So, Incursions.

With my Season of Discovery main in her high forties now, I've reached the part of the game that made up SoD's phase three, which - based on what I heard about it at the time - was widely lambasted as even worse than phase two. One of the phase's main new features were so-called "incursions" around the Emeral Dream portals in Duskwood, Ashenvale, Feralas and the Hinterlands. What I'd heard about those was mainly that they were simultaneously too good (in terms of rewards) and horrible (in terms of gamplay), which both hurt the economy and frustrated people who felt that they were being shoehorned into levelling from 40 to 50 by doing endless laps around one corner of a zone.

I was very curious to check these out for myself, if for no other reason than to see whether they were as bad as everyone had said.

I initially got a bit lost, because I thought they were all level 40-50 content, but when I got to the Feralas portal the NPC there didn't want to talk to me. It was only on reading up that I found out that actually, incursions start as low as low as level 25, and different zones are targeted at different level ranges.

I eventually found out that the right place to be at my level was the Ashenvale incursion, so I made my way over there.

I've got to admit, talking to the quest giver immediately had me horrified in a number of ways. Remember that in Classic, the quest log has a limit of 20 quests at a time... and here this night elf was offering me no fewer than eighteen missions to do in the local incursion, which meant I had to almost completely empty my quest log of everything else. The quests were numbered for convenience ("Ashenvale Mission I: Defeat Satyrs", "Ashenvale Mission II: Defeat Treants" etc.) and flavour-less copy-and-pastes of each other that just told you in the most minimalist terms where to go.

It was easy to see what the pattern was: The incursion was active in three nearby sub-zones of Ashenvale: Forest Song, Satyrnaar and the Warsong Lumber Camp, and each one had five quests tied to it: one to kill mobs, one to kill a boss, one to pick up an item, one to gather a field report from an NPC, and one to escort another NPC out of the area. The three remaining quests were profession-related, asking you to collect Emerald Dream-flavoured herbs, ore and skins.

I figured with such a high density of quests it would be hard not to trip over any objectives, so I just bumbled into Forest Song and started killing dreamy whelps there. In what turned out to be a stroke of good luck, a nearby orc hunter threw me an invite almost immediately. I warned him that this was my first time doing one of these, and he reassured me that it was the same for him. While he obviously had an addon running that was showing him details about where to find each quest objective, he wasn't exactly trying to speed-run the area. He was also a skinner and therefore paused all the time to skin the various dragonkin we'd killed.

I've got to admit I was happy to defer to him in terms of setting the pace and let him take the lead. All I had to do was follow him around and focus on healing him and his pet, while occasionally throwing out small bits of damage here or there or pausing to pick a herb. Priest and hunter make for a pretty good duo, and I found myself recalling happy memories of my night elf priest questing with a hunter friend back in Burning Crusade.

I didn't look at the time, but even with the two of us it took us some time to fully clear out all the objectives in all three areas. I wasn't sure whether we'd be able to do the named boss mobs with just the two of us as they showed as level "skull" but we ended up being able to duo them just fine. At the end I traded him some spare herbs so he could also do the herbalist quest, and he gave me some of his skins in return so I could complete the skinning quest (neither of us got the mining one done, obviously). I gained more than two levels from this adventure, though I'll admit that I was rested for a good chunk of it, which undoubtedly helped.

For a different perspective, I also decided to take my level 28 mage to do the lowest-level incursion in Duskwood (questing in Duskwood as a low-level Horde character felt very weird by the way). The quests there followed the exact same pattern, but since I didn't find a friendly helper over there, it was a lot less pleasant. (All I got was Alliance players spouting gibberish at me in /say and doing incomprehensible emotes.).

I couldn't do any of the bosses by myself, and one of the field report missions was also out, as the NPC was placed literally at the feet of the local boss mob, nobody else was around to kill him, and I was unable to even have a quick chat with the NPC before the boss flattened me.

Waiting for the escorts also turned out to be a waste of time. These are not classic-style escorts where you get an NPC walking from A to B while you defend them from exactly three ambushes; instead you talk to the person and they then follow you around. This is much more convenient in many ways but has one important downside: because there is competition for the spawns and people want to be efficient, whoever sees the escort NPC up will immediately talk to them to "claim" them... just to then proceed with their other dailies until they are ready to go back to the portal themselves. The problem is that this means it can take a veeery long time for the escort to reset and respawn. My mage didn't see a single one of these NPCs up and I grew tired of waiting.

What with being able to do fewer quests by myself and not being rested, I think I only gained about a level from this particular incursion, maybe even less, though I'm not sure as I'd spent some time fighting my way through two crypts in Raven Hill Cemetery for rune stuff before starting on the incursions.

Ultimately my conclusion was that I did like the conceptual idea of incursions - going into the Emerald Dream to fight off invaders - but in terms of execution, I'm not sure I've ever seen content in any version of WoW that was created with such a seeming lack of love, with not even any attempt at lore, flavour or interesting quest text. It's like the devs figured: hey, nobody cares about that stuff anyway; Classic players just want a way to efficiently grind levels outside of dungeons, so let's give it to them.

As it stands, with the rewards supposedly nerfed considerably compared to what they were at launch and the quests being dailies instead of endlessly repeatable, I can see incursions being a fun little diversion every now and then, especially if you find yourself running low on other sources of XP in a certain level range. My team-up with the orc hunter was good fun, and I can imagine it being even better with a group of friends. When you're by yourself, it feels a lot more lacklustre though.

And I can definitely see why people hated these. When they were endlessly repeatable and also gave ridiculous rewards, they must have felt like an absolute "must-do" for a while, but who wants to spend all day grinding the same fifteen quests over and over in one corner of the same zone? I'm not surprised people were put off by that. It was also very noticeable that whenever I looked up incursion-related things on Wowhead, I was lucky to find even one comment with two upvotes on anything. People just did not care about this content at all, not even enough to complain about it in the end. They just stopped playing.

I don't expect to see the Sunken Temple raid, so I suspect I'll be moving on to phase four content pretty soon.

Level 40 the 3rd

Well, who saw that coming? I certainly wouldn't have guessed, looking at my roster at the beginning of the year, that my third character to level 40 would be a brand new nelf hunter, but here we are. I'm just enjoying the solo experience as a hunter way too much, and playing as Alliance feels refreshingly different after focusing on Horde side for months.

I even remembered to take a ding shot:

This one doesn't have the money to buy a mount yet, but I decided not to fret about it this time. So instead of proudly showing off my new ride, have some random screenshots I took while levelling on Alliance side:

 

The very first screenshot I took of my hunter in the starting zone. It was raining so hard that night! Also, I really love the female night elf bow-drawing animation.

The night I made the run to Ironforge. I never realised how you can see the city's lights up on the mountainside at night.

 

Remember when the Titans were this big mystery from Azeroth's past instead of overused and annoying?

 

Ashenvale contains a fair number of ruins, but it didn't really hit me just how pompously those elves must have lived back in the day until I considered the sheer size of that half-buried statue.

There's this quest in the Wetlands that has you fighting cursed undead, and one of their abilities temporarily passes their curse on to you, turning you into an undead as well. To my great amusement this applies to pets as well, meaning that I ran around with a pet undead for a while. (And I guess it confirms that Spotty is a girl? Unless everyone gets turned into a female undead.)

Hunting at night on the Shimmering Flats. I've said it before but I'm astounded by how beautiful I find Thousand Needles in Classic, because I don't remember being particularly fond of it in Vanilla.

Always gotta keep your eyes open on the road through Duskwood, you never know when you'll run into Stitches!

Whenever I spotted him wreaking havoc in Darkshire, I sometimes decided to help out.

I noticed there's an impressive amount of yells associated with Stitches spawning as well. It's interesting and somewhat old-fashioned design if you think about it: There is no quest to kill him, he's just a really hard mob (for the level of the zone) that spawns when someone completes a certain quest and is basically like a cat set among the pigeons, making the road unsafe and killing lonely questers left and right if they aren't careful. Makes for a very memorable experience.

Stranglethorn can be quite beautiful when you take a break from killing wildlife and trolls every now and then.

Logging in one evening I was baffled to find such a crowd in Stormwind, considering the server's usual population levels. Turns out it was just before someone dropped Onyxia's head to give everyone a buff. There is a whole system to this where guilds take turns I think, everyone assembles just before the event to get buffed, then mages put up portals to take the big guilds away to raid and the city empties out again. Quite fascinating to watch.

The Hall of Explorers in Ironforge is such an RP place, with all those oddities on display, including plaques that you can actually read.

Looking out over the beauty of Loch Modan. Destroying that was one of those things I could never quite forgive Cataclysm.

Finally, a sunset over Theramore.

A Guild and Grind

I joined a guild again. It wasn't planned, but as I was sitting in Darkshire looking for people to polish off my last couple of group quests in Duskwood, a person called Pawsy whispered me to ask if I was unguilded for a reason, which I thought was an interesting way of starting a recruitment conversation. We talked for a bit, I told them about how I wasn't playing very much and had ended up somewhat disappointed by the last guild that I'd joined randomly, and in the end I agreed to join their brand-new levelling guild called "Mending". It really was brand-new, as according to the guild info it had been founded only about two weeks prior.

I was pretty impressed by the leadership's recruitment efforts, as they were apparently whispering people like crazy, to the point that they were joking about how they were getting "no, I don't want to join Mending right now" replies as soon as they even said "hi". I was impressed because while they didn't seem to be very discriminating with their invities, they did genuinely try to engage people in conversation in the process.

I asked about the group quests in guild chat and half an hour later they were done. Boom! That's why you joined a guild in Vanilla.

Of course, it also took only a few hours until I had my first impulse to ragequit, when I saw some guy repeatedly use the word "jew" as an insult in guild chat and realised that another guy called Donaldtrumps (the name says it all really) who had come across as kind of trollish in general chat was in the guild as well. However, I decided that I didn't want to be hasty, as the guild is still very new and one has to wait a bit to see how these things shake out. A few bad apples don't need to necessarily ruin it for everyone, depending on how they are received by the rest of the guild, and I've already seen a fair bit of pushback against people saying overly stupid/rude things in guild chat as well. In short: we'll see.

In terms of gameplay, after having gained a few levels in Stranglethorn Vale, I was starting to hit a bit of a wall there, in the sense that I ran out of quests that I could easily solo. Plus, the Horde players I was encountering were starting to get on my nerves a bit... like that troll shaman 7 levels above me that tried to gank me on the road twice, though both times I managed to keep myself alive for long enough for other Allies to come by and kill him instead. Then there was another troll shammy, only 2 levels higher or so, who tried to kill me near Nesingwary's camp, but I kept healing myself. By the time I was nearly dead due to running out of mana and he was out of mana as well, I handed in two quests so that I dinged and was instantly back to full health and mana, hah! Unfortunately that was when another troll shammy (is there anything else in STV?) who was 9 levels higher than me and had been fishing nearby decided to join in to kill me. Anyway, the point is - all those troll shamans were getting in my way a bit and I decided that it was time to visit Kalimdor again.

I took the boat to Theramore and crossed Dustwallow Marsh, the Barrens and Thousand Needles on foot. Seeing the old Thousand Needles again made me so happy, even if its design and textures seem kind of bland by today's standards. I missed those windy canyons. I unlocked the flight path in Gadgetzan and picked up the artisan cooking quest there, since my cooking is a bit ahead of my level, though I'll need to level up a couple more times before I can effectively farm the materials for the quest.

Then I decided to go do a couple of quests in the Shimmering Flats. I vaguely recall not doing those on my priest back in the day, because I was already too high level for them by the time I arrived in the area, so I was only ever peripherally aware of them. It's safe to say that I didn't miss out! They are all super grindy and anything that doesn't require you to simply kill things or pick items off the ground has a terrible drop rate. Salt Flat Venom or Hardened Shells, anyone? I was OK with it though, because honestly, I needed something to grind and these quests just gave me an excuse to pick on turtles and scorpids.

Also, an orc rogue who was something like 7 levels lower than me tried to kill me and failed; I killed her instead. Definitely preferable to Stranglethorn Vale.

Level 30, Loving Duskwood

Isadora hit level 30 today, with a /played time of 2 days and a little less than 11 hours. I was really hoping that I would be able to start this post with a screenshot of her proudly wielding Verigan's Fist, but alas, the quest for it is still in her log and has gone grey by now. I just can't seem to get a group for Shadowfang Keep. At one point I tried to form one with a druid, but we gave up after nobody responded to our LFM requests for too long. He joked that people probably didn't even know what "SFK" was. Alliance just doesn't like to go there - it's too far away, and I believe that other than the paladin class quest there are no other incentives to go. I wonder at what level I might be able to solo the first boss? I only need to get to the stables to complete my quest...

In regards to Blackfathom Deeps, reader Shandren had commented that the quest item also dropped from the elite mobs outside the instance and that I should be able to get it solo if I was careful. As it happens, I did end up finding a group for BFD though and completed a full run of the place. (We even killed the thrasher boss!) The way the party was formed was a bit bizarre. We only needed a tank, but as soon as we invited one, she immediately left again, citing the presence of two other plate wearers in the group as the reason. I had forgotten how peculiar people could be about that back in the day. It seems all the stranger considering how hard it can be to get groups at all, never mind your preferred group composition.

Anyway, at this point our level 23 dps warrior offered to tank instead (even though her level was slightly on the low end for BFD) and we started to look for a dps. We got... another dps warrior, several levels higher. "Well, you'll end up tanking then," she was told unceremoniously... and was perfectly fine with it. She just strapped on a shield and tanked the whole instance like a boss, even though she could have complained that we had originally invited her as a dps. It was just such a stark contrast to the previous tank leaving simply because she didn't like the group composition.

Other than that BFD run I haven't found much time for group content, so I've been questing instead. It's starting to become a bit of a drag at the moment because I'm having trouble finding gear upgrades (I don't want to waste money on the auction house) and my weapon is now more than ten levels below me. As if being a prot/holy hybrid wasn't enough to make me hit like a wet noodle... At least I get to squeeze some extra dps out of Exorcism whenever I'm fighting undead. (Yay, class flavour!)

A lot of my recent questing has taken place in Duskwood, and somewhat to my surprise I've been loving it (even if the constant running back and forth between Darkshire and Raven Hill is annoying as anything). The thing is, I don't recall being very fond of Duskwood back in Vanilla... in fact I seem to remember not liking it very much at all, because I wasn't a fan of the gloomy atmosphere. But looking at it now, it seems like the perfect example of why many things about Vanilla WoW just worked so well, even if people would probably call them bad game design these days.

For example, who thought that it would be a good idea to have a level 35 elite mob patrol among regular skeletons that are ten levels lower? Or to spawn another level 35 elite who'd then make his way to Darkshire on the road, squashing innocent players and quest NPCs alike if they happened to cross his path? Things like that really made the world feel dangerous and served to underline the background of Duskwood being a cursed and dangerous place.

 Just like the good old days...

Quests aren't always connected in a perfectly linear manner either. For example you get a quest to bring some food to Jitters in Raven Hill, but that quest simply ends there with no follow-up. Later however you receive a quest from a guy called Sven, who wants you to hunt down the last person he saw at the house where his family was killed, and after a fair bit of running around and collecting clues, it turns out that this person was the very same Jitters to whom you delivered that food parcel. The Legend of Stalvan also has you running all around the houses to find out more about this Stalvan guy, after the local medium has a vision of him bringing doom upon Darkshire. People may have argued that this made the stories too hard to follow or whatever, but it's hard to deny that actually having to read the quest text and connecting the dots also made the whole experience so much more rewarding for those who actually cared to pay attention.

Duskwood as a whole is bursting with what I would call "old WoW flavour", portraying a world that is cartoony and sometimes a little silly but still takes itself seriously. (I read all 20 pages of Jitters' completed journal - the bit about him witnessing the death of Sven's family was rough!) I feel that this is something that has been lost in current WoW - while it still has some serious quests, the overall tone is much less so, with people riding around on increasingly ridiculous mounts and areas like the goblin starter zone setting a very different tone for new players.

Remember when worgen were fierce monsters instead of dogs with top hats and bad English accents?

Now I just have to find out more about this "Scythe of Elune" - Jitters' journal mentioned something about it having been found inside a mine... (Read: I can't really remember where that particular quest line starts, but I'll be happy to find out.)