Turtle WoW's Version of Gilneas

I said I had one more post about Turtle WoW's custom content coming up, and this is it - about the Turtle WoW version of Gilneas. I'm glad I still managed to make it to this zone before the shutdown (it was designed for levels 39-46) because it was uniquely interesting in the sense that it was the first custom zone I encountered that had a direct retail counterpart.

I mentioned in my post about Grim Reaches that in terms of location and vague themes it had connections to retail's Twilight Highlands, but they weren't exactly the same zone. Gilneas though, that's the same place at its core as in retail: the werewolf-infested kingdom beyond the wall, ruled by Genn Greymane. Somehow, that made the differences all the more fascinating.

As I hadn't come across a breadcrumb quest to lead me to the zone, I simply rode over to the Greymane Wall from Southshore and stepped through the now open gate, bursting with curiosity. Visually, it was very much a continuation of Silverpine with slightly fewer trees.

The first quest hub I encountered was a refugee/rebel camp whose residents needed help with fending off the local wildlife and gathering food - pretty standard fare, but it did make me wonder what these people were fleeing from/rebelling against. My eyebrows shot up some more when further down the road, I encountered hostile mobs with names like "Greymane Enforcer" - followers of Greymane are the bad guys here?! What the heck is going on?

Fortunately I didn't have to wait too long to find out what was happening, as the town of Ravenshire contained an NPC called Lord Darius Ravenwood that was more than happy to provide an exposition dump about what the zone was all about. In short, Gilneas' isolation led to famine and unrest, which was only exacerbated by Genn having outsiders that were stuck in his castle whispering in his ear and ultimately led to him seizing the nobility's lands to provide food. After his wife Mia was killed in a riot, Genn completely withdrew from the public, and the population is now in open rebellion.

Now, I hated the bit about Mia dying because it seemed pretty much like a copy and paste of Tiffin Wrynn getting a rock to the head, and I don't consider the fridging of female characters a classic trope to be preserved. However, other than that, I thought it was an interesting twist. Genn is no werewolf in this alternate history of Azeroth - in fact, most Gilneans aren't.

This got me thinking about how the worgen lore in Vanilla is a bit confusing - in Pyrewood Village in Silverpine they are basically classic werewolves, living like normal humans by day, but the Scythe of Elune quest chain, somewhat contradictory to this, describes them as these demonic beings from another dimension that were summoned onto Azeroth. I can see on Warcraft Wiki that this has since been recontextualised so that the first worgen were actually druids... but regardless, the point is that in Turtle WoW's Gilneas, the worgen are still more like these strange, demonic creatures that are to be avoided at all costs, not like in Cata where they were made more obviously werewolf-like and Worgen and Gilnean became largely synonymous.

Anyway, to get back to the point - I had a feeling that Lord Darius' quest would result in more story about all that Greymane business, but I made it a priority to explore and do basically every other quest first instead, which led to some interesting discoveries.

In a crypt I found a cult of worgen worshippers that did want to become werewolves, so that idea was also present in Turtle WoW after all. It wasn't quite clear to me from the quests whether they were already capable of turning or were still working towards that part, as they were all normal humanoids and friendly towards me.

It took me embarrassingly long to notice because I so rarely look up in MMOs, but the centre of the zone was a tall tree on top of a mountain, and in a cave under said mountain I encountered the Pellars, a word I had to look up. They're kind of... nature-aligned witches friendly to the populace, but also a bit weird. One of them spoke in rhymes for example.

There was also a ruined town where the Scourge had broken through once, and a naga incursion from the south. The beach with the naga was a bit wonky as there was an invisible border where you could suddenly phase, with the current mobs around you disappearing and different ones suddenly popping into existence. It also made me realise that for all the love and care the Turtle devs put into their zone design, I don't think they were very good at beaches, as those always seemed more dull than the ones designed by Blizzard.

Regardless, I did decide to follow what I'd call the "main story chain" eventually, which tasked me with freeing Liam and Tess Greymane - yes, Liam is alive in this one! I already knew that Tess had escaped as I found her hanging out with the Pellars before I actually got sent there, but Liam was chained up at the back of a cave. Rescuing him was pretty tedious as I had to fight my way in, back out to get the key to his shackles, and then back in again - this was probably less annoying when there were more other players around than there were towards the end of my play time. I was half expecting that I'd have to escort him out as well, but escort quests are one thing I didn't see the Turtle WoW devs port over from Vanilla actually, and there wasn't one here either. Liam just finds his way to Ravenshire on his own once you've freed him.

In a nutshell, you then go on to fight some more Greymane soldiers, as well as recruiting the werewolf worshippers and the Pellars to your cause. Then you get given a quest to do the local dungeon, Gilneas City, to "save" Genn Greymane. Yes, it's in quotes in the quest text as well, which gives the game away a bit.

Unfortunately I didn't get to run the dungeon before the shutdown, but I did pop my head in the door and used my hunter's Eagle Eye to look around a bit. I could tell from the map at least that this one wasn't another mega dungeon like Dragonmaw Retreat or Stormwrought Ruins, but much smaller, so I don't feel I missed as much. I also watched a YouTube video that someone recorded of the place and it's basically a few streets full of Worgen and then a tower in which you kill Genn, who I presume has gone mad with grief or something (still not a werewolf though).

So I ultimately didn't get to see everything the zone had to offer - there were also a couple of elite quests I wasn't able to complete, and in a small house I found a guy that taunted me with a grey exclamation mark over his head, but at 45 I was apparently still too low to see what he wanted people to do.

However, I do think I got the gist of the zone, and I really enjoyed it. I might even go so far as to call it my favourite of all the Turtle WoW custom zones I played through, possibly outdoing even Northwind and Balor (and I did like both of those a lot as well). The people who designed it really seemed to get what makes a Vanilla WoW zone great, with lots of little stories woven together to form rich tapestry of everything that's going on in the zone, culminating in a big finale in the zone's dungeon, similar to how the lawlessness of Westfall makes you wonder just who these Defias guys are, until you eventually take the battle to the Deadmines. That's pretty much the highest praise I can give I think!

K'aresh and the Story of the War Within

Patch 11.2 arrived about one and a half weeks ago, and with it the final major story update for the War Within. That still feels weird to think about, considering the Midnight expansion announcement is still a few days away. I mean, we know that there'll be plenty of content to tide us over until 12.0, from Legion Remix to the release of housing, but it still seems odd for the War Within to just kind of end where we are now.

K'aresh is a nice enough zone. It recycles the city of Tazavesh from Shadowlands, which I don't have any particularly strong feelings about as I only ever did the associated dungeon one or two times. The wider zone with its purple tinge, floating rocks and eco-domes is strongly inspired by Netherstorm, which makes sense and is another thing I'm quite happy with. The large areas of desert and packs of devourer mobs also recall Shadowlands and Zereth Mortis for me, and look, I know everyone loves to hate on Shadowlands but Zereth Mortis was a great zone and I don't mind being reminded of it either.

I also liked the storyline well enough (I have yet to kill Dimensius and see what comes afterwards). I wasn't a fan of Xal'atath constantly crooning at me that I was her champion (though this meme on reddit made me chuckle) but the return of Ve'nari's sass gave me life and was good for some genuine laughs. (When she ended that one quest with "Now get some stygia... I joke.") However, I'm also left with a certain feeling of "Why are we here?".

I'm not saying there's no connection at all between the War Within's patches, obviously Alleria chasing Xal'atath has been a through line. But should it have been? The hook at the start of this expansion was that Thrall, Anduin and other important characters were hearing the call of Azeroth's world soul, and that something was seemingly wrong down there. We descended deep into the earth, learned about the earthen and world soul "shards" like Beledar. We met the Haranir, who also seemed to have a connection to Azeroth itself and were worried about corrupting influences. Undermine was admittedly always going to be a bit of a mid-expansion side quest, but it wasn't so far off that we couldn't have pivoted back to focusing on the world soul after that. Dataminers have reported that there was a planned zone called the "Rootlands", presumably under Azj-Kahet, which would have made sense as a final destination for us to find out just what is going on inside Azeroth.

However, instead we chased Xal'atath to K'aresh because suddenly it's all about the return of Dimensius the All-Devouring and the call of Azeroth's world soul seems all but forgotten. Now, considering that War Within and the next two expansions are meant to form "The Worldsoul Saga", we're probably not all done with world soul business, and I really hope that we'll get back to it - but right now, this doesn't feel like the first part of a trilogy but rather like something that was meant to be a stand-alone expansion and was cut off at the knees at the last moment to pivot towards a completely different plot.

Now, this does kind of mesh with how Chris Metzen said that large chunks of War Within were already done when he rejoined the team and had to be somewhat retooled to fit the new Worldsoul Saga narrative. He also indicated that he almost expected people to possibly feel a bit unsatisfied with War Within on its own, while promising that it would all pay off later.

I really, really hope that he is right, because at the moment I can't say that I'm really sold on this story. It's one thing for part one of a trilogy to have a bit of an open ending hinting at bigger thing to come. At the end of Fellowship of the Ring, we know that we're not done, but we do know where we're going and have been witness to some pretty exciting adventures relating to that.

The War Within has not given me that vibe. I know that the next expansion will be about elves and the void only because Chris Metzen said so, not because the War Within has really built either of those subjects up to be a major theme (until the sudden pivot with this patch that is). It's just been very focused on Alleria and Xal'atath as characters, and to be honest I kind of feel like that's been a mistake. You may blame part of that on my general dislike of Xal'atath, but I have no issues with Alleria - it's just that I don't think you can place something like a WoW expansion on the shoulders of two NPCs. Their personal struggles can be part of the larger story, sure, but I don't think they're strong enough to form the framework that's supposed to hold everything up.

I enjoy hearing tales about the adventures of different denizens of Azeroth - I did so in Vanilla too; and I'm fine with the additional bells and whistles of voice acting and cut scenes. But in my opinion at least, WoW is at its strongest when the focus remains on the big picture and the world as a whole instead of one specific character's journey, and I'm just not seeing that right now. People have ragged on Dragonflight's story a lot, but even if you want to make fun of Alexstrasza being kind of useless and other NPCs being flat in their characterisation, it was all extremely cohesive thematically, focused on the Dragon Isles, the dragon flights, the primalists and all their minions and allies, which made it easy for me to overlook the flaws in individual storylines.

War Within on the other hand reminds me strongly of BfA, which started off with this strong Alliance vs. Horde theme, including a very personal and powerful narrative for Jaina, but then we were suddenly spending our time on mechagnome island and under the sea, and next it was all about uniting to fight old gods and wait, what? Metzen may have big plans for the Worldsoul Saga, but I don't think it bodes well that the way he decided to build the first part of this trilogy is superficially indistinguishable from an expansion where the story just felt non-cohesive and random at times. We'll see what we'll learn from the Midnight expansion announcement next week.

Lorewalking Impressions

Retail WoW is going a bit crazy with the new content at the moment in my opinion. There are at least three different events going on simultaneously, and while I'm not someone who has to do ALL THE THINGS in WoW, I do think it's getting a bit hard to keep track of what's what as a more casual player, especially when some events are only running for a limited time and you want to prioritise things accordingly.

One permanent new feature that was added recently and that had me very intrigued is called Lorewalking. Whether you enjoy the current story updates or not, it's hard to deny that WoW's story is a tangled mess to newcomers and anyone who isn't constantly keeping track, so I'm always interested when Blizzard makes some kind of attempt to invest in story catch-up, regardless of what form it takes.

Lorewalking is no replacement for actually playing through any given expansion, but what it does attempt to do is string certain storylines, that were previously featured in the game in very scattered bits and pieces, together into a more coherent whole for easier digestion. The framing device is that Lorewalker Cho sits with you on a bench in a capital city and tells you the story of how certain things came to be, with the accompanying gameplay being that you get teleported all over the place to do small tasks here and there, in a variety of very different locations.

I'll talk about the Lich King one in more detail, since there's no new story here and it's quite well-known, so there's no real spoiler territory to worry about. It starts with you being given a (new) quest in which you play as young Prince Arthas inside the Lordaeron garrison, talk to some NPCs and spar with a few guards. It's extremely basic but gives you an idea of who he was before he got corrupted and who the important people in his life were.

Next we're off to the Culling of Stratholme to see him cross that infamous line, and I thought it was kind of ironic that there's now a feature in the game to specifically watch all the RP at the gates that people used to hate back when Culling was a current endgame dungeon in Wrath. I was starting to wonder whether the expectation was to do the whole instance, but no, the moment the RP inside the gates finishes, you get whisked away straight to the end of the dungeon to see the confrontation between Arthas and Mal'Ganis.

Then it's off to Northrend - remember those quests in Dragonblight where you interact with the ghosts of Arthas' expedition, and get to see a vision of him claiming Frostmourne? Yep, you get sent off to do those again.

Cho briefly tells you about Arthas killing his father (I was kind of surprised they didn't use this opportunity to play the Warcraft 3 cinematic here, especially considering that they did actually create an up-resed version of it for Reforged) and then you get sent to Halls of Reflection with Jaina.

Interestingly, here the game does actually make you do the whole dungeon, but I've got to admit I didn't mind because I was just reminded of how freaking cool that instance was back in the day. Also, you get to play the Alliance version with Jaina even if you're Horde, which does get funny at the end when you get rescued by the Skybreaker and the Alliance on board all attack you immediately after rescuing you.

The story gets wrapped up with two more short new bits where you get to play as Arthas again, first ascending the steps of Icecrown Citadel, vanquishing certain memories along the way, and then fighting a group of 25 Horde adventurers until Tirion does his whole kill-steal thing and you get to watch the cinematic of Arthas' death one more time.

Reading around a bit, this seemed to be many people's least favourite of the three Lorewalking entries, but personally, I liked this one the best. It doesn't take very long but gives you a good introduction to who Arthas is, making good use of existing content already in the game. I had no idea who or what the Lich King was when I started playing back in 2006, and back then Warcraft 3 had only been out for a few years. I would've appreciated this kind of interactive "lesson" back then and I imagine it's going to be even more useful to people coming to the game almost twenty years later (if they are interested in the story at all).

The other two Lorewalking entries are about the Ethereals and about Xal'atath and are clearly more aimed at getting people up to speed with the current storyline, which is also fine. However, I kind of thought the quests in these were somewhat less fun and felt like a bit more of a drag. (I was never a huge fan of all the Ethereum stuff in Netherstorm back in Burning Crusade, so I wasn't exactly dying to replay that part of the game for example.) What was interesting was that both of these end with new bits of lore about their subjects being revealed at the very end.

BRIEF SPOILER SECTION

The reveal that BC's Ethereals and the Brokers from the Shadowlands seem to be the same people was amusing in so far as I couldn't help but wonder whether this was actually planned or simply a reaction to the player base openly struggling to tell the two apart when it came to lore conversations.

The reveal of Xal'atath's true form and origin was also quite interesting, though the associated gameplay was a bit of a mess for me personally as I'm apparently the worst old god minion ever, as it took me forever to find the first thing I was supposed to click on (I had literally been everywhere else first except at the correct location).

END BRIEF SPOILER SECTION

I did all three Lorewalking stories in my current warrior main first and initially figured that nothing was scaled as everything was dying in one or two hits and doing seemingly no damage to me. However, after reading around a bit I noticed people mention scaling, which made me realise that the mobs did show up as being technically my level, they just seemed to all be made of paper.

Now, my warrior is close to having the best gear you can currently get as a solo player, so I figured maybe it was due to that. I then decided to take a low-level alt through two of the stories for comparison.

My blood elf hunter had just dinged level 20 from finishing her last quest in Eversong Woods and was dressed in mostly whites that left her with an awe-inspiring item level of 10. I was getting ready to struggle, but to my surprise all the enemies in the Lich King story still seemed to be made of cardboard and continued to die in one or two hits, even in Halls of Reflection. It was only at this point that I noticed that I was actually immune to all damage (though my poor pet wasn't and paid the price multiple times). I can't quite tell whether this was intended or just a temporary fix for a scaling problem as I found some complaints from people who had done the chain closer to its release, saying that the mobs were hitting too hard and killing them.

In the Ethereal story I wasn't immune to damage, though my damage taken still seemed pretty mild - until I walked off the beaten path during the bit on Argus and decided to attack a star mob, which - while nominally also scaled to my level - hit literally ten times as hard as any of the other enemies and killed me in four hits. So... I'm not really sure what's going on there or even what's supposed to be going on.

I will say that the damage immunity in the Lich King story makes that particular bit of Lorewalking an excellent way out if you ever find yourself stuck in outdated gear and unable to quest due to the curse of scaling, as the damage immunity inside the story will protect you and you'll get several level-appropriate gear rewards along the way. My blood elf hunter for example gained a little less than two levels but her item level increased from 10 to 43. The other stories don't work the same way though - as mentioned, I wasn't immune to damage doing the Ethereal story and while I gained almost four levels in that one, I was given only a couple of pieces of gear during that time.

Anyway, I'm curious to see whether Blizzard will add more stories to this feature as time goes on. I'd quite like that, because even for the bits of lore you already do know, it can serve as a nice refresher. That said, let's be clear that this in no way solves the problem of new and returning players being unable to tell what's going on and struggling to connect to the world in general. For that, it's simply too limited in scope and too passive (sit here and listen to me tell you stories about other people instead of getting to know the world on your own).

More on Legion

The meat of this post has apparently been sat in my drafts folder for more than four months at this point, but I guess when you're writing about content from an expansion that's already more than five years old, a few months more or less don't really make a difference anymore. If anything, talking about Legion is about to become more relevant again, with Blizzard planning to retune some Legion content to become replayable at level during Shadowlands... or something.

Still, the focus of this post was actually meant to be on the demon hunter alts my husband and I created earlier in the year and our progress through Legion. We didn't quite "100%" it, but we did complete the quest content for all the major patches and duoed all the old raids. We always meant to do the same for the BfA raids actually, but just never got around to even trying.

It's been quite fun, because while regular attacks basically didn't hurt our characters even a mere two levels above the content, some special mechanics could still kill us and actually introduced a bit of challenge. Me just about finishing off Fallen Avatar with my husband's character already dead and just as the boss's last platform was disappearing into the green goo was certainly a moment.

Not having set foot into a WoW raid, not even in its LFR version, since Mists of Pandaria, I was also surprised by how story-heavy some of these have been. Nighthold and Tomb of Sargeras for example definitely had more going on than us simply killing a big bad. I can see how that wouldn't have been popular with a certain segment of the player base.

But anyway, I'm only four paragraphs in and already digressing. What I really wanted to focus on was that the Legion content has been surprisingly fun, and I feel that even with all the borrowed power mechanics stripped out or made irrelevant, you can still tell why it's the modern expansion that people look back on with the most fondness. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if not having to deal with systems like legendaries and artifact power actually improves the experience, considering that those seemed to be the main things I remember hearing people gripe about back in the day. (My demon hunter did find three legendaries by the way, but they might as well be greens at this point in the game.)

One thing I liked is that Legion felt extremely thematically coherent, which is something that BfA was not. The core of the base expansion content is basically: The Burning Legion (demonic bad guys) are invading and we need to find these MacGuffins to defend ourselves! Also, some ancient elves in this land are actually working with the demons because of course they are. And after that the progression is: dealing with the demon-loving elves (Nighthold), pushing back against the demons themselves (Tomb of Sargeras), taking the fight to the demon home world (Argus).

The intro to Argus was bloody brilliant by the way. The scale of it all was impressive and the music bombastic, giving the whole thing a real feel of the end times. If anything I think Blizzard probably took that too far, because it's hard to dial things down again in a meaningful way after dealing with those kinds of world-ending stakes, something that I recall people criticising about Mists of Pandaria in the wake of Cataclysm as well, even if public perception seems to have changed to look back on MoP with a degree of fondness now.

Anyway, it's commonly accepted that most WoW players don't care much about lore and I agree, but I think there's a difference between caring about the intricacies of the lore and having at least a vague idea of what's going on, what your character is doing and why. If the game fails at conveying the latter as it kind of did in BfA with its weird meandering from faction conflict to adventures under the sea to old gods, people won't take to the forums en masse to complain that the story is bad (edit four months later: apparently it takes a cut scene with Sylvanas for that), but I'm 100% convinced that it does result in the average player feeling less engaged by the game.

Legion definitely didn't have that problem. Some details may have been confusing (Why does Turalyon talk about fighting the Legion for thousands of years? Surely he can't have been with the Army of Light for more than a couple of decades, tops?) but you could always follow the main throughline.

The way major lore characters were involved was also pretty well done for the most part in that they fight by your side and provide some guidance, and there are interesting things happening to them, but you don't need to like them or care about the details of their stories for things to work. The closest the game came to violating that rule was with Illidan, and it's no coincidence that I thought the "travel around the world to watch selected two-minute cut scenes of Illidan's life" quest chain was not a great piece of content, and not just because the removal of most portals from Legion-era Dalaran made it a pain in the butt from a gameplay perspective as well. The point is, even if you thought that Illidan was annoying, smug and generally overrated, the rest of the story still worked (more or less).

This is something that has shaped up to be a problem in Shadowlands, with the plot being heavily focused on Sylvanas Windrunner and Anduin Wrynn, both characters that have had almost no interaction with the player character up to this point in the expansion. At the same time the threat being posed by the Jailer is poorly explained and also feels very distant, meaning that players are essentially left to tread water in the covenant zones, with the occasional foray into the Maw, which is supposed to be a hellhole and it's never our plan to make it nice or anything, so why are we here again? It all just feels extremely unfocused, which is quite a feat for an expansion that is all about us spending all of our time on a different plane of existence with none of the usual old world concerns around to distract us.

Champion of the Banshee Queen

I've been visiting Nathanos Blightcaller lately. Similar to how it was quite the throwback to be reminded of Tirion Fordring's humble beginnings as a hermit asking the player for maggot stew, I hadn't really thought about good old Nathanos' original incarnation in a while.

An ugly undead who dual-wields meat cleavers, the vanilla version of Nathanos resides at the Marris Stead in the Eastern Plaguelands, where he used to live while he was still... well, alive. There he collects piles of skulls and plays with his plaguehounds. If you hang around long enough, you can even see him throwing skulls to play fetch with them.

He's also what's probably the most cantankerous quest giver on Horde side - and there's some competition for that spot, mind you - constantly insulting you and calling you names. It's hilarious.

Varimathras himself has requested that I send my most 'capable' agents back to the Undercity for a highly sensitive tactical operation.

Unfortunately, my most capable agents were killed over three years ago. In their stead I have a collection of brain dead riff-raff.

[Nathanos stares coldly at you.]

It may be an old joke, but it's still a classic!

After I dispatched Borelgore for him, he had this to say:

Keep this up and I may have to promote you from imbecile to mental deficient, first class.

He's also a raid boss and the Alliance has a quest to kill him. I've never seen it done, but I can imagine this making for some quite amusing situations. I've also heard that this actually makes him quite popular with Horde players, who delight in seeing hapless Alliance get slaughtered with overwhelming force. I imagine that on PvP servers, the Marris Stead must be a pleasant haven of safety for Hordies.

All this did get me wondering though how we ended up with Nathanos' current incarnation: From what I've surmised from watching YouTube videos of cinematics and the like, he's now a pretty handsome man (as far as undead go) who loves to make puppy-dog eyes at Sylvanas. She in turn seems to flirt with him a lot, though with Sylvanas being Sylvanas, I always get the impression that she just enjoys yanking his chain.

I actually went so far as to consult the Wowpedia entry for Nathanos - which is massive by the way - where I learned that apparently his body was restored in some dark ritual, and that Blizzard decided at some point to give him the backstory (established in written supplementary material) that he and Sylvanas had something like a clandestine affair going on when they were still alive (more or less), which seems to have transcended death. I do hope there's a bit more to the whole thing in game, because I have to admit that setup sounds kind of lame to me.

I'm not against the idea of some Forsaken still experiencing romantic feelings, but I honestly preferred the idea that Nathanos simply admired Sylvanas for her skills and willpower, and that she in turn valued his loyalty and ambition. But hey, I guess men and women can't just be friends... even if they're both undead and evil.

(Interestingly, the change to his character doesn't seem to have been all that popular with the currnet player base either - I was clued in on this by Google suggesting that I add the word "self insert" to my "Nathanos Blightcaller" search, which led me to a massive rant thread.)