Radiant Echoes: A Love Letter to Azeroth

Due to my current lack of excitement for War Within, I also ignored the pre-expansion event for its first week or so. It didn't help that what vague mutterings I caught about it usually complained that it wasn't fun for some reason or another. The other night though, I figured that I should really go and at least check it out, even if I wasn't that interested in farming it. I've taken part in the last two pre-expansion events, and it would have felt weird to miss this one entirely while I have an active subscription. Plus people were saying that it had been vastly improved since its underwhelming launch.

And I've got to say: I was positively surprised - except for the fact that the intro quest seems to be a bit buggy for max-level characters and doesn't always appear. Since it's supposed to be auto-granted, there's nothing you can do if it just fails to show up. But I just looked up where I was supposed to go on Wowhead and off I went.

The event, called Radiant Echoes, once again takes place in three older zones: Searing Gorge, Dustwallow Marsh and Dragonblight. The active zone rotates once an hour, and the general gist of the event is that you deal with manifested "memories" (which are basically group world quests) to fill a bar, and once you've done enough of them a big boss spawns (a memory of Rangaros, Onyxia and Arthas respectively). Then the cycle starts all over again.

I'll admit that doesn't sound very exciting on paper, but clearly a lot of love has gone into designing the memories, as they tend to reference a piece of classic content beloved by the community that takes/took place on the same continent as the active zone. So in Searing Gorge for example, you fight echoes of Hogger and Hakkar, hunt down Stranglethorn pages and relive the battles between Tarren Mill and Southshore. In Dragonblight, there are memories of the Argent Tournament and Thorim, so sometimes you hear shouts of "You face Jaraxxus, Eredar Lord of the Burning Legion!" and "In the mountains..." overlapping each other, which always cracks me up.

I had a good time doing a round of all three zones, but wasn't really that fussed about the gear rewards. One thing I noticed however was that a lot of people seemed to use the event to level alts, which is not usually something I want or need, but I realised only the other day that there's exactly one healing class I don't currently have at level 70: the paladin. I didn't want to make another Timerunner since I have a whole bunch of low-level paladins already, but what if... I took one of those existing lowbies through the event? Just to see what it was like? With everything being cross-server now, I could take any character from my old stable of alts and it would be able to play with my friends on any server in the future.

After brief deliberation, I decided to pick a level 25 dwarf paladin from my old Alliance server Darkspear. I chose the free gear upgrade and spent a few minutes feeling confused by the contents of her old bags, as they contained quite a bit of Outland stuff and I had no memory of taking her there whatsoever. She also had exactly one quest in her log, to kill two bosses in BRD. Okaaay?

At least the event intro quest worked fine on a low-level, which is how I learned that I'd been wasting a lot of time travelling to the different zones the old-fashioned way, as there's a temporary portal to Legion Dalaran right next to the Stormwind auction house, and within Dalaran itself there are three two-way portals to the relevant zones all right next to each other that also show you which zone is the currently active one and for how long.

I started my journey in Searing Gorge and rotated through the zones almost every hour, though I took breaks. I learned a lot of things that way:

• The first "cycle" of memories followed by a boss kill within the hour is always by far the fastest one, with huge crowds completing some of the memory world quests in a matter of seconds. I think this is because it's an obvious starting point, and it's easier to decide to take a break later in the hour. While groups kept working on the memories throughout the full duration of the zone being active, they definitely became a lot smaller over time.
• You get occasional gear pieces as rewards while taking part in the event, but for some reason they have a really low item level up to level 60 and are completely useless other than for transmog. This also means that - as usual - you become weaker and weaker as you level up. I initially thought that the people I could sometimes see just hovering on their flying mounts above the event area were "leeching" a bit, trying to get credit without doing anything, until I realised that many of them were levellers that were scared of getting into the fray as they had to worry about dying to something as small as a random knockback due to how squishy they were (something that happened to me multiple times as I got higher up in levels). 
• On top of that, phasing shenanigans can also screw you over. At one point things were rolling along super smoothly in Dragonblight when I flew to the next memory, landed... and found myself completely alone. I flew around to check on the other world quests, but none of them had any real activity, and all I saw was a couple of other levellers that seemed equally confused about where everyone else had gone. I don't know why the game thought that it was a good idea to separate us from the rest at that point. I followed the advice on reddit to go back to Dalaran and relog in hopes of landing in a better version of the zone on returning.
• There is a clear hierarchy in terms of how popular the various memories are. I've completed every single one at least once, but the single boss ones are easily everyone's favourite because they go fast, and they are pretty safe for even the squishiest leveller to take part in, as you just have to hit the boss briefly and stay out of bad stuff. The ones with lots of items to click on and mobs to fight are less popular because they're comparatively slow, and aside from the one with the frogs in Dragonblight, there are no real "non-combat options". Even the ones that look deceptively peaceful at first glance, such as the one to wake lazy peons, feature random mob spawns that attack you... which once again, is very dangerous if you're a squishy leveller as that random scorpid that suddenly aggros on you might well kill you.

Anyway, I didn't keep close track of how much time I spent on all this as I didn't remember to check the character's /played until after I'd started, but I think she was on about two and a half days of play time when I began my little experiment, and hit 70 after about five hours of grinding the event. She also earned just short of 50k of the event currency in the process. That strikes me as... pretty fast! It's not something I'd want to do over and over again, but it was interesting to do as a one-time thing.

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.

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.