Battlefield: Barrens

Still feeling a bit sad about Turtle WoW's demise, I found myself logging into Mists of Pandaria Classic again when I was craving my Classic fix this weekend. It's on patch 5.3 right now, with 5.4 (Siege of Orgrimmar) meant to go live in a little over two weeks.

I figured it might be interesting to have another look around, as MoP's 5.3 patch was another one of those weird experiments Blizzard performed at the time, adding some content that only existed for that patch and was then immediately removed again. From everything I'd heard about it, it wasn't particularly exciting, but I still wanted to at least have a look since I had the opportunity.

In a nutshell, the short introductory quest leads Alliance players to Durotar, where they find out that Vol'jin's Darkspear are openly rebelling against Garrosh, and you concede that you have a shared interest in stopping him. You agree that you'll both hassle his Kor'kron in the Northern Barrens where they are trying to gather lumber, meat, oil and stone, to deprive them of said resources and help bolster the rebellion instead.

This is all meant to be part of the build-up to Siege of Orgrimmar and kind of reminded me of how in Wrath of the Lich King, there were these repeatable quests to gather lumber in Cystalsong while the Argent Tournament was under construction, which also went away once that was completed, only with Battlefield Barrens being much larger in scope. The overall design of it feels more like an extremely early predecessor to world quests and other dynamic open world activities that would get added many years later.

Basically you can always collect resources by just killing hostile orcs that are gathering them all around the Northern Barrens, but this is very slow and you're better off tackling one of the dynamic spawns that pop up on the map every so often, such as caravans that need escorting and named elites Kor'kron commanders that drop large numbers of resources. The intro quest only requires 15 of each type, but then you get a weekly that asks for ten times as much, which takes some time to accumulate.

I was pleased when I managed to join my first communal kill of a named elite and he dropped a pretty good chunk of resources at once. I followed the small crowd to kill another couple as they spawned, figuring that I'd actually be done quite quickly, similarly to how these things play out in retail, but then everyone just disappeared all of a sudden and I found myself alone at the next elite. I did try to take it on by myself and failed miserably, so I was forced to go back to smaller and slower gathering tasks. (I did keep an eye on the elite's icon on the map and it never went away for the rest of my time there, everyone had just gone.) I was honestly quite baffled by how abandoned the zone was aside from the brief burst of activity of four or five people killing a few of the elites together - I know the patch has been out for a little while but it's still the current content, with an expiration date no less, so I would have expected more activity there.

One bit that was funny to me was that when I completed the weekly I earned the title "Hordebreaker" - a title that I learned is somewhat rare because patch 5.3 was the only time you could earn it. It does feel more like something you should get out of PvP though rather than as a reward for a weekly collect quest.

I also decided to try and pick up Wrathion's legendary quest line again. After I finally hit revered with him from another two rounds of Shieldwall dailies, he tasked me with queueing for the two battlegrounds that were added in MoP (Silvershard Mines and Temple of Kotmogu) and queues were looong. Once I waited over an hour for a pop. In terms of gameplay, my team was completely stomped in Silvershard Mines while utterly dominating the enemy in Temple, which to be fair is my usual experience with these in retail as well.

The other quest he gave me was more of a problem though: you're supposed to kill a boss type orc called "Warlord Bloodhilt" at Domination Point, the Horde base in Krasarang Wilds. The quest does state that you'll need a group. Looking it up, it seems that he was a raid level boss originally, but had already been nerfed to be more of a small group fight or possibly even soloable with some skill. My first attempt was a miserable failure however as he ate my cat for breakfast and I had to acknowledge that I needed a proper tanking pet, so I went out to tame a turtle. I also realised that I'd never bothered to learn a single glyph, another thing I rectified.

Unfortunately, returning more prepared ultimately didn't help because Blizzard introduced a bug a few months ago that causes the Kor'kron flak cannons in the base to not just shoot at players on flying mounts, but also on people on the ground, and more importantly - they can shoot through walls and inside buildings. So I honestly never got very far, less because of the boss himself but more because of the flak cannons often randomly nuking me in two to three hits. Certain spots sometimes seemed to be safe from them, but it wasn't consistent so I never really managed to come up with a safe strategy.

At one point I briefly got my hopes up when a pandaren monk arrived who also wanted to kill the boss. We grouped up and after getting blown up by the cannons a few times he suggested we just kill them. We did so, but unfortunately they respawned too quickly and were soon nuking us through the walls again. Eventually my gear was broken and the monk got fed up and said he'd rather go fishing than deal with this fuckery any longer.

I'm at a bit of a loss about how to continue. I find it very hard to think of a way to progress the quest at this stage, as even a larger group would likely get nuked by the cannons, never mind me being able to assemble such a group. As mentioned, I know for a fact that this bug has been in the game for a few months already (as I was actively playing when the daily quests in that area went from chill to "WTF is going on with these cannons"), and bug fixes for MoP Classic have not been a priority for Blizzard. You'd think something that blocks the legendary chain like this might still matter, but most people who care are probably already past this stage, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you've got any hot tips for this one, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Rediscovering Season of Discovery

I wanted to take some more notes on my experience picking up Season of Discovery again:

One of the first things the game reminded of was that I made a whole bunch of alts in phase one that were all between level 10 and 20. Now, playing alts won't help with my goal of getting a single character to a high enough level to be able to do Demon Fall Canyon, but it's also fun and alleviates bag space issues (since I can just send all the cloth to my tailor and so on and so forth), so I spent some time burning through restedness on all of them anyway.

The world was busier than I expected - I'd figured that pretty much everyone but me would abandon everything they were doing on other classic realms to join the rush on the anniversary servers, but Wild Growth still seems plenty busy. Also, people were dropping Rend and dragon heads in Orgrimmar at seemingly all hours of the day, which kind of surprised me.

While going out to quest, I made the odd discovery that gathering nodes and chests were respawning at absolutely stupid rates for some reason. I first noticed it when I found a chest on my druid in Mulgore. I looted it, went to kill a nearby gnoll, turned around, and it was back! I looted it again, killed another gnoll, and the same thing happened again.

Later I was questing in the Barrens on my shaman, who is a miner, and I would almost get stuck in a loop running back and forth between the same couple of ore nodes that just kept coming back almost immediately after being mined out. As this was on the night of the anniversary server launch, I couldn't help but wonder whether some hyper-spawn setting intended for the launch day crowds was bleeding through to other servers.

The launch itself certainly had an impact as I got booted out of the game with the message "world server is down" (truly a classic) multiple times. At the time I had just killed Kreenig Snarlsnout, and coming back online in the middle of a fully respawned quillboar camp was not very fun. However, before I could properly fight my way out, I got disconnected again. This happened about five times in a row, until I decided to give up on fighting and just made a run for it. As it happened, this was also the time the server finally stayed up and I was able to make a close getaway.

My shaman also got an invite to heal Ragefire Chasm, which she accepted. I was told that the tank was new, and it was very noticeable as I did a lot of face-tanking while healing, but hey, people gotta learn somewhere. Plus it was only RFC and nobody died (I'm not counting the druid who somehow managed to fall into the lava on the way out). The group asked me afterwards whether they could add me to their friends list and I said sure, though I'm not sure how likely it is that we'll meet again with me playing my alts only in short bursts.

In terms of grouping, I noticed that there's now a manual group finder in Season of Discovery that's similar to the one we had in original Burning Crusade. I was always quite fond of that one, even if seemingly not a lot of people used it, but personally I always got good results with it. That said, I haven't really had a chance to put the SoD version to the test yet.

Another thing that happened was that I realised that with the lauch of the anniversary realms, Blizzard had also launched the AQ war effort in SoD. For a brief moment I got all starry-eyed, remembering the wonderful memories I made of the AQ gate opening event on Hydraxian Waterlords, and even wondered briefly whether I'd have enough time to level up high enough to witness the ringing of the gong on Wild Growth too. Sadly I quickly found out that the war effort in SoD is "fake" in the sense that your contributions don't matter and it just auto-completes after a week. While I can kind of get wanting to speed things up on a seasonal server, I still think that fully automating the process sucks, and I will of course not be able to see the event. Though to be fair, it's not why I came back anyway; it just would have been a nice bonus.

More Hardcore Horde Adventures

I've continued to level my hardcore troll priest in small bursts of activity, and she's now up to level 20.

I initially struggled with more interface problems, as I could tell that I still wasn't seeing all the death announcements, even after joining the server-wide HardcoreDeaths channel. Some googling revealed that there's an additional drop-down in the in-game settings nowadays where you need to select how many deaths you want to see, and it's set to show only those of guild members by default.

I was happy when I finally got that sorted out and could see everything, as the discourse from the peanut gallery about deaths is always interesting. There were some raised eyebrows about a wipe in Ragefire Chasm for example, and when a level 52 died to fall damage in Tirisfal Glades there were exclamations along the lines of: "Why not wait five seconds for the zeppelin to actually dock, man?!"

Aside from that, guild chat sadly remains a bit confusing because they expect you to install an addon called "Greenwall" to connect it with the guild chat of sister guilds, which I've refused to do so far because I don't like the thought of having an extra addon just for that. That said, it makes reading guild chat a very disjointed experience right now as it's very obvious that people are frequently responding to things that I'm not seeing. I might cave eventually.

I've been surprised by how regular world buffs are dropping on hardcore. I think I mentioned this before, but still... I know that people raid on hardcore, but I figured it was more of a fringe activity considering the risk vs. reward. The number of world buffs going out on the regular seems to defy that assumption though.

After accidentally picking up some buffs in Orgrimmar one night, I decided to venture forth into Skull Rock at level 12. I knew that was probably a risky move, but I was feeling brave and was hopeful that I wasn't going to be the only person there. Indeed, I ran into a male troll hunter as soon as I turned the first corner. At first we continued fighting separately, just leap-frogging each other with our mob pulls, but then I spotted the rare elite warlock around a corner and suggested we group up to kill him. We did and then continued killing more together - grouping up is such a force multiplier in era (particularly as a priest!), it never ceases to amaze me.

Just as we were about to go out, a mage entered the cave and asked to join. I invited him, but of course he was only just starting his quests. The hunter thanked everyone politely and took his leave, but I stuck with the mage to help him get his quest done too. Then a druid showed up as well! I enjoyed the grouping experience, but at that point I was getting a bit worried that I 'd gotten myself caught in an endless loop of helping out new joiners. As if he'd read my mind, the mage said that he'd stay with the druid to help them complete their quest, but that I was free to go. I thanked everyone and took my leave, happy that the most deadly place in Durotar had gone so well for me.

Up next, I started questing in the Barrens. One funny experience I had there was when I was killing centaurs around the Forgotten Pools and a death announcement popped up that "a Stonearm" had killed someone at my location. For all the hours I've spent in the Barrens over the years, I had never heard of "a Stonearm" before, and I was rather alarmed to hear that this unknown entity was apparently killing people in my vicinity. A quick Wowhead search revealed him to be a rare centaur, and about five minutes later he killed another player. I was looking over my shoulder with some serious paranoia now, wondering whether he was a patroller or something, but he was not. I eventually spotted him guarding a chest near some tents but decided not to engage after the earlier carnage. When I came past the tents again a few minutes later, someone else had successfully killed him though.

At level 15 I wanted to run Ragefire Chasm. My first attempt to find a group in the evening wasn't successful - I saw that another group was already looking for a tank, so I didn't fancy my chances and went off to do something else. This turned out to be a good decision though, because when I logged in the following Saturday morning, I didn't even have enough time to type "LFG RFC" into chat before someone had already whispered me to ask whether I wanted to go there.

It was a smooth enough run, but it also highlighted to me that healing in hardcore feels like a much bigger responsibility than usual. We had a level 18 shaman tank, which was fine enough, but there was also a level 15 warrior with a two-hander and a mage that liked to go up close to spam Arcane Explosion, and they both got aggro on more than one occasion, which resulted in sudden damage spikes on them, and that at a point when I didn't yet have Flash Heal or anything... I think I saw the mage chug a healing potion once and when the warrior got low, the other shaman in the group threw him a quick off-heal. Usually I'd be mildly offended by people "panicking" like that as soon as someone's health drops below 50%, but in hardcore I understand wanting to be safe rather than perma-dead.

We also made the most out of the experience (seeing how you can do each dungeon only once per day) and even went to kill the troggs in the little cul-de-sac to the left, something I hadn't done in donkey's years.

We'll see how things develop as I go up in levels. I do love how much everyone seems to appreciate being buffed with a priest's fortitude. I do it all the time on the road and people will often stop what they're doing just to whisper me thanks - I like knowing that those extra HP might really help someone out in the world. My next personal goal is probably going to be to get into a Wailing Caverns run, but there's no rush.

Discovering the Level 25 Dungeon Endgame

I last talked about my priest in Season of Discovery in the context of her hitting level 15 after running Ragefire Chasm once and doing some questing in Silverpine Forest. I didn't want to spend too much time questing in the Barrens - I have no particular love or hate for that zone, but solo questing as a priest can be a bit tedious in general. It's not necessarily inefficient - shield, DoT, wand plus being specced into extra wand damage and spirit tap means that you can keep grinding mobs one by one with almost no downtime; it's just not particularly fun (in my opinion anyway).

At least for me, being a priest is about playing with others and forming a team that's more powerful than the sum of its parts, so I focused on doing the quests in and around the Barrens oases to get all the dungeon quests for Wailing Caverns. I was level 18 and about halfway to 19 by the time I was done with that... those raptor horns, man. Because of how busy it was, I actually found it hard to find many Scytheclaws alive, and a quick check on Wowhead revealed that they share a spawn point with ornery plainstriders, so in the end I just picked a corner with a lot of those birds and went on a killing spree to actually get some raptors to respawn.

With all the quests sitting ready in my log and my bags freed up as much as they were going to get at this level, I opened the LookingForGroup channel, expecting to find a group quickly, considering how many of them were running at all times. However, as is Sod's law, what I found instead was at least three other healers specifically looking for Wailing Caverns groups. I rolled my eyes at how typical that was, but then spotted a tank looking for dps and a healer for Deadmines instead. And I thought, why not? There are no quests for that on Horde side, but it still drops some nice loot, and it would be something different. So I ended up whispering him for an invite and made my way to the zeppelin tower.

On the zepp I actually met up with our tank in person, another shaman like I'd had in RFC. I wistfully recalled the launch of Classic and how I visited the Deadmines on a Horde character for the first time. I remembered getting there by swimming along the coast and was planning to do so again, but when we arrived in Stranglethorn, the shaman set off straight into the jungle, and my inner urge to trust in and follow the tank kicked in, prompting me to follow. Of course, I then saw him get eaten by raptors within less than a minute, which quickly caused me to swerve back to the coastline, but I hadn't counted on just how many crocolisks were lying in wait there, causing me to die quickly too.

However, my spirit then appeared at the graveyard in northern Stranglethorn, and I saw the shaman take res sickness and continue north from there. That actually seemed like a pretty clever idea, so I followed his example. He immediately died again as he got eaten by a panther, but his death allowed me to get past without drawing attention myself, and I actually made it into Duskwood without further incident. From there I just followed the road to Westfall and was lucky enough to not encounter Stitches or any other mobs on the road. The shaman followed a couple of minutes behind.

It took a little while to fully fill the group and get everyone to Moonbrook as we had no summon available, but eventually we were off, with a group of all melee (our shaman tank was supported by a feral druid, a rogue and a dps warrior). They killed everything incredibly quickly, as they were all above level 20 and pretty well geared already. I thought how interesting that was, considering that on a regular server, people usually try to run dungeons at as low a level as they can get away with, to maximise XP and gear rewards before moving on the next thing.

Despite a mess-up on the boat that led to a massive over-pull and two people dying, we finished the dungeon in something like forty minutes. Since we were already there, I was happy to just reset and go again, and so was the rest of the group - with the exception of the warrior, who had to go. He was eventually replaced by a hunter... who was in Orgrimmar, so it took something like another half hour until he was actually able to join us in person.

I tried to make good use of the time at least by doing some herbing and fishing along the coastline. I also learned that the Defias Profiteer on the first floor of the Moonbrook inn is happy to trade with Hordies as well, which was handy for bag-clearing between runs.

We then did the dungeon two more times, which is kind of nuts to me because I usually never chain-run dungeons like that. But it was just going so fast, and it had been such a pain to get there in the first place that it made sense to make the most of it while we were there. I didn't get much XP out of it, probably because of how high-level the damage dealers were, and I only gained about a level from the whole adventure, but I got very lucky with loot, picking up several greens as well as the Emberstone Staff and the Corsair's Overshirt. Those were huge upgrades and I could immediately feel the difference in my mana regen after I equipped them.

I'm now planning to spend most of the rest of my time levelling to 25 in Wailing Caverns and Shadowfang Keep. I know that's perhaps not exactly in the spirit of making discoveries in the outdoor world, but it is in the spirit of being a healing priest, and I can always do more exploring later, once I hit the current level cap of 25 and have geared up a bit.

As an aside, when I said goodbye to my group, I did so without any expectation to see any of them again, because I'm such a slow leveller nowadays, everyone else always gets away from me almost immediately. But one of them said "see you soon in BFD" and it hit me that I actually might see them again, because at least for now, they couldn't out-level me any more than they already had. And that was an oddly nice feeling.

More Classic Moments

My shaman had already made it into the low twenties when my husband suddenly decided that he was going to play too. He used to play WoW back in Wrath of the Lich King, but his history with the game isn't as long and sordid as my own, and he had previously told me that he had no particular interest in Classic and that my giggling fits brought on by how bad some things used to be weren't exactly selling it to him either.

However, he is very much an MMO player, and I think he could only take so many days of me going bananas over Classic until curiosity won out. Me complaining about being unable to keep up with my tank levelling buddy one evening just served as the perfect excuse for him to graciously suggest that he could roll up a character and come tank for me.

So I parked the shaman for now and made a druid to level with him instead. Once they're about the same level, I plan to switch back to the shammy, though to be honest the druid has been great fun as well.

 

It's amazing to me just how intensely I'm loving the whole Classic experience, even though I've been here before. Even though I've been here before only a couple of years ago on a private server! It just feels magical all over again anyway, and I find myself taking screenshots of all kinds of silly things, like the first time my shaman rode the elevator up to Thunder Bluff.

Or the first time she rode the zeppelin from Orgrimmar. (Reminder: The Thunder Bluff zeppelin connection wasn't actually added until Wrath of the Lich King.)

Or the first time she met Sylvanas Wildrunner in the Undercity. Remember when good old Sylvanas was basically just a nelf in a black dress? In hindsight, I kinda liked her more that way. "Sad goth" somehow seemed like a more appropriate look for a forsaken banshee than "Xena, warrior princess".

Sometimes I take a look around and simply go: "What the hell?" You bet that I didn't remember that the Horde used to make rugs out of centaurs. Talk about savage!

I said in my launch night post that competition for mobs didn't seem too bad in the tauren starter zone, but I gotta say, once basically all four Horde races end up getting funnelled into the Barrens, things became pretty hellish at times. Worst so far has been the quest to kill quillboar leader Kreenig Snarlsnout, who for some reason has a ridiculously long respawn timer.

On my shaman we stuck it out and camped him with a full group of five, competing with several other such groups for the tag. Doing the quest again on my druid and with my husband, we didn't have the patience for the competition at the camp and eventually got it done by logging in briefly in the morning before work, when even (at least our layer of) the Barrens was blissfully quiet.

I'm oddly fond of seeing player skeletons around. In the below screenshot we came back after a wipe in Wailing Caverns and the pile of skeletons was basically like a mark of shame to remind us of how we'd messed up here. When we're out questing, my husband also loves to point out the skeletons everywhere. When they suddenly multiply it's like a warning that you're entering dangerous territory.

While waiting for the rest of my party to arrive at the Wailing Caverns, I went outside to fish. A couple of Alliance players ran circles around the area, presumably also waiting for the rest of their team to show up, one of them a druid in bear form. After they ran past for the umpteenth time, I decided to turn into ghost wolf form and initiated a /dance with the bear, who promptly reciprocated.

It made me think of how little I use fun emotes like that in MMOs these days, even though they are plentiful. I think it's because the most natural situation in which to use them is during downtime in the company of other people, which is something that's consistently been shaved away as "tedious" and "boring". I'm glad Classic is reminding me of how these little moments can still make me smile.

As I play on the server called Pyrewood Village, I of course had to take a screenshot of the first time I discovered Pyrewood Village. I'd totally forgotten that this was the place with the worgen! For some reason I'd thought that it was one of the Furbolg villages in Felwood...

Another noteworthy first: The first warlock summon I participated in. At low levels I've run into quite a few people who didn't remember that meeting stones didn't gain summoning functionality until 2.0 (to be fair, I'd forgotten too until the private servers reminded me) and asked to be summoned places until they were reminded that this was a no-go and they'd have to hoof it themselves. Unless you've got a warlock of course, which does feel like a proper treat when it happens (and also serves to immediately encourage extreme laziness in some people).

While my druid was in Silverpine Forest for her seal form quest, she got assaulted by a Son of Arugal but fortunately got away. Putting a wandering level 25 elite amidst a bunch of level ten mobs is one of those things that no modern MMO would dare to do for fear of frustrating people, but personally I find it quite entertaining.

A bit later I saw a level 24 undead mage fight (possibly even the same) Son of Arugal and he had nearly got him down but only had a tiny sliver of health left himself! So I ran up and spammed all the little heals I had on him to keep him up, and it was enough to buy him enough time to achieve victory. He may have been grateful for the save, but to me he was the hero for successfully ridding the land (at least temporarily) of this bane of many a low-level player. I just love little moments like that.

Mankrik's Wife Was Never Hard to Find

So seeing Lazy Peon wonder about what people found so hard about finding Mankrik's wife finally gave me the push I needed to finish this post. I first wanted to write it after seeing this video by Tips Out, in which he talks about the Lost in Battle quest and Vanilla WoW questing in general. I don't disagree with the general gist of it, but it did bug me how he made the quest out to be this big mystery that gives the player no information and just asks you to blindly go out into the world.

I never really understood why this particular quest became such a meme to be honest. I did it on my first ever Horde character without having any issues, and I was quite surprised when I learned later how infamous it was. I guess because the Barrens were full of little kids that didn't have the greatest reading comprehension skills? Still seeing adults go on about it more than ten years later is weird to me though.

This is the original Lost in Battle quest text (emphasis by me):

We battled in a small tauren camp when we were separated--she held three of the Bristlebacks off by herself. But the odds began to overwhelm us. I led some away only to see her overwhelmed by newcomers. In my rage, I turned to face my enemies, but they brought me down easily with their vast numbers.

I awoke to a tauren druid tending my wounds--he had come across me on the Gold Road as I fell.

Please, [class], find some sign of my wife.

So right there, we know that the battle during which Mankrik's wife was lost didn't just take place anywhere; it took place near the Gold Road. Where is the Gold Road? If you're at the Crossroads you probably already know, but even if you don't you should notice as soon as you step out of the gates to either the north or south, as the Gold Road is the big road running through the centre of the Barrens all the way from Ashenvale down to Thousand Needles, and the UI tells you when you're on it, both in small and larger letters.

(As an aside, I logged into my Kronos account for the first time in ages to take these screenshots, and it was harder than expected as they actually lock you out of your account pretty quickly if you enter the wrong password too many times and I'd totally forgotten mine. Once in though, I was quite shocked to find that there were only 28 people online on the entire Horde side - I guess Kronos' golden days are over. Someone quickly whispered me trying to find people for a dungeon group - not like they had a huge pool of people to pick from - but I had to politely decline.)

Anyway, from this we can deduce that Mankrik's wife is to be found somewhere along this line:

That's admittedly still a pretty big area, but it's far from "she could be anywhere". And there are additional hints in Mankrik's general dialogue as well as in the other quest he gives, Consumed by Hatred.
Mankrik's introductory dialogue starts with: "I came to the Crossroads from the south seeking help", which means that anything north of the Crossroads is out. And in the quest text for Consumed by Hatred he says: "Perhaps instead of heading north to the Crossroads I should have headed to Taurajo." This further narrows the site of the battle down to somewhere between the Crossroads and Camp Taurajo, which is already a significantly smaller area, and not really an unusually large area to search by Vanilla standards.

If you then also consider the fact that the Barrens are very, well... barren, so that things like huts are really easy to see from a distance, and that you'll be roaming pretty far and wide for a lot of Crossroads quests anyway, Lost in Battle requires very little effort at all. I remember finding it much more challenging to find those missing guards in Elwynn Forest for example, and I'm sure there were other quests that had vague objectives that were much harder to find.

Back in the Saddle

Kronos has been back up again for a couple of days, but it's still a bit wobbly on its legs sometimes. I logged onto my paladin to see how things were going and a stranger ran up to me and traded me The Light and How to Swing It. However, before I could even do as much as say "thanks, stranger", I was disconnected and unable to log back in again. So, if you happen to read this, random stranger in Ironforge: I didn't mean to be rude, and thank you again!

Fortunately the server was stable enough for me to spend some time playing this Saturday, as I wanted to make use of the rested XP my new tauren hunter had accumulated during the downtime.

Before the servers succumbed to the DDoS attack, I had actually gone out and tamed a hyena as my second pet as planned, but I struggled with both of my pets being unhappy and absolutely ravenous 24/7. I had taken up fishing to keep my cat happy but didn't have enough suitable food for the hyena at hand, causing me to stable it for a couple of levels while I saved up random meat drops. Fortunately Petopia confirmed for me that this was just a side effect of the initial low loyalty level and that both pets would become less ravenous over time as their loyalty increased, which turned out to be true.

I also made a bit of a fool of myself when I meant to go to Orgrimmar to contribute some wool bandages to the war effort and kept looking for the zeppelin docking point in Thunder Bluff. After I gave up and googled it, I found out that this particular connection wasn't actually added until Wrath of the Lich King. Oops!

Two quests from Thunder Bluff reminded me of the existence of Ragefire Chasm. Maybe it's because of my early Alliance experiences, but I always kind of forget that this particular instance even exists, as I always think of the Deadmines as the lowest-level dungeon.

I decided that I wanted to run it. Fortunately there were plenty of LFG requests flying around, however I was soon reminded that things are a bit different when you play a pure damage dealer. On my paladin I could be relatively picky and wait for a group to be looking for a tank or healer at a convenient time, but when you play dps, things are a bit different. I would whisper someone who was "LFM", get no response, and a few moments later they were now only looking for a tank or healer. You just have to be quick and/or lucky... or you can take it upon yourself to be the person who actually puts the group together, which is a bit more work but also more reliable. So the next time I saw someone "LFG RFC", I snatched them up right away, and luckily it turned out to be a warrior willing to tank. It took maybe five minutes to put a full group together, and we ended up with "four undead and a cow" as one of my group mates put it.

There wasn't that much to say about the run itself. We had one near-wipe (the surviving rogue and I ran back out since we were still close to the door) but otherwise things went smoothly. Another time one of the two rogues fell off a cliff and died. I had to chuckle when a group member congratulated my pet (!) on levelling up, and that by name (!!). Quite a contrast to the silent LFG culture where you're lucky if people address you at all, never mind using anyone's name.

Back in the Barrens I also completed one of the more infamous group quests on Horde side: Counterattack! For those who never got to experience it, it's a group quest you get after hunting down centaur leaders in three different oases around the Crossroads (which is an annoying prerequisite to begin with). It involves an event where hordes of centaurs attack, until eventually an elite warlord spawns who hits like an absolute truck, able to two or three-shot players of the right level in average gear.

I was worried that it would be a pain to find a group for this, but as it happened one was forming up just as I was approaching the bunker with the quest giver to hand in the head of the third centaur leader. That said, even with a full five-man group people died to the warlord repeatedly, and most of the time I ended up desperately kiting him around the bunker. I've said before that I'm not very good at kiting, but it's interesting what the threat of impending death will do for your learning curve!

As an extra annoyance it turned out that the banner that he drops can only be picked up by one person at a time, forcing us to redo the whole event five times. One guy was even rude enough to quit the instant he got his own quest item, but fortunately everyone else at least agreed that this was very improper and definitely shun-worthy behaviour.

All in all it was a fun play session and allowed my hunter to hit level 20, a couple of hours earlier in terms of /played than my paladin. Plans for next time: to mop up the rest of the northern Barrens quests and get into Wailing Caverns!

Alliance vs. Horde AGAIN, and the zones the Cataclysm forgot

After completing all the quests in Stonetalon, my rogue moved on to the Southern Barrens. This is another one of the zones that have been reworked completely, at least for Alliance, because it didn't actually used to have any content worth mentioning in that area. I enjoyed it for that newness alone, and a subtle reference to Mankrik's wife made me chuckle.

Camp Taurajo has been razed by the Alliance, and there's a quest to take care of some looters in the ruins. Like in Darkshore, there were named corpses all over the place, but for some reason it hardly affected me. Mind you, while my first ever Horde character was a tauren and levelled through the Barrens, I don't have the same kind of fond memories of the place that I have of Auberdine, so that definitely played a part, but I think part of it was also simply that I was playing the other faction. As such, dead enemies weren't really that interesting to me and I tried to mostly ignore them. I'm pretty sure that if I were to visit the place again as Horde, I'd feel very differently.

The one thing that disappointed me a little was that it was yet another zone that was focused on the Alliance vs. Horde conflict. Yes, I know it's a core part of the game, but that doesn't mean that I want all my quests to be about it all the time. Maybe it's just the levelling path I chose, but basically I went from Ashenvale (oh noes the Horde has taken Silverwind Refuge) to Stonetalon (oh noes the Horde wants to bomb us) to the Southern Barrens (oh noes the Horde is attacking Northwatch) and it just never seemed to end. Maybe it's my bias from usually playing Horde that made me a bit uncomfortable there after a while, though the fact that one of the quest givers was a complete jerk whom I just wanted to strangle didn't help either.

Moving on to Dustwallow Marsh, I found that this zone didn't appear to have been changed at all, except for some very, very minor tweaks to the geography and the like. It's understandable, seeing how it was already revamped once back in 2.3, which pretty much put it on par with Outland content. So it's less linear than the other zones now and you'll have to do do more running back and forth, but it's still good fun.

I was just slightly miffed that the missing diplomat type chain hasn't been updated either, except for Jaina laughing at you at the end and going "oh right they kidnapped Varian, lol, that was ages ago and he's back now". Okay, so she doesn't actually say that, but it sure felt like it.

I then randomly got out another alt, my warlock, and had a look at the new Arathi Highlands for a change of pace, the one zone that I had skipped during my paladin's otherwise pretty linear quest progression. I had heard some rumours that this zone was really bad and hadn't been updated properly, and I'm sad to say that it's all true. I don't know what it's like for the Horde as they have a new outpost on the western edge of the map, so I'm assuming that they must have some new content to tackle, but on Alliance side it's literally the same old, same old. It's telling that the Arathi Highlands quest achievement only requires you to complete 18 quests, the lowest number of all zones. How do you make it through five or more levels on so few quests? Easily, as they are still as grindy as they used to be in vanilla. After clearing my way into the kobold cave for the Myzrael quest, out again and then in again just to collect enough quest items, I was about ready to bang my head against a wall.

Basically, I imagine that the revamp of this zone happened like this: the designers had already finished every other zone in the northern part of the Eastern Kingdoms, but realised that they were running out of time until the expansion's release, so they decided to just give the zone an emergency clean-up along the lines of "okay, tell me five things that used to annoy you about Arathi Highlands and we'll change those".

"That guy Fozruk wandering all over the place; I could never find him when I needed him!" - "Okay, we'll just have him stand in front of that rock over here."

"That Forsaken courier patrol! They used to kill me all the time. And then when I got the quest to kill them they were once again nowhere to be found." - "Fine, we'll remove most of them and just leave one guy. And um, he'll just run in circles on this small piece of road as if he's confused about where he was meant to go. Yeah."

"Stromgarde was kind of fun, but it was annoying that you had to run in and out repeatedly to complete that quest with the tower." - "No problem, we'll just have a quest NPC in there that moves you right along."

"Speaking of running around, the Myzrael chain used to require you to go to the Badlands or something, didn't it?" - "Not anymore, it doesn't. Next!"

"Faldir's Cove is a cool place, but ninety-nine percent of players never even found it in the past!" - "Okay, let's carve a big tunnel towards it into the mountain and put a sign in front of it that says 'here be pirates'. And add a breadcrumb quest for good measure. Oops, we're out of time, so that will have to do."

I thought it was telling that when I first entered the zone, I could only pick up two quests at Refuge Pointe - one to kill lots of mobs in one corner of the map, and one to kill lots of mobs in the opposite corner of the map. /facepalm. And they even allowed Myzrael to remain an elite mob and technically a group quest, though I didn't even notice until she spawned and my warlock still soloed her with ease.

It was really kind of shocking. So many lovingly revamped zones and then a rush job like that. I always felt pretty neutral about Arathi, neither loving nor hating it, but with the quests in the surrounding zones being so much smoother, having nothing to do except grind endless amounts of elementals, ogres and syndicate mobs all across the map sure made this one stick out like a sore thumb. I seriously hope that Blizzard is going to give it a proper revamp in one of the upcoming content patches.

Questing and travelling

My dabbling in old quests continues. In fact I found myself a lot more enthused about the idea than I originally thought, and finished off both the Barrens and Stonetalon Mountains yesterday. I didn't discover any new quests in either zone, that is to say that I had done all of them before on some alt or another, just never on my main.

Initially I found myself groaning at the long travel times, and wondered how I ever managed to get other characters through most of these quests back when you didn't get a mount until level forty. The effect was heightened by the fact that I had just completed the Zul'Drak quests on my night elf only two nights ago, which made for a very stark contrast in terms of a sleek gaming experience.

In the end I acclimated quite quickly however, and realised to my great surprise that all that running around actually added something to the experience too. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it did feel pointless and like it was only there to make the quests seem longer than they actually were. Running back and forth between the Crossroads and the Dry Hills three times just to kill a different bunch of harpies each time felt silly. When Kadrak at the Mor'shan Rampart asked me to plant a Horde banner in a cave somewhere in the Stonetalon Mountains, I really wanted to tell him that he had more immediate threats to worry about. And realising after completing Raptor Horns that I had to kill a whole nest of exactly the same mobs for Stolen Silver was annoying.

But for every quest-related frustration like that, there was another situation where the old quest design system actually added something enjoyable to the experience with the way it made quest givers stand around in odd places and forced me run around a lot. For example, having a crazed hermit living in a tent in the middle of nowhere and giving out a single quest may not be the most accessible way of going about these things, but it really does drive home the point that he is a crazed hermit. If he lived conveniently close to a village or people were sending messages to him, he wouldn't really be much of a hermit, would he?

Likewise, a goblin in Ratchet sending you to collect spider eggs in Stonetalon might not make for the most streamlined gaming experience, but you really get a sense that he is a smart entrepreneur who likes to hire other people to do the grunt work for him. If he was already sitting in Windshear Crag himself just to save you running time, he wouldn't appear to be nearly as clever. After all it doesn't take a genius to come up with the idea of picking up what's already right in front of you.

Or take this quest: All it does is tell you to go talk to someone else, since the quest giver feels that he's too old to handle the matter, a completely unnecessary step that could have been cut out very easily for the sake of convenience. As it is however, it makes you feel that NPCs are people too, and may simply not always have all the answers you want. There were a lot of quests like that in the Barrens region, with people telling you to ask someone else for help or seek the expertise of someone who lives elsewhere.

This certainly gave me pause and made me realise for the first time just how strangely isolated and completely self-sufficient most "quest hubs" in Outland and Northrend are. No matter what strange discoveries you make, there's almost always someone around who can make sense of it in close proximity. None of this "uh, we should report back to Orgrimmar" stuff, with the notable exception of the Mag'har quest line. I don't know why that is, are we just meant to assume that all the communication happens off-screen? Are the player characters too good to serve as messengers these days? But why? Blizzard still puts in breadcrumb quests to lead you back and forth between different zones, they just happen to be a lot less meaningful in comparison and can almost always be summed up as "go report to Guy McGuyson at [faction outpost], he might have work for you". Why not let us report some more interesting news?

Also, having to travel a lot simply makes things feel more epic. Frodo's journey to Mount Doom wouldn't have been half as interesting if he had already been living right next to it at the start of the story. I know people might argue with this, saying that travel in WoW is just a boring chore and adds nothing, but I suspect that it's simply something that we don't think about consciously most of the time. We know that we're willing to go to great lengths for things that are important to us, so we assume that if someone else asks us to do the same for them, it must be important too.

I thought a decent example of this in the Barrens was the Samophlange quest line. I mean, if you think about it it's just a goblin asking you to steal some gadget from the Venture company, completely trivial. But then he sends you to someone in the northern Barrens to repair it, and that lady then sends you to Orgrimmar, and you get asked to recover a torn manual in a mine, and so on and so forth, and you can't help but feel that this samophlange thing must be quite powerful after a while, because if it wasn't nobody would bother with all this stuff, would they?

I'm also convinced that the real reason that the Crusader Bridenbrad quest line is so popular is not that it tells a touching story, but that it makes you run all over the frikkin place: to Moonglade and into the emerald dream, to Wyrmrest temple, to Outland! If all the remedies that you try to save him had been conveniently available right there in Icecrown it wouldn't have felt half as epic I tell you.

Greetings from the Barrens

I actually played my shaman alt so much as of late that she eventually ran out of restedness again for the first time in ages. There's something about lack of restedness that always makes me want to stop playing, though I'm not sure what it is. I'm not obsessessed with levelling as quickly as possible; I think I just find the blue bar much more aesthetically pleasing...

Anyway, I decided to dig up another low-level alt of mine, my troll warrior, and take him to the Barrens. The Barrens are an interesting place, very iconic and typical for the Horde, but also infamous for housing a lot of stupidity (Barrens chat) and being a pain to quest in. In fact, Green Armadillo of Player Versus Developer made an interesting post about two months ago in which he analysed just what's so bothersome about questing in the Barrens, the most important point being that a single quest chain to kill harpies for example requires you to do twenty minutes of running back and forth, and that's without counting the time to actually kill anything.

Some quest descriptions are also incredibly vague for today's standards, like the infamous Lost in Battle, the quest to find Mankrik's wife. There's mention of "a small tauren camp" and the Gold Road - what, you mean the same road that spans the whole freaking zone? Though I have to say that in all fairness, I never actually had problems with that quest myself. My very first Horde character was a tauren, and thus I first approached the Crossroads from the south. Being new to Horde lands I took everything in with great interest and immediately noticed the burnt huts and the female orc corpse next to them. So when I got the quest from Mankrik it didn't take me long to make the connection and I considered it a very easy source of XP.

In fact, despite of their bad reputation I have many fond memories of the Barrens, though I never went back there for long after my first Horde character did most of the quests in the zone. Take WANTED: Baron Longshore. While Green Armadillo complained about respawn timers being too long, this guy is the exact opposite: If you just run down the coast south of Ratchet randomly killing pirates, you're bound to run into the baron at least three times or so. He respawns fast and all over the place, which makes for a nice running joke. I'm happy to say that I got a good laugh out of it on my troll warrior as well.

I then proceeded to do The Guns of Northwatch. I remember that when I levelled my first Hordie, a friend recommended that we do this quest as a group. These days I'd say it's definitely soloable too, but nonetheless tricky, with lots of fleeing mobs in a densly packed environment with healers. Also, you get to do what's probably the longest escort quest ever in the same area, leading a snotty high elf ("Finally! Someone to rescue me!") out of Northwatch all the way to Ratchet. While doing this he will run into packs of mobs left and right, all the time screaming about being attacked. Good times!

I think the reason that I enjoyed the Barrens quite a bit the first time around was that I was completely new to playing Horde-side and thus revelled in the search and exploration aspects of the zone. (Where's that centaur leader now?) However, due to the endless runs it's definitely not a good place to level in if you want to make progress quickly and without too much hassle. As it is I'm surprised that I'm enjoying it as much as I do to revisit the zone on my troll - I think it's because I largely went in there with the mindset of wanting to remind myself of all the quests before Cataclysm comes and tears the land asunder. My only "problem" is that with the increased quest XP I'm getting ahead of myself too quickly, with quests turning grey way too soon - but that's a rant for another day...

A rogue quest

Having done maybe a bit too much badge farming on my level eighties in the past two weeks, I decided to just mess around on a really low-level alt today for a change. My choice eventually fell on a blood elf rogue in his early twenties, whom I hadn't played in many, many months, except to log on briefly and fiddle with his enchanting occasionally.

The first thing I did was go out and buy him a mount. I knew that they had made mount and riding training cheaper in the last patch but was still baffled when it ended up costing me less than five gold altogether. I'm not complaining though, while I find money-making easy these days, I still vividly remember my first character hitting forty, me being very much not able to afford my training at the time and being quite frustrated by that. Speed boosts for everyone, I say!

Also, no matter if it's black (a nice rogue-ish colour), a hawkstrider is still a supremely silly battle chicken and my rogue looks really naff riding it. Whatever gets the job done, I guess.

Anyway, I looked at my quest log and found a rogue quest called Deep Cover that sends you to the northern Barrens. I vaguely remembered attempting it before but then being forced to abandon and restart it for some reason after the elite mob at the end had kicked my leather-clad little arse. As I quickly found out, the quest does indeed lead on to Mission: Possible But Not Probable, which requires you to steal some stuff and kill a bunch of mobs including a named elite. I wasn't worried about that this time around however, because while I hadn't actually played my rogue in months, he had received a constant stream of random bind-on-equip gear that I had picked up while playing other characters and had as such become pretty well-geared for his level.

And indeed, I had no trouble taking down even multiple mobs at once, including the named elite. As I looted the quest item at the top of the tower I noticed that I got debuffed with something called Touch of Zanzil. "Cannot stealth or turn invisible"? Ouch, that's a pretty cruel debuff to put on a rogue. Considering that it comes from a class-specific quest however, I assumed that they specifically put that in to make a point and force players to hurry up and/or play in a way they aren't used to.

I fought my way out of the tower again to hand in the finished quest but had to realise that one of the objectives was still greyed out, namely the one to get "Silixiz's tower key". I re-read the quest description and targeted Foreman Silixiz. He was a corpse on the ground behind me. Wait, if I had just killed this guy, why didn't I have his key? Ah I get it, since it's a rogue quest I have to use pickpocket... fine, I'll just wait for him to respawn and then...

No. Hang on. Touch of Zanzil. Cannot stealth. I guess I'll have to wait for that to run out first. What was the duration of it again?

Seven. Days. I kid you not.

I think I spent a good minute just sitting there and staring at my screen in astonishment. Would Blizzard, who's made so much wonderful and well thought-out content for this game, really implement a quest with a mechanic this stupid? Because, you know, I can't finish it without stealthing, and I can't stealth without (presumeably) getting rid of the debuff by finishing the quest first. And the only alternative seems to be to spend seven days waiting for the debuff to run out before trying again. At level twenty-three.

Incredulous and convinced that I couldn't have been the first person to run into this problem and that there must be a better solution, I checked the wowhead comments for this quest and was delighted to be informed that the debuff was just an ordinary poison. A highlighted comment specifically pointed out that it could also be removed by the low-level first aid item called anti-venom.

Anti-venom? You mean that stuff that I used to create en masse when I was new because it seemed really useful and then I never used it? The same stuff that I stopped making because I never used it and I couldn't even sell it on the auction house? The very same stuff for which I don't have the materials lying around on any of my alts, despite of my exessive hoarding? /sigh

Still, I tried to look at it as a challenge. Creating three pieces of anti-venom only requires a single small venom sac, an item that drops quite commonly from low-level spiders. Well, usually anyway. So I made my way over to Stonetalon Mountains, suddenly feeling that I was on an epic quest to save my rogue's life from being ended (or at least ruined) by a deadly poison. As it goes with usually common drops they suddenly become increasingly rare when you need them, so I had to clear out Sishir Canyon three times before I got my first venom sac. Excitedly I crafted the anti-venom, used the first charge... but except for a sparkly little animation nothing happened. I was still indecently touched by Zanzil. Maybe anti-venom could be resisted or something? I tried again; still nothing. Hoping against hope that the third time would be the charm I used the last charge but it was also in vain. Only as I went back to wowhead to complain about the useless advice I had been given I noticed that there were already comments about this not working anymore, they just hadn't been highlighted yet. D'oh.

Anyway, at this point I finished a couple more easy quests in the area and then hearthed back to Orgrimmar. The first paladin I saw emerging from the auction house received a polite whisper from me, asking him to please remove the poison on me, which he did. But now that I finally could have gone back to finish the quest I didn't feel like it anymore.

I'm always wary when people talk about how much the old world needs a revamp because it's not streamlined enough - I do like having to take a bit of a detour now and then, it keeps things interesting. But unfinishable quests with seven-day-long debuffs that take away your class's defining abilities? Crap like that really does need to be fixed, man.