A goblin in Azshara and Ashenvale

I rolled a goblin priest to see the goblin starter area some time ago. Those zones seems to be the kind of content that people either love or hate, and unfortunately my reaction fell on the negative side of the spectrum. Kezan and the Lost Isles just felt nothing like the Azeroth I used to know, and while I can generally appreciate pop culture references and the like, the goblins went overboard with it in my opinion.

So once I had seen what it was all about, I parked my little priest in Orgrimmar and didn't touch her for the next couple of months. I've found that not playing a character for a while gives them time to settle, and possible negative associations from the past are given time to dissipate. So I finally felt ready to play my goblin again the other week and took her to Azshara.

Azshara is a sort of continuation of the goblin starter experience, but officially open to all races and not quite as silly. Yes, the hyper-intelligent raptor that escaped into space with a rocket was a bit mind-boggling, and then there was that whole affair with Azuregos and the spirit healer. What the...? However, a lot of the zone was about fighting night elves and naga and typical wildlife, and I was happy.

I saw a comment on someone else's blog, I don't remember by whom, who said that Blizzard had "destroyed" Azshara with Cataclysm. It's certainly not the quiet and empty land it used to be, but... don't get me wrong, I certainly appreciated the old Azshara, but let's not kid ourselves: emptiness is cheap. Azshara was what it was due to Blizzard failing to do anything useful with it, not due to any intentional design making it awesome. They did the same thing again in Cataclysm in some areas, so if you miss that feeling of being lost in a landscape that is nothing else but land, you can always go for a stroll through Alterac. (Or actually, Gilneas works quite well too, due to so many things being phased.)

While Gallywix is ugly as sin, I have to admit that I still found this display oddly awe-inspiring.

Meanwhile, Azshara offers lots of questing fun now and I think it's a solid experience, though I had one problem here that I haven't managed to have in any other post-Cata zone: I managed to lose the plot. Suddenly I had no more quests in my log, even though I still had a good quarter of the zone left according to the quest achievement, and I was sitting out in the middle of nowhere, lost. I then spent about half an hour driving around the zone on my annoying-sounding trike, until I finally found a quest on a lonely mountain peak which then reconnected me with the rest of the story.

I wasn't sure how I felt about that. On the one hand it's nice to engage your own brain in search of quest givers every once in a while instead of blindly following a breadcrumb trail all the time. But if the entire zone is designed around the idea that you will be following the breadcrumb trail along fifty different mini-hubs, losing the plot is annoying because it could literally be anywhere. How I longed for just being able to check three different quest hubs for updates instead of having to peek into every nook and cranny of the zone in search of that lone missing exclamation mark.

I also felt bad about ending the zone by killing the former Alliance flight master.

I continued onwards to Ashenvale. For comparison, I wrote about how I experienced the zone on Alliance side in this post a few months ago. Horde side was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster to me. Oh cool, I get to ride around on a kodo. Argh, why are we killing all these night elves and I'm not allowed to join in? Why am I doomed to watching passively as the cut scene plays out? Combat cut scenes seriously need to go, considering that's the basic unit of WoW gameplay.

There were a couple of NPCs that I liked, like that orc couple where the guy made me pick flowers for his lady and she made me collect fel fire. It made me like the Horde. I was quite happy to slaughter generic night elves by the dozen, and I was absolutely delighted to see that the three named beasts from The Ashenvale Hunt were still around and dropping quest items.

Around the third time or so when I walked through Silverwind Refuge, I noticed that there were actually night elf corpses on the ground still... and named ones. Agrnagvekf. I didn't really remember them very well, but I found myself wondering which one of them had sold me the expert cookbook back in the day. Suddenly I hated being Horde.

Emotional turmoil aside, seeing the Alliance vs. Horde conflict in Ashenvale play out from both sides was also a bit strange. I've talked about how quests running in parallel on both sides can make for a more interesting story, and to some extent this is happening in Ashenvale, but it's all very inconclusive. The Horde has you bombing Astranaar and then happily sends you on your way with a pat on the back. But didn't I put all those fires out as Alliance? Didn't I save Astranaar? So Alliance wins, technically? Likewise a Horde quest sends me to corrupt the Forest Heart, and I do, but I know from Alliance side that they cleanse it afterwards. At Splintertree Post I fought off not one, but two major night elf attacks, but the attackers never really went away entirely. And at Raynewood Retreat the Horde kills the local Alliance leader, but the Alliance lays massive waste to the Horde army on their side of the quest. They then say that I saved the place, but did I really?

Silverwind Refuge is the only area where it's completely clear who won, but that happened before I even got there. Anything I contributed to the war effort made no particular difference from what I could tell. That's actually not a bad thing in principle, but what bothered me a little was that I couldn't tell whether that was by design, or whether the developers simply didn't want to tell Horde players that they lost those fights... because knowing what I knew from Alliance side, it kind of felt like they should have.

Next zones coming up in review from Horde side whenever I get around to it: Desolace, Southern Barrens, Thousand Needles.

One of those search term posts

A lot of bloggers I know occasionally post about funny search terms that brought visitors to their site, and I have to admit that even if they sometimes go slightly off-topic, I love those posts. Vidyala's interpretation of "you've got mail sfk" was an instant classic for example. So I went to Google Analytics and had a look at what brought people to my own blog. Unfortunately most of it was pretty boring in fact - who'd have thought that people would look for information about priests, healing and paladin tanking here? Crazy. There were a few search terms that I considered funny or interesting though, so without further ado:

arthas jokes - Why did Arthas cross the road? To cull the people on the other side of course. Sorry, I was never good at telling jokes. Let me know if you've got any good ones!

azshara how to get back up the cliffs - I guess that's a question that all of us have asked ourselves at one point or another. I don't know, maybe there are some secret paths somewhere, but if there are I never found them myself either. My personal recommendation is that if you fall off in the southern part of the zone, swim around to the Bay of Storms and get on the beach there. There are a couple of paths up through the naga-infested ruins. If you fall down somewhere up north, the slope at the eastern tip of that part of the landmass is quite gentle, so you can walk back up there, or you can swim into the bay as well.

azshara instances - Alas, there aren't any. Not as of now anyway, who knows what Cataclysm might bring. There are a couple of instance portals right now, but they don't work. The ones in the southern half of the zone were supposedly meant to lead to a battleground that never actually went live, and there's a mysterious portal to the Timbermaw Hold up north as well. When I was an ickle noob I was told that it would be a raid one day, but considering you become friendly with the furbolgs it could have been meant to become a city too I guess.

don't understand the ending of the arthas fight - If you've ever run Halls of Reflection and actually listened to the long intro with Jaina or Sylvanas, one of the things that Uther's ghost says is that there'll always have to be a Lich King. So that's why, uh... that stuff happens at the end of the fight. And that weird flamey dude? That's Bolvar Fordragon, who used to be an important Alliance NPC and then got poisoned and roasted at the Wrathgate (if you remember the video), though it seems he got better. If you actually know all this but still think that it makes no sense in context... let me just tell you that you're not alone.

i love the oculus - I don't really, but I don't mind it either these days, and I think a lot of people have softened up in their attitude towards the instance after it was nerfed so many times. Either way you're not alone, I even had a guildie or two who were in love with the instance from day one - though we all considered them weirdos at the time.

where will everyone afk in cataclysm - Good question. I don't know if they'll make a new Dalaran in the sense of a new city with lots of portals to everywhere. Generally I guess people will hang out in whichever major city ends up being closest to the new raids and dailies.

who killed the lich king - I did! So did a lot of other people though, and you can kill him too if you work hard enough. The Lich King is for everyone.

why did pally cross the road - To get to the Uther side? Nah, still suck at jokes.

Remembering Azshara

Last night I took my shaman fishing in Azshara, to help with getting her cooking skill up to Outland standards.

Azshara is a strange zone. It's sad and desolate, full of elven ruins and completely devoid of players most of the time. Yet it's also hauntingly beautiful, what with the weather appearing to be perpetually stuck on a sunny autumn day.

I remember the first time I went to Azshara on my night elf priest. One of my friends had somehow stumbled across the quest Arcane Runes in Ironforge, which sends you to Azshara to investigate some naga-infested ruins and then call onto an NPC on a small island off the coast. So we set off to find this Azshara place... and then proceeded to get lost a lot. The zone really lends itself to that, what with all the cliffs that make it very easy to fall off somewhere and then find yourself stuck in some ravine with no easily apparent way to get back up. We also barely escaped death by murlocs and other wildlife more than once, what with all of them being three or four levels above our own at the time. We didn't get a whole lot done I suppose, but it felt like a truly epic adventure at the time.

On my mage I went to Azshara to do the quest to get Polymorph: Pig, a bizarre venture that required me to sheep naga and then kill lots of weak little sheep with arcane explosions... Imagine my surprise when I first found out about Archmage Xylem's tower! A whole freaking tower that I hadn't even known was there! And yet so easy to miss if you don't happen to talk to a certain elf NPC sat in the middle of nowhere...

Much later I remember coming to Azshara on one of my Horde characters, I think it was my priest, falling off a cliff somewhere while exploring and randomly landing next to Captain Beltis, who gave me a little stand-alone quest to protect her crew from a naga attack. Certainly not what I expected to find at the bottom of a random cliff.

Oh, and all the level fifty class quests that lead you to Azshara of course! I thought the hunter one was the worst. Hello there, wavethrasher scales with a horrible drop rate. Hello there, wavethrashers with a horrible spawn rate. Ugh.

Anyway, all this left me with the impression that Azshara was very big and empty, but held a lot of secrets if you only knew where to look and followed the right quest chains. To an extent that's true, but not entirely. There are some quests there, but still a lot less than in most other zones. Plus there are a lot of things that just scream "unfinished content", like the locked gate to what looks like another section of Timbermaw Hold, or the instance entrances with Horde and Alliance flags that were apparently meant for a battleground that never went live.

Even Blizzard basically acknowledged that the zone isn't what they want it to be right now, and that it will thus receive a drastic overhaul in Cataclysm. If I recall correctly they said that the goblins will build a settlement there, and that it will be turned into a zone for a much lower level range (twenties or so). I'm quite looking forward to that, picturing an Azshara that is less sad and more alive.

However, my inner explorer is also a little disappointed once again. There is something to be said for a zone that very much feels like just a place. A place where you can go explore, pick flowers, go fish and discover a secret here and there, but not somewhere you go just to knock out the next ten levels (because it simply doesn't lend itself to that kind of thing). I'll try to appreciate that while I still can.