glimpse a bit more of it from the back of a hippogryph, as the flight path to Stonetalon Peak goes right over it.) It's been a long time since I stood at the edge of a Horde town, wondering just what the other faction gets up to over there. (It's probably not that exciting, but the point is that I don't know, and the unknown is fascinating!)

I later also found another, smaller new Horde town belonging to the Horde-aligned goblins - just how many hubs do they need to have in one zone? To the east, my eyes went wide when I discovered that the mountainside above the Grimtotem villages had been conquered by giant brambles, accompanied by quillboar spilling in from the Barrens. Again, it looked like the Horde had some quests to do there.

For Alliance there was actually surprisingly little to do and I mostly ended up doing old quests while I was there exploring. There was a new Venture Co. area carved into the western mountains where I got given a few tasks to do, so that was something. I also really liked the new mine shaft they opened up not far off Stonetalon Peak, since it wasn't very deep but had two guaranteed tin ore spawns inside.

The Wetlands were a very different experience, with most of the zone largely unchanged. To the east there's a new dungeon called Dragonmaw Retreat near Grim Batol, but since that seemed to be designed for around level 30 as well, I didn't go there until I was somewhat higher level. (There will be a post about it!) However, there was also a whole new sub-section of the zone to the south-west, where a steep mountain path just south of Menethil led up to a new dwarf town called Dun Agrath, with an adjacent human village called Hawk's Vigil.

While the main quests in the Wetlands were largely the same old, same old, I was given several breadcrumbs to go up to these new settlements, which filled me with a lot of anticipation. However, when I finally went there, Dun Agrath offered me exactly one quest to kill a few raptors down the hill and that was it. I stuck my nose into every building, and it all looked very pretty and interesting, with plenty of named NPCs you could chat with, but no quests. I'm honestly still a bit baffled by that. Again, I'm not saying every square foot of terrain has to be filled with activities, but what's the point of creating a whole (albeit pretty) sub-zone and then not adding anything to do in it?

The human settlement of Hawk's Vigil was better in that regard, even if whoever created it clearly liked Harry Potter a bit too much based on all the NPC names. (I know, Blizz has always had references to other properties in their games, but a whole town of people with last names from Harry Potter is a bit on the nose.) As there were no hostile mobs nearby, all the quests were of the "go talk to someone" variety, which made for an interesting change of pace.

Some of them sent me quite far afield, which at first made me sigh a bit - everyone hates these fetch quests that make you travel to another continent, right? Why make more of those? But then I thought nah, that's not fair, depending on the story these can be quite memorable so let's see where this goes. One chain ultimately had me exorcising a demon from a lumberjack after doing several slightly questionable things to get to that point, and the other had me hunt down information about the dark past of a guy new to the town and awarded a pretty nice piece of gear at the end. (I did feel a little weird killing the guy. They were clearly going for something similar to the quest chain that ends with "The Attack!" in Stormwind Keep, but that quest has you catching the bad guys in the act, while this chain has a lot of bad things to say about the person you're supposed to kill, but he just kinda sits there in his tent at the edge of town minding his own business, which made me feel a bit bad.)

Anyway, I was definitely more intrigued than I'd expected, even by these relatively minor additions to two zones I know well. I think the additions to Stonetalon felt more natural than those to the Wetlands (there wasn't even as much as a footpath leading up to Dun Agrath; if you didn't already know it was there you'd have no reason to assume that there was anything new down that way), but they were fun to explore either way. And honestly, even the old content felt refreshed by the uncertainty of never quite knowing whether an NPC wouldn't suddenly have a new additional quest or something.