Turtle WoW: A Different Stonetalon & Wetlands

I mentioned in my last post about Turtle WoW that I set myself the goal to level up a bit in order to be able to explore more of their custom content. Their next full custom zone was designed for you to be around level 30, but according to their Wiki there were new sub-zones and quest hubs to be found in several lower-level zones as well, so I made it my priority to spend my time in the twenties questing in Stonetalon Mountains and the Wetlands. Both are zones that I'm reasonably fond of and very familiar with, but I'll also admit that their original versions didn't exactly contain a huge number of quests, so they seemed like interesting candidates for expansion.

Let's start with Stonetalon. This is a zone that I don't think I spent a lot of time in back in original Vanilla (I just remember a more experienced friend warning me that the Scorched Vale was a death trap) but at least from Classic onwards I became very fond of it as a more quiet retreat from the crowds. It feels like a bit of a backwater zone for both factions (though more so for Alliance) and there just isn't a whole lot going on.

By that I don't just mean that there aren't a lot of quests, but that the map as a whole is pretty empty because so much of it is just assumed to be uninteresting mountains (which we didn't really get to see from ground level). It's telling that when Blizzard rebuilt Kalimdor to be fully three-dimensional for Cataclysm, they added a whole bunch of new points of interest to the Stonetalon map and still also ended up creating quite a lot of minimally textured mountainside with nothing going on because there was just so much unused terrain in that zone.

I'm leading with all of this to say that this zone is prime real estate for anyone wanting to expand on it in Classic+ style, as it's not that far-fetched for a bit of mountainside to come down to reveal additional valleys to explore. In the case of Turtle WoW, I found a narrow path up even further up the mountain from Stonetalon Peak, leading me to a Horde troll base that I couldn't get a good view of because high-level guards were blocking all entry. (I could eventually glimpse a bit more of it from the back of a hippogryph, as the flight path to Stonetalon Peak goes right over it.) It's been a long time since I stood at the edge of a Horde town, wondering just what the other faction gets up to over there. (It's probably not that exciting, but the point is that I don't know, and the unknown is fascinating!)

I later also found another, smaller new Horde town belonging to the Horde-aligned goblins - just how many hubs do they need to have in one zone? To the east, my eyes went wide when I discovered that the mountainside above the Grimtotem villages had been conquered by giant brambles, accompanied by quillboar spilling in from the Barrens. Again, it looked like the Horde had some quests to do there.

For Alliance there was actually surprisingly little to do and I mostly ended up doing old quests while I was there exploring. There was a new Venture Co. area carved into the western mountains where I got given a few tasks to do, so that was something. I also really liked the new mine shaft they opened up not far off Stonetalon Peak, since it wasn't very deep but had two guaranteed tin ore spawns inside.

The Wetlands were a very different experience, with most of the zone largely unchanged. To the east there's a new dungeon called Dragonmaw Retreat near Grim Batol, but since that seemed to be designed for around level 30 as well, I didn't go there until I was somewhat higher level. (There will be a post about it!) However, there was also a whole new sub-section of the zone to the south-west, where a steep mountain path just south of Menethil led up to a new dwarf town called Dun Agrath, with an adjacent human village called Hawk's Vigil.

While the main quests in the Wetlands were largely the same old, same old, I was given several breadcrumbs to go up to these new settlements, which filled me with a lot of anticipation. However, when I finally went there, Dun Agrath offered me exactly one quest to kill a few raptors down the hill and that was it. I stuck my nose into every building, and it all looked very pretty and interesting, with plenty of named NPCs you could chat with, but no quests. I'm honestly still a bit baffled by that. Again, I'm not saying every square foot of terrain has to be filled with activities, but what's the point of creating a whole (albeit pretty) sub-zone and then not adding anything to do in it?

The human settlement of Hawk's Vigil was better in that regard, even if whoever created it clearly liked Harry Potter a bit too much based on all the NPC names. (I know, Blizz has always had references to other properties in their games, but a whole town of people with last names from Harry Potter is a bit on the nose.) As there were no hostile mobs nearby, all the quests were of the "go talk to someone" variety, which made for an interesting change of pace.

Some of them sent me quite far afield, which at first made me sigh a bit - everyone hates these fetch quests that make you travel to another continent, right? Why make more of those? But then I thought nah, that's not fair, depending on the story these can be quite memorable so let's see where this goes. One chain ultimately had me exorcising a demon from a lumberjack after doing several slightly questionable things to get to that point, and the other had me hunt down information about the dark past of a guy new to the town and awarded a pretty nice piece of gear at the end. (I did feel a little weird killing the guy. They were clearly going for something similar to the quest chain that ends with "The Attack!" in Stormwind Keep, but that quest has you catching the bad guys in the act, while this chain has a lot of bad things to say about the person you're supposed to kill, but he just kinda sits there in his tent at the edge of town minding his own business, which made me feel a bit bad.)

Anyway, I was definitely more intrigued than I'd expected, even by these relatively minor additions to two zones I know well. I think the additions to Stonetalon felt more natural than those to the Wetlands (there wasn't even as much as a footpath leading up to Dun Agrath; if you didn't already know it was there you'd have no reason to assume that there was anything new down that way), but they were fun to explore either way. And honestly, even the old content felt refreshed by the uncertainty of never quite knowing whether an NPC wouldn't suddenly have a new additional quest or something.

SoD Phase 2: First Impressions & Ennui

Season of Discovery's phase two launched Thursday late in the evening in my time zone. I had a quick look at the time to see whether there was enough hype to create login queues again... there was not, though it was insanely busy in Thunder Bluff when I logged in. I needn't have worried about people immediately losing interest in the BFD raid once it was no longer at the level cap, as the "Denizens of Kalimdor!" yells were going out non-stop. They had always been frequent but now they were even more so as people were running it for XP.

I didn't really try to play properly until the next morning myself. I figured maybe I could avoid the worst of the crowds if I focused on my professions before trying to level, so I went out to buy the expert cooking, first aid and fishing books. However, I then realised that the primary professions still required level 26 to progress beyond 150 skill, even in phase two, so I decided that levelling up at least once should be my main goal for the time being.

I took my priest to Stonetalon since I had a few quests from there in my log and it's usually a comparatively quiet place - but it wasn't that day. Or rather, it might have been if things were even busier in other zones, but my point is that things were pretty crazy in Stonetalon as well, with everyone fighting to tag mobs as they spawned. I even saw people looking for group for "The Den" - a group quest which I think I've never completed at level because it's part of a chain that takes you all the way to Ashenvale and nobody wants to go back to Stonetalon to find a group to finish it, but on that day, people were doing even that.

While things were pretty brutal on Stonetalon Peak, the Charred Vale was the most striking to me, because I always remember my more experienced friend warning me about the place back when I first started playing WoW - that it was densely populated with mobs and could be quite dangerous. That Friday morning, it was barren, and harpies were dying pretty much as soon as they dared to make an appearance. Still, I successfully made it to level 26 and returned to town to work on my professions a bit.

I came on again later in the early evening, and actually found two guildies online who invited me to do some dungeons with them. We did SFK twice, followed by a partial run of Razorfen Kraul, in which I at least got my Blueleaf Tubers and the goblin escort done. Apparently the place was a popular destination to level as I saw people advertise for "RFK boar farm runs", which sounded very South Park-esque. Apparently dungeon farming to level is "the meta" even in Season of Discovery, simply because the open world is too full to quest efficiently. There's something kind of sad about that.

However, already the next day, the biggest wave of power-levellers seemed to have washed over me. I took my hunter (who hit 25 literally the night before phase two released and never did get to go to BFD) on a similar quest circuit around Stonetalon and it was much, much quieter... but in an oddly annoying way because without the hyperspawns triggered by the massive crowds I actually had to run bigger circles around the area to find more of the only slowly respawning quest mobs, while my priest had just had new ones pop up in front of her over and over.

I just needed a little more XP to get her to 26 so I thought I'd do the breadcrumb delivery quest to Thousand Needles. At the Great Lift, a human paladin aggroed my quest NPC while running to the lift, just before I could talk to him , so I did a /shoo emote on her, meaning to indicate that she should just get on the lift so he would run back to his spot and reset. She then decided to turn back and kill both Horde NPCs before I could talk to them, which meant I spent the next ten minutes waiting for them to respawn. In that moment I was kind of glad there's no cross-faction communication in Classic as I definitely would have called her names.

Meanwhile, my priest was close to 27 after the dungeons from the day before, so I thought I'd pop over to Ashenvale to ding her as well. I was successful, but Ashenvale was another sad sight as I saw the PvP event come on and nobody took part on either faction. I wonder whether anyone will come back to farm more Warsong Gulch rep once the current levelling frenzy is over.

I haven't checked out the new PvP action in Stranglethorn yet but I'm also kind of scared to. When I was doing the dungeons with guildies, one of them accidentally took the wrong zeppelin and landed in Grom'gol while the Blood Moon event was on. Turns out it's so free-for-all that even the guards hate you, meaning he instantly got ganked by them and was unable to revive and get back onto the zepp. He actually had to switch to a different character entirely to be able to go to the dungeon with us as the one stuck in STV was effectively unusable for the time being.

Reddit is afire talking about the new event, though I'm not sure I entirely understand what's been happening - something about people getting insane rewards for spam-killing the same characters over and over again at the graveyard since the event was lacking anything to discourage that? I don't know, it doesn't currently sound very fun either way.

I was wondering whether the release of phase 2 would bring more of my era guildies back to SoD to check out the new stuff, but after three days, only half a dozen people or so have even logged in. The ones who are still active are talking about moving to a new guild in SoD and I can't blame them. I need to think about what I want out of Season of Discovery myself. Right now I'm just getting major deja vu, finding myself feeling lonely on a crowded mega-server like I did a couple of months after Classic's launch, though back then I was still carried along for a few more months by the sheer excitement I felt about Vanilla making an official comeback. While SoD does have some interesting new mechanics, it's not enough to make the experience completely different from what I've been doing for the last five years (gosh, has it really been that long - it has), and being on my own all the time just feels unsatisfying.

I'm even wondering whether I should go and re-roll Alliance on the RP-PvE server - it's only medium pop so that should alleviate some of my stress caused by the crowds, and relocating to Hydraxian Waterlords is what ended up turning Classic around for me back in 2020. Who says that couldn't happen again? However, even if it could, would I even want to go in that deep again? (I went pretty hard for a while once I started raiding in Classic.) I just don't know. I keep looking at SoD and thinking that everything looks so fun on paper, but I just end up feeling slightly jealous of all the people who are so obviously enjoying themselves because something about it just isn't working for me right now.

Re-exploring Night Elf Lands

Once again, much faster than I expected actually, I've hit the milestone of reaching level 30. Does that mean that I'll lose my drive again soon? Hopefully not... I do have plans for the near future at least, such as revisiting Razorfen Kraul. I've seen enough LFG requests for it in world chat that I think it might actually be possible to get a pug for it.

I've been surprised by how much I've been enjoying redoing those low level night elf zones on Kalimdor. It's been long enough that my memory is very fuzzy and it feels exciting to re-visit all those stories, even if at times I've wanted to slap myself for making the exact same mistakes I made back in the day all over again (such as searching for a quest item in the wrong place and not realising it until I brought up a guide).

Stonetalon Mountains in particular has been a pleasant surprise. My memories of it back in the day mostly have it feeling very empty. It wasn't until I rolled my first Horde alt that I even realised that Sun Rock Retreat existed. As Alliance I don't really remember doing any quests there, just being confused by my druid friend being able to talk to an NPC that wouldn't interact with me, probably because she had found a breadcrumb somewhere that I had missed.

This time around I engaged in a whole chain around the Venture Co. loggers that had me fetching magical ingredients for a gnome all the way from Stormwind, and I could hardly believe my own eyes when I ventured forth into the Charred Vale with something like five different missions in my log that pretty much required me to kill everything in sight.

I think once I wrap up Ashenvale however, I'll probably want to switch over to the Eastern Kingdoms for a while. My memory of Desolace is relatively fresh thanks to questing there on my paladin, but I never did much on her in Hillsbrad and Arathi...

I also got into Gnomeregan already, once again as a healer. That run was kind of funny in a way, as I realised pretty much the moment we set foot into the instance that there was no way we were going to complete it with that particular group composition, as the last boss is level 34 and we only had a single damage dealer above 30 - a warlock who didn't really seem to understand English very well and kept meleeing things with his staff. The tank eventually got sufficiently annoyed with him to kick him from the group. (I get why someone like that might end up in your group in an average MMO... but on a private server for a ten-year-old game it's rather bewildering.)

However, that same tank was also very determined to finish the dungeon despite of being only level 29 and pushed onward with great care. I swear I've never killed this much trash in Gnomeregan just to avoid pulling it by accident. We found a treasure chest behind a pillar relatively near the entrance that I didn't even know existed. And remember those tunnels with walkways on two different elevations, where you'd traditionally take the upper path while sticking as close to the wall as possible to avoid pulling the mobs on the lower half? We tried that at first and after it didn't work out for us, we kept jumping back and forth between the two lanes to clear both of them in their entirety.

We did remarkably well like that (the kicked warlock was quickly replaced by a rogue), but the final tunnel with the Dark Iron dwarves did us in one too many times. I mentioned that during my previous visit they didn't appear to be laying mines as they should, but this has clearly been fixed in the meantime so we kept dying to too much damage. (I'm still not sure the mines were behaving entirely as intended though... I had to laugh when at one point after I died, a mine "ran away" from me back towards the remaining dwarves.)

After the third wipe on the same pull or so, the replacement rogue abandoned us, but this actually worked out in our favour as we somehow ended up with a level 35 paladin tank instead (6 levels higher than anyone else in the party) who managed to carry us through that last bit until the end. In the end the run took up the entirety of my afternoon, but at least I managed to finish all my Gnomer quests in one go, including the escort. Of course one of them has a follow-up that asks you to go right back in there...

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".

The Stonetalon Story

I mentioned that I haven't actually had a chance to do much questing on my new druid due to zooming through the levels so quickly. I did the Northern Barrens and thought that they were an entertaining enough place, but they haven't really been changed too drastically. All the quests have been updated and streamlined, but you still get to steal the Samophlange and they even left that harpy quest chain in... /shudder.

Around level twenty-five I found time to go to Stonetalon, and I have to say, unlike the Northern Barrens this zone is very different now. It used to be a fairly quiet and serene place with no clear theme to it - kill some wildlife, kill some elementals, and oh, I guess the Venture Co. is a bit of a problem in this corner here. This has changed a lot.

The following is going to be very spoiler-heavy, so don't read on if you have yet to quest in Stonetalon Mountains as Horde and want to be surprised.

It all started innocently enough, with a quest to ride with a caravan from Ashenvale (which I had skipped) to Stonetalon. "Will that cart fit through the tunnel to Stonetalon?" I wondered. And then my jaw dropped as I saw that the formerly narrow tunnel known as the Talondeep Path had been turned into the Talondeep Pass. "I can't believe they blasted through the bloody mountain," was all I could think of for the rest of the ride. In hindsight I suppose that the damage might have been done by Deathwing instead, but it didn't really look that way to me.

Once you arrive in Stonetalon, you're given the rank of grunt via a buff and are told to take care of a variety of tasks for the orcish army in the area, which is heavily involved in battling the Alliance. Kill some Alliance, destroy Alliance stuff, gather and build things to destroy even more Alliance stuff. As you do so, you advance in rank, as your superior comes to appreciate your contributions more and more.

I wasn't at all happy however. All the orcs that I got to work with were either fanatical Hellscream supporters or of peon-level intelligence. In Windshear Crag some orcs were burning down trees with flamethrowers. I thought the whole reason that the orcs cut down so many trees was that they liked to build things out of lumber, not because they get a kick out of blowing stuff up for the sake of it. If this was what the Horde was all about under Garrosh, I didn't really want to be part of it anymore, and I was starting to regret my choice to quest in this zone.

The only thing that made me smile was a side quest to repair a deranged little blood elf girl's pet robot and then go slaughter some Alliance with it to entertain her. Even the battle-hardened Overlord was slightly embarrassed by her request for ice cream after we were done. "I am really not sure where [she] even came from," he admitted uneasily.

Finally you get sent to take the big bomb that the goblins have been building to an Alliance base... or something. Upon arrival you see the local orc general arguing with a tauren druid who tells him that he's mistaken in wanting to attack the giant tree in the vale. It's just a place of learning for young druids; the Alliance isn't hiding any "weapons of mass destruction" there.

I cringed. Is the Horde an evil caricature of the United States now? Please keep real-life politics out of my World of Warcraft! Not to mention that I certainly don't remember that tree being there before the Cataclysm, and for all the changes that he has caused, I don't think that Deathwing planted giant trees anywhere.

The next quest has you going to the tree to investigate. The tauren tells you that he sent his son ahead and that you're supposed to meet with him. Why do I have a bad feeling about this...

As I approached the tree I soon stopped in my tracks. Low-level night elves were running back and forth with fear icons over their heads and shouting things in a language I couldn't understand. Such a simple thing and yet so evocative. I actually felt my stomach tighten as I climbed the tree towards the yellow question mark on my mini map. It was worse than I had feared: the young tauren was already dead, and in his cold hand he was still clutching the badge of the orcish general. Oh god.

I dutifully reported back to the tauren chieftain, who had been joined by his wife in the meantime. They were both extremely distraught by their son's death, and I joined them with a couple of /cry emotes because I felt sad too. I've reported the death of a lot of NPCs in my time, but rarely did the ones left behind express such grief.

Of course the story had nowhere nice to go from there. The tauren couple confronts the general about his involvement in their son's death and he basically launches into a villainous speech about how the young tauren was a weakling anyway etc. He's also mad at the player for unconvering his plot and in the ensuing kerfluffle the tauren couple helps you to kill the orc and his henchmen after they attack you.

But the pain isn't over yet. The tauren still haven't turned on the Horde; they are horrified by what happened and want you to plead with the Overlord, to let him know that the general was the one who started it all. I returned to his fortress with a feeling of dread. I had seen a couple of quests where Blizzard now gives you different dialogue options when talking to NPCs, but the overall outcome didn't seem to be different. Would I really get a chance to tell the Overlord what I wanted to?

Of course not. From the way the quest completes it's prescribed that you only tell him that those nasty tauren killed the general and the Overlord immediately rushes off to deal with the matter. I was so frustrated! There are linear stories and then there is pure railroading. Never in my life did I want anything more than to be able to just have a fricking choice in a WoW quest.

Wondering how much worse it was possibly going to get, I returned to where I had last seen the tauren couple and found the wife's corpse at my feet upon landing. The chieftain himself had been subdued by the Overlord and was kneeling at the edge of the cliff, looking out at the giant tree in the distance. The orc greeted me enthusiastically and told me to witness what it means to be Horde... at which point he sent the balloon with the bomb attached to it at the giant tree, it blew up in a ginormous explosion and left nothing behind but a giant black crater.

I felt close to tears. I've done quests where I accidentally helped the bad guy before, but somehow the results never felt all that bad. Oh, so I helped to bring Hakkar back? Oh well, that's one more raid boss for us to kill! But this... this was just all around horrible, seemed to serve no purpose and was supposedly sanctioned by my entire faction. I was about ready to stop playing Horde for good.

It was during this moment of deepest despair that a portal opened behind me and Garrosh stepped through. Great, just when I thought that it couldn't get any worse... except: Garrosh wasn't happy either. A fully voiced dialogue followed, during which he expressed extreme distaste at the way the Overlord had murdered innocents, while quoting Saurfang about honour - this felt very poignant, as he doesn't actually name him but I instantly recognised the quote from ICC. Pissed off to the nth degree, he then grabs the Overlord by the throat and tosses him off the cliff. Oh.

As he turned around to look at me with the words "And you!" I did a /cower emote and wanted to do nothing more than vanish on the spot. I sure did deserve his wrath, but the sad tauren chieftain of all people spoke up in time to save me from being the next one off the cliff and Garrosh eventually left while grumbling about how I should find better things to do elsewhere.

At the end my immersion broke a little as I couldn't help but wonder why the quest completion ended in the tauren chieftain offering me some gear after all that had happened, and when I took too long to pick my reward and complete the quest, the phase reset with the Overlord respawning next to me. I quickly pressed the complete button just to get him out of my sight.

I have to give Blizzard kudos for really getting me emotionally involved in this story. It covers some pretty serious ground, most importantly the terrible feeling of being caught in a vicious circle where things only ever get worse and you're unable to stop it.

On the other hand however, I'm not entirely sure whether this kind of story is really appropriate for a game like WoW. I don't mean that you can't have any serious or sad quests, but... it's basically an entire zone's worth of quests building up to you facilitating something atrocious. This isn't like watching a sad movie, this is you acting out something bad yourself. How many times do you really want to do that? How many times do you want to get all these people killed (again)? Your only option to avoid it is to is to just not play in this zone at all. I for one am likely to avoid Stonetalon when levelling any alts from now on because I'm not keen on supporting these particular events again, and I'm not sure whether designing content like that is a very good idea when you heavily rely on your game having a lot of replay value.

On a side note, I'm really curious now what this zone looks like from Alliance side, as there is an Alliance base not far from the giant tree. Do they live in a blissful alternate world where this story never happens? Is the area already a giant crater when you come there to quest? Or do you actually witness the events from afar, as more evidence of why you should really hate the Horde?

A rogue quest

Having done maybe a bit too much badge farming on my level eighties in the past two weeks, I decided to just mess around on a really low-level alt today for a change. My choice eventually fell on a blood elf rogue in his early twenties, whom I hadn't played in many, many months, except to log on briefly and fiddle with his enchanting occasionally.

The first thing I did was go out and buy him a mount. I knew that they had made mount and riding training cheaper in the last patch but was still baffled when it ended up costing me less than five gold altogether. I'm not complaining though, while I find money-making easy these days, I still vividly remember my first character hitting forty, me being very much not able to afford my training at the time and being quite frustrated by that. Speed boosts for everyone, I say!

Also, no matter if it's black (a nice rogue-ish colour), a hawkstrider is still a supremely silly battle chicken and my rogue looks really naff riding it. Whatever gets the job done, I guess.

Anyway, I looked at my quest log and found a rogue quest called Deep Cover that sends you to the northern Barrens. I vaguely remembered attempting it before but then being forced to abandon and restart it for some reason after the elite mob at the end had kicked my leather-clad little arse. As I quickly found out, the quest does indeed lead on to Mission: Possible But Not Probable, which requires you to steal some stuff and kill a bunch of mobs including a named elite. I wasn't worried about that this time around however, because while I hadn't actually played my rogue in months, he had received a constant stream of random bind-on-equip gear that I had picked up while playing other characters and had as such become pretty well-geared for his level.

And indeed, I had no trouble taking down even multiple mobs at once, including the named elite. As I looted the quest item at the top of the tower I noticed that I got debuffed with something called Touch of Zanzil. "Cannot stealth or turn invisible"? Ouch, that's a pretty cruel debuff to put on a rogue. Considering that it comes from a class-specific quest however, I assumed that they specifically put that in to make a point and force players to hurry up and/or play in a way they aren't used to.

I fought my way out of the tower again to hand in the finished quest but had to realise that one of the objectives was still greyed out, namely the one to get "Silixiz's tower key". I re-read the quest description and targeted Foreman Silixiz. He was a corpse on the ground behind me. Wait, if I had just killed this guy, why didn't I have his key? Ah I get it, since it's a rogue quest I have to use pickpocket... fine, I'll just wait for him to respawn and then...

No. Hang on. Touch of Zanzil. Cannot stealth. I guess I'll have to wait for that to run out first. What was the duration of it again?

Seven. Days. I kid you not.

I think I spent a good minute just sitting there and staring at my screen in astonishment. Would Blizzard, who's made so much wonderful and well thought-out content for this game, really implement a quest with a mechanic this stupid? Because, you know, I can't finish it without stealthing, and I can't stealth without (presumeably) getting rid of the debuff by finishing the quest first. And the only alternative seems to be to spend seven days waiting for the debuff to run out before trying again. At level twenty-three.

Incredulous and convinced that I couldn't have been the first person to run into this problem and that there must be a better solution, I checked the wowhead comments for this quest and was delighted to be informed that the debuff was just an ordinary poison. A highlighted comment specifically pointed out that it could also be removed by the low-level first aid item called anti-venom.

Anti-venom? You mean that stuff that I used to create en masse when I was new because it seemed really useful and then I never used it? The same stuff that I stopped making because I never used it and I couldn't even sell it on the auction house? The very same stuff for which I don't have the materials lying around on any of my alts, despite of my exessive hoarding? /sigh

Still, I tried to look at it as a challenge. Creating three pieces of anti-venom only requires a single small venom sac, an item that drops quite commonly from low-level spiders. Well, usually anyway. So I made my way over to Stonetalon Mountains, suddenly feeling that I was on an epic quest to save my rogue's life from being ended (or at least ruined) by a deadly poison. As it goes with usually common drops they suddenly become increasingly rare when you need them, so I had to clear out Sishir Canyon three times before I got my first venom sac. Excitedly I crafted the anti-venom, used the first charge... but except for a sparkly little animation nothing happened. I was still indecently touched by Zanzil. Maybe anti-venom could be resisted or something? I tried again; still nothing. Hoping against hope that the third time would be the charm I used the last charge but it was also in vain. Only as I went back to wowhead to complain about the useless advice I had been given I noticed that there were already comments about this not working anymore, they just hadn't been highlighted yet. D'oh.

Anyway, at this point I finished a couple more easy quests in the area and then hearthed back to Orgrimmar. The first paladin I saw emerging from the auction house received a polite whisper from me, asking him to please remove the poison on me, which he did. But now that I finally could have gone back to finish the quest I didn't feel like it anymore.

I'm always wary when people talk about how much the old world needs a revamp because it's not streamlined enough - I do like having to take a bit of a detour now and then, it keeps things interesting. But unfinishable quests with seven-day-long debuffs that take away your class's defining abilities? Crap like that really does need to be fixed, man.