Night Elf Heritage

This is kind of a part two to my post about dusting off my original priest. I actually did the night elf heritage quest chain! Aaand... it was pretty disappointing.

While trying to find out what other players thought about it, I came across this reddit post ranking all the heritage quest lines in game so far, which taught me two things: 1) that there already are a lot more of these than I realised, and 2) that it wasn't just me who found the night elf chain disappointing. The OP in that thread put the human heritage quest line that I liked so much in second place out of ten, and the night elf version in dead last.

It started out alright - there'll be spoilers from here on by the way, but trust me, there isn't really much to spoil - with a reunion with Arko'narin, the night elf prisoner turned Wonder Woman that you rescue from Jaedenar in Vanilla. She remembered my priest rescuing her back in the day too and I was like, yeah, nostalgia! Also, we learn that she has a younger brother called Lysander who's a mage and voiced by Max Mittelman, whom I mainly know as Arn Peralun from SWTOR. I've also heard him in WoW before though, most memorably as Prince Farondis from Azsuna. I can't help but feel that he's really being typecast at this point, always playing troubled young men trying to overcome past trauma.

Anyway, the three of you are off to Felwood together to revisit Jaedenar, which despite the Cataclysm and everything else that has happened since then, is still corrupted (or again). Maiev Shadowsong is also there, and maybe she has something to say to the player if you met her in Legion, but obviously she had no special connection to my never-made-it-past-Cata priest.

And then... basically the entire quest is that you go into Jaedenar again to put out some braziers and slay a dreadlord at the end - just like in the old days, huh? Except that with fewer, less dangerous enemies and no less than three NPCs by your side, it's not at all an exciting experience, just slow.

The only real narrative comes from the NPCs talking to each other. One thread here is that Maiev still hates mages (I mean, they've been available to night elves since Cata, but I guess when you're thousands of years old that's like, yesterday) but kind of overcomes that thanks to Lysander's brave example, and the other is Lysander more generally struggling with past trauma and not wanting to be defined by it, something in which I guess he's supposed to be a stand-in for the night elf race as a whole.

Those could be interesting enough themes I suppose, but the problem is that having NPCs monologue at you while you do a slow and boring escort quest is far from the most engaging way of telling a story. And Maiev's change of heart is just way too predictable and fast. At the end she even whips a tattoo set out of nowhere to grant Lysander a cool face tattoo for his services. That's... quite a turnaround from actively hating mages twenty minutes ago. (In fact, based on what I've read, saying that Maiev "hated" mages is downplaying it - apparently she actively murdered them in the Wolfheart novel and that's being retconned now or something...)

Also, where the human heritage quest line basically has people throwing a little parade for you at the end, the night elf chain finishes with Maiev handing you your reward behind a bush at the Stormwind embassy, which is a pretty funny contrast. I mean, night elf heritage was always going to be tricky to handle what with several of their most iconic zones having been razed throughout the years, but it feels like Blizzard could've done better than that.

The ultimate joke was that when I unwrapped the cosmetic rewards, I realised that one of them was a glaive transmog and that actually, I could have just done this whole chain on my demon hunter without reviving my old priest. For some reason that thought hadn't even crossed my mind, as I just tend to forget that she's a night elf because the identity of "demon hunter" kind of overpowers everything else in my mind (and it's not like they can be any other races). Kind of funny, but I have no regrets in that regard. I just wish the quest chain had been better.

An Afternoon in Jaedenar

As of me writing this, my hunter is sitting at level 56. Pretty much as I predicted, I'm finding that the fifties seem to go much faster than the twenty levels or so that preceded them, despite of their objectively higher XP requirements.

Contrary to the common wisdom, I'm also having no problems with finding quests. In fact, many of them go green before I actually get around to doing them, as I seem to be levelling up faster than I can complete them. At level 56 I still haven't even touched many of the higher level zones, including Searing Gorge, Blasted Lands, either of the two Plaguelands, Winterspring or Silithus.

Mind you, I will admit that the quests do seem to get somewhat more annoying at this level. The amount of travel required is considerable, and I'm forever busy trying to minimise the pain through efficient use of my hearthstone and hopping on long flights before going AFK.

What's worse though (in my opinion) is that every quest suddenly seems to involve one to four quest items. I don't have that much bag space, man! This in turn makes the above issue worse since it means that I can't pick everything up at once and sometimes have to go back and forth between places repeatedly for no other reason than that I don't have the spare bag slots to ferry all the different items from one place to the other at the same time.

What's good though is the increased incentive to group. It was very high in the lower levels but seemed to peter out somewhat in the midbies, but at my current level it's worth throwing group invites around for a lot of things again, not just dungeons. Clearing all the quests in Jintha'alor in the Hinterlands took a full five-man group longer than most dungeons for example, even with our tank being somewhat over-levelled for the area.

But it doesn't even have to be elites. I was just heading down towards Jaedenar in Felwood when a mage whispered me to group up. I hadn't planned to do so since Jaedenar is basically just a big cave full of normal mobs and I figured I was going to be okay on my own... in hindsight I was lucky that the mage invited me though, because I had underestimated just how much tougher the mobs got further in compared to near the entrance.

Somehow we picked up a level 60 warlock as well who didn't really need our help but just felt like being social I guess. She was there for her Dreadsteed quest, having imbibed a special potion that made her friendly to the mobs and required her to talk to some of them, but was repeatedly stalled by other players killing who she needed to talk to.

She did have to kill a mob as well though, and when we did that as a group he dropped an epic ring. I think it was this one? We all made o-faces in chat and I went ahead and rolled greed.

As a tangent, I've seen some discussion about loot etiquette when it comes to BoE epics, and most people seem to recommend that everyone should need "because someone is going to need anyway and that way they can't ninja". I've met many players who hold similar attitudes when it comes to valuable loot in SWTOR, but I've always been against this practice. Basically, the worst that can happen if I hit greed is that I unjustly miss out on a chance at some loot. The worst that can happen if I hit need is that I end up being the ninja! The latter would be much worse to me, so I always hit greed right away to be on the safe side.

Anyway, the others hit greed as well, even though I said that I would be fine with the mage needing since a ring with frost damage on it was obviously a mage item. However, she wanted to give everyone a fair chance and rolled greed too. The warlock ended up winning the roll, but then graciously agreed to sell the ring to the mage for 50 gold, which was an absolute steal compared to how much the item would have fetched on the auction house, but as she said: "It's not like I'm losing out here, I got an extra 50 gold that I wasn't expecting!"

Anyway, with those quests done we set out to do the local escort. Rescue from Jaedenar is a quest I always found quite memorable because of the pathos conveyed in the quest text but also but also because of what I tend to think of the night elf's Sailor Moon routine when she finds her armour. Unfortunately, Classic servers being what they are, the area was busy and Sailor nelf was not in her cage when we got there.

We saw some Alliance players go past escorting her outside and waved at them, patiently awaiting our turn. Shortly before she respawned however, a level 60 dwarf warrior showed up and jumped the queue. We made /shoo emotes at him, but he was determined to get in there before us, and indeed he did - since we were in a group and had tried to make sure that everyone was on the right step, we were too slow and had to watch our escortee walk off without us yet again.

By this time we'd been in there for a while and I was willing to call it a day, but the warlock suggested that we should help the dwarf to make him finish faster, even as she expressed annoyance about his behaviour. So this dwarf warrior bizarrely ended up with an escort of three Hordies that killed everything ahead of him to clear the way, while one of them (the warlock) also kept hitting a macro to insult him. (How's that for mixed messages?)

Anyway, we helped him finish his escort and went back to waiting at the cage. Eventually Sailor elf respawned again, and this time we got to rescue her. But then there was a follow-up! It sent us back into the cave yet again, to retrieve the remains of her dead friend and kill the succubus who had tortured him to death. (Grim!)

The mage was starting to fret a bit as apparently their girlfriend was getting impatient for them to finish up. We went ahead anyway, but the succubus was nowhere to be seen. After a few minutes of waiting I looked her up on Wowhead and relayed one of the comments there which said that her respawn timer was long and to "bring lunch and dinner". "Oh god," went the mage, clearly fearing an incoming domestic, but just then she appeared anyway, ready for us to cut her head off.

As a final farewell, the mage offered us a portal to a destination of our choice (I opted for Undercity, which was quite far away and where I had some quests to hand in) and logged off. I was pleased to have completed several quests and with having had another interesting adventure.

I'm also quite excited by the prospect of finally being able to run some dungeons with my guildies soon, since I haven't really been able to join a guild group for anything since the first week, after which I was left in the dust and had to watch their max-level adventures from afar ever since. I have no real plans for Classic endgame, but it would be nice to be able to at least dip my toes into some level 60 dungeons this time around.

Furbolgs and other friends

After finishing my rogue's old world tour, I realised that there were only two zones left in Kalimdor that I hadn't looked at yet: Felwood and Winterspring. I hopped onto another roughly level appropriate alt (of which I seem to have a lot), my long abandoned male night elf warrior, and took him up there.

As it soon turned out, my idea of what was level appropriate for those zones wasn't correct anymore as the mobs in both were about five levels lower than they used to be, but they still gave me experience (just about) and I was already there, so I decided to just get on with it.

One of the most defining features of both Felwood and Winterspring are the furbolg: the infamously rep-grindy Timbermaw and their corrupted enemies, the Deadwood/Winterfall. They are all still around, but the Timbermaw reputation gains have been buffed massively. I remember that whenever I did the Felwood quests in the past, I would end up barely neutral with the Timbermaw by the time I got to their big tunnel, and maybe reach friendly in Winterspring. By the end of my questing this time around, with no extra mob grinding or anything, I was revered. Yowza. Makes me want to go back on my main to do those quests; with the reputation she already has, she should be able to get to exalted with no effort whatsoever.

Also, in what felt like an effort to make the whole "we have to kill our own kind because they've been corrupted" thing seem a little less dire, they added a couple of quests centred around two little furbolg children that get up to crazy hijinks. I actually thought that they were quite cute.

Overall, Felwood is another zone where I feel that Blizzard really managed to hit the spot while combining old and new. Aside from the additions mentioned above, the furbolg quests are still present. You still get asked to kill satyrs and other demons, and descend into the Shadow Hold to kick some Shadow Council butt. The only old quest that seemed to have gone without a trace and that I really missed was the escort to rescue Sailor Moon that night elf chick from the Shadow Hold and deal with the fate of Trey Lightforge. I always thought that it was quite touching, and the fact that their friend's NPC dialogue still talked about her being in Felwood to look for two lost friends really got my hopes up. I guess that's just a leftover that the developers forgot to clean up.

However, there are also loads of new and highly entertaining quests. There's the chain featuring the night elf mage and the imp (rainbow power!), the little talking tree whom you help to grow (I thought he was very cute, even if some of the things he said also sounded slightly creepy to me), and a cool quest featuring some Illidan lore. There's a new green quest hub established by the druids, as well as a worgen outpost (they seem to be really good at growing massive, old and twisted looking trees very fast). I'm guessing the Horde works for the goblins here. It's really a nice mix of new and old and I had a right blast levelling through this revamped zone.

Scrubbing dirty squirrels gives the words "cleansing the forest" a whole new meaning.

As I emerged into Winterspring, the fun continued pretty seamlessly. Again, the furbolg quests had been kept and tweaked only slightly, but pretty much everything else has seen changes of some sort, and only for the better as far as I'm concerned. Are We There, Yeti? still exists, but it's much, much more straightforward. The old quests to hunt for a couple of named mobs (they may have been Horde only, I can't remember for sure) have been transformed into a fully fledged hunting camp à la Nesingwary. This could be seen as a good thing or a bad thing depending on whether you like killing dozens of bears, owls and frostsabers, but I had a real blast doing these. Much to my amusement I also found myself getting really hungry while reading the quest text - no, I don't really care for eating owls myself, but these guys sure were very convincing in their passion!

About halfway through my frostsaber carnage I ran into the local Wintersaber Trainer. Still covered in the gore of a dozen innocent kitties, my warrior walked up to the guy and assured him that sure, he loved sabers! I was then pleased to discover that Blizzard changed the Wintersaber rep grind to use the same model as the Ravasaur quests on Horde side, which I absolutely loved. In other words, you get a little cub that gives you a daily quest to feed it and you can watch it grow into a proper mount over time. Awww! It goes without saying that I was happy to pick that one up, even if my little cat is likely to grow into a very disturbed individual, considering that I spent the rest of that evening slaughtering more of its relatives.

I also loved what they did with the old E'ko system. I always thought that the way it used to be was pretty rubbish, having to carry that cache around, gathering a whole bunch of different items to combine for different buffs... keep in mind that the average character's bag space was considerably less back then than it is now and it was just too much of a pain to be worth the bother. Nowadays you just get a couple of quests explaining what E'ko is, and then you can randomly gain various buffs from killing the right creatures.

I also ended up discovering a part of the zone that has apparently been there since vanilla, but that I never even noticed in all my years of playing: the Ban'Thallow Barrow Den. Good job at making me feel like a noob again, Blizzard. And I don't mean that in a sarcastic way at all, I'm amazed that it can still happen after all these years!

If I had to criticise anything about the new Winterspring at all, it would be that it would have been nice if they had added another flight path closer to the Timbermaw Hold, but that's really a very minor thing.

On a concluding note, I ended up finding a disgusting oozeling in the aforementioned barrow den and immediately had to think of Tam's old post about the different stages of insanity he went through while trying to intentionally grind for one. Typical that someone like me, who doesn't care much about pets, would get one on an alt without even trying. I considered selling it since several thousand gold are still a decent amount of cash and I'm not that rich on that server, but then I thought that I didn't really need more money for anything either and just allowed my warrior to learn it. At least I'll have something tangible to remind myself of his adventures in Felwood and Winterspring, and they were definitely memorable!