Hanging With the Freshers on Zandalar Tribe

There is an actual guild called "Freshers" on Zandalar Tribe, so just to be clear on that right away, this post isn't about them. I merely use the term in a general way to refer to players looking for a fresh server experience.

I wrote about the community-driven "fresh Vanilla server" initiative about a month ago, and I noted at the time that this project wasn't really for me, for a number of reasons. Those reasons still apply, however... I'm also a very curious person, and I kind of wanted to know more about how things were going over there, especially after I saw lots of people talking about the US version of the project on the Deviate Delight server, both positively (it's oh so busy, there are so many players here) and negatively (it's all streamers and their fan clubs and there's drama everywhere), yet at the same time heard nary a peep about the goings-on on the European equivalent Zandalar Tribe. Are there no European content creators supporting the project? I mean, WillE gave it a shout-out in one of his video only the other week! What was going on there?

Plus, taking a new alt through the first twenty levels of the Vanilla world is always good fun, even if I'm somewhat creatively bankrupt at this point and keep recreating my night elf hunter from 2019 Classic everywhere.

Anyway, I kept levelling my way through Teldrassil in very short play sessions initially, and it was pretty quiet there. I did all the quests, even the ones that require a lot of running back and forth, and moved on to Darkshore by level 12 or 13, by which point I'd run into what must've been less than a dozen other characters. However, things started to pick up a bit once I made it to Auberdine, and I figured human lands were going to be even busier.

I had my first grouping experience while doing the mushroom quest in Cliffspring Hallow. I spotted a human warrior the moment I entered and worried whether we were going to compete for spawns, so I immediately turned into a direction away from him. Soon afterwards I saw him trying to take a shortcut by jumping down a ledge instead of clearing a proper path, at which point he quickly got swarmed by naga and died (there were some mobs and distance between us, so it's not like I could've come to his assistance). After he revived we found ourselves fighting next to each other for a bit, and eventually grouped up to kill the rare naga as well as to maybe get the quest starter that can drop from the Twilight guys, though we had no luck with that. At least the rare dropped a mail chest for him. We parted ways again after exiting the cave and it felt very friendly.

I continued questing in Darkshore until level 16 or so, at which point I thought it might be a good time to move to Westfall to get ready for the Deadmines. I had another nice grouping experience when I teamed up with a gnome mage to do the Defias traitor escort. After I had gathered up all the dungeon quests, I continued questing, picking flowers and fishing in the zone while keeping an eye out for potential groups. Once someone whispered me to ask whether I'd like to join their DM group, but at the time I was only logged on briefly and didn't have enough time for a dungeon run. Overall it took several days and me being level 19 to actually find a party, which kind of surprised me. I think I'm relatively patient when it comes to manual group finding so I didn't mind too much, but for what's supposed to be a "fresh" server where the low levels are popping, LFG seemed really quiet and like people were mostly looking for mid to high level dungeon groups already.

The DM run itself was fine - people weren't super chatty, but everyone was nice enough and we had no issues. I whispered the priest to thank them for also healing my pet and they replied that they'd just finished levelling a hunter to 60 so they understood what it was like.

Ultimately I came away from the whole experience kind of wondering what the point was. I had a nice enough time, but in terms of population levels, I think I could've had pretty much the exact same experience on the main era PvE cluster or on hardcore. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if those were actually a bit busier than this was.

I guess Zandalar Tribe could aim to fill the niche of "PvP server that isn't as busy as Firemaw", which is something I thought could be viable ever since Classic era blew up at the start of last year and I spent some time puttering around on the empty second PvP cluster. However, as a "fresh" experience, catering to the kinds of players who want to see everyone starting together and huge crowds in the levelling zones, it doesn't really seem to be fitting the bill right now. I guess things could always change if a large content creator ends up giving it additional publicity, but right now - as much as I'm all in favour of more era servers getting love in some form or another - it doesn't strike me as a huge success for its intended purpose.

More Nelf Huntering

I continue to work on my nelf hunter because playing Alliance again makes for a nice change of pace. She's up to level 24 now.

I spent a lot of time doing pretty much every single quest in Darkshore. Now there's a zone where I'll fully admit that I'm blinded by nostalgia, because I always remember it so fondly from my early days in the game... yet on redoing it I can't get over the stupendous amount of running up and down the road you have to do. I swear it's worse than the Barrens.

I guess I didn't mind so much back in the day because I was too utterly enchanted by the world to worry about things like efficiency, and I had friends levelling with me that I could chat with during our time on the road. Nowadays it's just tiring.

I also made the trip to Stormwind to do the Deadmines. Doing the pre-quests for that was an interesting reminder of all the little details that private servers get wrong: When I got to the step where I had to hunt down the Defias Messenger, I found him right away, but unlike the last time I met him on a private server, the little bugger was actually running and I couldn't catch him!

Eventually he dived into a whole cave full of Defias, including the notorious Pillagers, and I had to hit the brakes to clear out some room for myself. Then I waited until he had finished his business inside the cave and foolishly came strolling out again, thinking he was safe. That felt like a little mini-adventure of its own.

The actual Deadmines run after that was relatively uneventful, though I think it's noteworthy that our tank was a retribution paladin and that setup actually worked surprisingly well. Of course it helped that she was the highest level in the group and we were all very well-behaved, always letting her pull and giving her a chance to get aggro.

At 19 my hunter was actually the highest level damage dealer at the time, what with the other two being casters who were only level... 16? 17? I forget exactly, but I was definitely worried that we'd struggle to kill the last boss. Struggle we did, by wiping once, but we did get him down in the end. Things did get very slow towards the boat though, as the casters faced a lot of resists and it basically came down to me slowly shooting things to death by myself.

This meant that despite of having started with a full quiver, I noticed that I was almost out of arrows by the end, and decided to start preserving ammo by meleeing things on the easier trash pulls, to make sure I wouldn't suddenly run out at a point where it actually mattered. Being the seemingly dumb hunter meleeing things felt very old-school.

One interesting note related to grouping in general is that I've found the LFG channel on Hydraxian Waterlords to be pretty whack. On Pyrewood Village it's rare that people try to hold off-topic conversations in there, and if it happens it usually doesn't last long, not least because the channel is always very busy with actual LFG requests that would make it hard to have an unrelated chat.

On HW though, people are almost always chattering away about some nonsense in LFG, as if there weren't enough other channels for that. Last night they were on politics when I joined and talked about the taste of human flesh by the time I left for the evening. And here I thought people on roleplaying servers were supposed to be the sensible ones.

Finally, another piece of hunter-specific news: I couldn't quite get the idea of getting a unique cat skin for my pet out of my head, and became somewhat infatuated with the idea of taming Humar the Pridelord, who has a distinctive look that literally isn't shared by a single other mob in the game.

Undeterred by the many Wowhead comments about how he only spawns every eight hours or so and tends to be camped to hell and back, I jogged down to Ratchet to check under his special tree, and what do you know: He was right there, the very first time I looked.

So now I have two cats. I didn't plan to level two pets on this character, particularly two pets of the same family, but I'm feeling strangely attached to Spotty the saber and am not sure I'll be able to part with her. Then again, this is an RP server - maybe I can be a crazy cat lady?

Wholesome Levelling

Levelling continues to go well for our little worgen duo and they are almost ready to go to Outland. In a way I'm almost surprised by how well we are doing. We started out with nothing, on a server where we'd never played before... and while I had quite a blast levelling alts back in Cata, the old world revamp hasn't been without its issues. I had alts that outlevelled whatever content I was doing way too quickly, and where seeing everything go grey just sapped my motivation to continue. Trying to level professions as you go turned into a veritable nightmare - I'll never forget the human hunter I had who spent more time farming grey mobs for leather than actually doing quests, until I eventually abandoned her in frustration. More than one attempt at levelling as a duo died in the early levels when one character was a miner or herbalist while the other one wasn't, as the experience gains from gathering made it bloody impossible to comfortably stay around the same level.

We managed to avoid the latter this time around by having me go herbalist and my pet warrior going miner, but even that hasn't been completely without its issues, as I keep shooting ahead ever so slightly and had to train myself to ignore a vast majority of nodes to avoid making things even worse. If there's any rhyme or reason to how much experience you get from gathering from any given node, it's certainly not apparent to me. Within the same zone I would run into one "green" (slight chance to skill up) herb that gave me fifty XP per pick, and another one that gave me five hundred. Why? Who knows, it's not as if the latter were particularly rare or anything. Meanwhile the ores seemed to almost always be of the (roughly) fifty XP variety, which is why we got out of sync quite frequently.

On the plus side, we never really outlevelled our regular quests too badly, despite of the gathering experience, running every dungeon except the Deadmines at least once and doing the cooking and fishing dailies every day. We were always ahead of the levelling curve, coming into each new zone about five levels late, but by that point experience gains had generally dropped off to such a low level (without stopping completely) that we could comfortably continue completing quests without having them turn grey on us (with the possible exception of the first couple of zones we did - it's very hard to make it through all of Darkshore's over ninety quests without outlevelling any of them for example).

Due to us almost always working on green difficulty content, our levelling speed has been relatively sedate and keeping our professions up to scratch hasn't been too bad either. There are massive amounts of mining and herbalism nodes in the revamped old world, so our alchemy and blacksmithing haven't really been starved for materials (though Goldthorn is still hard to come by for how much of it you need to level up).

The secondary professions have been a bit trickier. For example you move through the "cloth tiers" quite quickly at first, and then end up getting nothing but Mageweave for twenty levels or so (or at least that's what it felt like), which makes keeping up with first aid a bit awkward. I expect that we'll be okay though, assuming that they haven't removed the Runecloth drops from early Outland or anything. Cooking is mostly fine as long as you make sure to save any and all meat drops you come across for later, as you'll often come across a particular kind of meat at the wrong level in respect to your cooking. Keeping up with your fishing also helps immensely of course.

Speaking of fishing, I was very surprised to see that you don't actually need a fishing pole to fish anymore now... and my first gut reaction was to be annoyed at yet another instance of unnecessary simplification of the game, but I soon found that I actually quite like this change. The "stick with a piece of string attached" graphical effect is quite cute, and it's nice not to have to worry about changing your equipment if you're only just stopping at a pool in passing. The fishing hat, pole and lures can still come out if I actually sit down at a dock to fish "properly" for ten minutes or longer.

Archaeology is the one profession I haven't been able to keep up with, as much as I would have liked to. My pet battling has also fallen behind, despite of my initial enthusiasm for it. I believe that neither would be impossible to keep levelled as you go along, but you'd have to focus heavily on travelling around to dig/challenge random pets and neglect other parts of the game in the process. I suppose Blizzard designed these features more as something to do at endgame than as an alternate way of levelling, but I suppose it's good that the option is there for those who want to be really hardcore about it.

We've only really been focused on completing all the quests in each zone we decided to tackle (we went for the Darkshore -> Ashenvale -> Stonetalon -> Desolace -> Feralas -> Thousand Needles -> Tanaris -> Un'Goro path) and doing all the dungeons. After my last post we only did Uldaman, Scholomance and Stratholme via the dungeon finder and had no more issues with unpleasant people in those runs. I had forgotten that Scholomance was also redone for Mists of Pandaria and was therefore a bit confused while trying to keep up with the new story in the usual dungeon finder rush, but it was just about bearable. Dire Maul, Razorfen Downs and Zul'Farrak we decided to tackle with just the two of us and had no issues with any of them, except for dying a few times to the guard captain in Dire Maul North, as his combination of fear and summoning of hard-hitting adds was still pretty painful at the level we went in.

Currently we're planning on finishing up our business in the old world with a quick dungeon finder run of Sunken Temple and an extended tour of Blackrock Mountain between just the two of us. Then it's off to the Dark Portal to see how the Outlands will treat us. As much as I loved the Burning Crusade, I remember the transition from Cata questing to Outland being pretty jarring the last few times I tried to level an alt.

Dogs chasing squirrels and vice versa

So after I made my last post, I thought that would be it for a while. I had expressed some interest in Warlords of Draenor, but it's going to be many months until the new expansion actually goes live, and I still don't care for pandas.

However, a certain someone took my post as a cue that we should return to WoW right now, and promptly gifted me a month of game time. Sigh, can't very well let that go to waste, can I?

Since he had never played Alliance before, we rolled up a couple of worgen, a druid and a warrior. I've never been particularly keen on their looks and animations, but the older character models bug me even more now. Plus I'd only done the worgen starter area once.

It's funny how much you forget, being away from the game for more than one and a half years. The names of zones, of NPCs. Just how beautiful parts of the in-game world are. Yet at the same time it's funny how much you remember instantly, as if you'd never been away. That there's a quest over there. Where all the trainers in Darnassus are. As soon as I spotted the profession trainer in the worgen starter zone, I was reminded of the issues I had with finding him during my first playthrough, and instantly pounced on him to learn everything I could this time around.

A lot of things have changed too. In fact, my very first reaction upon logging in on my new druid involved some confused squealing about what they'd done to Wrath. "What is this? That doesn't look like a nature spell! It's all... yellow! Makes me look like I'm shooting fire or something, that's just wrong! I'm a druid, not a mage!"

The act of levelling up, the actual "ding", is depressingly boring now. No training needed, ever. It feels particularly striking in the worgen starter area, where they made sure to have trainers for all classes travel with you through the continuous phasing, who are nothing but useless remnants of a forgotten age now. I miss the act of actually choosing to train my new abilities. It gives you time to acknowledge their acquisition and what they do. If they just appear on my bar on their own, I tend to miss them. I'm not even sure when I got bear form now, it was just there all of a sudden and I went: "Huh, where did that come from?"

I also miss the old talents already. There's just no reward for levelling up. You can moan all you want about how choosing "+1% spell damage" or whatever was meaningless to you, but at least it was something. Right now I feel like I have zero agency in growing my character. And when you do finally hit one of the milestones where you get to pick one of the new talents, it's something like a slight increase to your run speed. Wow, that sure feels so much more meaningful and is totally worth not getting any other talents for fifteen levels... [/sarcasm]

One of the more pleasant surprises for me was the new druid travel form. I vaguely recalled reading about it somewhere ages ago, but I thought it required a glyph or something. But nope, gorgeous stags are the default now. Really can't complain about that one, though I'll miss ye olde cheetah a little bit.

I feel pretty, oh so pretty...

We finished off the worgen starter area without any issues and then loitered around Darnassus for a bit. It was fun to watch my partner in crime, new to the Alliance and having been away from the game for even longer than me, approach many things with almost newbie-like innocence and delight. We even spent some time fishing in Rut'theran Village together, just because we could. No rush.

After we'd decided to continue to Darkshore and had been bumming around Lor'danel for a little while, we discovered pet battles. They were one of those features of Mists of Pandaria that sounded interesting in principle, but that I simply felt completely indifferent about on a personal level, not being a massive pet collector and never having played Pokemon or anything like it. I have to admit that I'd heard nothing but good things about this mini-game from people who actually tried it though.

In this particular instance, things played out like this between me and my partner in crime:

Him: Ooh, there's a pet battling trainer here.
Me: [only vaguely interested] Oh? Where?
Him: Over here.
[Pause.]
Him: I'm picking a fight with a squirrel.
Me: Er, what?
Him: And... apparently I'm being killed by a squirrel.
Me: What? You're being killed by a squirrel? [giggles maniacally]

After that introduction we were both hooked and actually struggled to get any "proper" quests done for a while as we were just chasing green paws on the mini-map to get into epic battles with squirrels, rabbits and snails. It felt utterly ridiculous ("World of Sparring-with-fuzzy-critters-craft!") but it sure was fun. It's just a shame that it doesn't really make for a good group activity, because while you can kind of watch the other person battle, it's not amazingly interesting to spectate, plus you kind of compete against each other for the best pets to fight and capture.

We'll see how things go from here.

On my way through night elf lands

I'm a levelling machine! Once I had decided to park my dwarf paladin at sixty for the time being, I immediately picked up another old alt, in this case my level fifteen human rogue, and took her to Darkshore to get onto the questing path in Kalimdor.

Darkshore is still a wonderful zone, though I admit that I might be biased as this is where my little night elf priest first learned the ropes back in vanilla. As such it's never been a zone that I would have named as one of my favourites (I generally prefer things a little less melancholy and a bit more green), but every time I go back there, a part of me immediately feels at home. It's funny how much that early conditioning can stick.

The zone is one of the ones that have been changed more drastically by the Cataclysm, and the quests have been overhauled completely to reflect this, but somehow it still manages to retain the same old feel and atmosphere (which I consider a good thing). It's also a zone that struck me as particularly attractive to old-timers who are rolling a new alt, because there are a lot of references to the way things used to be that won't mean much to a new player but will definitely catch a veteran's attention.

The quest line dealing with the destruction of Auberdine is the most striking example of this. I won't claim that I immediately recognised any names I read during The Last Wave of Survivors, but many of them seemed familiar in a vague way, so I went to look them up and then usually went "nooo, not him/her" and felt distressed, as if Deathwing had killed someone that I personally knew. It's interesting how little things like that can get to you.

There are also the Shatterspear trolls, and I for one felt a pang of sadness remembering how they used to be neutral and people would hurl themselves off mountains to go dance with them, yet now they are getting slaughtered in the name of the Alliance. War, what is it good for?

Oh, and the Master's Glaive! For years we wondered what lay buried there, and now we finally get some backstory for it, which again, wouldn't be anything special to a new player, but for someone who has wondered about that strange site many times in the past, it's very satisfying.

Gameplay-wise it's worth mentioning that Blizzard attempted to alleviate all the running up and down caused by the elongated shape of the zone both by more sensible quest design as well as by implementing night saber riders that will give you a ride between different sites, which is a reasonable enough solution to move players quickly between places where it wouldn't make sense to have full-blown flight paths but that are still far enough apart that all the running will start to bore players without a mount. There's also a quest that allows you to acquire a permanent run speed buff that works in the entire zone.

Moving on to Ashenvale felt mildly disappointing in comparison, as it hasn't been changed nearly as much. The conflict with the Horde has been escalated, but overall a lot of the old quests were kept and simply adjusted somewhat. This is not entirely a bad thing, as Ashenvale had some pretty memorable quest lines to begin with, but still the final result wasn't as exciting as I had hoped. For example I had heard a rumour some time ago that the new Dartol's Rod quest line would allow you to keep the rod at the end, but that didn't turn out to be true, and the new version of the rod can only be used in Ashenvale anyway. Slightly disappointing.

The zone's lore also felt inconsistent to me. I've talked about the "Haven't I killed this guy before?" syndrome before, but it's really not just about named NPCs. Why can the Alliance procure an entire keep out of thin air in Swamp of Sorrows, but Forest Song still looks as if they started building it yesterday, after nearly five years? The passage of time sure has left a lot of anomalies after the Cataclysm. Oh, and speaking of anomalies, there was also a quest that has you defending Astranaar against a Horde attack, and while phasing was used to show fires and enemy windriders, all the NPCs still calmly went about their business in the middle of it all, completely undisturbed, which was just weird.

The transition from Ashenvale to Stonetalon was pleasantly smooth, with a couple of quests "spilling across the border" so to speak, which I liked as it felt more natural and less as if you were simply playing a game and just ticking off another zone as "done". There was also an explanation for why some quest givers are able to talk to you remotely as one of the gnome NPCs at Stardust Spire builds a "gnomecorder" for you - it's just a shame that this same technology is also automatically assumed to already be existent in several other (including lower-level) zones without any kind of explanation. Plus, you kind of wonder why the NPCs don't use such a powerful technology for more important things than talking to the random schmuck that they sent out to kill ten orcs.

I was curious what Stonetalon would be like for Alliance after my rather intense playthrough of the Horde side. It was... not as exciting to be honest. I was kind of disappointed to see that more than a few quests were complete carbon copies of what I had experienced on Horde side, and not just mechanics-wise. The Alliance even has its own deranged little girl with a pet robot! The big plot happening on Horde side only comes into play in a marginal role really - the Alliance discovers the bomb and you manage to delay its deployment a bit, but in the end you don't make that much of a difference. I don't know why the big climax of that story didn't touch me as much as Alliance. Part of it was probably that it wasn't played up as much, not to mention that I already knew how it was going to end, but more importantly I guess it was just another instance of "watching the Horde being jerks" as opposed to the massive guilt trip the Horde story puts you through.

The rest of the zone was kind of mix and match. Fight the Horde and gather some stuff. Alright I guess. Lore-wise it was interesting to see the Alliance try to ally with the Grimtotem. I also hit exalted with Darnassus about halfway through, which seemed way too easy, but whatever. Oh, and was I the only one who kept looking for some kind of follow-up to Brood of Seldarria that involved doing something to Seldarria herself? It just seemed very atypical for a WoW quest giver to go "oh noes, a black dragon... let's, um, smash up some of its eggs and then leave it alone".