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.

Night Elf Hunters Everywhere

A few weeks ago my night elf hunter had just landed in Searing Gorge and was about to go off in search of some incendosaurs when a call in general chat caught my attention: Someone was looking for exactly one more for the quest Overseer Maltorius, which I knew to be a pretty tough group quest. The request for exactly one more struck me as slightly odd because it seemed to imply that they already had four people, and surely that was enough to take him down, pretty tough or not?

Never one to pass up an opportunity for easy group content completion however, I asked for an invite and soon found myself partied up with two other night elf hunters, who were both dead, causing me to deduce that they had tried to take him on with the two of them and failed. I guess they figured that just one more person was going to be enough to tip the scales and that "LF1M" sounded more enticing than a generic "LFM".

After reviving near the boss, they partially fought their way back out to meet me on my way in. We felt pretty powerful: Three hunters with their pets is almost like six players! We hatched a plan to use ice traps and our pets to distract all the adds and nuke down the boss. We executed it pretty well too, but unfortunately it wasn't a good plan: the boss had so much health that he was still far from dead when our traps ran out and our pets died, resulting in another wipe.

After we had revived ourselves and all our pets, we decided to take the weakest of the adds on first on the next try. I think the boss then ran into one of our traps kind of by accident so that we ended up killing all the adds first... and suddenly we were able to finish the whole thing smooth as butter, with nobody dying at all.

We then proceeded to run out of the area and kill other mobs around Searing Gorge for other quests for a bit before saying our goodbyes. Hunters for the win!

The other night I had another amusing encounter of a similar kind. Having just landed in Un'goro I saw someone call out for help with "the elite elemental quest". I asked if they meant It's Dangerous to Go Alone and they replied in the affirmative. I threw them a group invite... and they were dead by the elemental's cave. I couldn't resist joking: "I take it you tried to go alone?"

Once again it was another night elf hunter with a cat. In fact, she couldn't help comment on how similar we looked: not twins exactly, but we were both girls with green-ish braids and wearing several pieces of identical gear. Together we managed to make short work of Blazerunner - though my newfound friend managed to die again in the process - and after she'd revived I took a quick picture of us together before once again saying my goodbyes.

It's funny to me that there seems to be a theme here of all the soloers levelling nelf hunters and then coming together to help each other with the elite quests. Classic can be quite peculiar that way.

Through the Dark Portal... or maybe not

My little dwarf paladin hit level sixty yesterday, less than three weeks after I decided to start playing her again, and after what were effectively only a handful of play sessions. I suppose that's hardly amazing considering that I often hear that you can take a character the entire length of the way from 1 to 85 within less than a week these days, but to me, a player who always spends a lot of time idling, exploring and faffing around with professions, it still feels huge. A month ago I hardly even remembered that this character existed, now she's my toon with the fourth highest level on that server. The zones flew by so fast it's silly.

I also thought it was kind of funny when I hit sixty about halfway through the Blasted Lands and the anti-fun team's XP penalty for "playing in the wrong expansion" kicked in. As I watched my experience bar's progress slow down massively, I actually found myself thinking "yeah, that feels more like it". I also noticed the number of experience points needed to level, something I hardly ever pay attention to, and it was less than 300k. I distinctly remember coming to Hellfire Peninsula for the first time and marvelling at the fact that my next level was over a million XP away. How times change.

Anyway, mini reviews of the zones I covered on my way - there were four of them as they were all relatively short:

Searing Gorge

Apart from Lunk the friendly ogre (who is very amusing), this zone felt very familiar. You're still helping the Thorium Brotherhood, though they become friendly much more quickly now than they used to, to kill the same old Dark Iron dwarves with the exact same names (déjà vu?) - but it's still more fun now than it used to be in my opinion, as everything has been strung together into a more cohesive story and they got rid of the need to constantly crawl down into the Cauldron and back up again. That thing used to be the bane of my existence whenever I quested my way through that zone, as I'd inevitably get lost somewhere in the tunnels or on the metal scaffolding outside, unable to find my way back up, and there'd be Dark Irons everywhere and GAH! Now they just dump you at a tunnel entrance towards the end of the zone, you antagonise the Dark Irons in every way you can at once, then you climb up again and that's it. This is one case where I'm honestly in favour of simplification.

Burning Steppes

I can't really say that I miss anything about the way the Burning Steppes used to be, because as far as I remember there simply wasn't that much there in the first place. Back in Vanilla I just remember it as this place where everyone went to farm Thorium and dragon scales. Nowadays players get to meet up with Rambo Corporal Keeshan, whom an Alliance player may or may not have met before in Redridge Mountains (a zone which I did on another character right after the Shattering). He once again concocts a crazy plan that allows the two of you to defeat a huge army on your own, and it's still funny. I was just disappointed that there was no mention of, erm... how he got from where he was at the end of Redridge to hanging out in Burning Steppes. The final quest of the zone displayed what I thought was one of the rare cases of a good use of the cut scene mechanic.

Swamp of Sorrows

The next stop in the natural zone progression was the Swamp of Sorrows, which used to be a bit out of the way to get to from the Burning Steppes. Blizzard decided to fix this by adding a mountain highway straight from the latter zone to the swamp, and it just so happens to be traversed by a random woman on a rocket mount who has nothing better to do than sit on a rock in the Burning Steppes all day, waiting for customers. Convenient, but somewhat contrived.

Swamp of Sorrows used to be a very dull place for Alliance (and actually for Horde too as far as I'm concerned) and to be honest it's still not that exciting, though at least there's something to do. There are Steamwheedle goblins, Itharius wanting to get into the Sunken Temple and a newly erected Alliance base among other things. The latter kind of bugged me simply because from what I could see of Stonard from my limited Alliance point of view, it still looked like the same old somewhat poorly equipped outpost that it's always been, but the Alliance somehow managed to erect an entire keep out of nowhere in the meantime. Developer bias!

Blasted Lands

The Blasted Lands are once again a zone that I remember as pretty boring and empty before the Cataclysm. There used to be a couple of longish quest chains that led you there for some reason or another, but there wasn't much in the way of proper quest hubs. This has been rectified and it's fun. The zone has been spiced up a bit via the inclusion of some greenery, wildlife and worgen in the Tainted Scar, but nods to the way things used to be are still around as well. For example you can run into some mobs that still use the ancient high elf model (hideous!), and the old blood mages that used to give out boring buff quests are still around, as proper quest givers this time. I also found one slightly hidden quest (read: no exclamation point or sparkles to start it), which was both sweet and sad. A good mix of story and random adventure in my opinion.

I have to admit that I felt a slight distaste at the thought of continuing through the Dark Portal after that - I don't share many people's opinion that Burning Crusade content is just horrible to play through these days, but there's definitely a big break in terms of style and story, and it feels jarring. I'll probably leave my little dwarf at sixty for a while and move on to the next alt in order to explore more of the new low-level zones. My paladin never even had to leave the Eastern Kingdoms, so there's a lot left to discover.